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This thesis investigates the representations of crowds and crowd scenes in Shakespearean drama. Contrary to the assumption that the crowd's character in early modern drama had a peripheral role, this thesis argues that Shakespeare's crowd is a complex "character" in its ,. own right, and that the playwright's use of it in his drama reveals its dramatic importance. / On the stage the crowd was not dangerous because its role was scripted. This study further proposes to view the character of the crowd from a perspective that has not been applied before in reading Shakespeare's drama. It employs Martin Buber's concept 'I-Thou', aiming to demonstrate that Shakespeare's dramatic characters should be perceived as "dramatic items", and examined through their relations, dramatic and theatrical. Furthermore, this thesis introduces the concept of 'the space of the character' which, unlike the term 'character', refers to theatrical relations that shape "dramatic identities" during the theatrical production. This thesis argues that our understanding of the dramatised hero and the crowd is only fully accomplished when we understand, and acknowledge, the relation between them, and that the relation is not only apparent, but inherent to crowd scenes. It is this non-tangible outcome of interaction between staged characters, and the network of these different theatrical relations, that constitutes the 'theatrical' effectiveness of the crowd scene. This thesis further argues that the crowd scenes are always political in nature, and that they focus not only on the interaction between the crowd and the authority figure, but also on the interaction between the stage and the audience. The key point is that the role of the audience in theatre has been widely debated and recognised, and yet the role of crowd scenes has not. This study insists that a crowd scene should be seen as a dramaturgical device or a theatrical trope that utilises the presence of the audience in such a way that no other scene can. It can incorporate the audience in the theatre and simultaneously give them voice on the stage. Through his dramatisation of the character of the crowd Shakespeare reforms our views about crowds. He reminds his audience that the "crowd" is not a many- headed multitude at all times, but that it consists of individuals with different view points. Shakespeare's crowd is thus meaningful and always' in order when most out of order'.

The thesis explores ways in which Shakespeare's plays deal with the tragic intervention of such crises as disease, monstrosity, bewitchment, and death, in the biological and ritual functions of maternity. Shakespeare dramatises the way in which these crises have an epistemological impact that extends beyond the limited confines of the home and the family, having the potential to disrupt those bodies of knowledge which ratify patriarchal control over the processes of chUdbirth and maternal nurture. Each chapter is focussed on a body of knowledge: anatomy natural history demonology heraldry. In the first chapter I demonstrate how Shakespeare's Hamlet provides a testing-ground for the ideological underpinnings of anatomy. Hamlet's appropriation of the dissecting discourse of satire ultimately serves to undermine the anatomical regime's power over a diseased maternal body which, it claimed, was the locus of sin and human depravity. The second chapter offers explorations of ways in which Shakespeare's Tempest replicates the homological dialectic between the reproductive anatomy and the natural world which made the female body amenable to the newly-emerging natural historical project. However, it is suggested that Shakespeare stages the specific crisis of the monstrous birth in order to destabilise the categories of human and monster upon which this colonising enterprise is based. Chapter three contains a detailed re-reading of Macbeth, in which the maternal body becomes, through the crisis of alleged bewitchment, the vehicle of scepticism, the very fountainhead of equivocation which challenges the intellectual scaffolding of demonology. The final chapter offers an examination of the historical fracturing of the discipline of heraldry which is then discussed with reference to Antony and Cleopatra. The Egyptian Queen is seen to embody a new form of maternal commemoration that resists the primacy of those masculine codes of memory which seek to turn the female body into a mere conduit for patrilineage. The thesis argues that Shakespeare was aware that these bodies of knowledge shared a specific epistemological perspective an early form of biological detemiinism through which maternal crises were re-conceived as proceeding not from the machinations of a divine will imposing itself directly on creation, but from the inherent properties of a largely autonomous nature.

