In the period 1890-1914, such playwrights as G. B. Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Harley Granville Barker, Henry Arthur Jones, and Elizabeth Robins led a movement to revive the drama as an intellectual art: these playwrights sought to create a theater that could treat social and political issues and themes hitherto banned from (or limited in treatment on) the public stage while at the same time retaining the theater's hold over a popular audience. In the case of Jones, Wilde, and Shaw, each playwright would revise his early style to create plays that had strong ties to more traditional popular dramas but which nonetheless offered a critique of those older, expected forms. Despite the severe limitations in the theater, dramatists had room for experimentation in the relation of genre to the mise en scene. The nineteenth-century theater had been notable for its preference for "fantasy" genres, such as melodrama and farcical comedy; at the same time, however, the audience maintained an appetite for realism in the staging of plays. It is in this seeming opposition of dramatic form and theatrical realization, the mechanistic and fantastic versus the hyper-real, that the innovators of this period could find a way to change the older drama while working within it. Victorian stage "realism" was in fact carefully contained within generic structures that artificially "solved" social problems depicted in the plays. Wilde, Jones, and Shaw would all manipulate conventions of genre and scenic effect in order to make overt the problem of defining the "real" in the theater. On another front, their critical and theoretical writings analyzed this troublesome connection between the worlds on-and off-stage, and were intended to change the way audiences viewed plays by providing a critical "frame." The Edwardian playwrights also faced the problem of enforced generic continuity, and some of them, particularly St. John Hankin, Harley Granville Barker, and John Galsworthy, would use the continuing popularity of realism to undermine melodramatic structure. Often the settings of their plays, in their mannered distortion of traditional representative scenes, alter the desires of the audience for generic conformity.

Put simply, magical thinking is the belief that one may affect reality by thought alone. Where Freud classifies such a concept as neurotic delusion, Winnicott embraces the idea as a memory from infancy and argues that "omnipotence of thoughts" is the origin of creativity. Both viewpoints are represented in Shakespeare's universe, their positions sometimes at war in the playing out of the hero's dilemma. This dissertation traces the idea of magical thinking through psychoanalysis, anthropology, and art, then explores the battle of thoughts in Shakespeare's tragedies. Freud's viewpoint is well-founded in Hamlet: for thoughts in Denmark are not tools with which to control reality, but a reality that cannot be controlled. The hero drowns in thoughts. He cannot escape them, particularly the thought of Gertrude's infidelity, which resurfaces in dagger words and pregnant metaphors, to the point that sometimes Hamlet forgets his revenge. His search to find a plan to kill the king thus parallels his search to find a way to kill his thoughts. Hamlet tries to bury them in the actor, who can control his thoughts long enough to "act." Both Othello and Macbeth likewise flounder in thoughts they can't control. Othello's thought echoes Hamlet's thought of a woman's infidelity. Othello cannot live with this thought, forget or disprove it. Indeed the thought is like virginity itself: once thought, he can never reclaim his ignorance or his wife's innocence. So he buries the thought in Desdemona's body--then kills it. The thoughts that plague Macbeth, however, are the result, not the cause, of his killing. He murders Duncan and Banquo only to be buried alive with "those thoughts that should indeed have died/With them they think on." Hamlet tries to escape thoughts. Othello's thoughts betray him. Macbeth defies them. Cleopatra embraces them--wholeheartedly, She is the mistress of magical thinking, Winnicott's "good-enough mother," nursing Antony on desire. Though the lovers' dream to be legends, god and goddess, may be delusional, their wish is transformed into a beautiful illusion for the audience as they birth death as Elysium, tragedy as romance, through the magic of poetry.

