This thesis examines twins as objects of wonder in early modern drama. In Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150-1750, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park divide the experience of wonder into three separate emotional reactions: horror, repugnance, and pleasure. The thesis builds on this model, arguing that, as objects of wonder, twins were capable of inspiring this range of emotional responses which could, consequently, be capitalized on in a dramatic work. The first three chapters consider non-Shakespearean drama and its depiction of twins as wonderful, tracing how twins emerge as either objects of horror, repugnance, or pleasure in these plays and how these depictions resonate with other circulating discussions of twinship. Chapter 1 examines the horrific depiction of twins in The Duchess of Malfi and The Cruel Brother and its relation to the monstrous and prodigious birth of the early modern broadside. Chapter 2 investigates the repugnant twins of The twins and The Love-sick Court in light of the early modern medical understanding of twins as errors in nature. And Chapter 3 begins to reveal how more pleasurable associations can override these horrific and repugnant connotations, as shown in Changes, Ignoramus, and Senile Odium. However, all of this builds toward a final analysis of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, demonstrating how Shakespeare fully transitions twinship into the realm of the pleasurable, combatting the negative cultural assumptions about twinship with an alternate and largely revolutionary depiction of twinship as a positive characteristic.

My thesis is an exploration of the collaborations between British and Irish dramatists and Shakespeare over the past forty years. Within its bounds, there exists an extensive collection of innovative works produced in spaces from the community halls of the fringe to the main stages of the national theatres. The dramatists in question write from diverse perspectives. They may inflect elements in the work to counter stereotypes, employ intertextual images to subvert naturalistic scenes, or, alternatively, deploy the dark images inherent in the language in modern tragedies. It is helpful to think about this relationship in terms of a series of exchanges: contemporary dramatists influence Shakespearean production, offering fresh readings of the plays; and they value Shakespeare’s poetry and ability to address history in an enduring form. Although there are parallels with the present, denying Shakespearean resolutions can reflect present-day complexities. New plays are viewed as ‘collaborations’ rather than ‘appropriations’ or ‘adaptations’, so as to place the focus on the coming together of ideas from more than one source. It is not so much about what contemporary dramatists have done to Shakespeare, but how and why they have chosen to combine their ideas with those inherent in his works.

This thesis examines the relationship between the sexual formation of identity and three ‘impressing technologies’ (sealing, coining and printing) in Shakespearean drama. In a number of plays, Shakespeare uses the ‘language of impression’ to create metaphors that analogise sexual activities such as kissing, defloration and impregnation with acts of imprinting. In doing so, I argue, he establishes a rhetorical nexus that contributes to the construction of his characters’ sexual identities. Following a chapter on relevant historical contexts, each chapter close reads a single Shakespeare play, focusing on its language of impression. Chapter 2 considers the representation of wounds as impressions in Coriolanus and tracks the development of the protagonist’s identity as a hyper-masculine war machine that stamps and is stamped. Chapter 3 investigates the role of sealing imagery in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play which subverts the patriarchal figuration of women as impressionable wax to be transformed by the imprints of men. Chapter 4 analyses the recurring metaphor of counterfeit coining in Measure for Measure, a trope that associates figures of state with their sexually transgressive subjects. And chapter 5 addresses the analogy of procreation with printing in The Winter’s Tale, arguing that this aspect of the play’s rhetoric influenced the composition of the preliminaries to Shakespeare’s First Folio. The thesis concludes by comparing the plays and exploring what it is that makes Shakespeare ‘impressive’.

This thesis is a practice-as-research project ‘articulating and evidencing’ (Nelson, 2013, p. 11) research and practical explorations of Christopher Marlowe’s \(Hero\) \(and\) \(Leander\) and William Shakespeare’s \(Venus\) \(and\) \(Adonis\), using a method defined in the thesis as ‘dramatic ekphrasis’. A theatrical adaptation of the works — staged using the language of both poems as an amalgamated visual and acoustic theatre piece — exposes (through practice) the authors’ transgressive sexual and amorous themes. The narrative poems of Shakespeare and Marlowe are interpreted as having cultural purpose, and the exegesis explores how the poems expose and challenge biased Elizabethan gender paradigms, homosocial hegemony and moral stability in Elizabethan England. Through ekphrasis and contemporary performance methodology, the adaptation transposes the narrative verse to dramatic action in order to challenge our twenty-first century audience by destabilising gender and sexuality. By transposing the narratives into performance practice, the thesis strives to link the poems’ challenge to homosocial bias in the late sixteenth-century to our modern culture — to challenge present-day audience perspectives of gender-normative and heterocentric biases. Also, the thesis describes ways in which the practice illuminates and reinforces unique differences in the authors’ dramatic style. The thesis concludes by reflecting on and assessing the efficacy of both research and practice findings.

