This thesis explores the role of metaphor in the construction of early modern English national identity in the dramatic writing of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The metaphorical associations of character names and their imagined native or foreign stage settings helped model to English audiences and readers not only their own national community, but also ways in which the representation of collective ‘Englishness’ might involve self-estrangement. The main body of the thesis comprises three case studies: Cleopatra, Kent and Christendom. These topographies -- personal, local and regional -- illustrate how metaphorical complexes shifted against both an evolving body of literary texts and under pressure from changing historical contexts, variously defining individual selves against the collective political nation. Each section explores inter-textual connections between theatrical metaphors and contemporary English non-dramatic texts, placing these within a wider European context, and ends by discussing a relevant play by Shakespeare (Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear and Cymbeline respectively). The first case study examines ways in which Cleopatra was used as a metaphor to define individual against collective identity. I shall suggest that such Oriental self-alienation might be seen as enabling; Cleopatran identities allow English writers, readers and audiences to imagine aesthetic alternatives to public identities. The second case study looks at the idea of Kent as an emblematic identity that both preserved local peculiarity while providing a metaphor for collective English identity. Writers use Kentish ambiguity to explore discontinuities and uncertainties within the emerging political nation. The third case study examines the idea of Christendom, used as an imaginary geography to bridge the gap between individual and political identities. I suggest that attempts to map Christendom to literal territorial coordinates might be resisted in ways that produced, again, alternative, non-national literary identities.

Although it is generally acknowledged that an Elizabethan grammar school education was intensely oral and aural, few studies have approached the literature of its pupils principally in light of such an understanding. There may be good reason for this paucity, since the reading of textual remains in the hopes of reconstituting sound and movement—particularly in non-dramatic literature—will always, in the end, be confronted by an inaudible and static text. Yet for the Elizabethan schoolboy, composition and performance were inseparable, whether of an epistle, a theme, or a translation of Latin poetry. The purpose of this project is firstly to describe the conditions which led to and ingrained that inseparability, and then offer some readings of the poetry, oratory, and drama of those whose voices and pens were trained in the grammar school, here Merchant Taylors’ School in 1560s London. Edmund Spenser, Lancelot Andrewes, and Thomas Kyd all attended Merchant Taylors’ in this period, and their poetry, sermons, and drama, respectively, are treated in the following discussion. It is argued that their texts reflect the same preoccupation with pronuntiatio et actio, or rhetorical delivery, held by their boyhood schoolmaster, Richard Mulcaster. I suggest that delivery provides a unique way of assessing literature in the context of an oral/aural education, largely because its classical and Renaissance rules invariably stipulate that vocal and gestural modulations must follow the emotional and intentional sense of words rather than their literal meanings. Delivery is thus shown to exist at the nexus of orality and literacy, performance and text, wholly absorbed with the concerns of speech, but distinct from language as well. In imagining the physicality of this middle ground within their narratives, it is proposed that Mulcaster’s students recalled an education very often spent stirring the emotions with and for their bodily expression.

‘The Ophelia Versions: Representations of a Dramatic Type from 1600-1633’ interrogates early modern drama’s use of the Ophelia type, which is defined in reference to Hamlet’s Ophelia and the behavioural patterns she exhibits: abandonment, derangement and suicide. Chapter one investigates Shakespeare’s Ophelia in Hamlet, finding that Ophelia is strongly identified with the ballad corpus. I argue that the popular ballad medium that Shakespeare imports into the play via Ophelia is a subversive force that contends with and destabilizes the linear trajectory of Hamlet’s revenge tragedy narrative. The alternative space of Ophelia’s ballad narrative is, however, shut down by her suicide which, I argue, is influenced by the models of classical theatre. This ending conspires with the repressive legal and social restrictions placed upon early modern unmarried women and sets up a dangerous precedent by killing off the unassimilated abandoned woman. Chapter two argues that Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen amplifies Ophelia’s folk and ballad associations in their portrayal of the Jailer’s Daughter. Her comedic marital ending is enabled by a collaborative, communal, folk-cure. The play nevertheless registers a proto-feminist awareness of the peculiar losses suffered by early modern women in marriage and this knowledge deeply troubles the Jailer’s Daughter’s happy ending. Chapter three explores the role of Lucibella in The Tragedy of Hoffman arguing that the play is a direct response to Hamlet’s treatment of revenge and that Lucibella is caught up in an authorial project of disambiguation which attempts to return the revenge plot to its morality roots. Chapters four and five explore the narratives of Aspatia in The Maid’s Tragedy and Penthea in The Broken Heart, finding in their very conformism to the behaviours prescribed for them, both by the Ophelia type itself and by early modern society in general, a radical protest against the limitations and repressions of those roles. This thesis is consistently invested in the competing dialectics and authorities of oral and textual mediums in these plays. The Ophelia type, perhaps because of Hamlet’s Ophelia’s identification with the ballad corpus, proves an interesting gauge of each play’s engagement with emergent notions of textual authority in the early modern period.

This thesis argues that there is an enigma at the heart of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi; a disjunction between the critical history of the play and its reception in performance. Historical disquiet about the status of the play among academics and cultural commentators has not prevented its popularity with audiences. It has, however, affected some of the staging decisions made by theatre companies mounting productions. Allied to other practical factors, these have impacted significantly – and occasionally disastrously – upon performances. It is argued that Webster conceived the play as a meditation on degree and, in aiming to draw out the maximum relevance from the social satire, deliberately created the multi-faceted performative role of Bosola to work his audience in a complex and subversive manner. The role's purpose was determined in response to the structural discontinuity imposed upon the play by the physical realities of staging within the Blackfriars' auditorium. But Webster also needed an agent to serve the plot's development and, in creating the role he also invented a character, developed way beyond the material of his sources. This character proved as trapped as any other in the play by the consequences of his own moral choices. Hovering between role and character, Webster's creation remains liminally poised on ‘the dangerous edge of things.' Part One explores the contexts in which Webster created one of the most ambiguous figures in early modern drama - subverting stock malcontent, villain and revenger - and speculates on the importance of the actor, John Lowin in its genesis. It includes a subsequent performance history of the role. Part Two presents the detailed analysis of a range of professional performances from the past four decades, attempting to demonstrate how the meaning of the play has been altered by decisions made regarding the part of Bosola.