The thesis examines the main conventions governing traditional Nigerian entertainment and the development of these conventions under influences from Western drama. Wole Soyinka's development of these conventions is considered along with his influence on present day play-wrights. The main section of the thesis is concerned with the further evolution of Nigerian theatrical conventions by four playwrights; Zulu Soiola, Wale Ogunyemi, Femi Osofisan and Bode Sowande. The discussion is presented in three parts. In the first chapter, there is a recapitulation and evaluation of the conventions which emerged from traditional Nigerian entertainment by the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The second section consists of two chapters: the first is concerned with the period when there was strong western influence on modern Nigerian drama through the University College at Ibadan, the chapter on Wole Soyinka that follows is concerned with the further evolution of theatrical convention in his drama, the third and major section of the thesis examines the present day development of Nigerian theatrical convention through an analysis of the techniques of the four playwrights; Zulu Sofola, Wale Ogunyemi, Femi Osofisan and Bode Sowande. The material in the thesis includes accounts of interviews with Soyinka, and the four playwrights. It is hoped that this material which has not previously been collected will prove valuable to students of modern Nigerian drama. The aim of the thesis is to provide knowledge, analyse conventions and techniques and stimulate interest in Nigerian drama, particularly, that developed after Soyinka1s successes in the sixties.

W.S. Gilbert, one of the foremost writers of the London stage between 1870 and 1890, had little popular success with the ten works he brought to London audiences during the last twenty years of his life (1891-1911). This study examines the critical reception of those later works, speculates on the reasons for their popular failure, and reveals the chief defects and merits of each work The study attempts to provide exhaustive lists of early London reviews of the original predictions of these works and concludes with what is hoped to be a complete bibliography of all other material related to these works written both during and sinee Gilbert's lifetime. Included throughout the test arc facsimiles of reviews, illustrations, and photographs of the original productions. Although the study admits that these later works of Gilbert had serious Haws and discusses their limitations in detail, it also provides evidence to show that Gilbert's artistic genius was not exhausted, and that these neglected pieces contain important expressione of his philosophy of life and dramatic art.

Twentieth Century English History Plays - An attempt to define the scope and limits of the genre of the history play, in relation to twentieth century English historical drama, through an examination of selected plays which exemplify various approaches to history. This includes major works by writers of the first rank, such as Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, T S Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, and Edward Bond's Early Morning; as well as successful works by minor playwrights, representing popular taste and response, such as Gordon Daviot's Richard of Bordeaux, Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons and Peter Shaffer's The Royal Hunt of the Sun. Shaw's Saint Joan illustrates the new tradition of history play stimulated by Shaw, with his emphasis on discursive rational elements, an anti-heroic tone and diction, an overtly modern perspective, and a consciousness of different possible views of an event. Gordon Daviot's Richard of Bordeaux, Reginald Berkeley's 'The Lady with a Lamp' and Clifford Bax's 'The Rose without a Thorn' popular plays by popular playwrights of the 1930's, demonstrate the meeting and crossing of two traditions, the Romantic and the Shavian. They exemplify the kind of narrowly realistic theatre in vogue at the time with its concentration on the obvious exterior world. In contrast, T S Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and Charles Williams's Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury, stylised in form and treatment, illustrate the use of history to explore deep psychological and spiritual areas of conflict. Three plays of the 1960's - Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, Peter Shaffer's The Royal Hunt of the Sun and John Osborne's Luther - reflect different concerns and different levels of imagination but a common interest, in their various ways, in religious motivation. Robert Bolt and Peter Shaffer provide two examples of minor playwrights going to history as a source, in the one case for a moving character portrait (A Man for All Seasons) and in the other for spectacle and sensation (The Royal Hunt of the Sun). They illustrate the putting over of history in a popular way. A playwright of much greater calibre, John Osborne is drawn to an historical subject for its religious interest. His play, Luther, focuses on the individual of remarkable stature who is both prime mover and victim of social and religious forces. It is a forceful rhetorical piece moving towards expressionism and a more poetic and violent form of theatre. This trend in modern drama is vividly demonstrated by the concluding play of the study, Edward Bond's powerful surrealistic drama, Early Morning. Revolutionary in approach and intention, it is a disturbing dream vision which opens up new possibilities for the treatment of history.

