In the first part of this dissertation the theoretical basis of a large number of writings on imagery is discussed, and some proposals made for a wider definition of poetic imagery and a new concept of dramatic imagery relevant to the criticism of poetic drama. The second part of the dissertation consists of analyses of the dramatic imagery of five plays.

The aim of the present work is to extract as much information as possible from the early quartos of George Chapman's twelve plays by the various methods which analytical bibliography has recently developed, and to present the results in such a way as to be useful to a prospective editor of the plays. The present work, which has involved an entirely fresh examination of all the quartos, is an original contribution to Chapman studies, but it should also make a general contribution to analytical bibliography with special reference to Elizabethan and Jacobean printed plays. The main body of the present thesis comprises an introduction with a bibliographical description of the play studied; four chapters on, respectively, the nature of the printer's copy, variants, compositorial analyses, and on the characteristics of compositors; and a brief general conclusion. Appendices include bibliographical notes on the Chapman quartos. A bibliography has been provided at the end of the thesis.

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This thesis explores how literary editing for the dramatic publication was developed in seventeenth-century England. Chapter 1 discusses how the humanist scholars embraced the concept of textual editing and put it into practice about a half century after the invention of the press. Chapter 2 addresses the development of the concept of literary editing in seventeenth-century England by investigating the editorial arguments preserved in the paratextual matter. Chapter 3 explores Jonsonian convention of textual editing which was established in imitation of classical textual editing of the humanist scholars and which eventually furnished a model for dramatic editing to the later editors who were to be commissioned to reproduce play texts for a reading public. Chapter 4 looks at Thomas Middleton’s The Mayor of Quinborough published by Herringman in 1661 which signals the restoration of the Jonsonian editorial convention. Chapter 5 will attempt to identify the printer of the play and considers the division of the editorial work between the editor and the printer. Chapter 6 addresses the reflection of the Jonsonian textual editing in the 1664 Killigrew folio and assesses its establishment of literary editing of seventeenth-century English drama as a herald of the 1709 Shakespeare edition by Nicholas Rowe.

This thesis considers the different ways Persia was perceived in early modern England. Persia, understudied in recent scholarship, played an important role in the early modern English imagination, both as a classical civilization and as a counterweight to the Ottoman threat to Christendom. This classical heritage and anti-Ottomanism, when intersected with a Persian Muslim identity, resulted in a complex phenomenon. This thesis is an attempt to understand the various cross currents that constructed this complex image. Chapter One discusses English interest in classical Persian themes in the wake of Renaissance humanism. It focuses on three classical ‘Persian' plays featuring Achaemenid Kings; Cambyses, Darius and Cyrus, and investigates how classical Persia became a focus of interest for Elizabethan playwrights. Chapter Two moves to the wars between the Ottomans and Safavids and how they fascinated many English writers of the time. Paying specific attention to Usumcasane in Marlowe's Tambulaine plays, the chapter suggests the significance of Persian references in the play and offers a new interpretation of the notorious Qur'an burning scene. Chapter Three analyses John Thomas Minadoi's Historie of Warres betweene the Turkes and the Persians and shows the significance of Christian knowledge of schism in Islam for Catholic-Protestant debates. Chapter Four concentrates on the representation of Persia in Romance texts from late Elizabethan England and shows that despite being hailed as an anti-Ottoman power, Persia's anti-Christian Islamic identity, which was also suggested by Minadoi, becomes manifest in the alliance of ‘Sultan' and ‘Sophy' against the Crusaders. Chapter Five combines two crucial moments in Anglo-Persian encounters: Jenkinson's trading mission and the ‘travailes” of the Sherley brothers. Through an analysis of the play The Travailes of the Three English Brothers, the argument of the chapter is that it represents the cumulative experience of Englishmen in Persia in the early modern period.

This thesis examines the reciprocity of literary and legal cultures, and seeks to enhance understanding of cultural and socio-legal constructions of morality in early modern England. Identifying the tensions in an institutional legality in which both secular pragmatism and moral idealism act as formulating principals, it interrogates the sense of disjuncture that arises between imaginative concepts of moral justice and their translation into the formal structures of law. Chapter 1 investigates representations of rape in light of the legislative changes of the 1570s, and addresses the question of how literature shapes the legal imaginary of immorality. Literary models, notably Shakespeare's The Rape Of Lucrece (1594), and George Peele's Tale of Troy (1589), are examined together with the texts of Edward Coke and Thomas Edgar to argue that lawyers' mythopoeic interpretative strategies produce a form of legal fiction in relation to sexual crime. These strategies are contextualised in Chapter 2 in relation to the education and literary-legal culture at the Inns of Court, and the thesis progresses to an examination of the inns' literary and dramatic output – notably that of Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorbuduc, and Arthur Broke's contemporaneous revels' masque, Desire and Lady Bewty (1561-2) – to establish how the legal fraternity wielded significant authority over Tudor sexual politics, moral signification, and interpretative practices. Chapters 3 and 4 explore legal and ethical challenges heralded by the Jacobean accession, particularly those posed by the Somerset scandal. Analysis of histories, letters, and court satire, together with Thomas Campion's The Lord Hay's Masque (1607), and George Chapman's Andromeda Liberata (1614) and The Tragedy of Chabot (1639), illuminates the period's textual negotiations of legal, political, and personal ethics, and offers a revealing picture of the moral paradoxes produced by the opacity of the parameters between the personal and political lives of the ruling elite.

