This thesis explores the role of the boy actor in the plays of Lyly, Marlowe, Marston and Jonson circa 1580-1610. Focusing on the Children of Paul's and the Children of the Chapel Royal/Queen's Revels, the two most prominent children's troupes of the period, I seek to redress three main critical imbalances. Firstly, I attempt to counter the general preoccupation with the boy as a player of female roles in the Shakespearean adult companies; and secondly, I argue against the exclusion of Lyly from discussions about the boy's performance of gender. Thirdly, this study aims to accompany recent literature about the Jacobean boy player, by offering the Elizabethan perspective. However, rather than analysing the organisation of a particular repertory, my approach takes the boy player as a single entity, concentrating specifically on his role within the performance practices of the companies. It attempts to reveal insights into the playwrights' conceptual approaches to the child, linking the boy's place on the stage to wider social discourses of parent-child relationships, sexuality and gender, and the economic imperative which also fuels theatrical performance.

This thesis analyses the production of contested green space on the early modern stage. I argue that Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights staged subjective versions of green space which responded differently to cultural and political unease. Collectively, early modern dramatists produced a sedimented English countryside whose layers addressed dissonant interpretations of contemporary ideological struggles and debates. Representations of green space on the early modern stage negotiate both the political status quo and its alternatives; the stage represented the countryside in ways which both the court and those beyond hegemony wanted it to look like. In order to discuss fully the multivocal dimensions of green space, I offer a topological reading of spatial representation on the early modern stage. Contrary to the usual topographical analyses performed by critics of early modern drama, my topological reading focuses on spatial interrelation, configuration and complexity, registering multiplicities and contradictions within the social production of specifically homeomorphic green spaces. Across the four chapters, I discuss the negotiation of a specific element of contemporary discourse in a distinctly contested theatrical green space. I demonstrate in Chapter One how theatres imagined Robin Hood’s northern greenwood as both Protestant and residually Catholic. In Chapter Two, I interrogate the ways in which playwrights debated the benefits and dangers of agricultural innovation in rural England. In Chapter Three, I argue that Arcadian green spaces represented both a monarchic and an alternative Spenserian ideal. Lastly, in Chapter Four, I analyse how early modern drama complicated understandings of English nationhood by producing contested Welsh green space as both civil and barbaric. The stages’ collective output produced contested green spaces which dramatists layered with models of and models for reality, simultaneously containing and exploring the period’s discursive concerns over religion, consumption, royal succession and nationhood. Representations of green space on the early modern stage performed specific, if contradictory, conflicting and heterogeneous functions. The theatres’ production of contested green space negotiated the tensions and competing positions within Elizabethan and Jacobean socio‐political debates.

The thesis completes the history of pre-censorship of the British theatre by the Lord Chamberlain started by Dr L. Conolly and Dr J.R. Stephens in their respective disserations, Theatrical Censorship in England 1737-1800 (University of Wales, 1970), and Dramatic Censorship During the Reign of Victoria (University of Wales, 1972). Drawing on information contained in the Lord Chamberlain's Day Books, the vast literature associated with abolitionist agitation and other sources, the dissertation chronicles the changing policies of the Play Licensing Authority and, more significantly, the rise of sustained agitation to the institution. Two distinct periods of agitation are isolated and discussed in detail: that beginning in the 1890's associated particularly with the suppression of works by Ibsen, Shaw and Granville Barker and culminating in the Joint Select Committee on the censorship in 1909; and that associated with the growth of a new controversial drama in the mid-50's and 60's and culminating in the 1967 Joint Select Committee on censorship and the Theatres Act of 1968. The Report of each Joint Committee is discussed and the underlying assumptions of the censorship, the foundations of the abolitionist argument and the ideas of the pro-censorship lobby analysed in each case. The dissertation ends with an extensive survey of the theatre since 1968 with the purpose of examining the effect censorship had on drama and the response of writers and impresarios to the freedoms granted by the 1968 Theatres Act. It concludes that in all probability censorship had little effect on the quality and content of drama during the period of its existence, that it nevertheless constituted an unwarranted annoyance to many in the theatre and that in practical terms, owing to developments in the theatre in the late 60's and 70's it is unlikely that it could have survived for much longer.

This thesis introduces the concept of 'lesbian-inflected narratives' to investigate recent Toronto-based theatre productions articulated around female same-sex desires and relationships. Analysing Wild Dogs (2008), Bear with Me (2009), A Beautiful View (2009), My Mother 's Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding (2009), SPIN (20 11), and More Fine Girls (2011), I demonstrate the importance of contemporary lesbian-inflected narratives as indicators of recent shifts in the cultural, social, and political landscape of Canada. Since the cultural impact of a theatrical work is most productively evaluated in the contexts of its production and reception, my in-depth readings of play scripts and stage performances are paired with larger examinations of how their characters and storylines are circulated, received, and preserved in Toronto. This thesis applies a queer perspective to materialist semiotics, making a unique contribution to the study of Toronto-based theatre and enriching the fields of Canadian theatre, performance, and queer studies. By bringing together mostly unpublished plays, it also acquires considerable documentaty value, giving further textual visibility to scripts that would have disappeared from circulation after their stage productions closed.

