This thesis will focus on twentieth-century German translations and adaptations of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Some of the pre-requisites of a work's translatability are that it must exist in a stable text, its meaning should be accessible to interpretation, and it should provide a unitary comment that can be re-constructed in a second language and culture. I do not believe that Hamlet satisfies any of these pre-requisites. There is no transcendent text, it seems to resist interpretation, and the lack of a unitary comment problematises the articulation of a response to the play that can be re-coded in the target text. Translators seek to stabilise and interpret, whereas Hamlet is semantically and formally in continuous motion and resists attempts at closure. The demands of translation and the nature of Hamlet seem to be in direct conflict, and I begin my investigation with a hypothesis that Hamlet is 'untranslatable'. I have conducted a series of interviews with German translators of Hamlet, and I have used these discussions to construct a dialogue in this thesis. In Part 1 of the study I will focus on those translators of the play that have agreed that Hamlet is a flawed work, which must be repaired and improved before it can be translated. This dialogue explores the assumptions about Shakespeare's 'artistic failure' and how changes to the text are thought to facilitate its translatability. There will be an investigation of how translators and editors have continually rewritten Hamlet based on notions of 'correct' text. I will examine the validity of concepts such as the 'originar work and 'fidelity' to originals, as the premise on which translation is based, and I will question whether the work of these translators is phenomenologically flawed. In Part 2 of this thesis I will proceed to consider whether Hamlet has been rejected as untranslatable because of metaphysical qualities that foreground our notions of the play. It seems to be the case that translators only experience the problem of untranslatability, or of Hamlet as a flawed work, when certain demands are made on the transcendent text in which Hamlet is believed to exist. The translators and adapters, whose work is the object of my analysis in the second part of this study; have been able to circumscribe the issue of translatability by changing the way they have understood the ontology of Hamlet. By deconstructing notions of the unitary work or the transcendent text, and conceiving of Hamlet as a series of enactments or a methodological field, it becomes possible to trahslatethe material across the boundaries of language and culture. I will thus develop the argument that by moving away from traditional notions of a 'work' to understand Hamlet as a broader cultural text, we can re-think the interpretive possibilities of the play and push back the boundaries of what has been traditionally possible through the limited practice of translation. I will be working towards the conclusion that translation theorists should re-think their conceptions of the 'source text' and the function of translation, working from a field of cultural material, rather than attempting to translate a non-existent transcendent text. The work of translators and adapters examined in the second part of my study presents a more productive approach to translation, and a more realistic II understanding of the ontology of literary works, compared with the attempts of other translators, who continue in their search for the play's lost echt. My research methodology, which involved the construction of a dialogue between translators, is also an attempt to promote a method of analysing and evaluating translations that includes the translator. Analyses of translations too often treat the translation as if it had been written in a social, political, linguistic and cultural vacuum. In fact, there are many factors that decide how a text is going to be translated even before the translator reaches his text. There have been many forces that have shaped and conditioned the way Hamlet has been translated and appropriated in German, ranging from large-scale intervention from political regimes like the Nazi Party and the Socialist State in East Germany, to small-scale domestic quarrels with a spouse. My thesis combines textual analysis and detailed discussions with translators, in order to develop a fuller understanding of the pragmatics of translation, and the need for a new interpretative methodology.

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This edition presents a fully modernised and annotated text of Samuel Rowley’s 'When You See Me, You Know Me', first performed by Prince Henry’s Men at the Fortune playhouse c.1604. The earliest extant playtext to represent King Henry VIII as a character on the early modern stage, When You See Me dramatizes a number of key events in the Tudor king’s reign including, as per the play’s subtitle, ‘the birth and virtuous life of Edward, Prince of Wales’. The play was first printed in 1605, with subsequent editions appearing in 1613, 1621 and 1632. Despite its apparent success on the Fortune stage, however, the play has become increasingly marginalized since the mid-seventeenth century, receiving only cursory critical attention. In addition to making the text of Rowley’s play accessible to a modern readership, this edition aims to rehabilitate When You See Me as an important dramatization of the Henrician Reformation; it also seeks to draw attention to Rowley and his long and influential career in the early modern theatre. The introduction to the edition is divided into two main parts, focusing respectively on the author and the play; the latter is subdivided to include separate critical, bibliographical and editorial introductions. The Critical Introduction provides information on the play’s composition and performance history, including aspects of its performance on the Fortune stage and its position within the extant company repertory; the Bibliographical Introduction considers the play’s entrance in the Stationers’ Register and the manuscript used as printers’ copy, as well as the physical manufacture of its first edition and the text’s treatment in later and modern editions; and the Editorial Introduction provides comment on the specific methodologies employed in the production of the edition, with particular reference to the Arden Early Modern Drama editorial guidelines upon which the text is based. The appendices provide useful supplementary information, including Rowley’s likely source material; doubling charts; current locations of extant copies; bibliographical descriptions; press variants; and photographs of the copy-text.