This thesis examines representations of lawyers and law in examples of Jacobean city comedy, taking into account certain contemporary developments in the legal profession and the law in England. The period covered is 1598-1616. The thesis questions the conventional interpretation of city comedy as hostile to the legal profession. It suggests the topic is more complex than has been assumed, arguing that city comedy makes direct and indirect positive representation of Inns of Court lawyers, who are to be distinguished from attorneys (newly segregated in the Inns of Chancery), amateur quasi-lawyers, and university-educated civil lawyers. It is proposed that city comedy represents Inns of Court lawyers positively in two ways. Firstly, by means of legal content: representations of developments in the profession and the law demonstrate a wish to connect with the young lawyers and students of the Inns of Court, and reflect a contemporary drive by them for increased organization and regulation. Secondly, by means of literary form: ostensibly pejorative representations need not be taken at face value; instead, they may be found to be ironic. The main proposed contributions to knowledge are: that Inns of Court lawyers were a favoured part of the target audience of the private playhouses, making it questionable that they would be represented negatively in city comedy; that lawyers as represented in city comedy are not a single or a simple category; that representation of lawyers is inflected by the various forms and impulses of city comedy; and that city comedy incorporates some reflection of the increasing professionalization of legal practice in the period.

This thesis consists of two components: a 70,000-word verse novel and a 50,000-word critical component that has arisen out of the research process for that novel. Creative Component: The Marlowe Papers The Marlowe Papers is a full-length verse novel written entirely in iambic pentameter. As with verse novels such as The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth, or The Emperor's Babe by Bernadine Evaristo, its inspiration, derivation, conventions and scope owe more to the prose novel than to the epic poem. Though there is as yet no widely-accepted definition, a verse novel may be distinguished from an epic poem where it consists, as in this case, of numerous discrete poems, each constituting a ‘chapter' of the novel. This conception allows for considerable variations in form and tone that would not be possible in the more cohesive tradition of the epic poem. The Marlowe Papers is a fictional autobiography of Christopher Marlowe based on the idea that he used the pseudonym ‘William Shakespeare' (employing the Stratford merchant as a ‘front'), having faked his own death and fled abroad to escape capital charges for atheism and heresy. The verse novel, written in dramatic scenes, traces his life from his flight on 30 May 1593, through the back-story (starting in 1586) that led to his prosecution, as we similarly track his progress on the Continent and in England until just after James I accedes to the English throne. The poems are a mixture of longer blank verse narratives and smaller, more lyrical poems (including sonnets). Explanatory notes to the poems, and a Dramatis Personae, are included on the advice of my creative supervisor. Critical Component: Writing Marlowe As Writing Shakespeare This part of the thesis explores the relationship between early modern biographies and fiction, questioning certain ‘facts' of Marlovian and Shakespearean biography in the light of the ‘thought experiment' of the verse novel. Marlowe's reputation for violence is reassessed in the light of scholarly doubt about the veracity of the inquest document, and Shakespeare's sonnets are reinterpreted through the lens of the Marlovian theory of Shakespeare authorship. The argument is that orthodox and non-Stratfordian theories might be considered competing paradigms; simply different frameworks through which interpretation of the same data leads to different conclusions. Interdisciplinary influences include Kuhn's philosophy of scientific discovery, post-modern narrativist history, neuroscience, psychology, and quantum physics (in the form of the ‘observer effect'). Data that is either anomalous or inexplicable under the orthodox paradigm is demonstrated to support a Marlovian reading, and the current state of the Shakespeare authorship question is assessed. Certain primary source documents were examined at the Bodleian Library, at the British Library, and at Lambeth Palace Library. Versions of Chapters 2, 3 and 4, written under supervision during this doctorate, have all been published, either as a book chapter or as a journal article, within the last year (Barber, 2009, 2010a, b).

In locating the idea of nostalgia in early modern English drama, ‘A Rhetoric of Nostalgia on the English Stage, 1587-1605’ recovers an influential and under-examined political discourse in Elizabethan drama. Recognizing how deeply Renaissance culture was invested in conceptualizing the past as past and in privileging the cultural practices and processes of memory, this thesis asserts nostalgia’s embeddedness within that culture and its consequently powerful rhetorical role on the English Renaissance stage. The introduction situates Elizabethan nostalgia alongside nostalgia’s postmodern conceptualizations. It identifies how my definition of early modern nostalgia both depends on and diverges from contemporary arguments about nostalgia, as it questions nostalgia’s perceived conservatism and asserts its radicalizing potential. I define a rhetoric of nostalgia with regard to classical and Renaissance ideas of rhetoric and locate it within a body of sixteenth-century political discourses. In the ensuing chapters, my analyses of Shakespeare’s drama formulate case studies reached, in each instance, through an exploration of the plays’ socio-political context. Chapter Two’s analysis of The First Part of the Contention contextualizes Shakespeare’s development of a rhetoric of nostalgia and investigates connections between rhetorical form and nostalgia. I demonstrate the cultural currency of the play’s nostalgic proverbial discourse through a discussion of Protestant writers interested in mocking the idea of a preferable Catholic past. Chapter Three argues that Richard II’s nostalgic discourse of lost hospitality functions as a political rhetoric evocative of the socio-economic problems of the mid-1590s and of the changing landscape of English tradition instigated by the Reformation. In Chapter Four, Julius Caesar and Ben Jonson’s Sejanus constitute a final analysis of the relationship between a rhetoric of nostalgia and politics by examining the rise of Tacitism. The plays’ nostalgic language stimulates an awareness to the myriad ways in which rhetoric questions politics in both dramas.