The events of 9/11 deeply impacted the Arab American community, initiating a renewed Orientalist narrative that framed them as the “enemy within”. This thesis examines how Arab American playwrights are reclaiming their voice and agency to offer narratives of self-representation that unsettle and counter the discourse of Otherness that entraps them. Through an exploration of selected Arab American plays, this thesis examines the newly articulated Arab American identity, which aims to transcend an either/or dichotomy, despite being positioned on the periphery. Focusing on the racial, national, social, gender and sexual components of Arab American identity, this thesis problematises definitions of the “suspect” Arab, the “sexual” Arab and the “victimised” Arab woman and homosexual. It further questions the politics of visibility/invisibility influencing Arab American playwrights and theatre platforms as they attempt to defy their marginal positioning. It investigates the possibility of alternative theatrical spaces where Arab American playwrights can overstep the political and cultural limitations/demarcations imposed on them by a hegemonic “multicultural” discourse that privileges whiteness. In doing so, it celebrates the emergence of a resistant discourse within an Arab American theatre movement that liberates Arab American identity from Otherness.

This thesis considers the different ways Persia was perceived in early modern England. Persia, understudied in recent scholarship, played an important role in the early modern English imagination, both as a classical civilization and as a counterweight to the Ottoman threat to Christendom. This classical heritage and anti-Ottomanism, when intersected with a Persian Muslim identity, resulted in a complex phenomenon. This thesis is an attempt to understand the various cross currents that constructed this complex image. Chapter One discusses English interest in classical Persian themes in the wake of Renaissance humanism. It focuses on three classical ‘Persian' plays featuring Achaemenid Kings; Cambyses, Darius and Cyrus, and investigates how classical Persia became a focus of interest for Elizabethan playwrights. Chapter Two moves to the wars between the Ottomans and Safavids and how they fascinated many English writers of the time. Paying specific attention to Usumcasane in Marlowe's Tambulaine plays, the chapter suggests the significance of Persian references in the play and offers a new interpretation of the notorious Qur'an burning scene. Chapter Three analyses John Thomas Minadoi's Historie of Warres betweene the Turkes and the Persians and shows the significance of Christian knowledge of schism in Islam for Catholic-Protestant debates. Chapter Four concentrates on the representation of Persia in Romance texts from late Elizabethan England and shows that despite being hailed as an anti-Ottoman power, Persia's anti-Christian Islamic identity, which was also suggested by Minadoi, becomes manifest in the alliance of ‘Sultan' and ‘Sophy' against the Crusaders. Chapter Five combines two crucial moments in Anglo-Persian encounters: Jenkinson's trading mission and the ‘travailes” of the Sherley brothers. Through an analysis of the play The Travailes of the Three English Brothers, the argument of the chapter is that it represents the cumulative experience of Englishmen in Persia in the early modern period.

Grounded in a multi-faceted theoretical framework that examines the dynamic interaction between the public and the private spheres of Elizabethan everyday life, this thesis aims to trace how the concept of privacy and its associated terms were developed, constructed, evoked, and configured both in Shakespearean drama and in other illustrative early modern texts. The author suggests that Shakespeare's configuration of space results from a combination of the conditions of representation - empty stages - metaphorical language, technical dramatic devices, and textual markers that create a sense of space in the texts and onstage. The research also explores the place and space of early modern women and of Shakespeare's female characters in terms of their relation to the private space; that is to say, their construction of 'self-in-relation-to-space', as well as their movements and activities within and outside the private's real or imagined boundaries, thus their ability to fashion the public sphere from within the private. Rather than analysing the role of women in the plays exclusively from the point of view of opposition between spheres - public man versus private woman - the study wants to question and pose, at the same time, the relevance of approaching Shakespearean texts from a spatial perspective, a choice that may have an impact on the very interpretation of them.