This thesis examines the politics of privacy and the public drama of the English Renaissance commercial stage. It intervenes in the study of publics and the early modern public sphere, contending that a wider examination of the corpus of public drama in the English Renaissance can illuminate the politics of privacy as well as the nature of dramatic practice. The thesis is split into two parts. The first examines external evidence – the ways in which the language of privacy is applied to the commercial theatre – and contains a single chapter on the emergence of the so-called ‘private’, indoor playhouses. It is divided into three main sections that explore the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline periods and a short epilogue which considers the period of theatre closure. The second part examines internal evidence: how the plays of the period configure political privacy. It falls into two chapters, each of which contemplates four different forms of movement across public/private boundaries. The second chapter addresses depictions of private people participating in public affairs; analysing representations of private passivity, active resistance, promotion, and favouritism. The third chapter investigates the reverse phenomenon – public people becoming private – and discusses portrayals of corruption, privation, surveillance, and withdrawal.

The Reformation had exposed ideas of female religiosity, ridiculing the contested site of the gendered bodies of nuns. Nevertheless, memories of pre-Reformation religion could not be easily destroyed. Nuns and nunneries are memorialised in a range of early modern English texts, among which this thesis identifies a number of tropes featuring nuns in historiography and drama. The first two chapters examine works by authors with differing agendas, John Foxe and Raphael Holinshed (Chapter 1), and John Stow and William Dugdale (Chapter 2), which can be regarded as memory banks of nun tropes. The next three chapters focus on tropes featuring nuns in drama from the mid 1580s to circa 1640. Chapter 3 examines references or allusions to dramatic nuns, which are generally stereotypical, suggesting the onset of cultural forgetting. Chapter 4 explores plays featuring nuns as characters, where nuns assume various roles, sometimes demonstrating a mix of tropical and innovative in a single play. Shakespeare’s utilisation of nun tropes while accommodating the symbolic value of female religious life to artistic needs is treated separately in Chapter 5. These dramatic tropes are seen to draw from and in turn feed into the tropes circulating in the culture of early modern England.

This thesis examines beds as stage properties in English Renaissance drama. It argues that their indissoluble associations with the major rites of passage in the early modern lifecycle – birth, marriage, and death – created particular dramatic effects in performance not immediately obvious to audiences today. Chapter one identifies the theoretical and methodological frameworks informing the thesis, and addresses assumptions about the physical structure of beds from the period and their appearance as props. The succeeding chapters each explore different rites of passage. Chapter two considers childbirth rituals in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and other plays depicting the lying-in ritual, and the bed’s function in these plays as a mockery of the religious and cultural ideals it was intended to represent. Chapter three focuses on marriage, exploring how the bed becomes a subversive emblem of female marital control through a comparison of the manuscript and Folio editions of The Woman’s Prize. Chapter four analyzes the death ritual in relation to Humphrey’s murder in Henry VI Part II, comparing the uses of the bed in the Quarto and Folio versions in order to consider the extent to which Humphrey ‘dies well’. Chapter five explores the inherent interconnectedness of all three rites in A Woman Killed With Kindness, and establishes the ways in which they converge upon the bed. As these case studies demonstrate, the use of the bed by playwrights as a prop in performance on the Renaissance stage was a not an incidental inclusion, but a considered choice intended to exploit the dramatic potential of the object’s multivalency to affect the scene in which it appeared, due to its rich symbolic association with the three major rites of passage.

