This thesis considers to what extent cultural, social and political issues encroach upon and shape the private lives of the characters in the plays of David Hare. I will focus on thirteen of Hare's original full-length stage plays in which Hare asks probing questions regarding the moral fabric of society. He does this by exploring the private concerns of the individual when faced with the challenges of the public arena. This thesis argues that, although Hare's plays are consistently informed by their political contexts, for the most part political concerns serve as a backdrop to plays that focus on the private worlds of individuals. This thesis is divided into five chapters and each one will explore a comparable group of plays. Each chapter of this thesis will mark a stylistic and/ or thematic shift of emphasis in Hare's drama. I argue that Hare's plays often contain nuanced subtexts through which he attains a level of intimacy that critics do not often acknowledge or adequately address, and it is through exploring the minutiae of private lives that Hare develops themes that express the fears of the individual when confronted with the demands of wider society. In conclusion, it is suggested that by focusing on the shifts of emphasis in Hare 's canon, I have been able to map areas of Hare's work that have not previously been explored. I conclude that Hare 's plays examine how social pressures (the public frame) invariably collide with the personal needs of the individual (the private frame) and that, by extension, Hare argues that in order to improve the moral fabric of society it is necessary for the individual to accept personal responsibility for one's actions. This thesis asserts that Hare's nuanced subtexts reveal that his central characters' actions are often clouded by private motivations.

This study will focus upon the dramas of Mary Sidney, Samuel Daniel, Samuel Brandon, William Alexander, and Elizabeth Cary, as well as the Roman tragedies of Thomas Kyd and Ben Jonson, which are characterised, to varying degrees, by their appropriation of continental models of neo-classical tragedy practised by the French tragedian Robert Gamier. The idea, promulgated by several early twentieth century critics, that many of these plays are linked by a common anti-theatrical agenda has been roundly rejected by more recent critics. This thesis will offer a new perspective on these plays by arguing that the recent criticism which distances them from the anti-theatrical agenda has served to repress the intertextual affinities that exist between them. These are characterised by their common interests in such humanist outlooks as republicanism and stoicism. Classical authorities, including Seneca and Tacitus, as well as contemporary theorists, such as Niccolo Machiavelli and Justus Lipsius inform these discourses. This form of drama also offered the authors a space to interrogate the practical utility of a number of theories from a variety of perspectives, indicating that the plays are in dialogue with one another rather than offering a single uniform outlook. As a related issue, the study will consider the various ways that the engagement with these theories affects the representation of a number of features in these plays, such as the dramatisation of key historical events, the representation of exemplary figures like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and the plight of the individual in a tyrannical society, as well as their response to topical events such as the accession of James I. Such features, this study will argue, provide evidence of how this form of drama was appropriated to address the concerns of a politically disenfranchised group of writers during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras, as well as revealing the commitment of the writers to a form of humanist dramatic authorship.

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This thesis is composed of two primary parts. The first part, which comprises seventy per cent of this doctoral study, is made up of two new history plays, We’re Gonna Make You Whole and The Interrogation. The second part, which makes up the remaining thirty per cent, is a critical analysis that positions my creative writing within the spectrum of Canadian postcolonial drama, alongside other dramatists who employ magical realism and new historicism in their work. I analyse my creative practice and compare and contrast Marie Clements’s Burning Vision with We’re Gonna Make You Whole. In the final chapters I analyse my way of working, looking closely at the construction of The Interrogation. The creation of the two new history plays is my primary contribution to knowledge. Published in 2011 by Oberon Books, the first of my two submission plays, We’re Gonna Make You Whole, is a magical-real new history of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Disaster. This compact, two-act play interrupts and disrupts the mainstream mediatised history of the disaster by deploying an interwoven, alternate perspective of the catastrophe. This interruption aims to make the mainstream history seem uncanny by normalising the alternate, subversive history. Set in the military headquarters of an unidentified military body, The Interrogation, my second play, interrupts the mainstream narrative of the global economic crisis by suggesting a link between the neocolonial attitudes of the UK, US and Germany and the present financial landscape. The play dramatises the brutal interrogation of two soldiers, one junior and the other senior, by a mysterious chameleon interrogator (also a soldier) who assumes the accent, affectations and status of his ‘victims’.

