Shakespeare's plays occupy a uniquely prominent position in English language and literature. Shakespeare was, however, one among a number of other successful and popular playwrights of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and, when examined on an empirical basis, his language style has much in common with that of his peers. In this corpus stylistic study, I investigate similarities and differences between the language in Shakespeare's plays and in a range of plays by a selection of other contemporaneous dramatists. My quantitative data is extracted from an existing corpus containing Shakespeare's First Folio, and a new, specialised parallel corpus of plays from similar dates and genres written by other contemporaneous dramatists. This new corpus was constructed during the study. The corpus linguistic methods I use are simple frequency, keyness (Scott e.g. 1999,2000) and Baker's (2011) new concept of "lockwords". Simple frequency and keyness (linguistic items occurring with comparatively low or high statistical frequency) are established corpus linguistic methods for investigating language styles in literary texts. However, as Baker (2004:349) argues, keywords highlight only the differences between texts. Similarities are also important, to contextualise differences and avoid overstating their stylistic implications. Moreover, as I show in this study, empirical evidence of similarities is of stylistic interest. It reveals preferences for language style features which Shakespeare and other contemporaneous dramatists shared, and which constitute features of the register of Early Modern English drama. I examine three types of language units in each corpus: single words, word clusters and semantic domains. I extract word and word cluster data using Scott's (1999) WordSmith Tools and semantic domain data using Rayson's (2009) Wmatrix software tools. My findings hav(} implications for (a) the distinctiveness of Shakespeare's style, (b) the register of EM odE drama and (c) methods for investigating language similarities using corpus linguistic methodology .

This dissertation attempts to trace some of the various cross-fertilizations between three roughly contemporary genres of discourse during the latter part of the sixteenth and early seventeenthc enturies. I aim to show that a shared set of concerns regarding individual agency and the moral acceptability of profit underlies many of these texts, and that they therefore benefit from being read against one another. Chapter One examines the use of classical concepts of virtue in early modern civility literature and the ways in which this appropriation can be understood as an attempt to forge a model of masculine agency in response to changing economic and social circumstances in England during the course of the sixteenth century. I argue that the use of the Aristotelian concept of deliberated choice combined with Renaissance understandings of conversation and propriety contributed to an increased stress on individual interiority and to newly instrumental modes of social bonding. Chapter Two looks at the links between humanistic pedagogy and rhetorical practice and civil or temperate behaviour, as well as the means by which standard tropes of imitation and discursive production helped to negotiate the potential ethical difficulties associated with profit-making in the early modern period. Chapter Three focuses on one particular text on civility-Lodowick Bryskett's The Discourse of Ciuill Life (1606)- in relation to its Irish context; and looks at the ways in which rhetorical techniques of emplotment and the rearranging of found matter were implicated in colonial discourse of the period. Chapter Four discusses the means by which the productive tensions and exchanges between civil and uncivil behaviour, insularity and social circulation, were explored in, and helped to structure, certain city comedies by John Marston and Ben Jonson.

The primary objective of this thesis is to examine the role played by topical concerns in the "representation" of Muslims and Islam in two important Elizabethan plays. The two plays are George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar (1589) and William Percy's Mahomet and his Heaven (1601). The former play was the first to introduce a Moor in major role, while the latter was the first play to be purportedly based on Quranic material and the first play to present the Prophet of Islam as a dramatic character. My study views topical interests as the major factor informing the depiction of Muslims in both plays and questions the term "representation" of Islam after taking these interests in consideration. My methodology is akin to the New Historicist approach in that it tries to posit a close relationship between the two selected plays and their political and religious milieu. The presence of an ideological commitment in both authors, albeit to different currents of thought, is seen as an important factor that challenges the very idea of a representation of Islam. Briefly, I argue that what we see in these two plays is less a representation of existing knowledge of the Muslim Other, and more a topical construction reflecting very local contemporary issues and events. Chapter One focuses on Peele's Battle of Alcazar as an ideologically-based pro-government work. The play was written shortly after the Spanish Armada in 1588, a time when England was undergoing serious political turmoil. Of special interest is the visit of the first Moroccan ambassador to London in 1589, which probably coincided with the play's performance. Special attention is paid to the dramatic side and characterization in the play with the aim of showing how, in his play, Peele was interested in promoting Queen Elizabeth's new allies, the Moors, more than presenting a good or an evil Moor. Chapter Two studies Percy's Mahomet and hZJ Heaven as the product of a tense and complex set of circumstances relating to both the playwright and late Elizabethan England. Contemporary views on magic, women, and the Catholic-Protestant schism all play a role in forming the final outcome which constructs a topical allegory of England rather than a representation of Islamic Arabia. Together, my analyses of these important plays show that the Muslim figure was, more often than not, constructed from topical and local material that was hardly based on original existing knowledge about Islam. In my conclusion, I suggest that the same may be true of other plays and texts of the period.