An examination of the science of human anatomy and dissection as it occurs in plays of the early modern period. Starting with a survey of available literature on the subject, the thesis then moves on to examine the state of human anatomy in England at the time as well as an overview medical training, textbooks and information that may have been available to the public at large. This leads to an examination of a group of plays that refer explicitly to the practice of anatomy, references that are found to be either literal or metaphorical in nature. In this, the theatrical representation of anatomy is examined with an eye toward investigating the nature of these representations.

This thesis discusses critical attitudes in Art Shakespearean Criticism and the Theatre during the eighteen-eighties, with an account of the "Lyceum style" and its critics, and a description of Irving's 1888 Macbeth.

This thesis brings ecocriticism to Shakespearean performance through an examination of adapted performance worlds. Studying cinematic and theatrical productions of Shakespeare’s King Lear and The Tempest, it develops a strategy of ecopoetic analysis: a critical approach to the creation of worlds in the process of adapting a play for performance. This work developed out of my own environmentalism and experience in performing Shakespeare’s works. My goal is to develop a critical strategy for examining performance that utilises the tools of ecological criticism and furthers the fields of performance studies and ecocriticism. Ecocriticism modifies the scientific analyses performed by ecologists for looking at works of art. Beginning with the principal that everything is connected to everything else, ecocritics focus on the interactions between elements of a work, the interactions between the work and the world at large, and between the work and its audience. I examine the cultural context of a work, other landmark works with which it engages intertextually, and the reactions of original audience members, especially journalistic and academic reviewers, in order to ascertain how an individual production adapts a Shakespearean play to a new environment. I found in my analyses that Shakespeare’s works are particularly fertile ground for an ecopoetic analysis. Directors, in their efforts to keep his work relevant to a modern audience, frequently adapt and alter the worlds of Shakespeare’s plays in their productions. My ecopoetic approach to these productions reveals the ways in which the performances engage their audience, providing a better understanding of how to increase participatory spectatorship. I also found that this approach reveals underlying engagements between individual productions and the culture out of which they grew, and that the construction of performance environments is tied to cultural conceptions of the natural world. Finally, I discovered that Shakespeare’s works are an international language for performance, with adapters around the world experimenting with his plays in order to further the effectiveness of theatrical and cinematic production. As such, they are a logical place in which to formulate a new method of performance criticism, one which engages the world of the performance, the context of the production, and the audience that experiences the performance world. This thesis confronts numerous difficulties, including the fact that ecocriticism does not provide a critical apparatus as such, but is a politically-inspired way of viewing works. As such, I develop a more rigourous method of analysis, applying the tools of ecological science (interconnectedness, ecosystems, and adaptation), and the ethos of a modified phenomenology of performance criticism, to the worlds of performances. The crucial confrontation in my work is between nature and culture. I argue that the two are mutually constructing, and that performance occupies a place in which the two meet and interact and is thus the ideal ecosystem in which to investigate the interactions between culture and nature. Our world is endangered, the effects of global climate change and pollution are potentially catastrophic for us all. The issues that we face, the relationship between our human culture and our natural world, are dramatised in the works that I examine. The ecopoetic model of analysis that I develop can be applied to a greater variety of performance works, and this critical methodology is paramount for understanding the world and our place within it.

While examining a selection of plays centred on the phenomenon of mothering, my thesis also investigates the interaction between theatre and feminism in post-war Britain, aiming to highlight mutual correspondences between women's theatre making and feminist agendas. I focus mainly on the period of second-wave feminism, but I also discuss the decade preceding the appearance of the Women's Liberation Movement, as well as its aftermath up to the mid-nineties. Scrutinising proto-feminist, feminist and post-feminist stances, I argue that several fifties women dramatists anticipated key concerns of the late sixties and seventies; and equally, that many playwrights active after the heyday of second-wave feminism revisited the climate of the seventies in an attempt to evaluate the transformations that have since occurred in women's lives. In this manner, I not only contextualise some of the major achievements and shortcomings of successive feminist interventions, but also elaborate on key changes that have taken place in the negotiation of dramatic form and content. Rather than privileging one dominant theoretical position and adopting its perspective for the purposes of my analysis, I connect the work of playwrights informed by different artistic positions and political convictions, in order to pinpoint the principle of co-existence and multiplicity. This aesthetic and ideological diversity in women's writing for the stage, characteristic of the past five decades, has been confirmed not only by the primary and secondary sources that I drew upon but also by the playwrights themselves, whom I interviewed. For most present-day female dramatists, as this thesis argues, contemporary British women's theatre is a space of experimentation and of confluence - in which the broad range of individual voices can situate themselves next to one another, without the urge to replicate an ultimate direction imposed by hegemonic political constraints or artistic platforms.