Shakespearean mourners display aggression in lieu of grief, they rely upon introjection and substitution, and they manifestly deny their loss. Denial of death runs throughout the canon; however, it is best epitomized in Antony and Cleopatra and the romances. Shakespeare's most famous mourner, Hamlet, introjects his dead Hyperion father to deny death and contain mourning. Nevertheless, the comedies argue that introjection of a lost object is no substitute for mourning, and in Pericles, introjection even threatens the life of the mourner. If denial represents the final strategy for the containment of grief for Shakespeare, then the conversion of grief into revenge is probably his first. Beginning with the English histories, Shakespeare genders mourning, prescribing socially constructed “masculine” and “feminine” modes of behavior. Men convert their grief into martial revenge; therefore, the first tetralogy is dominated by avenging sons, culminating in the unexpected bereavement of Richard III. The famous lamentation scene of Richard III, part of a tradition of communal and powerful women's mourning, stages a locus of female resistance to male revenge. The comedies star women who mourn: Viola in Twelfth Night and Helena in All's Well pursue the love-object with difficulty after the death of their fathers. Helena's denial of grief and her substitution of Bertram for her dead father have been so successful they produce guilt. A central issue for me is Helena's inability to mourn: remembering rather than forgetting the dead. In Hamlet, a father's ghost returns insisting, “Remember me.” This Trauerspiel or “mourning play” struggles to construct male identity by mastering grief and exhausting revenge. Fearing he too will not be remembered when the rest is silence, Hamlet asks Horatio to tell his story. And by telling stories, we remember—and mourn—the dead. Cleopatra's dolor, like Hamlet's, leads to and ultimately transcends thanatos. This late tragedy prefigures the romances where women who grieve, like Marina, will be given unprecedented power of rejuvenation. What Shakespeare's art finally arrives at is the suggestion that Freud was wrong: mourning never ends. Raise the dead, and no one need ever mourn again.

The fear of plague was inherent in Renaissance English society. On average, at least two periods of extensive mortality occurred within each reign of a monarch from 1500–1700. All kings and queens knew that plague might in any year visit and force them to abandon their thrones in flight. A court page or cook breaking out in a fever was enough to shake the national foundation, as John Davies of Hereford records in his poem, “The Picture of the Plague According to the Life as it was in Anno Domini 1603”: The King himself (O wretched Times the while!) From place to place, to save himselfe did flie, Which from himselfe himselfe did seeke t'exile, Who (as amaz'd) know not where safe to lie. Its hard with Subjects when the Soveraigne Hath no place free from plagues, his head to hide; And hardly can we say the King doth raigne, That no where, for just feare, can well abide. For, no where comes He but Death followes him Hard at the Heeles, and reacheth at his head. (1.45) This was no way to keep a monarchy intact or a society stable. In their new worlds, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, and Margaret Cavendish each constructed a “no-place” for the king “his head to hide”; however, containing the plague was not simply a matter of dreaming up a panacea. Rather than easily eliminate plague from their worlds, they grappled with the very presence of plague, both releasing and controlling it within their borders. This dissertation examines the specific religious, scientific, and literary regimens each writer utilized and depicted. The last chapter analyzes the less optimistic response to plague and utopia, assessing the failed utopian world presented by Shakespeare in Timon of Athens and by Jonson in The Alchemist.

Hollywood productions of Shakespeare often strive for accessibility by extensively reducing the complexities of the plays. The characters are turned into familiar types and ambiguities are erased. Postmodern productions attempt to problematise the supposed ideological assumptions behind the plays as well as Shakespeare's iconic status in our culture. The result is often irreverent, shocking, “subversive.” Characters and situations lose their original complexity and irony by being subjected to a metatheatrical irony imposed by the production. Both the Hollywood and the postmodern performances are attractive to adolescents, who are typically reassured by the familiar types and revel in rebellion against perceived “authority.” While many are tempted to praise this attractiveness as a service in rendering Shakespeare “accessible” to adolescents, what is rendered accessible is not Shakespeare. This is deeply unfortunate, as a rich understanding of Shakespeare—one which allows for his multifaceted vision of the human condition, his endless perspectivising on problems of morality and character, his skepticism of values and ideologies—is of great value precisely at this stage of life, when the jumbled world invites simple solutions. Evidence of the ability of adolescents with a wide range of backgrounds and intelligences (as conventionally measured) is provided by firsthand accounts of student productions of Love's Labour's Lost, The Winter's Tale, and Romeo and Juliet. The reactions of a group of adolescents to Baz Luhrmann's film William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996) before and after they themselves had worked on a production of the play demonstrate a sea change in attitude toward the film. Luhrmann's movie, which has elements both of Hollywood reduction and postmodern irony, is subjected to a thoroughgoing critique in an attempt to explain this shift in attitude. Ultimately it is the demoting of the language of the play which condemns the audience of such “accessible” productions to a superficial and misleading encounter with Shakespeare.