For the first time this thesis traces the history of the Oxford Playhouse from its beginning to the present day. I call it Agamemnon and After ... the 'lost cause' that became the Oxford Playhouse because it was a production of Aeschylus's tragedy in 1880 by a student, Frank Benson, later one of Britain's foremost Shakespearean actor-managers, which led - fortuitously - to the theatre's launch in 1923. Since J.B. Fagan staged the first successful production of Chekhov in England in 1925 most directors have contributed to Britain's dramatic heritage. Even the happy-go-lucky Stanford Holme, who took the Playhouse downmarket in the 1930s, has his niche in history for taking theatre to the people during the Second World War. A few, like Peter Hall, have achieved international stature. Yet the Playhouse itself, though historians often mention it in the same breath as pioneers of the repertory movement like Birmingham and Liverpool, has never received full recognition - in part because its own records before 1956 have vanished, in part because of its ambivalent relationship with Oxford University. By leafing through old journals, collecting documentary evidence, including missing programmes, and interviewing as many people as I can, I have pieced together the story of the last 83 years. It has many surprising twists, but most fascinating, and complex, is the role the university has played, or rather failed to play. Central to my thesis is the contention that even from 1961 to 1987, when the Playhouse was the University Theatre, it was an ill-starred partnership: as I put it when I was Oxford Mail theatre critic, a shotgun marriage that ended in a messy divorce.

This thesis will investigate the structural forms which emerge when the custom of swearing is regarded as the central organising principle of the plot. Studies of dramatic structure and oath-taking in Renaissance scholarship have been curiously neglected in recent years; my work is intended to redress this balance by arguing that the representation of mimetic action in early modern culture is unusually focussed at the moment of pledging. It will draw on recent critical interest in rhetoric and utterance, as well as the contextual pressures which shape the construction of narrative, to offer a detailed examination of the intricate and contested relationship between language and action on the Renaissance stage. This thesis will consider the temporal properties of pledging across a range of plays, from the 1580s to the Caroline era. The breadth of study will demonstrate the pervasiveness of narratological models shaped by swearing to early modern dramatists through the period, whilst also considering its use as a form of influence. It will also demonstrate the range of creative responses to this structure by considering the different generic forms which pledging helps to facilitate, including revenge tragedy, roman drama, history plays, seventeenth century sex tragedy and the looser, more hybrid plots of the late period. Each chapter will begin with a study of the salient features of a particular social or cultural area in which swearing occurs, drawing on a range of contemporary sources, followed by an exploration of the actions opened up by the making of an oath in two plays. In some chapters the works will share obvious aesthetic influences; in others, they will be responsive to a mutual interest in a precise form of cultural pledging. The original contributions made by this thesis to knowledge are three-fold. First, the placing of dramatic structure in the context of swearing will complement other recent developments in the contextualisation of narrative form; second, it will shed light on the authorial structures inherent in the linguistic formulation of swearing, which seek to channel the scope for self-agency into regulated patterns of action; and third, it will promote a revised model of pledging, in which the rhetorical ingenuity of making an oath will open up the possibility for actions which are not always anticipated by the terms of the original bond.

Wole Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, the first African recipient of this honour, for his body of works covering plays, novels and poetry. Soyinka is also a literary and cultural theorist, a memoirist, and a social activist, known internationally for his campaign against tyranny and injustice. This and many other dimensions of his career as a man of letters, his cultural background and the postcolonial context in which he writes flow freely into his creative works. This study describes Soyinka’s theatre, based on eight major plays published between 1960 and 1996. This is the peak of Soyinka’s literary career and provides the most illustrative instances of the maturation of his art and thematic concerns. Using the selected plays as focal points, a critical appraisal of Soyinka’s characters and their cosmos, and the development of the key ingredients of his theatre is undertaken. It is argued that Soyinka’s theatre portrays a liminal world in which myth, ritual and postcolonialism are ascendant elements. The main framework for this argument is Barthes’s poststructuralism but other theorists apply as well, including Bhabha, Eco, Foucault, Hutcheon, Jeyifo, Jung, Kristeva, Levinas, Olaniyan, Turner, Van Gennep, Vermeulen and Akker, and Soyinka himself. Accordingly, this study opens new frontiers on Soyinka by delving into key concepts such as liminality, postcoloniality, modernism, postmodernism, metamodernism, abjection, “othering”, and intertexuality as they apply to Soyinka’s theatre. It features a wide-ranging discourse on Soyinka’s “fourth stage” as a form of applied dramatic theory in which the poetics of myth and ritual and the postcolonial distinctions of Soyinka’s theatre find congruence. Myth and ritual ensconce Soyinka’s dramatis personae in a way that prepares them for and, crucially, prevents them from overcoming the gulf between their personal volitions and the will of their community.

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