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This thesis establishes the extent to which theatrical treatments of the notion of women as threat, in England and France from 1553 to 1610, participated in contemporary pro-feminine discourses, and identifies the specificities of female representation in drama as a genre. In studying the diverse theatrical representations of female threat (e.g. political, sexual, ethnic, verbal), it draws on recent studies of gender, sexuality and race in Renaissance France and England. The thesis engages with a broad corpus, which includes relatively little-studied French dramatists such as Etienne Jodelle, Gabriel Bounin, Robert Garnier and Antoine de Montchrestien, and focuses on inconsistencies in representations of femininity, with a view to revealing the ideological tensions and contradictions in the plays’ depictions of threatening female characters drawn from Biblical, classical, or more recent history. This research therefore enhances understanding not only of late sixteenth-century drama, particularly in France, but also of early modern concepts of sexual, class, and racial difference. The thesis illustrates the contested nature of the discourses of class, gender and race in contemporary social debate in this period, indicating the differences between French and English cultures in the modalities of the representation of women, acknowledging the plays’ ambivalence in this respect, rather than minimizing it or explaining it away. It is an interdisciplinary work, drawing on gender and feminist theory, social history, new-historicism, post-colonialism and theories of sexuality, in order to explore concepts, discourses and representations of normative and non-normative femininity in a number of plays. In the plays the female characters are represented as negotiating and subverting the cultural constraints imposed on women, and the gendering of power, violence, language and sexuality. The first chapter analyses the representation of women and power, through the transgression of gender codes and appropriation of masculine values. The threat that women represent is manifested by their rebellion against, resistance to and subversion of patriarchal power and structures, which enable them both to question and to validate them, as power is both fuelled and destabilised by resistance. The second chapter considers the extent to which certain forms of violence are sanctified and others abhorred, in order to acknowledge the threatening potential of female violence and to understand the strategies of social repression of women’s violent instincts and masculine qualities both within the plays and as part of their overall social context. Verbal and psychological violence are addressed in the third chapter which analyses the representation of women as rhetorical threat. Chapter Three demonstrates how women can seduce men with their words, not only to arouse desire but also to provoke action. Seduction can also be physical when the male characters are represented as dependent on women’s beauty, as explored in Chapter Four. The preceding chapters point to one common feature, the imbrication of the issue of gender with those of sexuality, race and class; this is the main concern of the fourth chapter, where the issue of female sexuality is tackled through its link with race.

This doctoral project is the first comprehensive study of plays about Christian martyrdom on the French stage from 1596 to 1675.1 have compiled a corpus of such tragedies (Appendix). In Chapter One, I argue that such plays should be treated as a characteristic tragic sub-genre, distinct from other forms of religious plays. I also examine the background to the appearance of the martyr-play, in particular the exaltation of martyrdom in both Protestant and Catholic communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as other artistic representations of the martyr-hero. Religious literature has often been studied in the light of theological controversy. Since a martyr-play deals with an individual resisting lawful authority, I have concentrated on looking at plays from a political aspect: the depiction of revolt. Accordingly, at the end of Chapter One, I consider how the French king was widely portrayed under the traits of a Roman emperor in popular iconography, demonstrating that this allegory was so widespread, that an audience viewing an emperor on stage would see a link with their own monarch. In Chapters Two, Three and Four, I examine the extant tragedies from the period, with a particular emphasis on how authors treat the question of obedience and the martyr's struggle. Writers with court connections mellow and neutralise the martyr's refusal to obey, notably Comeille and Rotrou. Other dramatists emphasise and highlight the element of individual conscience, particularly La Serre and Desfontaines. The martyr-play peaks during the 1640s and early 1650s, that is to say during a time of civil war, and I believe that the play was a vehicle through which authors could express their discontent with contemporary authority, or even use the example of the martyr as a deterrent to active revolt (Gaspard Olivier is the most striking case).In Chapter Five, I explore the inherent ambivalence of the martyr, and look at the tragedies from the perspective of suicide and the portrayal of gender. I conclude that the martyr is always an ambiguous model, and that this is reflected in the French stage portrayals.

This paper explores the leasing standard update ASC 842, and its potential impact on investors. In addition to analyzing the differences between the old and new standard, this paper explores if there will be any impacts on investors, by testing investor reactions to news releases of ASC 842, conducting interviews with accounting professionals and testing the sophisticated ownership in selected companies. The results from these tests conclude that while there might be a difference in the financial statements with the implementation of ASC 842, there will be no significant impacts on investors of companies with large lease obligations.

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This thesis constitutes the first extensive study of tragedy during the Napoleonic era. The new tragic productions of this period have been sidelined by French theatre history, allegedly because they were tired copies of seventeenth-century classical models, conduits for propaganda, and suffocated by censorship. I challenge this judgement by excavating this period’s theatre and by applying renewed critical approaches, notably André Lefevere’s notion of rewriting which posits that all productions are subject to poetics and ideology. This thesis is comprised of two principal axes. The first focuses on poetics to contend that new productions were not simply copies of classical plays. Although tragedy was based on the imitation of seventeenth-century models, which scholars refer to as classiques, these examples were rewritten during the eighteenth century, an activity which continued under Napoleon. Therefore, there was no stable example to imitate, rather there was a particular contemporary understanding, which I label the ‘classique’ model to underline its specificity. Using contemporary treatises to form a generic framework, I examine how new tragedies performed at the Comédie-Française depart from this inheritance, reconsidering the passage from theatrical Classicism to Romanticism. The second axis engages with Napoleonic cultural politics by rethinking the terms ‘propaganda’ and ‘censorship’. Although tragedy was used for its propagandistic properties, this policy was not always successful. Moreover, the works’ reception reveals that playwrights and the public appropriated tragedy’s rewriting of historical narratives as a means of mediating the Revolution. Finally, I examine censorship, investigating how the State’s bureaucratic and the Comédie-Française’s lateral systems combined to control and tailor tragedies in performance and print for contemporary audiences. Consequently, this thesis sheds light both on the transition from Classicism to Romanticism in the theatre, and the public and the regime’s use of tragedy as a means of reconstructing the French nation after the Revolution.

The aim of this study is to show what was Rotrou's conception of the tragic, which is concomitantly to point out in what ways it differed from the conception of tragedy held by his precursors, such as Hardy, and his contemporaries.