‘Rewriting History’ is a reappraisal of Shakespeare’s history cycle, exploring its origins, its popularity and its effects before challenging its dominance on critical and theatrical perceptions of the history plays. A critical history of the cycle shows how external factors such as patriotism, bardolatory, character-focused criticism and the editorial decision of the First Folio are responsible for the cycle, more so than any inherent aspects of the plays. The performance history of the cycle charts the initial innovations made in the twentieth century which have affected our perception of characters and key scenes in the texts. I then argue how the cycle has become increasingly restrictive, lacking innovation and consequently undervaluing the potential of the histories. Having accounted for the history of the cycle to date, the second part of my thesis looks at the consequent effects upon each history play, and details how each play can be performed and analysed individually. I close my thesis with the suggestion that a compromise between individual and serial perceptions is warranted, where both ideas are acknowledged equally for their effects and defects. By broadening our ideas about these plays we can appreciate the dramatic potential locked within them.

The thesis investigates the concepts, processes and purposes involved in adapting one play into another. The study is based on post-1956 adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, and we find that these may be classified into five distinct types on the basis of the adaptive processes used: collages, cultural transpositions, domestications, reorientations and transformations. Despite differences between these types, all have common characteristics which enable us to term them ‘adaptations’ as opposed to directorial interpretations or new plays. Having established a definition of an adaptation we proceed to broaden its application, showing that any narrative form (eg novel, film) using a narrative source (eg history, legend) can be subjected to the same processes. The modern Shakespeare adaptations are then placed within their theatrical and political contexts in an attempt to explain their existence and their form. In this way we discover that the period 1959 to 1964 saw changes of dramatic form and of thematic purpose. Finally we consider whether it is valid to adapt plays, and suggest criteria for evaluating such adaptations. These criteria emphasise the significant connections between the adapted play and the adaptation, and so indicate how effectively this particular genre has been exploited.

Chapter 1 considers the notion of 'theatre specificity' and the transfer of plays between venues. Recent evidence for the opening dates of the Globe and Blackfriars playhouses is considered, and from these dates and an analysis of textual provenance a list of reliable 'Globe plays' is derived. Chapter 2 considers aspects of staging which are unrelated, or only indirectly related, to playhouse design. Chapters 3 and 4 describe and evaluate the scholarship of Globe reconstruction before and during the Wanamaker project, leading to a theoretical model of the Globe and its practices which is described in chapter 5. Chapters 6 and 7 provide scene-by-scene reconstructions of the original staging of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline. Chapter 8 draws conclusions about the importance of playhouse design in the study of original staging. The first appendix considers the evidence for the dating and provenance of the 29 plays claimed by Richard Hosley as 'Globe plays'. The second appendix considers Thomas Platter's account of his visit to a London playhouse in 1599. The third appendix considers the location of the 'Lords Room'. The fourth appendix assesses and explains John Orrell's trigonometric analysis of the Hollar sketch of the second Globe and Peter McCurdy's work on the 'jetties' at the Globe.

Nathan Field, an actor contemporary with Burbage, is virtually unknown as a playwright. His work reflects the fact that he was an all-round man of the theatre, so Part One is largely biographical, tracing Field's involvement as actor, manager and writer with the Children of the Revels, the Lady Elizabeth's Men and the King's Men. In Part Two, which lays the foundations for Part Three, I investigate Field's authorship, or part-authorship, of six collaborative plays: The Fatal Dowry, with Massinger, The Honest Man's Fortune, Four Plays in One, The Queen of Corinth and the Knight of Malta from the 'Beaumont and Fletcher' folio of 1647, and the anonymous manuscript play The Faithful Friends. Part Three deals with Field's dramatic output as pieces for the theatre, examining them in terms of theatre resources, their relationships with their spectators and their verbal and non-verbal communication. The conclusion supplies a perspective from which to view and to evaluate Field's work, by considering it in relation to popular theatre tradition, and by reviewing its limited performance history.

In the period from the opening of the first public theatre in London in 1576, until the death of Shakespeare in 1616, over one-third of all extant plays, and almost one-half of those written for Public playhouses, include battle scenes: scenes in which wars between large-scale forces are depicted. They are the product of a tradition of publicly performed mock battles which dates far back into the Medieval period, combined with the new subject matter of Elizabethan drama which dealt much with tales of adventure and chronicle history. They are also a product of the times, for they seem to reach a height shortly after the Armada, and to slowly fade from new plays during the reign of James I and after. Although there was, even from the early part of the period, an element among both playwrights and critics that did not look kindly upon them, they stayed popular on the public stage until the closing of the theatres. Few of the almost 150 battle sequences available for study are explicit about stage activity, and the modern scholar and theatre producer are often at a loss to know exactly what was intended. This thesis is an attempt to piece together all the information available from the plays and contemporary report, and to analyse the convention as a whole and in its component parts. A section is devoted to a close analysis of the oft-used terms such as alarums and excursions, and another to a study of the stage and its equipment. Although the focus is on battles and their presentation, a great part of the thesis is devoted to textual problems. Many ambiguous and incomplete sequences have been examined, and attempts made to clarify them. The plays of Shakespeare and Heywood, both of whom wrote many such scenes, have been treated at length.