This is a critical edition of the unattributed Admiral’s Men comedy 'Look About You', first published in 1600. The playtext has been treated according to standard editing practice: spelling and punctuation modernized, scene divisions imposed, and changes to the text collated. Full critical apparatus, including textual commentary and an expository introduction, accompanies the play. This edition views the text as a practical theatrical document, looking to performative and stageable choices first, and to thematic, stylistic, and generic influences second. The introduction is framed as a series of contextual narratives, applying methodologies from attribution and repertory studies to discuss the possibilities of authorship and date of composition. Once situated in its repertorial context (plays written for the performance at the Rose theatre between 1598-1600), the introductory matter interprets adaptation of source texts, verbal influences from contemporary drama and non-dramatic literature, and generic trends to determine a probable date of composition in 1599. The emphasis is on understanding how 'Look About You' interacts within contemporary dramatic works and how it functions as a piece meant for performance. Sections of the introduction examine these more practical aspects through dramaturgical structure, staging conditions, casting and doubling requirements, and an extended editorial practices section.

This thesis will argue that by applying a hermeneutic of performance to biblical narratives, religious dramatic texts and Anglican liturgies we are able to encounter the divine as an immanent and transcendent presence in theatrical performance. Performance, and theatricality, create realities beyond our quotidian experience and provide a context for such encounters. To explore these encounters I consider biblical texts, where God is present and active in a narrative, dramatic texts where God is a character on stage and Christian liturgies where God is active as first person of the trinity, passive as object of worship, or supremely in the Eucharist, present as Jesus. All will be examined through the twin lenses of performance as an end and theatricality as the means to such an end. Theatrical performance is conditional upon multiple dynamics of action and reaction, feedback and response between both actors and audience which constantly modulate its process. Although capable of repetition, a performance remains unique and possessed of its own truth – however interpreted, Hamlet remains Hamlet. In performance actors become characters, each working with audiences to create and participate in different realities. This is the single most important application of theatricality. In performance, all characters and audience are of equal value and within the framework of a performance can shape and change what happens. ‘Upstaging’ of any character, by any character is always possible. This means that outcomes may be expected but can never be guaranteed. God viewed as a character must be subject to the same constraints as other characters. This raises theological problems. In the biblical narrative of Moses, God is upstaged by Aaron casting the Golden Calf, and by Moses’ post hoc rejection of divine forgiveness. Once God appears on stage his divinity is at risk by being, or perceived as being a human playing at being God, so finite and idolatrous. In liturgical texts God is the object of worship, but when worship includes elements of performance and theatricality, God, Jesus and congregations are all potential performers raising the theological spectre of authentic ‘liturgical celebration’ becoming theatrical ‘imaginative representation’. However, the different realities afforded by performance and theatricality allow mutual liminalities as God and humanity cross thresholds into each others’ presence sharing and shaping events. In all the texts examined there are events where transgression and conflict render them susceptible to becoming tragedies. As a character in their performance God’s impassibility is threatened and he must bear responsibility for their outcomes with their apparent loss of redemptive hope. As God becomes a character in human stories (Moses, cycle plays) his immanence affects their outcomes, but as humans become characters in divine stories (the Eucharist) they enter moments of transcendence. In their mutuality, realities created by performance and theatricality offer transformative experiences of truth and redemptive hope unique in themselves but unitive in their repetition.

This thesis explores how embodying Shakespeare’s language through theatre-based practice can connect young people to the plurality of human perspectives, and develop their skills of communication. I review the evolution of Shakespeare’s value in formal education as literary heritage, and the tension that persists between his roles as literary icon and living artist. Peter Brook warns that Shakespeare is particularly in danger of becoming ‘deadly theatre’: admired and respected, but not alive to the moment of its production and reception. A parallel can exist with ‘deadly’ classrooms, where Shakespeare is taught with reverence but students find no relevance in his plays to their own lives. I construct a theoretical framework using key concepts from education and theatre along with findings from linguistics and cognitive science to explore the pedagogical value of Shakespeare as a cultural heritage with which young people can critically and creatively interact. I explore the relationship between language, thought and learning, and how theatre-based practice creates meaning through a dialogic process of collaborative negotiation and close study of the text. This practice acknowledges the role narrative and analogy play in how we learn, and allows young people to be both emotionally engaged in and intellectually critical of how Shakespeare creates situations of human experience. I conclude that the musicality and metaphorical nature of language is critical in how we express, share and shape our sense of the world and suggest that as performance texts Shakespeare’s plays provide a site of continually evolving cultural metaphors. I propose that embodying Shakespeare’s text allows young people to explore the possibilities of sense behind the meaning of words, and to reflect metacognitively on their experiences to build understanding of how language works and what it achieves in a search for the quality of truth.