In Place of a Show is written to function both as a creative writing project and as a critical-theoretical enquiry. It focuses on the once dominant architectural and aesthetic apparatus associated with Western theatre since the Renaissance: the théâtre à l’italienne, or the European opera house. An enclosed space, functioning according to specific conventions embodied in its form (curtains, stage, proscenium arch, auditorium, balconies, etc), this construction has long been dismantled and abandoned. And yet, might its very ruination signal a persistence of sorts? What kind of potentialities – material, imaginative, historical – might lie within empty or unused theatres? Each of the four chapters focuses on a particular building, linking its specificities to broader questions around the persistence of the theatrical apparatus: 1. A baroque opera house in Munich, meticulously dismantled during the WW2 bombings and later reassembled on site, prompts questions over the theatre’s preservation as a means to obscure historical destruction. 2. A chapter on London’s Dalston Theatre, demolished in 2007 to make way for a shopping and residential complex, explores how a theatre might be seen to “linger” after it is gone, subtly manifesting within sites and structures that bear no apparent relation to it. 3. During a visit to the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza I witnessed a swallow flying beneath the auditorium’s sky-painted ceiling; the flight of the bird reconstitutes the otherwise empty theatre as a place for inhabitation and co–presence. 4. Based on a trip to the Teatro Amazonas in the North Brazilian city of Manaus, the chapter explores the interplay between theatre and non-human nature, reflecting on the opera house’s construction at a time when Manaus was supplying most of the world’s rubber. What emerges in the writing is a building unlinked from its “proper function” i.e. the staging of performances. The focus falls on the promissory force held by walls, seats, curtains, and the micro-events taking place within and without the building. What happens in a theatre when nothing is happening? What occurs in place of a show?

This thesis argues that an understanding of how to read stage directions involves a non-theoretical but historically-nuanced awareness of the mediating processes of text and performance. In order to illuminate these mediating processes, the thesis maintains that those playwrights involved in all aspects of dramatic production provide the most significant evidence for understanding the reading of stage directions. The thesis further argues that the most decisive redefinition of the literary and critical significance of stage directions emerges in the period spanning the mid nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The thesis takes two parts. Part One examines the contexts for reading stage directions historically. It considers the stage direction and its place in the developing censorship and copyright laws of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It then illustrates the development of the written and performed stage direction, drawing upon the work of Robertson, Shaw and Barker and supplementing the discussion with an analysis of the plays, rehearsal techniques and play publications of Gilbert and Pinero. Part Two provides the reader with three case studies. The first, which considers Robertson's play, <I>Caste </I>(1867) challenges the accepted perception of Robertson's staging reforms by reading the stage directions of manuscript and privately published versions alongside the posthumously published text. It then goes on to consider how the information described in the stage directions might have been interpreted in performance. The second case study analyses a group of stage directions at the end of Shaw's <I>Heartbreak House </I>(pub. 1919; perf. 1921). By considering the written and performed stage directions in an historical and theatrical context, the thesis provides a key to interpreting the play. The final study examines Barker's topically resonant play, <I>Waste</I>. In its comparison of the three extant versions of the play, 1907, 1909 and 1927, the thesis seeks to consider how the stage directions mediate the relationship between the play's text and context.

Arthur W. Frank’s notion of a ‘diagnostic identity’ provided the departure point for my study. The thesis examines contemporary British drama that stages the cultural movement towards post-diagnostic identity. Four groups form the focus of the discussion: the mentally ill, the sexually abused, older people, and those with learning disabilities. I contend that these groups are particularly stigmatised with both health and cultural milieus as untrustworthy speaking subjects. Their voices are invalidated on the basis of their health identities and consequently it is vital to examine theatre work that seeks to re-shape lay and cultural perspectives of those deemed, mad, damaged, old, or stupid. Chapter one charts the movement from madness as dramatic metaphor to the staging of mental ill health. This section explores how these dramatics disturb the material of theatre in order to articulate experience that is inherently resistant to language. Chapter two is concerned with the theatrical representation of child sexual abuse, and explores the translation of sexual violence into theatre aesthetics. By examining issues of pornography, torture, fetish, comedy, and gender politics, this chapter questions the representational possibilities of ‘unspeakable’ stories. The third chapter discusses ageing in contemporary drama. While the social narrative of ageing is one of inevitable decline, this section demonstrates how dramatists place ageing in a state of flux. Further, the relationship between acting, illness roles, and stereotype is explored in order to demonstrate the resistive practices of these dramatists. Chapter four draws together works that represent those with mental or learning impairment, and examines plural strategies of representation from positive imagery to normalisation to social realism to farce and finally to tragedy. This chapter anatomises the debate about equality activism and politically radical work that seeks to alter structures of feeling and models of engagement. The final chapter juxtaposes the recent work of Peter Brook with a Bristol-based mental health service user collective – Stepping Out Theatre Company.