The thesis explores the relationships between language, power and identity in the drama of Ben Jonson. The approach is primarily through linguistic analyses of the plays, but frequent reference is made to other texts which illuminate the social, and cultural conditions out of which the drama emerges. The first three chapters deal, respectively, with Jonson's Humour plays, Poetaster, and both tragedies. Four subsequent chapters deal individually with Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair. Two final chapters deal with Jonson's late plays. The thesis analyses the way in which characters reflect on each other's' uses of language and make artificial use of language themselves in order to acquire power over others, raise their social status, and confirm, deny or alter their identities. This involves the analysis of the numerous discourses which are contained in the plays (e.g. those characterized by origins in the Classics, in English Morality plays, or in contemporary sources such as the literature of duelling, or the idiom of the Court). The playwright's self-conscious use of language games, plays-within-plays, disguises, and deceptions is studied with close attention to the self-reflexive effects of these dramatic techniques. Jonson's plays, by using mixed modes of drama, set off dramatic conventions against one another in ways which often undermine the artifice. The moral views in the plays, inconsequence, fail to find any single basis and are also set in conflict with one another. Thus, it is argued, the plays, contrary to certain orthodox views, do not offer simple moral positions for the audience, but demand of the spectators a re-examination of their own frames of moral reference. It is suggested that the view of the world implicit in the earlier plays is one where language seems to offer the possibility of access to an ultimate truth, whereas in the later plays, language increasingly constructs its own truths.

Dorothy L. Sayers’s first festival play, The Zeal of Thy House (1937), was written at a time when it was widely believed among Christian drama practitioners that drama itself has a sacramental significance. This conviction took on a new urgency for Sayers as theologians and church people sought ways of establishing Christianity as a basis on which to rebuild society after the Second World War. Sayers’s The Mind of the Maker (1941), a study in theological aesthetics intended as a contribution to public debate about post-war reconstruction, outlined a trinitarian and sacramental model for human work considered as a creative activity. Sayers wrote three more festival plays between 1939 and 1951, and this study examines the four plays in the light of her sacramental emphasis. It locates Sayers’s dramatic practice in the context of those Roman and Anglo-Catholic practitioners of the arts who embraced the neo-Thomism of the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, and examines the influence of William Temple and his belief in the sacramentality of the whole material creation. The study argues that while the festival plays have the background of timeless sacramentality noted by a number of commentators, Sayers takes sacramentalism further in all four plays with the onstage enactment of a timebound sacramental event in which the protagonist, estranged from God by an imbalance in the dynamic trinitarian flow within his creative self, experiences anagnorisis, repentance and the hope of restoration to the community of believers. This sacramental enactment becomes a model for the audience’s participative reception of the play itself, and the study uses insights from contemporary theorists of medieval drama to elucidate the nature of the dramatic experience in which theatre and sacrament become reciprocally paradigmatic. The belief that art and theology can critique each other was central to Sayers’s approach to dramatising the gospels in her wartime BBC radio life of Christ, The Man Born to be King, and a chapter on this play examines its participatory hermeneutics as an extension of the sacramentality of the stage plays. A final section locates Sayers’s concept of the ‘passionate intellect’ in relation to the mid-century theological tension between faith and reason. Few commentators have given Sayers’s four plays equal weight, and many have omitted her last play. This study aims to unite literary and theological methodologies in arguing that Sayers’s festival plays demonstrate an increasingly participative sacramentality that culminates in the onstage baptism of the final play, written for the Festival of Britain, The Emperor Constantine.

