This thesis seeks to provide a new perspective on storms in Shakespeare. Rather than a recurrent motif, the storm is seen as protean: each play uses the storm in a singular way. The works of Shakespeare's contemporaries are explored for comparison, whilst meteorological texts and accounts of actual storms are examined for context. Using close reading and theories of ecocriticism throughout, I show that Shakespeare's storms are attentive to the environmental conditions of experience. Although the dominant practice of staging storms in early modern England is to suggest the supernatural, Shakespeare writes storms which operate quite differently. I argue that this is a compelling opportunity to see Shakespeare develop a complex engagement with audience expectations. Five plays are explored in separate chapters, each with respect to performative conditions and through close reading of the poetry. Firstly, I argue that the Globe's opening in 1599 demanded a spectacular showcase, to which Julius Caesar responded, shaping the play's language and staging. With King Lear (c.1605), the traditional, non-Shakespearean location of the heath betrays a tendency to misread the play in terms of location rather than event. King Lear's storm withholds the supernatural, a manifestly different approach from that in Macbeth (c.1606); Shakespeare both adheres to and resists convention in this respect. The relationship between storm and the supernatural in Macbeth is shown to be fundamental to the play's equivocation. Shakespeare's next storm is in Pericles (c.1608), which also contains a storm by George Wilkins. The two writers' approaches are explored with respect to the Bible, alluded to extensively throughout the play. Finally, with The Tempest (c.1611), I argue that Shakespeare's manipulation of audience expectation through the storm demands a reading which combines the metatheatrical and the ecocritical. Foregrounded as expressions of dramatic and environmental awareness, I bring new insights to Shakespeare's storms.

No description available.

This study aims to offer a new literary biography of Thomas Dekker (c. 1572-1632) and demonstrates the ways in which he refashions his principal source, Geoffrey Chaucer. The first chapter considers Dekker in both literary and theatre histories, situating him amongst his collaborators: Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle, Michael Drayton, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster. This chapter also aims to re-evaluate Dekker’s achievement in history, starting from Dekker’s presence in Henslowe’s Diary, his ‘part’ in the War of the Theatres, his theatre writing, followed by his observations of London written during the plague years, his imprisonment, and his posthumous historical reception. The second chapter investigates how Dekker uses Chaucer, whose ‘book’, I argue, is a common theatrical source book that offers the playwrights quick access to stories and plots. To provide evidence of Dekker’s readership of Chaucer, I trace the early modern editions of Chaucer available in Dekker’s time and survey Dekker’s reading of Chaucer from his early career to his late years. The final three chapters concentrate on Dekker’s uniquely creative refashioning of Chaucer in theatrical terms. Chapter Three examines how Dekker turns Chaucer’s serious Clerk’s Tale, a ‘text of loss’, into a comic parody, re-titled as The Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissil. Chapter Four investigates Chaucer’s legacy of the festive and the carnival, whose ideas of ‘game’ and ‘play’ in The Canterbury Tales directly influence Dekker’s Westward Ho and Northward Ho, wherein I call the Ho plays Dekker’s ‘game’ plays. Chapter Five demonstrates the ways in which Dekker transforms the tropes of Chaucer’s Loathly Lady in The Wife of Bath’s Tale into performative metaphors in The Roaring Girl, a fantasy satire. This is the first attempt to discuss and study, in full, Dekker’s texts alongside their source. Through Dekker’s Chaucerian re-imaginings, we see the playwright’s three-dimensional transformation of his source and the ways he visualises his performances.

The prominence of women in Jacobean drama is immediately evident. Jacobean dramatists excel in their depiction of courtship and marriage, in their evocation of London life and city women, and in their analysis of female character. This concern with women is new to the drama, and is most marked, and most fruitful in the plays written between 1590 and 1625. The major dramatists of the Jacobean period - Shakespeare, Webster, Jonson, Middleton, Marston, Heywood, Dekker, Chapman, and Beaumont and Fletcher - share attitudes to women, but their sensitivity to conflicting ideas, and eagerness to spell out their own assumptions, suggests that the similarity is not merely conventional. Their treatment of women implies confidence in their audience's involvement in the issues on which they focus. The Puritans, preaching to the same audience as the dramatists write for, promote liberal attitudes to women by following through the implications in the Protestant and Humanist ideal of chaste marriage. The dramatists echo them in disapproving of virginity as an end in itself, and in exalting sexual passion in marriage, in opposing inhumane practices such as forced marriage, and in pointing out that a wife's obedience to her husband is conditional on his treatment of her. The dramatists hark back to Humanists such as More, Erasmus and Vives in their distrust of romantic excess, both in adulterous situations, and in courtship. They portray individual women who fulfil Humanist convictions about women's rational and intellectual equality with men. The drama reflects contemporary uneasiness at women's liberty in a society where economic change alters a wife's relation to her husband's work, and where an impoverished gentry seeking middle-class wealth creates a booming marriage market. The dramatists expose both female presumption and male alarmism. They recognize the bid for independence of women who join Puritan sects (ridiculed as disreputable in the drama), or who ape masculine dress; their defence of masculine-feminines is in part a defence of theatrical practice against Puritan extremists. The abundance of stock medieval satire on women in Jacobean drama seems at first misleadingly at variance with liberal attitudes to women. The dramatists give it a coherent dramatic function by attributing it to groups of characters whose way of life, or associations for the audience, neutralise its venom. Convinced that women are as capable of virtue as men, the dramatists concentrate on the causes of adultery and whoredom, whether they lie in witchcraft, or in special pressures - the temptations of money and social status, the corruption of Court life, the condition of womanhood - which operate against women. They attack the double standard by dividing moral responsibility equally between seducer and seduced, and by implicating the husband in the adulteress's guilt. Shakespeare shares his contemporaries' attitudes to women, but integrates them into his realisation of individual character. He shows how preconceptions about women in general damage individuals, and limit the experience of love. The dramatists’ close contact with conflicting ideals and prejudices relating to women outside the theatre contributes to the richness and vitality of Jacobean drama.