This thesis seeks to establish the literary background to the representation of Hell in Elizabethan tragic drama. It uses historicist techniques to posit a causative relation between religious change introduced by the Elizabethan religious settlement and the form and content of Elizabethan tragedy, both dramatic and non-dramatic. More particularly I am concerned with the post-Reformation conceptions of the spaces of the afterworld, especially those consequent upon the dissolution of purgatory and the developing emphasis on Hell. I am also interested in the new emphasis on predestination and the effect on theological doctrine concerning the divine or diabolical origin of sin on earth. If sin originates with the Devil then sinful acts on earth are linked with Hell, and the link between Hell and the Devil is articulated in tragedy as a particular discourse of tyranny. At the start, I cite Shakespeare's Richard III, a familiar Elizabethan text, that demonstrates how the secular and religious anxieties about the endless punishments in Hell generate a fear that the forces of Hell penetrate earth and produce "mirrors" of Hell on the Elizabethan stage. Then Igo back to look at less familiar texts leading up to it, starting with the Elizabethan adaptations of the de casibus form in the William Baldwin editions of A Mirror for Magistrates, especially the contributions from Thomas Sackville, and also Richard Robinson's The Rewarde of Wickednesse. In part three I include a discussion of Jasper Heywood's translations of two Senecan tragedies, Troas and Thyestes, and the Reformers' debates on the treatment of tyranny in four early Elizabethan tragedies: Gorboduc, Cambises, Horestes and Jocasta. The final part of this thesis examines Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine and their engagement with the discussions of Hell and earthly sin.

This thesis proposes that Garrick's alterations of Shakespeare mark a watershed in eighteenth-century attitudes to the Bard's works. The most famous actor of the century, Garrick was publicly regarded as Shakespeare's greatest interpreter and high priest. During his career as actor and manager (1741-1776), he was also to a greater or lesser extent involved professionally and personally with the main Shakespearean editors of the period: Johnson, Warburton, Capell and Steevens. As the first chapter suggests, the roles of editor and alterer of the plays at this time, though different, overlapped, 'stage' and 'page' not yet having become divorced. Chapter Two contextualises Garrick's alterations of Shakespeare by describing, first, London's literary clubs and, in particular, The Club (founded by Johnson and Reynolds) of which Garrick was a member. Following a brief account of the theatrical conditions and cultural constraints that influenced the altering of old plays, Garrick's alterations of Jonson's Every Man in His Humour is analysed in order to draw out the principles of underlying alteration in practice. The three main chapters look closely in detail at a number of key instances of Garrick's alterations of Shakespeare's plays, concentrating on six taken from near the beginning, middle and end of his career, in which Garrick himself played the leading role: Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, The Winter's Tale, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear and Hamlet. In each of these chapters, Garrick's involvement with one or more editor is discussed. The main emphasis, however, falls upon the changes, additions, omissions and 'improvements' Garrick made to the plays over a lifetime devoted to Shakespeare. Recognition of that devotion is found in Garrick's 'Ode', discussed in Chapter Five, which forms an entr'acte following the chapter on The Winter's Tale and Antony and Cleopatra. The Stratford-on-Avon Jubilee in 1769, at which his 'Ode' was performed, gave rise to a host of theatrical and literary offerings that sought to exploit that event, not least Garrick's own entertainment, The Jubilee.