There is an inherent sociality and collectivity in the theatre. Theatrical activities, like other cultural productions, involve a great many elements seeping through, in and out and between the theatrical institutions and other vectors of the social space. Theatre is both a result of and simultaneously one of the many constitutive factors in the process of social formation. This thesis examines the conventions of xiqu and its transformations in relation to the modernisation in China since the second half of the 19th Century. The introduction of Western theatre architecture in the last decade of the 19th Century in Chinese cities was probably the most important catalyst for the metamorphosis of xiqu into its present form. The changed parameters of the newly constructed theatres injected new possibilities into productions and changed the theatrical consciousness of the audience. The jingju form provides a particular case in point. It was initially developed into a distinctive regional xiqu as a consequence of the merging of a number of existing regional forms, the performances of which in the capital were only made possible by modern communications and transportation. Its subsequent popularity in the principal cities was inseparable from its development in the modern theatres. The cinema was introduced to China at about the same time as Western theatre architecture. Xiqu films were first produced as records of performances to extend the commercial possibilities of the xiqu market. As film language improved in its refinement and aesthetic grammar, cinematic aesthetics took over and xiqu films started to take another direction. As more features of its stage aesthetics were replaced by camera treatment, xiqu films ceased to be a genre of xiqu and became instead a genre of cinema. This clear-cut distinction was especially obvious in the xiqu films produced in Hong Kong, where market forces were relentlessly fierce. Nowadays xiqu is facing the same challenges as all other theatre forms in the globalised market-place. To survive it must find a way to remain competitive and commercially viable. At the same time, it must rediscover its artistic edge by offering experimental and innovative productions in order to make itself artistically relevant and attractive to its contemporary audience.

Mediated Breath examines a wide range of possibilities of understanding and redefining the context in which the corporeal function of breathing is represented in art. during the performative turn, and in relation to contemporary debates around presence and relational aesthetics. The thesis aims to examine Beckett's Breath, both as a minimalist art work in order to see how it might contribute to debates led by Fried around minimalism and (anti)theatricality, and as a text for and related to contemporary intermedial production in order to explore how intermedial art practices contribute to new understandings, for example of the body's intermedial relationship to the world. The above issues are addressed, in relation to the special significance that respiration acquires by means of an artistic system. The thesis examines, in particular, Beckett's Breath (1969) in the spectrum of intermedia aesthetics, high-modernist art criticism and theories on theatricality, so as to comprehend Beckett's ultimate venture to define the borders between a theatrical performance and a purely visual representation, in the context of the interface between the theatre and the visual arts. Beckett's playlet demonstrates a decisive moment in the history of theatrical experimentation, in part because of the new relationship it developed towards the fonnal possibilities of the theatrical event. The exposition of the components of a medium in skeletal fonn is pivotal for understanding aspects of Beckett's intermedia practice. Breath is analysed, alongside Michael Fried's seminal essay on minimalism "Art and Objecthood" (1967) and the "Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit" (1949). Beckett's final piece of discursive writing. considered within the context of its subject matter, the tension between abstraction and expression, the dilemma of artistic expression and the impossibility of expression in painting. The "Three Dialogues," also, illuminate specific aspects of the playlet, principally Beckett's decision to eradicate the text and the human figure, hence, the interest lies in the ways that Beckettian aesthetics translates into practice. This reading attempts to provide a theoretical model for thinking about the intersection of critical discourses in the visual arts and the theatre, more specifically about tbe notion of anti-theatricalism in the theatre and the modernist anti-theatrical impulse in the visual arts. In this perspective, Breath serves as an indication of the fonnative, productive role of anti-theatricalism in the theatre and not as an external attack on it. Breath, as a representative piece of minimal ism in the theatre, is paradigmatic of Beckett's aesthetics of impoverishment and his fidelity to failure. As such it resists recuperation and can be seen as a critique of the conditions of art making, display, marketing and interpretation, in contrast to minimalist art, which became dependent on these processes.

The last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed an important development in contemporary theatre dance practice and its study. Since the early 1970s an increased level of concern with'masculinily' has directed dance makers and scholars alike, resulting in a number of new and challenging dance works alongside a significant growth in publications devoted to gender and identity politics. This activity has led to a change in a cultural practice that had previously been dominated by women practitioners and of critical interest mainly to feminist scholars. The impact of this shift towards a concern with 'masculinity' directs this studys exploration into the ways in which selected contemporary dance works represent forms of male identity that resist being categorised according to established models. Set within a framework of current thought on gender drawn from debates in the visual arts, dance literature and other non-dance sources, this research project investigates the extent to which these alternative models contribute to the development of a greater understanding of what it means to be a man in todays society. Furthermore, by paying close attention to the ways in which meaning is articulated in individual works, and setting subsequent findings against a historical perspective, this study questions some of the essentialist rhetoric used in dance scholarship and other critical disciplines which describe representations of masculinity. Through an interdisciplinary approach that is sensitive to how aspects of masculinity are articulated in dance, this study uncovers a diversity of representations hitherto unacknowledged by other analytical models. Moreover, this project raises awareness of how dance not only reflects cultural norms of gender and sexuality but resists them and presents new ones. This is the visionary capability of dance wherein works can be read as working'against the grain' of old-fashioned and essentialist attitudes about men in dance and in society.