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Significant changes and advances in technology in the twenty-first century, and the rapid evolution and development of the internet in particular, have shaped the production, publication, and consumption of, and access to, a wide range of media. For adaptors of Shakespeare, such advances can be exploited as new and innovative ways through which to interpret, perform, and understand Shakespeare. This thesis argues that a possibility space emerges from the restrictions of video-sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, enabling the creation and online distribution of original internet-disseminated short film adaptations of Shakespeare on a scale — and with a potential audience — previously unimaginable to those without significant financial resources. I explore the effect that the enforced brevity of the possibility space has on filmmakers’ adaptations of Shakespeare and ask how this space enables newly creative and innovative approaches to adapting Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ speech, Ophelia’s image (and death), and a distilled Romeo and Juliet narrative. I aim to show that a generally circulated cultural memory of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet is crucial for this kind of short-form adaptation, as the brevity of the format relies on audience familiarity with the images and texts deployed to fill in any gaps. I demonstrate that image-based adaptations, such as Ophelia’s death, are predominantly reductive due to a strong visual tradition that results in repeated reproduction of the same image, whereas text-based adaptations, such as Hamlet’s speech, allow exploration and amplification due to the nebulous nature of the text and exploitation of the possibilities of film; the Romeo and Juliet love story, bound up in both text and image, is more visually resonant than adaptations of Hamlet’s speech, but less so than those of Ophelia’s death. Ultimately, I conclude that although the possibility space always exists, it is not always leveraged in the same way: it can, and does, offer internet-disseminated short filmmakers the opportunity to approach familiar Shakespearean material in new and innovative ways, but this creative potential can be overlooked in favour of static, mimetic replication that uses Shakespeare to confer legitimacy without writing back.

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The aim of this thesis is to engage with current debates surrounding contemporary performance, queer theory and the body, which proffer a number of complex and contentious questions. How does queer theory work in practice, and does performance provide the ideal context for such deliberation? How do the subjective essentialisms of performance conflict with ideas of queer performativity and the deconstruction of sexual identity? Drawing upon corporeal and ontological theories of the body in conflict with queer strategic critiques, an attempt is made to articulate a problematically "essential" form of queer subjectivity in performance. By exploring the potential "origins" of a preceding queer practice in the works of Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht and Jean Genet, the work proposes that their approach to theatre and performance articulated and deployed a particularly "deviant" form of expression and aesthetic. They established an approach to theatre and performance, which has continued to inspire and influence anti-essentialist and political forms of queer performance in the new millennium. From the early struggles of lesbian and gay theatre in the politically volatile context of the seventies and early eighties, the thesis foregrounds a liberating yet problematic attempt at enabling a "transformation" in British and North American theatre in response to queer critical paradigms in the nineties. Critical paradigms that are consistently promoted as the unique "product" of a postmodem deconstructive culture, and yet derive much from the works of the early avant-garde, the experiments of the sixties and the subversive texts of post-war British theatre. The nineties have witnessed a proliferation of gay/queer-oriented performance "break through" into the populist mainstream, and the "heteronormative" culture in general. The concluding section focuses upon ideas of a queer corporeality that seeks to remap the significatory potential of the live body in performance, in conflict with discursive inscriptions that attempt to fix and regulate categories of gender and sexuality. Yet, what role does the spectator/audience play in relation to this "activated" queer form of performance? How is the gaze/reception problematised, or does it subvert the very efficacy of queer theory itself?

The plays and autobiographies of Sean O'Casey are generally considered in isolation from each other as being two not only distinct, but also largely independent areas within his work. This thesis, however, embodies an approach to O'Casey's creative work as an organic whole, of which both the autobiographies and the plays are essential and interrelated parts. The writing of the autobiographies did not take place in isolation from the plays, but evolved over a period of time which was also central, and crucial, to the development of the author's work as a playwright; and each of the autobiographical volumes was written, in part or whole, while he was working too upon a play, or even plays. Since both the plays and the autobiographies are the product of the same creative imagination, the writing of plays and autobiographies contemporaneously must have , inevitably, presented countless opportunities for mutual influence between the natures of the plays and the autobiographies. And by re-integrating the autobiographical volumes into the main-stream of O'Casey's work in the order and position (with regard to the plays) in which they were written, it can be seen that such opportunities for mutual influence not only arose, but were very often utilised by the author to very great artistic effect. But the plays and autobiographies seem to have influenced each other in manifold ways and upon different levels, and the relationshipbetween them is not confined to that central period of the author'swork during which the autobiographical volumes were written, but involves also all the extant plays which were completed before the first autobiographical volume was begun, as well as all the plays which were only begun after the last autobiographical volume was completed. Indeed,as viewed through the changing perspective of the relationships of the autobiographies to successive individual plays,'the overall relationship and' interaction between the plays and autobiographies of Sean O'Casey can be seen not only to evolve in a definite and coherent, if complex, pattern, but also to assume gradually the power of being a prime force in directing the course of his dramatic work, and of being a chief source of inspiration in his creative life as a whole.