No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis examines plays written by four playwrights in the context of Edwardian suffragism between 1907 and 1914. It aims to demonstrate that suffrage drama is much more versatile in its subjects, representations of women and dramatic strategies than previously thought. It argues that suffrage plays were not only an imitation of Edwardian social drama with a political message. Instead, it suggests that suffrage playwrights exploited a large variety of sources and strategies in the construction of their female characters and plots. To do so, they appropriated theatrical and dramatic strategies of popular theatre genres of the Edwardian age such as melodramas, musical comedies, tableaux vivants, history plays and farces. The method used in this thesis is first to look at the play structures and textual representations of femininities constructed in these plays. Second, the play is analysed through its text, photographs and illustrations produced about the production or in relation to the construction of female characters. Third, representational strategies used in the stage performances are examined whenever there is available information. Finally, the plays’ success is assessed by interpreting their critical and popular reception. This thesis is divided into four chapters. These chapters explore plays written by four dramatists: Elizabeth Robins, Cicely Hamilton, Christopher St John and George Bernard Shaw. In examining and identifying these playwrights’ strategies and representations of femininities, archival sources such as manuscripts, production bills, leaflets, photographs, newspaper articles and reviews published during Edwardian age have frequently been used as complementary and contextual materials. The principal collections, archival materials from which have been used in this study, are British Library Manuscripts and Ellen Terry Collection, Victoria & Albert Museum Theatre and Performance Collections, and The Women’s Library Collections in London.

This thesis looks at Samuel Beckett’s film and selections of his dramatic works for radio, theatre and television to demonstrate the processes in which an intuition of loss may be invoked in the audience. More specifically, interrogating the dominant attitude in Beckett studies that Beckett's works are intellectually demanding of the audience, I maintain in the dissertation that his drama may appeal more to the audience members' intuition than their intellect. Following this trajectory, I posit that the frustration experienced by an audience member could be caused by an intuition of loss that is triggered by the plays’ reconstitution of her habitual framework of understanding. Key texts that influenced the definitions of ‘habit’, ‘intuition’, and ‘time’ in this research are Henri Bergson’s Time and Freewill and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In this dissertation, I illustrate that the radio plays thematically appropriate the regard for radio as a ‘blind’ medium to highlight the audience’s entrapment in their habitual way of knowing. Further, Film is analysed as reconstituting the audience member’s habit body to an ecstatic being that is temporarily freed from stratified limits. Whereas Beckett scholars tend to attribute static interminability to Beckettian time because of the pervasiveness of ineffectual repetition depicted in his stage plays, I argue that Beckett’s conception of time may be dual: an incarcerating habitual continuum and a potentially liberating durée. Following that, I analyse how the television plays establish the intuition of loss as seemingly subject-less because the characters and the audience’s reliance on the habitual way of knowing has rendered them amnesiacs who cannot remember what they have lost, except that they have lost. In considering the intersection of Beckett’s dramatic works with the concept of habit, this thesis maps out the process in which each medium could have been exploited by Beckett to reconstitute the audience’s habitual framework of understanding to an intuitive experience of his works.

No description available.

In this dissertation, I discuss the process of playwriting in Scottish dialect: why Scottish writers choose not to write in Standard English; how and why they choose their specific dialect; what problems lie in the writing of dialect plays; and what problems may arise in performance and production. Following on from that, I also investigate why Scottish playwrights often find themselves excluded from English theatres - particularly from the London stage - and what cultural stereotypes seem to fuel this problem. I have examined Scottish dialect plays and playwrights’ accounts from the 1940s onwards, as well as considering the critical response to these plays. In the light of this contextual background, I also analyse my own personal experience as a playwright over the course of my PhD by Practice at the University of York, and my experience as a Glaswegian playwright at an English university in a traditional English town. My dissertation begins by discussing why Scottish playwrights choose Scottish dialects, focussing in particular on the idea of language survival and resistance to English hegemony. I examine the merits and effects of urban and rural dialects, investigating why rural dialects are now largely neglected and why urban dialects are vital to representations of class and city life in modern Scotland. I scrutinise the problems of writing dialect, and the lack of official spelling and prevalence of profanity in urban dialects, which present particular problems. Audience reception will also be considered, examining the idea that non-Scottish audiences struggle to understand the dialect, and subsequently struggle to understand its humour. Finally, I consider audience responses towards Scottish dialect.