The Victorian era was the 'Golden Age' for Shakespeare illustration. Between 1939 and 1880 thousands of illustrations were produced within many different editions of Shakespeare's Complete Works. What is so fascinating about these illustrations is that they have, historically, been widely neglected by academic scholarship. These editions, which were hugely popular in the Victorian era, are a very important part of our cultural heritage and, indeed, our construction of Shakespeare's plays as we understand them today. The 'Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive' is centered on the four major Victorian illustrated editions of Shakespeare's Complete Works and makes available online over 3000 of these illustrations in an open-access database. The archive is available online at 'ShakespeareIllustration.org' and will allow researchers and members of the public to explore a rich image archive and to ask new questions about this material: for example, 'how did the Victorians portray certain characters and plays pictorially and does this portrayal differ throughout the Victorian era?' Alongside such questions, the archive, more broadly, allows users to explore and interrogate the complex relationship that exists between the page and the stage, between word and image and between the past and the present. Underpinning the project is my strong belief that an online academic resource can be both scholarly rigorous and user-friendly. Further, the archive uses social networking to enable a community of users to discuss the images and to collaborate in exciting new and unforeseen ways. This thesis explores the implications around the creation of such work.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict dates back to 1917, when British Prime Minister Balfour declared Britain’s support for the establishment of a homeland for Jews in the land of Palestine. The conflict has had many political, social, and artistic implications. On the political level, a struggle that has not been solved until this day has evolved. On a social level, many lives have been crushed: thousands of native citizens of the land became refugees, mainly in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, but also worldwide. Others, like the Arabs who stayed in what was in 1948 declared to be the state of Israel, have been suffering from an identity crisis; many of these Arabs face unlawful detention, demolition of houses, killing and racism. The Gaza strip has almost always been under siege by the Israeli military machine lately. Meanwhile, the Jewish society has never had a day of peace since the establishment of their state. On the artistic level, the conflict has always had implications for Arab/ Palestinian and Israeli writings., I seek to read the depiction of the conflict with its different violent confrontations from both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives starting with the Palestinian Nakba to the violent Israeli oppression of any Palestinian resistance in the Intifada. I also read literary texts about Palestinian resistance, actual material resistance of the first Palestinian Intifada as represented by both sides in postcolonial terms. In fact, I believe that both Palestinian and Israeli literature could be read in the context of postcolonial discourse. On the one hand, for Palestinian and Arab writers, Palestinian writing is and should be read as resistance literature, or ‘Adab al-muqawamah’, a term coined by Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani. Anna Ball’s study Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective examines Palestinian literature and film in the light of postcolonial feminism. Ball places the conflict in the context of colonial/ postcolonial discourse and breaks the taboo against using the word colonialism when speaking about Zionism. In fact, the research problem is based on the idea of the inadequacy of ignoring Palestinian and Israeli literature as part of postcolonial studies simply for fear of revealing the colonial status quo of the land. According to Anna Bernard, who seeks to draw attention to what she calls ‘blind spots in postcolonial studies’, mainly Israel/ Palestine: ‘by dismissing a ‘postcolonial’ approach to Israel-Palestine studies outright, [critics like] Massad and Shohat overlook the value of a literary study that seeks to demonstrate the collective and cross-cultural impact of the various modern forms of colonialism and imperialism on artistic production across the globe’. Massad’s argument that there is difficulty in describing space, time and body in Israel/ Palestine as postcolonial is based on his interrogations: ‘Can one determine the coloniality of Palestine/ Israel without noting its ‘‘post-coloniality’’ for Ashkenazi Jews? Can one determine the post-coloniality of Palestine/Israel without noting its coloniality for Palestinians? Can one determine both or either without noting the simultaneous colonizer/colonized status of Mizrahi Jews? (Although one could debate the colonized status of Mizrahi Jews) How can all these people inhabit a colonial/postcolonial space in a world that declares itself living in a post-colonial time?’ Ella Shohat, likewise, is against what she calls the ‘ahistorical and universalizing deployments, and potentially [the] depoliticizing implications’ of the term ‘post-colonial,’ especially that, according to her, it is used instead of important terms like imperialism and neo-colonialism. In spite of the importance of paying attention to the correct description of states of imperialism and neo-colonialism, I still find it possible to read both Palestinian and Israeli texts in postcolonial perspective, agreeing with Bernard ‘that the tools that have been developed for reading these texts comparatively – including colonial discourse analysis, national allegory, minority discourse, and so on – can be usefully applied, tested, and revised in the analysis of Palestinian and Israeli literary and cultural production’. This view resonates with Ashcroft, Tiffin and Griffiths’s in their study The Postcolonial Studies Reader (1995), when they comment on this wide range of relevant fields that the term postcolonial suggests: ‘Postcolonial theory involves discussion about experience of various kinds: migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, representation, difference, race, gender, [and] place’ . In fact, the term ‘postcolonial’ is not necessarily restricted to a real colonial period; it could be used, according to Ashcroft, Tiffin and Griffiths in The Empire Writes Back: ‘to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. This is because there is continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression’. Between the view of the land of Palestine as a lawful possession of the Jews and that which sees Jewish presence as a settler or colonial one, a debate about reading the conflict and literary production tackling the conflict within theories of colonial and postcolonial studies arises. What makes reading the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and its literature and literary production within the paradigm of postcolonialism problematic is worth some further investigation. First, the preference and focus on the discursive practices of colonialism over the material practices has resulted in excluding the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict from the field of postcolonial studies by a number of critics like Ella Shohat and Joseph Massad, which is more elaborated on later. Second, the debate about the Zionist project as a settler colonial one could also problematize analysing the conflict within postcolonial theories. The first chapter explores the Israeli/ Palestinian and Arab writing of the conflict from a colonizer/colonized perspective. I mainly focus on the representation of violence as an essential element in a colonized society and the decolonization process, drawing on Frantz Fanon’s theory that violence is inevitable in any colonized community as the backbone of the analysis. For this purpose, I have chosen Syrian playwright Saad-Allah Wanous’s play Rape (1990), to compare with Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin’s play Murder (1997), since both plays represent violence as a vicious circle that does not lead anywhere in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, even though it is an everyday act that has become a way of life for both sides. Crucial terms in the field of postcolonial studies such as resistance/terrorism are examined. Some similarities between the ways the two playwrights write the conflict are also highlighted, which supports the idea that literature can always find shared ground between any two conflicting parties. In Chapters Two and Three I write about the history of the conflict as a chain of endless violent confrontations; violence in this case is on the national level when the two nations fight each other. Chapter Two addresses some of the landmark events in the history of the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, mainly the Israeli War of Independence/Nakba as the same historical event seen from the two extremely different colonizer/colonized perspectives. The chapter also addresses what the Holocaust has to do with the two events and how the Holocaust was exploited by the Israeli state to silence any condemnation of the Israeli/Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine and later on to silence any international condemnation of the Israeli 1967 occupation of more Palestinian and Arab lands.

This thesis offers a theoretically-aware discussion of the stage appropriations of Gothic novels and dramas in the 1790. Works discussed in detail include: *The Monk*, *The Romance of the Forest*, *The Castle Spectre* and their adaptations, re-writings and afterlives. The author examines many intersemiotic practices in the above works as well as in several others, drawing her examples from the whole Georgian period; she also explains the signifying function of costuming, lighting, music and special effects in Gothic. The concepts of intertheatricality and infratheatricality, and their relavance to Gothic are addressed in order to attempt a new definition of the genre.