This thesis examines the significance of 'place' and 'space' in seven of Shakespeare's tragedies - Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus - through two inter-related approaches: on the one hand, by exploring how 'space' implants what might be labelled a spatial anxiety in Shakespeare's protagonists, an anxiety that complicates a tragic hero's response to a play's physical and psychological distinctiveness, and, on the other, by reading the spatial structure of each tragedy on geographical, historical, and political levels. This thesis thus tackles 'place' /'space' as a prominent agent in influencing the construction of the Shakespearean tragic hero who comes to be, this thesis argues, spatially destined. The Shakespearean tragic protagonists' relationships with 'space' /'place' in the plays will be shown to serve as a threshold to a network of issues, from questions of interiority and sexuality, gender and nationalism, political power and cultural hegemony to those of the tragic hero's relationship with self and others. Rather than remaining merely a passive container of a play's events, 'space' for Shakespeare becomes an active agent within the tragedies, adding to the tragic discourse of any play in key ways. When the spatial framework in Othello, for instance, moves from the wide scale of the city of Venice to the narrower space of the island of Cyprus before finally ending in the confines of a single bedchamber, such a spatial arrangement enhances the suffocating mental realm of the hero in the constrictive snare of jealousy. Shakespeare, by having the scenes of Hamlet restricted to the chambers of the court in Elsinore, emphasises the claustrophobic realm of Hamlet's 'distracted globe'. The movement of the characters from one locale to another in ancient Britain similarly intensifies the menacing realm of King Lear and cements the tragic sense of human vanity in the play. Such is the spatial machinery of Shakespearean tragedy, in which spatial organisation is not accidental to the plot of the play, but rather generated by it. Space, indeed, proves to be, in each Shakespearean tragedy addressed in this thesis, the blueprint which marks the nature and the tempo of events, the tragic hero's inward struggle, and the overall tragic sense of the play. Romeo and Juliet is thus structured around a network of public places imbued with social feuding and of private spaces in which privacy is denied and invaded, rendering the lovers not just 'star-' but also 'space-crossed' figures. In these terms, King Lear becomes a tragedy in which dislocation is equated with the loss of personal and national identity and relocation paralleled with selfhood and national belonging. Hamlet comes to be a play of utter confinement, be it conceptually through Hamlet's mental 'nutshell' of 'bad dreams', or materially in the close quarters of the King's court. Shakespeare invests in Macbeth both a spatial liminality, between the realms of witchcraft and reality, and a psychic liminality in Macbeth's restless fear and eventual tyranny. Likewise, in Antony and Cleopatra, Antony's spatial identity wavers between Roman and the Egyptian sensibilities just as the play's scenes sweep us geographically from Rome to Egypt and back again. By contrast, two approaches to the concept of the 'city' prevail in Coriolanus - again, conceptual and material - as shown by the hero and the various classes represented in Shakespeare's Republican Rome: both contribute influentially to the political struggle in the play. In short, space in Shakespearean tragedy signals the topographical equivalence both of a character's inward struggles and of a play's more exterior conflicts.

