This thesis traces the development of Shakespeare's conceptualisation of ancient and early modem Greece through an analysis of his Greek plays. Contrary to the numerous studies of Shakespeare's Roman plays, very little interest has been paid to his Greek ones. The single extensive study conducted on the subject to the present, has focused exclusively on the structural interrelation between classical Greece and Renaissance Britain, failing to take into consideration early modern Greece. The specific thesis aims at filling this crucial gap. It sets about to demonstrate that Shakespeare's contemporary Greece was equally, if not in some ways more important, than classical Greece as a moving force in the creation of the Shakespearean reek plays. Reading these literary texts through a historicist approach and in conjunction with a wide variety of other discursive forms ranging from travelogues to ambassadorial reports to historiographies, this thesis demonstrates the deeply contradictory role of Greece in both sustaining and dislocating Renaissance English authority. It reveals that Elizabethan and Jacobean England struggled to achieve selfrepresentation and establish itself as an imperial authority through an emulation of classical Greek cultural, linguistic and imperial models, while simultaneously endeavouring to break free from the overdominant influence of these models and establish an independent identity. At the same time, Renaissance England's ambition to achieve self-representation was unsettled by its anxiety over the vulnerability of Europe's eastern borders, deepened by the subjection of early modem Greece to the Otttoman Empire. Shakespeare's Greek plays are informed by and engage with these particular tensions. The introduction outlines the parameters of this study and explains the choice of texts. The first chapter reads Shakespeare's first dramatic poem, Venus and Adonis, as the playwright's call to Elizabethan England to abandon its emulation of classical Greek language and devolop its own instead. The second chapter focuses on The Comedy of Errors as a Shakespeareane xploration of England's effort to forge itself as different to both the Ottoman Empire and early modern Greece and its inability to achieve such a goal due to its confrontation with an Eastern `other' who is both a reflection of the self and determinately alien. This blurring of boundaries is further highlighted in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play dramatises the dissolution of strict binary oppositions such as the Athenian city and the forest, the elevated classical Greece and the degraded early modem one, and the stereotypical differences between the two sexes by effeminating men and emasculating women. The fourth chapter analyzes Troilus and Cressida as a Shakespeareans atire of the breakdown of the classical world which disrupts the use of the Troy legend as a tool of political propaganda by both Elizabeth and James I. The last three plays of the thesis, written well into the Jacobean era, are analysed in relation to James's and Henry's courts. Timon of Athens satirizes the fall of the Athenian civilisation in order to critique Jacobean England and its decadent monarch. Pericles is read as a dramatisation of the dream of proto-capitalistic Jacobean England's redemption by its re-naissance of feudal values, its engagement in a war against the infidels and its solidification of a Christian Renaissance English identity. The seventh and last chapter examines The Two Noble Kinsmen as a call for Jacobean England to resuscitate its decayed chivalric ethos by abandoning its imitation of Greek antiquity and engaging in a more introspective process, a return to its Gothic origins.

Ben Jonson's middle comedies in particular have an astonishing energy, excitement and capacity to thrill. Where does this come from? Having surveyed recent Jonson criticism, I argue that Jonson's deep-rooted Stoicism and humanism make him hostile to the dissolution of personal identity produced by the rampant free market of Jacobean London, and to the `classical' episteme in Foucault's sense. Jonson's response is to write drama which is not mimetic; it embodies and continues the world, and thus organically re-unites signifier and signified. Both early modern and current theory are discussed in support of this claim. I argue that Jonson's commitment to the theory and practice of classical rhetoric entails a thoroughly materialist understanding of the workings of language. I look at the physical impact of Jonson's language on his audience. I argue that Jonson's middle comedies are best understood not as mimetic or even primarily representational. They are rhetorical displays by performers at play, who do not strive to signify an imagined on-stage world so much as to sport promiscuously with the conventions of popular and classical theatre. This is not classical mimesis, but theatre as raw phenomenon. In support of the argument I quote actors and directors. The effect is a kind of Erasmian lusus, where the audience are challenged to find a new and authentic moral understanding in a city where all solid moral landmarks have just melted into air. The final two chapters look at how this idea makes sense of the distinctive way that Jonson interpenetrates the `on-stage' and `off-stage' worlds as a matter of dramatic strategy. I produce a detailed reading of Jonson's employment of personation; his expositions and endings; his distinctive use of on-stage time; and his exploitation of the different modes of spatial representation on the early modem stage for ironic effect.

