Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University. / The purpose of this study is to examine the imagery and relationships between imagery and structure in the eight comedies that George Chapman wrote without collaboration. In the first chapter several underlying assumptions are set forth. These concern the appropriateness of formal criticism, the critical neglect of Chapman's adherence in comedy to philosophical as well as artistic decorum, and the significance of his expressed intention of creating ethical "coherents" for his age. The functions of dramatic imagery are classified, and Chapman's awareness of irony and decorum ls indicated by his commentaries on Homeric translations and his early non-dramatic poems. Finally, the usefulness of the commonplace symbolism of Fortune as an index to Chapman's ethical thought and comic structure is advanced in connection with his intellectual inheritance and moral predispositions. The Blind Beggar of Alexandria is shown to belie its apparent merely farcical content by Chapman's consistently ironic manipulation of imagery of the process of"knowing. [truncated]

Akademisk avhandling--Engelsk litteratur--Lund, 1982. / Bibliogr. p. 260-265.

xiv, 234 p. : ill. / The twentieth-century project of American rhetorician Kenneth Burke, grounded in a magic-based theory of language, reveals a path to the origins of what I am going to call occult invention. The occult, which I define as a symbol set of natural terms derived from supernatural terms, employs a method of heuresis based on a metaphor-like process I call analogic extension. Traditional invention fell from use shortly after the Liberal Arts reforms of Peter Ramus, around 1550. Occult invention emerged nearly simultaneously, when Early Modern British authors began using occult symbols as tropes in what I refer to as the Occult Mode. I use six of these authors--George Chapman, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Abraham Cowley, John Dryden, and Jonathan Swift--as examples of how occult invention arises. In appropriating occult symbolism, authors in the Occult Mode began using the invention methods of the occult arts of magic, alchemy, astrology, and cabala to derive new meanings, transform language, develop characters and plots, and reorient social perspectives. As we learn in tracking Burke's project, occult invention combines the principles of Aristotle's rhetoric and metaphysics with the techniques and principles of the occult arts. Occult invention fell from use around the end of the eighteenth century, but its rhetorical influence reemerged through the work of Burke. In this study I seek to contextualize and explicate some of the literary sources and rhetorical implications of occult invention as an emergent field for further research. / Committee in charge: Dianne Dugaw， Co-Chairperson； John T. Gage， Co-Chairperson； Kenneth Calhoon， Member； Steven Shankman， Member； Jeffrey Librett，Outside Member

My dissertation proposes that the history of early modern repertory theatre cannot be understood free from the history of disability. I argue that disability was a far more ubiquitous presence in early modern theatre than scholars have hitherto recognized. This is because playing companies represented disability through a manifold web of tools pervading the theatrical marketplace, including player identity, props, embodied acts, gestures, vocalizations, fragments of dialogue, and even the staging of locational places. Tracing disability’s overt and allusive ubiquity is essential for understanding how assessments of (dis)ability consistently informed spectators’ encountering and interpretation of staged drama. Chapter One places period commentary on stage players in dialogue with Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, arguing that ability and able-bodiedness were valued and idealized by playing companies and audiences alike. Chapter Two examines Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso, Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, and George Chapman’s The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, proposing that leading players’ consistent embodiment of disability troubled a firm binary between disability and able-bodiedness in theatrical performance, as players’ stage identities consistently bore the residues of disabled performance. Chapter Three examines William Shakespeare’s Richard III and Othello, as well as Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen, arguing that even minute tics and gestures onstage evoked the memory of past and present disabled performance. Disabled characters were, this chapter argues, often self-consciously constructed upon one another in ways that allowed repertory theatre to both recount and rework its history of disabled representation. Chapter Four examines the anonymous The Fair Maid of the Exchange, Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, and Robert Armin’s The Two Maids of More-Clacke, arguing that disability was essential to the conception of place in early modern theatre—especially within a repertory system in which “place” often depended upon tools of theatrical representation that bore the residues of past and present disabled performance.