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The aim of this edition is to present an old-spelling, critical text of The Great Favourite; or, the Duke of Lerma (1668), a tragicomedy attributed to Sir Robert Howard. The thesis begins with a literary introduction which, after a brief survey of Howard's life, and a discussion of his literary career, examines the historical background of the play (including possible historical sources), and evaluates the various claims put forward concerning the play's authorship. The candidate most frequently proposed is John Ford. In an attempt to keep the question of attribution in perspective, this introduction considers, too, the political background against which the play was written, and the relationship between The Great Favourite and Howard's other works (which reveal the influence of both Jacobean and Restoration dramatic tastes and techniques). The literary introduction concludes with a critical appreciation of the play in its own right. The text has been prepared from a copy of the first edition, collated with five other copies of the same edition and with all subsequent editions. It is preceded by a bibliographical introduction which includes a statement of the principles on which the present edition is based. A commentary attempts to provide such textual, critical, and explanatory material as may assist the reader's understanding and appreciation of the play. Emendations are recorded at the foot of the relevant page of the text and appendices record alterations in lineation, historical collation details, and an interesting discrepancy in the binding of the early gatherings of copies of the first edition. other appendices look at contemporary satire directed against Howard, explore a connexion between Howard and Milton, and provide details of the contact between Rubens and the Duke of Lerma that resulted in an equestrian portrait of the great favourite (reproduced as the frontispiece to the present edition).

The present thesis examines the interrelation between the dynamics of human company and the psychoanalytic concept of witnessing in Samuel Beckett’s major post-war drama. The analysis provided concentrates primarily on 'Waiting for Godot' (1952), 'Endgame' (1957), and 'Happy Days' (1962) and situates these plays within a post-war framework, while examining their stylistic qualities and thematic concerns within the context of trauma studies. To trace and expose the overwhelming presence of trauma in the plays, I focus on the treatment of form and content and expand on existing critical readings by proposing that both form and content simultaneously internalise the symptoms, the rhythms and the processes of traumatic memory and experience. Demonstrating that the theatrical performance is adequately suited to represent and give embodied form to trauma, I then discuss the viability and significance of approaching Beckett’s post-war trilogy as testimonial drama. Testimonial drama, I argue, embodies the symptoms of trauma both thematically and structurally, and effectively manages to testify to its historical context through the act of being performed in front of an audience, in front of a human witness. By acknowledging the physical presence of the audience, the theatrical performance manages to create the witness to its struggle to testify, as the Beckett stage mutates into a key site of interaction between trauma, theatre and history. Focusing then on the condition of memory, language and the body, I suggest that they constitute three primary sites for the manifestation of unprocessed traumatic experience and question agency, subjectivity and the availability of choice in the aftermath of massive historical trauma. This discussion is followed by the assessment of the nature, purpose and value of human company in the traumatic aftermath. Human company, I argue, is fundamentally related to past trauma. It is decisively shaped by the collapse of social structures, the loss of communality and the absence of witnessing, emerging as a compelling human need that is compulsively longed for, sought out and maintained while reducing individual identity to role-play. A product of a deeply traumatic history, human company also surfaces as a means of resistance to historical horrors as the human other serves as a vital source of solace, support and communality, while providing with his or her physical presence the much-needed human witness to one’s existence. A key trope of Beckett’s post-war drama, human company foregrounds the status of the trilogy as a profound artistic and ethical response to the horrors of the Second World War, as the need for the human other as a witness – exposed both thematically and structurally – opens up the possibility for witnessing and testimony to take place in the aftermath of a historical period which precluded its own witnessing.

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This thesis re-examines the relationship between Senecan drama and the emergence of the public tragedy of the 1580s and '90s. In criticism, this relationship has been understood as a continuation of the 'influence' Seneca had been exerting on the Universities and the Inns-of Court since the 1560s. This thesis challenges this established view on the grounds that it fails to explain the innovativeness of the public tragedies: the formative impact of Seneca could not be the same on conventional academic authors as on creative public dramatists. Chapter I of this thesis explores and formulates this unresolved problem. Challenging the established view depends on the possibility of a Seneca who could offer a tragic vision alternative to academic moralism. Chapter II is concerned with showing that the plays ofthis Seneca dramatize not moral certitudes but tragic contradictions - the 'tragic' Seneca is made possible by an unstable conception of the individual - who is simultaneously individual and social, or individual because social. The privileged tragic expression of this ambiguous selfhood is revenge. Essentially, this thesis attempts to demonstrate that Senecan revenge so understood was fundamental to the earliest masterpieces of public revenge tragedy, The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus, and that Kyd's and Shakespeare's new treatment of revenge was facilitated by a rediscovery of Senecan tragedy as opposed to Senecan sensationalism. Chapters III and IV (on The Spanish Tragedy) and Chapter V and VI (on Titus Andronicus) attempt to show that this recognition has been impeded by the inadequate notion of revenge that has dominated modem criticism. Founded upon the orthodox pieties that Kyd and Shakespeare challenge, much of this criticism has obscured the distinctiveness of the Senecan avenger as against the Machiavel. This thesis conceives the would-be a-social Machiavel and the highly-socialized avenger in opposition to each other, but in order to reveal the inescapable social condition of the individual in both cases. At its moment of inception public revenge tragedy appears as a synthesis of tradition and modernity, social commitment and individual endeavour.