While recent scholarship understands early modern play production as a collaborative process between multiple playhouse agents, the contributions of those stationers responsible for the rise of Shakespeare in print are often dismissed as acts of textual corruption. Particularly in the case of Shakespeare, who was not directly involved in the publication of his plays, the interaction of printers and publishers with his texts is central to the more inclusive understanding of the printing and publishing of Shakespeare in his time proposed in this dissertation. Each chapter explores largely neglected textual interactions between Shakespeare and his stationers in order to demonstrate how the group of play quartos discussed in it are products of thoroughly collaborative publishing ventures. Examining collections of commercial drama in print produced by playwright and stationer partnerships in London between 1594-1632, my research shows that collaboration was a recurrent phenomenon in early modern dramatic publication and instrumental to Shakespeare’s presentation in print. Key to this approach is my understanding of dramatic publications not simply as material artefacts but as complex textual spaces within which all agents, though not necessarily in the same place or at the same time, contributed in distinctive and significant ways to the production of Shakespeare’s plays in print. Considering playtexts as the product of textual collaboration, the printing and the publication process become sites of textual production, rather than contamination by non-authorial agents. This thesis also offers a new methodology for identifying non-authorial intervention in early printed playbooks, positioning the work of such agents as integral to their textual and bibliographic make-up.

The aim of the thesis is to establish a sense of continuity in the development and transmutation of the character of Julius Caesar from history to epic and drama. The research question is: what elements from Caesar’s self-representation, constituting themes and characterization, have been transmitted to his epic and dramatic representation? The groundwork of my study is formed by an analysis of Caesar’s self-representation in his Commentaries on the Gallic and Civil Wars as fundamental for the establishment of his specific epic-dramatic image. Epic Caesar is characterized by exceptional speed, leading to his transcendence of ordinary temporality; this supernatural asset distinguishes him as a certain quasi-divine presence. Caesar’s dramatic aspect is expressed in the heightened sense of self-dramatization achieved by the self-referential use of the third person, the utilization of dramaturgical techniques and by highlighting the performativity of war and the gaze of the commander. The fusion of author and protagonist exemplified in Caesar’s works allows their assessment both on a level internal to the narrative, and on an external, or meta-level, as part of the author’s political and personal propaganda. A chapter on ancient historiography, focusing primarily on events not described in the Commentaries, explores the development of Caesar’s epic-dramatic character in the light of his dramatization by the historical canon and the Late Republican performative milieu. One epic (Lucan’s Civil War) and three dramatic case studies (Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, George Chapman’s The Tragedy of Caesar and Pompey and Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra) are investigated in the light of the set of qualities, identified as intrinsic to Caesar’s agenda set in his own works. By drawing parallels between Caesarean self-characterization and its interpretation by the dramatists I aim to elucidate the Commentaries’ potential for thematic influence, created by the unique blending of author and protagonist.