The twentieth and the twenty-first centuries have Catholicised Shakespeare. At the heart of this movement lie the so-called Lancastrian theories: that Shakespeare spent some time during his `lost years' in Lancashire and that he is to be identified with `Will[i]am Shakeshafte' in the will of the Catholic magnate, Alexander Hoghton of Lea. Although the proponents of the theories - aptly called `Lancastrians' - agree in terms of the identification of `Shakeshafte' with Shakespeare, their arguments vary and sometimes even contradict each other. We have, therefore, Lancastrian theories (plural). They are attempts to investigate the whereabouts of Shakespeare during the `lost years' and to find out the means by which he entered the London theatre. The Lancastrian theories can be seen in part as a counter-movement against recent Shakespeare scholarship that has been preoccupied with theory. Paradoxically, another stimulus for the revival of biographical studies is literary critics' interest in early modem history, which materialist criticism, especially new historicism, has brought in since the 1980s. Religion has become a major issue in Shakespeare studies. The modem historiography of the English Reformation, especially `revisionism', which emphasises the continuation of medieval Catholicism after the Reformation, has provided significant energy for the development of the Lancastrian theories. Furthermore, the Lancastrians have their own agenda - personal ambitions and motivations, some of which are not altogether scholarly. However, these theories are for the most part based on a chain of speculations, and tend to state them as fact. The biographers, whether Lancastrians or not, who believe Shakespeare and his family to have been Catholics are unfamiliar with the religious condition in Elizabethan England, including anti-Catholic acts and the penalties imposed on recusants. Their arguments also neglect other Elizabethan customs. These biographers' lack of profound knowledge of socio-political and religious history of Elizabethan England has produced inaccurate dramatisation of Shakespeare's life. One other disabling tendency among these biographers is to neglect negative evidence and disregard alternative interpretations. Their approaches to Shakespeare biography simplify the complexity of documentary evidence and produce narrowness of view. In Elizabethan England a series of continuous religious negotiations and renegotiations took place. Through this struggle, the clear-cut division between Catholicism and Protestantism was deconstructed, and there emerged `religious pluralism' -a compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism. It was in this complex matrix that Shakespeare was born, grew up and wrote plays and poems. It is against this cultural background that we should study Shakespeare's life (or lives).

The thesis is concerned with the relationship between psychoanalysis and tragedy, and the way in which psychoanalysis has structured its theory by reference to models from tragic drama - in particular, those of Sophocles and Shakespeare. It engages with some of the most recent thinking in contemporary French psychoanalysis, most notably the work of Jean Laplanche, so as to interrogate both Freudian metapsychology and the tragic texts in which it claims to identify its prototypes. Laplanche has ventured an ‘other-centred’ re-reading of the Freudian corpus which seeks to go beyond the tendency of Freud himself, and psychoanalysis more generally, to unify and centralise the human subject in a manner which strays from and occults some of the most radical elements of the psychoanalytic enterprise. The (occulted) specificity of the Freudian discovery, Laplanche proposes, lies in the irreducible otherness of the subject to himself and therefore of the messages by which subjects communicate their desires. I argue that Freud’s recourse to literary models is inextricably bound up with the ‘goings-astray’ in his thinking. Laplanche’s work, I suggest, offers an important perspective from which to consider not only the function which psychoanalysis cells upon them to perform, but also that within them for which Freud and psychoanalysis have remained unable to account. Taking three tragic dramas which, more or less explicitly, have borne a formative impact on Freud’s thought, and which have often been understood to articulate the emergence of ‘the subject’, I attempt to set alongside Freud’s own readings of them, the argument that each figures not the unifying or centralising but the radical decentring of its principal protagonists and their communicative acts. By close textual analyses of these three works, and by reference to their historical and cultural contexts, the crucial Freudian motif of parricide (real or symbolic) which structures and connects them is shown ultimately to be an inescapable and inescapably paradoxical gesture: one of liberty and autonomy at the cost of self-division, and of a dependence at the cost of a certain autonomy.