This thesis dexamines for the first time the origin and development of the multi-part play in English between the years 1587 and 1630. After Tamburlaine, dramatic sequels become a regular feature of the professional theatre, and figure significantly in the early careers of Shakespeare and Marston as well as that of Marlowe. More than one hundred separate plays, extant and lost, are considered for evidence of composition, performance, publication, and literary and theatrical relationship. The plays are grouped according to genre, but at the same time a continuing chronological development is revealed. Many of the multi-part plays were unanticipated by the author, sequels appearing in response to popular success; others, especially among the Histories, were deliberately conceived in two or more parts. Nevertheless, in both categories, verbal and structural cross-references exist which can indicate intellectual consistency even where the original circumstances of performance made this difficult to perceive. From the general considerations, some specific conclusions emerge: many of the problems of 1 Henry VI are explained with reference to other planned sequences influenced by Tamburlaine; Munday's Huntington plays are shown to have an ingenious design in an extended rehearsal framework; new reasons are given for the derivation of 1 Hieronimo from an earlier sequel to Kyd's revenge tragedy; the structure of Chapman's Byron plays yields new evidence of their textual history; and Dekker's 2 The Honest Whore is profitably discussed in relation to Shakespeare's treatment of Hal in 2 Henry IV. In an essay comparing the composition and structure of sequels, it is suggested that they have an unrecognized significance to the growth and achievement of English Renaissance drama.

This thesis aims to demonstrate that Shakespeare encoded his comedies with spiritual arcana including: theurgy; Celtic mysticism; alchemy; Renaissance Platonism; and the Bible. An analysis of The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night's Dream shows that the plays are polysemous, providing simultaneous readings of a number of spiritual allegories. The arcana are examined in the light of material to which Shakespeare could have had access. They are separately documented in chapters designed to provide a resource of information on their contemporary nature mediated for modern understanding. The research is based on an exploration of plays in production, represented in programme notes in the appendices. The work was undertaken to clarify the director's notes to cast and audiences of the international professional Theatre Set-Up company and the results of this study informed their productions from 1983 to 1996. It was found that explanations of the scripts' iconography which the research revealed, clarified and lightened their performance. Early chapters review a range of opinions from literary criticism on the issues discussed in the thesis, revealing considerable sympathy with its tenets.

This thesis presents the case for adopting comics in the design, visualisation and evaluation of interactive stories. The potential for comics to be employed in the representation of interactive story-driven material has been identified in previous work. However, there is a lack of theory or evidence upon which an informed approach can be based. Consequently, this thesis contributes a process for employing branching comics to design and visualise interactive stories informed by previous approaches to stories, interactive stories and visualisations. It is argued that comics have several advantages over previous methods of designing interactive stories due to their inherent structural compatibility with visualising hierarchies of abstraction of story content. A series of studies are conducted to demonstrate how comics can be employed to visualise abstraction levels, and how branching comics can be employed to evaluate interactive stories. Qualitative and quantitative methods related to both user experience and comprehension are employed, which demonstrate the advantages in the use of comics to explore a range of different phenomena related to creating, interpreting and using interactive stories.

The thesis uses performance to elucidate the politics of sports commentary. In contrast to Williams' assertion that TV sports maintain a strong sense of their independence despite control and commodification by government or commerce (1989) and Kennedy's suggestion that the significance of sport is not tied to ideology (2001), the thesis argues that sports commentary, however implicitly, asserts neoliberal authority within sporting broadcasts. This written thesis and the Practice as Research articulates and critically contextualises the performance of sports commentary resulting in the production of a postdramatic theatre performance referred to as PhD Practice (2016), DVD documentation of the live event, a script and critical writing. Focusing on the commentary of the charity fun-runner in the Big City Marathon (BCM) the thesis uses Fischer-Lichte's notion of performance as event (2008) as a framework to examine how sports commentary changes the way an event is received and subsequently perceived. Through the creation of a performance event that renders the strategies of the sports commentator (Whannel, 1992) as an event of text (Turner, 2009), the research articulates a gap between the event and how that event is framed, reframed and enframed (Žižek, 2014) by the commentary. The thesis subsequently argues that the position taken by the commentator complicates Fischer-Lichte's autopoietic feedback loop (2008), enacting a degree of sovereignty (Agamben, 1995) over the event, contradicting the way in which the feedback loop purports to neutralise the sovereign position of the performer in postdramatic theatre (Lehmann, 2006). This partially sovereign position maintained by the commentator manipulates the audience into a pattern of consent that mirrors the enactment of neoliberal authority (Harvey, 2005). The commentator is thus able to reframe mass participation in the BCM, so that fun-runners and spectators are made to perform as neoliberal subjects, contextualised by capitalist charity (Livingstone, 2013), complicit with neoliberal ideology. This approach represents significant developments in two distinct areas. Firstly, considering sports commentary as an event of text (Turner, 2009) represents a distinctive contribution to the study of event based performance and provides a position from which to articulate a practical and political critique of the autopoietic feedback loop (Fischer-Lichte, 2008). Secondly, the use of performance to examine sports commentary, as an example of commentary as a broad cultural phenomenon, contributes to discourse around the performance of ideology.

My thesis investigates the functions of dreams and sleep within Shakespeare’s wider design of comedy and tragedy. Methodologically, it combines its focus on genre with a strong historicist component in order to reconstruct the early modern understanding of dreams and sleep that influenced Shakespeare’s approach to this material. Comparing Shakespeare’s representations of dreams and sleep with those in classical culture, from which dramatic genre, dream theory, sleep theory, and the deployment of dreams within comic and tragic structures originally derive, I argue that Shakespeare uses devices of dreams and sleep to support his deviation from those classical conventions of comedy and tragedy that he found incompatible with his aspiration towards a fuller, darker, and more complex representation of human nature, behaviour, and character. To that effect, I discuss how dreams and sleep in Shakespeare’s comedies introduce tensions that are neither resolved nor absorbed by the respective endings; and I show how dreams and sleep in the tragedies and tragic histories help emphasise human agency and responsibility at the expense of the ideas of fortune and supernatural determinism found in classical tragedy.