This thesis addresses the volatile body as a historiographical and literary category in selected works of Renaissance English literature. Through readings of poems by Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton, and of plays by Ben Jonson, John Webster, Richard Brome, Philip Massinger, and Sir William Berkeley, I investigate how Renaissance writers trope the idea of transformation in different ways, in different moments, and in different genres. What meanings inhere in the shifting forms they represent, and how do these transformations interplay with both literary and non-literary modalities? Each chapter focuses on metamorphic changes that at times engage with psychological inwardness and at other times manifest social, political, or theological imperatives arising out of the Reformation. My inquiry is not, however, limited to instances of physical transformation: to these writers, shapeshifting is not simply a subject matter or theme but an aesthetic practice preoccupied with molding and remolding literary form itself. Recognizing the formal implications of textualized, topical, and literal transformation helps us understand the complexity of early modern ideas about transformation without losing sight of transformation.s material aspect. Chapter One focuses on Adicia, Spenser.s embodiment of injustice in The Faerie Queene, whose psychosomatic transformation complicates Spenser.s politically topical allegories of justice in Book 5 and opens up new ways to read his approach to Elizabethan historiography. Chapter Two examines Milton.s Satan, whose hardened and altered body manifests his fallen and polluted inner state. Satan's physical volatility and newfound capacity to feel pain is, physiologically and semantically, integral to Milton's phenomenology of evil. Chapter Three considers how Donne.s preoccupation with transformation shapes his sacramental poetics, focusing on Metempsychosis, the Holy Sonnets, and La Corona. This sequence of poems illuminates Donne's sacramental transformation not only conceptually but also formally, manifesting Donne.s turn to poetry as liturgical artifact. Chapter Four explores Stuart dramas that exploit the trope of Aethiopem lavare or "washing the Ethiope white," using washable blackface to enact man-made miracle. The staged transformation of a chaste woman from black to white is in these plays instrumentalized to conform (if not reform) libertine masculinity to patriarchal ideology, especially marriage.

This dissertation examines the intersection of English Renaissance drama and conduct literature. Current scholarship on this intersection usually interprets plays as illustrations of cultural behavioral norms who find their model and justification in courtly norms. In this dissertation, I argue that plays present behavioral norms that emerge from this nascent profession and that were thus influenced by this profession and the concerns of the people who worked in it, rather than by the court. To do so, I examine three behavioral norms that were important to courtiers, specifically Disguise, Moderation and Wit through the work of the English Renaissance theater's most celebrated professional, William Shakespeare. Shakespeare's plays evince a theatrical code of conduct that, rather than being an illustration of courtly norms, was sometimes in direct contrast to them and sometimes formed an alternate or lateral code. This code shows a distrust of disguise, a lack of interest in moderation and a belief in the need to eschew wit in favor of a happy ending. The modern theater has retained many of these essential behavioral norms, including the value of community above the self, the need for sympathy and compassion, and the willingness to risk.

In this dissertation I examine how skin, both human and non-human, was defined and represented on stage in the medieval English cycle plays, and more importantly how those material representations both reflected and transformed medieval understandings of skin and its relationship to the body. I consider how the creators of the medieval English cycle plays dramatized and expanded upon medieval readings of skin as a changeable and transformative outer covering that not only altered the body's physical shape but also defined its essential nature, demarcating the limits of human identity. I propose that skin was used both explicitly and implicitly throughout the cycles as a means of defining and distinguishing human bodies, and that this use enhanced the cycles' larger exploration of the creation, fall, and salvation of mankind. In addition to close readings of the play texts, I also draw on theatre history and production records to tease out an understanding of how the various types of skin depicted on stage were materially represented, as the necessities of theatrical staging required certain alterations and created a space for problematizing accepted readings and traditions. I argue that readings of skin as a literal covering and as a figurative garment regularly became conflated on stage, and the theatre's necessarily literal presentation of bodily change often amplified the metaphorical meanings. While in the gospels the Resurrection is a mystery that can be believed without being seen, on stage it must be embodied and a tangible representation of Jesus Christ's transformed body and skin depicted. In determining ways to present this body of Christ-as-divinity on stage, as well as the other human and non-human bodies within the plays, the medieval cycle producers fashioned outer skins that reflected traditional conceptions, yet also re-shaped and deepened their audiences' understanding. Ultimately, I argue that both the language of the plays and the material representations demonstrate and support a theological reading of skin as a permeable and changeable border between human and non-human, body and soul, and mortality and immortality that delineates not only the limits of the human body but of human identity itself.