This thesis examines a selection of Lady Gregory’s original dramatic works. Between the opening of the Abbey Theatre in 1904 and the playwright’s death in 1932, Gregory’s plays accounted for the highest number of stage productions in comparison to her co-directors William Butler Yeats and John Millington Synge. As such, this thesis analyses examples ranging from her most well-known and successful pieces, including The Rising of the Moon and The Gaol Gate, to lesser known plays such as The Wrens, The White Cockade, Shanwalla and Dave. With a focus on the historical, bibliographical, and political contexts, the plays are analysed not only with regard to the printed texts, but also in the context of theatrical performances. In order to re-evaluate Gregory’s contribution to the Abbey, this thesis is divided into three chapters dealing with dominant themes throughout her career as a playwright: Empire, class, and religion.

Although Barker began in the early 1970s as a Marxist satirical playwright, by 2005 his approach had shifted in focus to such an extent that he felt able to define his theatre as having ‘many of the characteristics of a religion.’ This study investigates the relationship between Barker’s theatre and religious and spiritual ideas, focusing on two key influences: the medieval Christian mystical theologian Meister Eckhart and religious and mythic elements of ancient Greek tragedy. Barker’s dramatic engagement with Abrahamic monotheism reveals his interest in early biblical portrayals of God and his appropriation of dominant Christian tropes, notably apocalypse and rebirth. The specific influence of Eckhart’s apophatic theology, his Neoplatonic conception of the One and his doctrine of ‘detachment’ are shown to inform aspects of Barker’s work, including his theoretical text Death, The One and the Art of Theatre. Greek tragedy is examined as a religious and ritual event, establishing parallels with Barker’s view of tragedy as a sacred art that challenges rational and moral ideals by generating ecstatic emotions through an imagined proximity to death. Greek narratives that centre on an encounter with the dead, nekyia and katabasis, are explored in connection with Barker’s drama, along with ritual initiation in Greek mystery cult. Finally there is an investigation into the immoral, ecstatic, erotic, and thanatic aspects of the female protagonist in Greek tragedy and how these aspects of the tragic female continue and are appropriated in Barker’s contemporary tragedy. Eckhartian mystical theology and elements of classical tragic spirituality help to give Barker’s theatre a unique and mysterious dimension. The recurring antagonistic female archetype of ‘the one’ in Barker’s drama expresses core aspects of this spirituality: sexual ecstasy, proximity to death, and detachment from morality and ideology.

The purpose is to elucidate one of the most important types of play written in rejection of late nineteenth-century secular realism. The theory of the form was most forcefully expressed by T.S. Eliot and G.B. Shaw. Although in many ways antithetical, Shaw and Eliot, in terms often curiously similar and with a crucial model in common, demanded a drama which would reject the secular ethos of realism, its formal amorphousness, and its preoccupation with the portrayal of personalities. Quite independently, in looking for an exemplary play in the whole English tradition, each fixed on the medieval Everyman. In "Four Elizabethan Dramatists" Eliot puts the point with force in a phrase pellucid yet richly suggestive: "In one play, Everyman, and perhaps in that one play only, we have a drama within the limitations of art." Shaw used Everyman as the clearest example in English of the work of the artist-philosophers. In both Shaw's and Eliot's admiration for the medieval play lies a horror of chaos, and a demand for philosophical order. Some plays by Maeterlinck, Yeats, Beckett and Pinter are assessed according to their success or failure as 'drama within the limitations of art', drama that imposes order on actuality in order to elicit a sense of order in actuality Yeats's successful creation of a complex private mythology provided him with what the other three dramatists so cripplingly lacked - what Yeats called his "defense against the chaos of the world".

This thesis is concerned with exploring different forms of Jacobean drama and performances that span across different sites, from the commercial stages of London, to the civic pageants that took place on the Thames and in the City, and the court entertainments held at Whitehall Palace. My research necessarily casts a wide net over its subject matter in order to illustrate how these different modes of performance engage with representations of the marine through the technologies available to them, whether poetic, material, or both. While the sea had long been a receptacle for literary and poetic attention and can repeatedly be found as the stronghold of adventure, wonder, danger, and exile in the English narrative tradition, it is specifically at the beginning of the seventeenth century that the sea takes a hold of the literary imagination with particular force. The cultural, political, and economic predominance of the marine in early modern England found numerous means of expression in drama, where the different facets of marine identity and occupation create on-stage marine spaces. The thesis elucidates how these modes of performance often invoke and exploit the dramatic potential of the marine and its commercial, political, and iconographical meanings. Commercial drama, written for a pre-proscenial stage, realises the marine through language and metaphor, appealing to a collective imaginary in bodying forth the limitless watery expanses on which the action takes place. This imaginative embodiment finds a very different—and indeed a more material—means of expression in civic drama and the court masque, where the extensive and elaborate pageant devices and stage machinery were largely indebted to and shaped by continental theatrical design. The material means of expressing the marine that are found in the civic performances and the court masques discussed in this study necessitates a consideration of European trends in theatre design and the decorative arts. In looking to visual and material culture this thesis explicates the interdependence between different modes of creating on-stage marine spaces and the ways in which the material presence inflects both language and action in Jacobean drama.