This thesis comprises an exploration of the Shakespearean adaptations created by American director Charles Marowitz while he was Artistic Director of the Open Space Theatre in London, UK. In order of creation, they are: Hamlet (1964; revised 1966); A Macbeth (1969); An Othello (1972); The Shrew (1973); Measure for Measure (also called Variations on Measure for Measure) (1975); and Variations on the Merchant of Venice (1977). The central inquiry of this thesis is whether Marowitz’s Shakespearean adaptations adhered to his own parameters for such work, and if not, whether his objectives were subverted by other factors, political or psychological, which he unconsciously manifested dramatically within the works. Further, do Marowitz’s reconstructions of Shakespeare possibly spring from a latent desire to attack the cultural authority of Shakespeare himself? In order to accomplish this inquiry, the concept of ‘personal politics’ will be established, this being both the political orientation of an individual in terms of social government, as well as the underlying belief systems and paradigms which influence their perceptions and reactions, as factors influencing Marowitz’s adaptations. In terms of methodology, the author will examine Marowitz’s perceptions of Shakespeare’s original plays, highlighting the particular concerns that motivated him to create the adaptations under analysis. The validity of these perceptions will then be tested against a precise examination of the play text, and viewed against a survey of scholarly opinion on the original work. Any sociopolitical objectives expressed by Marowitz for the adaptation will be reviewed, then juxtaposed against the historical context in which they were written in order to discern where and how the politics of the period influenced his creative impulse. The collage technique, which characterized many of Marowitz’s adaptations, will be explored followed by a discussion of Marowitz’s stated parameters for the adaptation of theatrical classics. His approach to challenging the paradigm of Shakespeare’s work will be scrutinized, and an analysis of the adaptation given, as well as a discussion of the effect the changes from the original text might have had on an audience and a survey of critical reaction to the resulting production, based upon reviews in the major publications of the day. At this point, the central inquiry of the thesis will be addressed: to what degree does the adaptation hold to Marowitz’s own stated guidelines for Shakespearean adaptation, as well as his expressed objectives for the work in question, and if this degree is slight, what factors might account for this? In order to discern these influences, the adaptations will be examined through the lens of biographical criticism: Marowitz’s autobiographical writing, as well as personal opinions and beliefs gleaned from his theatrical reviews, journal articles and texts on acting techniques, will be gathered to shed light on dramatic choices which contravene the expressed intention for the adaptations. Aspects of psychoanalytical criticism will also be referenced, particularly focusing on trends common to the majority of the works which potentially sprang from an unconscious source. Finally, comparable adaptations of the same Shakespearean work will be reviewed in terms of how they differently, and possibly more effectively, redressed Marowitz’s stated concerns regarding the original work, in order to highlight why and how Marowitz’s personal politics may have overturned his stated intentions. Detailed synopses of all six plays under examination are provided in Appendix One.

My research explores the intimate relationship between object, language and perception in Shakespeare's plays. Using an analytical approach inspired by basic principles of phenomenology, I consider how Shakespeare's language influences our perception of real and non-present stage properties and set: how he imbues imaginary objects with an almost palpable sense of presence, and engineers our perception of onstage objects, subtly shaping and augmenting visual stimuli with verbal imagery. Through close reading centred on five plays, I explore how Shakespeare's fusion of word and object is engineered to evince a vividly visceral response to what we see, hear and imagine. My research poses the following questions: how does Shakespeare prepare the mind of a watching and listening audience to perceive more than may actually appear on stage? How far can illusion, created by language and imagination, supplement what an audience might see? How is language used to blur the boundaries between subject and object, transcending the mere exchange of characteristics? Textual examples have been selected from Shakespeare's tragedies and histories. My study does not encompass Shakespeare's comedies, for − though they offer rich opportunity for analysis − such work would require a separate approach, geared to this very different genre.

This thesis examines the way dramaturgical techniques in Shakespeare's late plays are used to create a complex and radical exploration of the relationship between ideology and interpretation. It links such concerns via the multiple meanings of "construction", illustrated using the scene of reading at the end of Cymbeline, centred upon the prophetic label. In Part I, major reservations are expressed about the standard interpretative paradigms applied to late Shakespearian drama, and their effect on critical understanding. The deficiencies of a "Romance" reading and the problems with traditional attitudes to chronology, authorship, and collaboration are stressed; elements often marginalized as aesthetically inferior are defended; and two related areas of dramaturgical technique, theatrical spectacle and reported action, are emphasized. Part II focuses on reading individual late plays, with special emphasis on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. It adopts a reconstructed, politicized close reading, concentrating on issues relating to the problematics of interpretation within the plays. Individual chapters highlight different forms of "construction": art, history, truth, authority, display, narrative. Attention is drawn to how reading and interpretation are shown to be always inscribed within power relations and the performative dynamic of language.