Drawing on recent criticism in food studies and material culture, this dissertation examines representations of recreational consumption in early modern drama. Shakespeare and his contemporaries litter the commercial stage with scenes of appetitive desire, leisurely eating, and conviviality. This dissertation asserts that such moments provide more than comic relief or colorful accents to staged fictions; they coalesce into a socially and politically resonant discourse of profitable consumption. While pastimes such as civic festivals and pageants were common in early modern England, what I term the culture of the everyday feast--commercially organized opportunities to eat, drink, and recreate that occurred in and around London's public theaters--emerged as a new, socially powerful phenomenon. By closely examining depictions of recreational spaces and goods in plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, and many others staged between 1585 and 1615, I demonstrate how recreational experiences not only make social relations visible but also interrogate the sources of social authority. By strategically celebrating and satirizing various alimentary desires and practices, the theater encourages audiences to consider the ways in which leisurely consumption can be constitutive, not corruptive; communal, not isolating; and, above all, socially and politically advantageous. This dissertation adopts two strategies to explore staged depictions of socially profitable consumption. The first is a treatment of theater's engagement with one of early modern London's most popular recreational spaces, the tavern, and the way that chronicle history plays and urban comedies utilize the tavern as a setting in order to negotiate the changing nature of political and social life in urban culture. The second strategy involves case studies of consumable goods, such as tobacco and other novelties, which provide evidence for the material culture that shapes and defines recreational commerce and how it functions dramatically. Taken together, these chapters demonstrate the theater's efforts to distinguish itself within the broader recreational economy of early modern London. The theater does so by incorporating London's other pleasurable practices and spaces into its staged narratives, and imagining the social possibilities--the liberties and limits--that the recreational marketplace affords its participants.

Shakespeare's dramatic work occupies a strange and double-edged position in the Indian literary consciousness. On the one hand, it is a colonial text that the British imported to India as a tool to illustrate proper 'moral' behavior to their Indian subjects. On the other hand, it has taken on a decidedly Indian identity, an identity marked by the post-colonial conditions of hybridity, subversion, and negotiation. As a result, the Shakespeare industry as it exists in contemporary India is a multifaceted and even contradictory institution. In this dissertation, I study how Indian directors and scholars have appropriated and adapted the Shakespeare canon to suit their individual needs. In the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, the continued teaching of English literature resulted in a growing class of hybrid Indians who, by their successful absorption of English education and culture, persisted in fracturing colonial authority. In "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817," Homi Bhabha argues that these subjects articulate a discourse that subverts and alters the colonial status quo through intervention. Subversion and intervention articulated through forms of mimicry offer limited alternatives to colonial subjugation. I have found that Indian productions and interpretation of Shakespeare engage in such mimicry, simultaneously asserting and disrupting colonial authority. Infusing the English texts with Indian concerns both challenges colonial authority and articulates post-colonial realities. Indian appropriations of Shakespeare's drama are not new, post-colonial phenomena. During the colonial period, the plays were often used to explore cultural and political tensions. Today, Shakespeare's plays serve as vehicles to investigate the realities of post-colonial existence. Shakespeare productions, particularly those staged in English, best represent the multiple, ambiguous, hybrid, and hyphenated realities and identities of post-1947 India. The cross-culturation that marks this growing genre situates Western, canonical texts within the dual institutions of Indian theater and literary criticism. Shakespeare has, in effect, become an Indian commodity.

The five essays that comprise this text are linked by a central problematic: the relation between erotic desire and its corollary, anxiety, and their role in the construction of gendered subjects in Shakespearean drama. Situated at the nexus of feminist, psychoanalytic, and historical inquiry, the essays together are structured by four relationships: between sexuality and gender, subjectivity, transgression, and critical practice. Four bodily figures are interrogated: the Oedipal male, heterosexual body, the fantasized female reproductive body, the male homoerotic body, and the female homoerotic body. "Jewels, Statues, and Corpses: Containment of Female Erotic Power" argues that the strategies of containment employed in Hamlet and Othello are evident also in The Winter's Tale. Metaphorically and dramatically, erotically threatening women are transformed into jewels, statues, and corpses. "Prince Hal's Falstaff: Positioning Psychoanalysis and the Female Reproductive Body" offers an analysis of the parallel construction of male subjectivity and sexuality in the Henriad and psychoanalytic theory. Both "narratives" perpetrate similar repressions of the fantasized maternal, upon which "normative" male development depends. "Sex, Gender, Desire: What Difference Does it Make?" argues that in much contemporary criticism, gender is misrecognized as a signifier for sexuality in such a way that erotic practice is conveniently forgotten. The conflation of gender and sexuality is historicized by examining Freud's account of homosexuality and the contradictions that existed between gender and eroticism in the early modern experience of homosexuality. "The Homoerotics of Shakespearean Comedy" applies the historical information of Chapter III, arguing that a textual circulation of homoerotic desire transgresses the binary logic upon which patriarchal mandates depend. In As You Like It, Orlando's effusion of desire toward an object simultaneously hetero- and homoerotic prevents the stable reinstitution of heterosexuality. However, in Twelfth Night, fears of erotic exclusivity are conflated with anxiety about generational reproduction, with the result that the male homoerotic position is scapegoated at the same time the female gender is resecured in a patriarchal economy. "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and New Historicism: Subject, Structure, and Agency" places the conclusions of the preceding chapters in the context of contemporary debates about the relation between these critical methods, highlighting their particular affordances and limitations.