This thesis considers the depiction of medical practitioners in plays and selected pamphlets by Thomas Middleton and other playwrights in the period 1603-37. It directs attention to the dramatists’ representation of characters who prescribe and dispense medicine, contending that concerns which in previous criticism were focused on the sick body can also be explored in relation to the medical practitioner. It examines how dramatists use medicine as a framework within which to stage anxieties about the meaning of professionalism, the changing urban world, access to bodies and private space, the limits of medical knowledge, and the power and authority of medical professionals. The thesis situates the drama in relation to the early modern medical marketplace, paying special attention to licensing, treatments, the professionalisation of the physician and the impact of scientific change. The following subjects are treated: the divisions of the medical marketplace and licensing and regulatory structures; the limits of medical knowledge and the conflict between medicine and religion; physicians’ knowledge of poison and tensions between professional ethics and royal authority; the position of the quacksalver in the urban medical market and anxieties about medicine as a trade; the difference between the treatment of the body and the mind and the potentially curative power of theatre. The thesis concludes that Middleton’s consistent interest in medical practitioners is particularly representative of contemporary medical anxieties, whilst recognising that he was working within a cultural context which was strongly conditioned by medical anxieties. The thesis demonstrates that Middleton’s wide-ranging depiction of practitioners deconstructs the symbolic divisions between them, questions medical power, authority, and considers anxieties about the expansion of access to medical knowledge and tensions about medicine’s status as a vocation or a trade. The thesis further concludes that drama’s potential for cure is emphasized through the staging of treatments and cures.

Poisonings are the staple of revenge tragedies of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, and contrary to a common perception that poison is a female weapon, male characters are often portrayed as the main perpetrators. I argue in this thesis that the plays discussed show a distinct type of male poisoner who employs poison as a weapon in a way that effeminises and emasculates them. I shall explore the character traits of this distinct male poisoner in six revenge tragedies: Hamlet, The Tragedy of Hoffman, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Tragedy of Claudius Tiberius Nero, The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, and Albovine, King Of The Lombards. I will attempt to demonstrate that there are two categories of male poisoner: one is the heterosexual male who poisons others because of ambition, lust, or revenge (for example, the Duke in The Revenger’s Tragedy or Claudius in Hamlet), the other is the distinct male poisoner who acts in ways more associated with females than with males; and it is these characters that I focus on in this thesis. These distinct male poisoners are not just represented as effeminate, but are shown forming close homoerotic relationships with other males through their language and actions; in effect, these male poisoners take on the subordinate role of the female within these relationships. My contribution to knowledge is to bring attention to this distinct type of male poisoner and demonstrate that, while not all male poisoners are presented as identical to each other, all these insidious characters have deficient manhoods that are empowered by poison.

Thomas D’Urfey (1653-1723) was one of the most prolific playwrights of the Restoration and early eighteenth century. His vast repertory and the range of publications, plays, song-books and poems attributed to the playwright demonstrate the potential extent of scholarship on Thomas D’Urfey, both dramaturgical and musical. His involvement in the music and lyrics, and his collaborative efforts with some of the most famous composers of the day, reveal the extent to which D’Urfey used music to enhance his drama. This thesis considers elements of tradition and experimentation in the work of Thomas D’Urfey and examines the ways in which D’Urfey adopts and adapts established characteristics, in music, theatre and song. Chapter One examines D’Urfey’s use of the court masque within his own dramatic works. I explore the ways in which D’Urfey looked to earlier English court music and dramatic productions, and adapted these to suit his own style and the changing tastes of the Restoration and early eighteenth-century audience. Chapter Two looks at the rise of Italian opera in England, and D’Urfey’s variable approach to the presence of the foreign entertainment on the London stage. Chapter Three begins to address the lack of scholarship concerning D’Urfey’s songs. Focusing on his pastoral songs, I discuss the ways in which D’Urfey’s songs contain certain tropes and characteristics of the traditional pastoral mode and the English pastoral tradition, as well as how D’Urfey established his own style of pastoral, that involved scenery and characters he hoped would be more familiar to his English audience.