Renaissance drama, viewed against the new, fame-obsessed restlessness of Petrarch, Cardan, and Montaigne, engenders an imperial selfhood that fashions itself with narcissistic aggression and simultaneously undermines itself by becoming an agent in its own destruction. Selfhood issues in a restless self-overcoming in which the individual struggles to outdo himself in dizzying jousts of self-rivalry. "Victims" often follow a self-destructive career; self-fashioning and self-cancellation are not really that far apart. Doctor Faustus examines the Reformation impulse toward self-fashioning in relation to an "other." It signals not the fullness but the dissolution of identity through pride, despair, and death. Faustus internalizes Mephastophilis, the great "other" of Marlowe's age; this results in satanic parody. His quest for self-knowledge mimics the Protestant's journey toward God. But in parody, selfhood and self-cancellation become interchangeable. In King Lear, Lear's actions are almost death-driven. His libido moriendi is connected to his quest for self-knowledge; finally, it is death alone that teaches self-knowledge. Aided by thumos, Plato's "high rage," Lear acknowledges his mortality, and knows himself through rage and madness. Awakening to find Cordelia, he repossesses everything that makes life worthwhile. In The Revenger's Tragedy, Vindice takes Renaissance self-fashioning to a sinister extreme, enacting several roles in a revenge drama written, directed, and performed by himself. He transforms his dead mistress into his grisly doppelganger whose charms rival those of Petrarchan beauties. He usurps the divine function and metes perfect poetic justice, initiating his own death, and laying claim to a perverse fame. In 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, Giovanni perverts the laws of kinship and social exchange through incest. Unable to give the "gift" of his sister to another, he loses his place in the kinship structure. Her repentance indicates that her heart has been "stolen" by a higher deity, and she becomes a defiled object in his eyes. To purify her and to recover his lost heart, Giovanni offers a violent sacrifice where he is both an enraged god and a sacrificer seeking to placate that god with the "gift" of Annabella's heart.

The language of idealism and skepticism in Shakespearean moments of disillusionment provides terms for understanding features of the late plays—their self-conscious artificiality, their blend of wonder and irony, pathos and moral indignation. The psychology of disillusionment illuminates the relationship of tragedy to romance. In Timon of Athens, perhaps the last tragedy, Shakespeare skeptically exposes the psychology of idealism but reveals the consequence of such skepticism, a world drained of wonder. Subsequent plays rejuvenate idealism, protecting it from its own tendencies toward punishment and revenge. Moving toward heroic assertion and death, tragedy often colludes with the idealist in his time-foreclosing and self-destructive acts of revenge, but the new genre gives him more time to return to reality without sacrificing the psychological benefits of idealism. Pericles escapes the anxiety brought by awareness of evil by flight and delay. The unifying principle of his play is not the tragic closure of heroic integrity, but a life extended in time. Cymbeline returns to the truth impulses of love-idealism. Posthumous' disillusioned misogyny carries these impulses into a punishing mode, but his reacceptance of Imogen represents an irrational but redeeming subordination of epistemological truth to interpersonal truth. The Winter's Tale rejuvenates idealism after displaying its destructive potentials in jealousy. Married love embodies idealism in an image of the good of life. In the statue scene, the wish for an atemporal ideal gives way to faith in the temporal world. In The Tempest wonder arises from seeing a world as if for the first time, and is thus exposed to the irony of perspectivism. Marriage returns as love at first sight, but shares the stage with tropes of ambition, usurpation, subjugation, murder. Prospero identifies with reason over fury but remains perplexed by irony and anxiety. Taking bearings from within the Shakespearean ethos rather than from a specific theory of genre allows this study to register the distinctive tonalities of the individual plays. The development illuminated is not that of a sustained progression toward a preexisting genre but that of a vital intelligence probing a specific set of problems in an intellectually coherent way.