This thesis aims to examine the varied notions of space in early modern play-texts as well as to challenge the assumed text-space relationship that has been the foundation of various scholarly approaches towards early modern theatrical practice, including a Shakespeare-centred historiography and theatre reconstruction carried out by scholars such as Andrew Gurr and Richard Hosley and contemporary editorial practices that appear to reconstruct early modern performances scenographically through annotations and editorial interventions. In order to depart from such Shakespeare-centred and London-biased architectural determinism, the thesis will adopt a repertory approach to the Queen’s Men, a methodology that emphasises the materiality of the play books and an author-function approach to the plays associated with Robert Greene in order to explore the alternatives to a conventional architectural and scenographic theatre reconstruction based primarily on the literary analysis of play-texts. In addition to challenging the assumption of an interchangeable relationship between play-texts, performance and space, this thesis aim to demonstrate how the concept of space within a play-text will be ultimately an issue of dramaturgy, determined and defined by the diverse dramatic forces in this period and the idiosyncratic styles of their narrative.

The present study considers Brome’s playbooks and his reputation as a dramatist from the perspective of different approaches to ‘the history of the book.’ It examines various methods of critical discourse while it re-evaluates the worth of a dramatist whose work has been underappreciated. The study takes seven unconventional approaches as the Complete Works of Richard Brome Project (forthcoming 2010) will be addressing the theatricality of Brome’s plays; and, because Matthew Steggle’s 2004 monograph, Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage, synthesises most discoveries about Brome’s life and career found in recent years. Chapter 1 speculates on how the commercial and political context of play publication can impact the received meaning of plays as texts. It reflects on how bibliographical environments can create meaning. Chapter 2, on the other hand, looks at the effect that delayed publication had on Brome’s late-Caroline revivals. It explores twentieth-century ideas of “decadence” once associated with Brome. Chapter 3 addresses a series of related issues bearing in mind certain print conventions and performance practices. In it, I contend that certain print conventions had yet to become standardised in the 1630s. I do so using a cast list and a pamphlet to suggest community expectation behind the staging of Brome’s Antipodes. Chapter 4 examines Brome’s syncretic texts. This examination is founded upon an understanding that play-writers could act as ‘play patchers’ – Tiffany Stern’s term – and that such ‘patching’ must be acknowledged in the study of printed books. Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 show how Brome’s career as an author, which has been studied through his plays, involved theatrical and non-theatrical creativity. Brome’s commendatory verses allow me to address issues of “paratext,” i.e., concerns that have become apparent because of English translations of Seuils. Brome’s non-theatrical publications indicate to me that Brome, as a dramatist, was more than simply aware of print – as Lukas Erne has argued of Shakespeare. Brome’s skills as a literary contributor (c. 1639) provided him with opportunities for employment (c. 1649). My final chapter stresses the significance of playtexts of the 1630s and playtexts of the 1650s by reconsidering the reception of Brome’s plays as playbooks. It also suggests that the Commonwealth period – a period in which the public performance of Brome’s plays was forbidden – became a defining force in his twentieth-century biography.

This thesis critically examines some of the plays of the playwright, screenwriter and poet, Harold Pinter, in order to argue, first of all, that he was a writer of psychological realism, and that his oeuvre can, in the main, be defined as a body of psycho-political works. My essential contention is that Pinter’s defining interest in power relations, coupled with his dedication to exploring how psychological ‘realities’ shape these said relations, implies that he is a playwright, who generally wrote psycho-political works. In the main body of the thesis, I then offer eight close readings of Pinter’s plays, which are essentially informed, in their respective ways, by theories drawn from the post-Freudian school of thought, most notably Winnicottian object-relations theory (indeed, the common feature of these otherwise disparate theories are that they all explore how the self is constituted and/or influenced by its relationship with the other). Whilst there were a number of themes that could have been selected, my decision to focus on the themes of authoritarianism, territoriality and of patriarchy was not arbitrary. Apart from an appeal to quantitative considerations (i.e., that these themes recur again and again at different stages of Pinter’s career), my main reason for including them is that they are defining features of power relationships in general. For example, if one construes power as ‘power-over’ others, then a psycho-political exploration of power necessitates that the malignant form of authority (i.e., authoritarianism) be examined; likewise, if sexual politics involves, as Pinter, for one, contends, power reified as the possession of a particular sex (i.e., patriarchy), then again this suggests that this theme is of central importance in the psycho-political taxonomy of power. The final part of the thesis explains how the three central themes can be considered to be inter-related in general and in Pinter’s work in particular. Furthermore, the thesis conclusion also provides several possible criticisms of Pinter’s psycho-political approach to power (e.g., a social materialist position contends that ‘psychologising’ power relations obscures the central importance of how distal powers construct oppressive political relationships).