In the commercial theaters of early modern London there worked a group of dramatists who, though they wrote for the playmaking industry, were not members of it. Rather than outliers in a unified, closed field of playwriting, they were amateur dramatists, a distinct class of writers who took advantage of the radically open nature of the field of playwriting for professional theaters to supply their own plays to the actors. Their plays require a different set of critical and historical questions than that traditionally used in examining plays by professionals. The reason for this distinction is that amateur dramatists came to their work with primary experience of the theater as cultural consumers rather than producers: they were playgoers who, though from a diverse range of economic and social backgrounds, shared a passion for the public stage—a passion that they translated into efforts to pen plays for that same stage. As plays by playgoers, their texts provide evidence for better understanding how particular audience members saw and understood the professional stage. Their plays reveal directly what audience members wanted to see and how they thought actors might stage it. In their attempts to replicate specific practices, conventions, and techniques that they saw in professionals' plays, they reveal how certain playgoers understood, or thought they understood, the professional theater. In their deviations from what they saw in professionals' plays, they testify to a gap between what the profession produced and what the audience wanted—a gap unnoticed by studies of audience experience that rely on professionals' plays to recreate that experience. Playgoers writing their own plays demonstrate that the early modern audience was a participatory, engaged, and even autonomously active force of dramatic creation. In the early modern professional theater, playgoers could create the texts and, in some cases, the performances that they desired. Reading amateurs' plays with an awareness that they were written not just for audiences but also by audiences thus opens a new window onto the early modern playhouse, the diversity of dramatists who wrote for it, and the creative experiences of the spectators who attended it.

The question of what makes great art has intrigued us for nearly as long as the art itself has cast its peculiar spell over our minds and souls. Only recently have we begun to understand something of the way in which the human psyche works, thanks to the work of Dr. Freud and those who came after him. According to Carl Jung, consciousness is a relatively recent part of human evolution. We are still evolving into conscious beings, so that each individual's progress is a microcosm of the whole of humankind. Shakespeare and other great artists tap into the collective unconscious, the place where all our archetypes are stored, waiting to be brought to light and integrated into our conscious mind. His work is so powerful because it is a reinactment of the inner drama that all of us experience on an unconscious level, in the process of individuation. The problem plays present an unusually fertile field for Jungian tillage. Like a face glimpsed in a crowd and then lost, these plays seem to hint at truths that cannot quite be grasped. Viewed through Jung's lens, the puzzles fall into place with remarkable clarity, each revolving around a specific critical axis that allows us to see the form and structure that elude us in other readings. My argument is that, from a psychological view, Jung furnishes us with what is, to date, the best map of Shakespeare's work in these plays. Shakespeare, on the other hand, as the universal poet, proves the validity of Jung's theories by furnishing material that yields to analysis by Jung's methods. This work is meant to champion Jung, not Shakespeare, who needs no champions. I hope to bring the work of two giants together in an effort to add something to our common understanding of both.

This dissertation investigates Shakespeare's presence in nineteenth-century American culture and the meanings audiences made of Shakespeare's texts. My interest and my method has been to examine the intersection of textual representation, performative representation and cultural reception of the six most popular Shakespeare plays on the nineteenth-century American stage. The careful and extensive examination of the reviews of many productions and the promptbooks that guided performances has formed the backbone of this inquiry and has suggested how the culture read the performances it was seeing. An analysis of nineteenth-century American Shakespeare productions raises questions about and challenges current beliefs about the attitudes nineteenth-century audiences held on gender, race, ethnicity and democracy. I look at American Shakespearean performance between about 1835 and 1875 to see where the smooth surface of theater history appears to give way—to rupture in some way—and reveal something startling about gender, race, ethnicity and attitudes toward democracy, something that would not be readily apparent without the Shakespearean overlay to bring it out. My reading of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet addresses the practice of women taking on the roles of Romeo and Hamlet and examines how the almost certainly disruptive figure of the transvestite on stage would have called into question gender and gender roles. The discussion of Othello investigates how blackface minstrelsy powerfully influenced productions of the play in the legitimate theater before and after the Civil War; meanwhile, The Merchant of Venice became a site of exploration for audiences struggling with Jewish difference, revealing a collective ambivalence toward American capitalism. In my reading of Richard III and Julius Caesar, I discuss how these two plays, in championing freedom and yet cautioning against unlawful rebellion, provided audiences with a vocabulary in which to frame feelings of uneasiness about the democratic experiment.