The critical discussion of metatheatre has historically connected a series of reflexive dramatic strategies—like soliloquy, chorus, dumb show, the-play-within-the-play, prologue, and epilogue—and assumed that because these tropes all involve the play's apparent awareness of its own theatrical nature they all have similar dramaturgical functions. This dissertation, by contrast, shows that the efficacy derived from metatheatrical moments that overtly reference theatrical production is better understood in the context of restaged non-theatrical cultural performances. Restaged moments of both theatrical and non-theatrical social ritual produce layers of performance that allow the play to create representational space capable of circumventing traditional power structures. The Reflexive Scaffold argues that this relationship between metatheatricality and restaged moments of culture is central to interrogating the complexities of dramatic genre on the English Renaissance stage. This project asserts that a great deal of early modern English drama begins to experiment with staged moments of cultural performance: social, cultural, and religious events, which have distinct ramifications and efficacy both for the audience and in the world of the play. However, while these restaged social rituals become focal points within a given narrative, their function is determined by the genre of the play in which they appear. A play or a feast inserted into a comic narrative creates a very different sort of efficacy within the world of the play from that which is created when the same moment appears in a tragic narrative. These various types of performance give us a glimpse into the ways that early modern English dramatists understood the relationship between their works and the audiences who viewed them. I argue that the presentation and reinterpretation of early modern social ritual is utilized by many of the major playwrights of the English Renaissance, including Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, and Philip Massinger to redefine genre. These moments of reflexivity construct efficacy that, depending on the genre in which they appear, runs the gambit from reinforcing social order to directly critiquing the dominant cultural discourse.

During the eleven years of Margaret Thatcher's administrations in Britain, playwright Caryl Churchill had perhaps the most productive period in her career to date and achieved an unprecedented degree of success. This phenomenon is unusual since Churchill is a self-described socialist-feminist and these were times of increasing conservatism in the theatre, as in society as a whole. This dissertation seeks to explain this apparent contradiction. It begins with a survey of changes in British society during the Thatcher years, including the effects which Thatcher's policies and attitudes had on women, feminists, the left, and artists (especially theatre workers). Next, it examines Churchill's collaborative writing strategies against the context formed by an ideology of radical individualism. Three specific plays from the Thatcher Years are then considered in terms of the society's influences on them and their potential impact on contemporary culture. Top Girls (1982) is discussed as an attempt to reclaim the term "feminism" from a new breed of conservative business women and return it to the materialist-feminists who were once the core of the British women's movement. Fen (1983) is examined in terms of regional policy, class and gender issues, and the reconfiguration of "family" in Britain in the 1980s. Serious Money (1987) was Churchill's greatest commercial success, and the reasons for its popularity form the basis for the discussion of this play. In each case, considerable attention is given to issues of critical and public reception.

The conceptions of Julius Caesar in the English Renaissance were complex and contradictory, and the four surviving plays about Caesar from the period--the anonymous Caesar's Revenge (c. 1595), Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1599), George Chapman's Caesar and Pompey (c. 1604), and Sir William Alexander's The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (1607)--negotiate these conceptions in distinct ways. The views of Caesar current in the Renaissance were diverse in both their sources and content. The medieval tradition glorified Caesar, but classical sources were mixed in their assessments. Caesar was lauded for his virtues and the authoritarian stability he brought to Rome, but was also condemned for his vices and his subversion of the Republic. In the Renaissance, therefore, Caesar was an ambiguous figure who was regarded as both an ambitious usurper and as a legitimate monarch. Renaissance drama imposed didactic lessons on historical subject matter, and, thus, Caesar's Revenge illustrates how ambition and revenge cause civil discord. Caesar and Pompey espouses Stoic independence, and The Tragedy of Julius Caesar both condemns ambition and counsels Stoic transcendence of the vagaries of Fortune. The three plays, however, cannot simplify Caesar and the events of his life to fully complement their didactic aims because of two primary factors. First, the plays were composed within disciplinary paradigms that promote ambiguity. These paradigms--historiographical in Caesar's Revenge, philosophical in Caesar and Pompey, and rhetorical in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar--resist reductive, didactic appropriations of Caesar by acknowledging opposing viewpoints and perspectives. Secondly, the multiple and conflicting conceptions of Caesar in the Renaissance defied simplification. The number of accounts of Caesar and their contradictory nature produced an intertextual web of references and interpretations that undermined unequivocal portrayals of Caesar. Shakespeare avoided these difficulties by focusing Julius Caesar on ambiguity itself. His play demonstrates the manner in which assessments and judgments of character are the product of the perceiver's perspective and how identity is thus shaped to appeal to the perceived judgments of those perceivers. These insights are applicable to the operations, specific to the Renaissance, of the other three plays, and to the means of interpretation today.