This study examines the intellectual background of the paradoxes of John Donne. In the first chapter, the classical foundations of the concept of paradox are detailed. These foundations reflect basic philosophical differences which are manifest in a writer's approach to the defence of a paradox or uncommon opinion. The first chapter also discusses the derivation of classical concepts of paradox by sixteenth century writers in an effort to correlate these concepts with the respective philosophical positions with which Donne would have been familiar. The second chapter focuses on the dialectical procedure of the thesis. Aristotle explicitly associated the thesis with paradox, and he delineated its fundamental role in the investigation of contested speculative questions. Cicero adapted it to his rhetorical theory but continued to observe its essentially dialectical character. In the sixteenth century, writers on both rhetoric and logic drew heavily on the works of Aristotle and Cicero for their own formulations of the thesis. These formulations reflect precisely the relationship which Aristotle and Cicero observed between the paradox and the thesis. The third chapter begins by examining the challenge posed by Peter Ramus to the Aristotelian dialectic upon which the scholastic curricula of European universities was based. Donne's English contemporaries, Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe, disagreed on the value of Ramus' innovations, and their comments on them in their quarrel reveal an awareness of the profound epistemological ramifications of Ramus' denial of the sceptical use of the thesis which Aristotle had observed in his Topics. The fourth chapter details those epistemological theories which competed with Ramus' neoaristotelianism. The majority of these theories are neoplatonic; they exhibit the characteristic features of Platonic Idealism which Aristotle had rejected in his Metaphysics, and which would be later rejected by Aquinas. Donne was familiar with these neoplatonic alternatives and was not wholly unreceptive to them. However, he explicitly denies the value of neoplatonic theories of mind for the practical affairs of Christian life, and maintains that the doubt implicit in matters to which revelation and reason have not delivered absolute precepts insures the viability of paradoxical opinions. The fifth chapter compares Donne's Aristotelian notion of paradox with other paradoxes of the sixteenth century. Through this comparison, the scholastic foundation of Donne's dialectical argumentation is exposed. Once exposed, his characteristic tentativeness with regard to the doctrinal differences of his day is understood to be a consequence of his Aristotelian and Thomist regard for the difficulty with which reason attains knowledge. The sixth chapter examines Donne's paradox and thesis, Biathanatos, in light of the Thomist principles which it employs in its exposition of the problem of suicide. Throughout Biathanatos Donne criticizes the value of Augustine's moral doctrine in practical life, and accepts an epistemological doctrine which accommodates doubt and error in the manner detailed by Aquinas and denied by Augustine. It is with this doubt and error in mind that Donne's paradox proceeds towards its conclusion's request for charitable interpretation, an interpretation which is informed specifically by Aquinas' doctrine of charity.

Part Two demonstrates the centrality pf this preoccupation with solitude and the definition of the self in Shakespeare's work, comparing and contrasting the development of his ideas with that of his contemporaries. The thesis considers Shakespeare's sympathies, moral judgements r and ideals through the changing perspectives on the solitary from play to play, Despite his sensitivity to the deepest levels of the contemporary cult of solitude, Shakespeare finally keeps faith with the essentially medieval ideal of the social bond. Solitude, for him, fails as an ideal, and is acceptable only where the social ideal is irreparably corrupted.

Literary remains often survive more by good luck than good management: looking at the history of the Hawthornden MSS the wonder is that they exist at all. For more than one hundred and fifty years after Drummond's death his papers were treated in a most casual way; handed out to editors, looked over, neglected, lost, scribbled upon and shuffled, till we might think ourselves fortunate to have any left. In the last century a responsible scholar came forward to save what he could, and one of his first emotions was an intense regret at the amount of valuable material that had been destroyed. Drummond died in 1649, leaving behind him in manuscript an unpublished history, several unpublished political essays, a considerable number of posthumous poems, some letters, commonplace books and miscellaneous notes. The history and the essays were at first thought too controversial for immediate publication, and the poems had been suppressed by Drummond himself; nevertheless six years later the bulk of this material was offered to the public. Drummond's son William was a youth of fourteen on his father's death; Drummond's brother-in-law, Sir John Scot of Scotstarvet, sorted through the MSS and sent to the printer Richard Tomlins in London the history and some letters, and a year later, some poems. (The originals may have gone to London, but it seems more likely that Sir John had copies made for Tomlins and his editors, Mr. Hall and Edward Phillips.) During the next fifty years the MSS lay at Hawthornden, where they were pawed over from time to time by Drummond's son, now Sir William, and scribbled upon by Drummond's daughter Eliza. Sir William went through the papers and marked the contents - perhaps with a thought to their publication - and censored the letters, erasing as many phrases referring to the family poverty as caught his eye. He may have destroyed some leaves, for there are gaps in this volume of the MSS.

In sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, portrayals of the Turk reflected aspects of Christian thinking. More specifically, these views varied according to ideological outlook, place and time. To complicate matters further, while there are a variety of images of the Turk responding to a range of Christian concerns, the nexus of images of the Turk - the imago Turci – is essentially contradictory. English portrayals and responses to the Turks are not uniform, but vary, while the Turk operates at once both from within and at a distance from English culture in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. In other words, the Turk is both real and imagined. This project is a response to these issues. It examines the ways in which Turks - both real and imagined - not only figure in early modem English prose texts as a site of their cultural production, perpetuation, and negotiation, but also the ways in which these images relate to and participate in current political and cultural debates that also informed these prose texts. As a consequence of the diversity of the imago Turci in a wide range of available, printed prose works, I adopt five categorical distinctions representing five groups of overlapping genres, or modes for my analysis: history, religion, travel, mercantile writings and romance. Reading the material in their historical contexts, one of the arguments to arise from this is that the use of the Turk in these English texts reflects the wider cultural and political developments in Western Christendom and England, and between Christendom and the Ottoman Empire. The central argument of this project is that the imago Turci in early modem English prose emerges as a complex discursive site in which a variety of competing interests are negotiated.

I contend that Jung provides insights in keeping with Shakespeare's own intent as in many respects they were "of like mind." It is the attempt of this thesis to demonstrate how this might be so, comparing Jung's own writings with those of Shakespeare. The Introduction provides an overview: what the thesis sets out to do. The first chapter represents a highly technical treatment for determining an exact location for the Globe Playhouse. It is as if one were an archaeologist requiring as much evidence as possible for determining where the foundations might lie within a given site. But this determination of the Globe's center and the shape of the Globe's groundplan represent a mandala form ("mandala" is the Sanskrit word for "circle"). Jung's work after his departure from Freud (1913-1928) became progressively more concentrated on the significance of mandalas (his first mandala drawing was in 1916). The mandala form represented integration and evidence for it was found not only in the dreams of his patients but in the artifacts of all civilizations - in the groundplans for cities and buildings, and in the art and religious practices of diverse peoples reaching back to Rhodesian cliff-drawings. I relate Hamlet and its use of soliloquy to the central motif of the mandala the protection of the center. Using his Tavistock Lectures as a point of departure, Chapters 2-3 take up Jung's figure of the Psyche, divided up into ectopsychic, endopsychic, personal unconscious, and collective unconscious "spheres." "Chapter 2: The Four Functions" deals with Hamlet, Othello, The Winter's Tale, and Measure for Measure. "Chapter 3: The Shadow" refers to King Lear, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. After a consideration of King Lear, I relate Joseph Campbell's "journey of the hero" to Jung's figure of the Psyche with reference to the three plays mentioned above. Chapter 4 treats Jung's descriptions of "anima" and "animus" in relation to Macbeth. Some attention is then given to the characters of Ophelia, Gertrude, Desdemona, Cordelia, and Hermione, and their depreciation. "Chapter 5: Jungian Criticism" takes up the way in which literature may be viewed from the angle of Jung-oriented criticism with particular reference to Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry IV, Part I, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, and King Lear. The Conclusion is followed by Appendices A-G which summarize and amplify Jungian thinking treated in this thesis and conclude with a statement about Shakespeare by Peter Brook. The Bibliography Section provides a list of works consulted in relating the Globe Playhouse to its site and works consulted in regarding the Globe and Shakespeare's work in the light of C. G. Jung.

This thesis is a modern-spelling edition of Tarlton's News Out of Purgatory, based on the British Library's copy of the first edition of 1590, with occasional emendations from the second and third editions, and including a full collation of the three early editions. The Introduction offers studies of various aspects of the work, including the bibliographical background of the piece, and descriptions of surviving copies; the life and legend of Richard Tarlton; the background of the genre of 'News from Hell', to which the work belongs, and examination of works in that genre which immediately followed the publication of Tarlton's News Out of Purgatory; and the sources of the pamphlet, and the author's adaptation and development of them. There is a study of the work published in response to Tarlton's News Out of Purgatory in 1590, The Cobler of Caunterburie; an investigation into the question of the identity of the author, including consideration of claims that have been made for various writers, and, finally, a short critical appreciation of the work. There is a full Commentary on the text, including glosses of obscure and archaic words, textual notes, explanations of references in the work, and, as part of the investigation into the authorship, echoes of the works of contemporary writers.