The aim of this thesis is to clarify the role that female interpreters in Britain played at an early stage in the canonisation of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare, one of the popular playwrights in English Renaissance theatre, became increasingly famous during the first half of the eighteenth century, and the Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769 marked the climax of the popularisation of his works. It is said that since then, he has maintained his position as the ‘national poet’ of England (or Britain). Although women had supported Shakespeare even before his works had established their canonical status, the extent to which female interpreters contributed to the canonisation of Shakespeare, how they participated in the process, and why they played the roles that they did have not yet been sufficiently visible. In this thesis, I illustrate women’s engagement in the process of the popularisation of Shakespeare by examining the early reception of his works, and to document how individual women’s pleasure of reading and playgoing relates to their intellectual activities. I adopt three approaches to provide answers to my research questions in this thesis: reading critical and fictional works by women; analysing the descriptions of female readers and playgoers by male writers; and conducting a large-scale survey of the ownership history of pre-mid-eighteenth-century printed books of Shakespeare’s plays. This thesis is divided into four chapters. In the first chapter, I analyse women’s engagement with theatre in Renaissance England, and consider Shakespeare’s popularity amongst them based on records about female audiences. The second chapter discusses female readers and writers in Renaissance England and their responses to Shakespeare’s works. Chapter 3 focuses on Restoration Shakespeare and female interpreters from 1642 to 1714. The fourth chapter discusses women’s playgoing, play-reading, writings, and their participation from the early eighteenth century to the Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769.

My thesis analyses the journey that The Taming of the Shrew has made on screen. It is arranged with a broad sense of chronology but it does group different versions generically. The argument is led by inquiry into the notion of the 'frame'. Stage productions too often cut the Christopher Sly sequence or rework the text to include the scenes from A Shrew by way of closure. I argue that screen versions of the play are able to find a televisual or cinematic framing which parallels how Shakespeare's theatrical technique functions.

This thesis explores the presentation of the boy characters in Shakespeare's Richard III, King John and Macbeth, examining their performance history on stage and screen and considering the ways in which elements of their characterisation have been emphasised or suppressed at various moments in history in order to reflect the prevailing image of childhood. It has, therefore, three areas of focus: an evaluation of the boys as they appear in the playtext which re-assesses the complex and varied dramatic functions of these often over-looked characters; an extensive investigation of the performance history of the three plays from the eighteenth to the twentieth century; and an examination of the shifting historical attitudes towards children and childhood which have shaped the production and reception ofthe plays. There are striking similarities between these three plays: all present noble or royal boys whose political and dynastic significance is set in sharp contrast to their immaturity and physical vulnerability, and in each case the death of the child signals the tyranny of the protagonist and sets in motion his downfall. Yet despite such parallels, the plays present varied depictions of boyhood, and this variation is reflected in the plays' stage history: each drama has proved particularly popular, or of special interest, during one specific historical period, and the transformations the plays have undergone in performance are revelatory of that era's particular ideal of childhood. For example, Colley Cibber's popular eighteenth-century adaptation of Richard III transformed the characters of the princes in the tower, expunging their Shakespearean precocity and accentuating their vulnerability. These alterations reflect both the heightened sentimentality which began to be associated with childhood during this period and also the increased emphasis on the affection between parents and children that accompanied the rise ofthe nuclear family. Never very popular on stage before or since, King John was an established favourite of the nineteenth century and the child Arthur was at the centre of its popularity. This thesis argues that Arthur's mildness, meekness, innocence and docility resonated with the Victorian image of the ideal child, particularly as it came to be presented in the fiction of writers and novelists such as Charles Dickens. It also examines the Victorian appetite for fictional deaths of children and situates Arthur's popularity in relation to this trend. Twentieth-century productions of Macbeth, in contrast, are reflective of a growing fear of 'evil' or criminal children. Late twentieth century visions of the play have increasingly emphasised children's potential for evil: Polanski's 1971 film included a dream sequence in which Fleance attempts to murder Macbeth, Adrian Noble's 1986 production doubled the actors playing Macduffs children with the apparitions conjured by the witches, effectively tainting the innocence of the Macduff 'babes' and implicating them in the evil that pervades the play. Finally Penny Woolcock's 1996 TV film Macbeth on the Estate cast 'weird children' as the witches, placing childhood at the root of the destruction at work in Macbeth. Thus this study demonstrates that the children of Richard III, King John and Macbeth have been a crucial factor in the performance history ofthese plays over the centuries: prevailing ideals of childhood have influenced both the production and reception of these plays, and an examination of the history of these dramatic boys reveals the extent to which concerns about childhood and children have found expression, and continue to find expression, through the performance of these varied and fascinating characters.

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