This thesis consists of three distinct but interconnecting case studies that took place between 2007 and 2010 in collaboration with Warwick Arts Centre (WAC), Britain’s second largest multi-arts venue. The study developed practice-led methods to investigate the dynamic interactions between notions and perceptions of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘internationalism’ in relation to WAC’s theatre and performance programming and education activities. The first case study is a qualitative audience reception study designed to make sense of WAC’s programme in relation to multicultural and international issues. The second case study focuses on an educational outreach project that placed two local schools in collaboration with a commissioned teacher-artist and a University of Warwick academic. These encounters inspired the final case study, which made use of WAC’s newly built Creative Space as a site for a devising project with young people from nearby Coventry, culminating in a performance for an invited audience. The thesis explores the varied complexities that frame ‘multiculturalism’ by focusing on its origins as a political concept in post-1945 Britain and its subsequent association with contemporary contentious social, political and cultural national and international issues. An analysis of the negative effects of ‘multiculturalism’ is balanced by considerations of the project’s emergent concepts: ‘hospitality’ and ‘conviviality’, which articulate the possibilities of living in diversity in more ‘positive’ terms. These paradigms reverberate throughout each case study, informing their methodologies, influencing their conceptual frameworks and placing ‘multiculturalism’ in more dynamic and relevant dimensions of pedagogical and creative practices. Each case study considers collaboration between strangers and investigates the potential of WAC as a hospitable and convivial environment. These new perspectives demonstrate the optimistic possibilities of creative and humane action for producing a ‘positive multiculturalism’.

This thesis is an analysis of the responses in the early modern period of civic and church authorities to local and visiting groups of players in Gloucester, Tewkesbury and Bristol. It is also an examination of the venues in which these groups performed. Reactions to these groups varied, and this study explores how these, both positive and negative, were affected by economic, legal and cultural factors. The thesis proceeds chronologically, and is thus divided into twenty-year intervals in order to draw the most effective comparisons between the three urban centres over a number of decades. The first period under examination, the 1560s, records the early reaction of the three settlements to the phenomenon of the Elizabethan travelling company. The relationship between the regional authorities and the patrons comes to the fore in the second period, the 1580s, as the dominance of the ambitious Earl of Leicester grew in the region. Legislation decreeing the withdrawal of mayoral control over itinerant troupes at the close of the sixteenth century, the third period, released civic officials from previous obligations and this influenced the level and character of their hospitality towards the ‘noble’ companies. Although evidence is scarce, the records of Gloucester, Tewkesbury and Bristol contain clues to an attitude towards these entertainers during the reign of James I, the final period under scrutiny. The study is based on the extant economic records for the region, as these contain much fruitful information. This thesis consciously places itself in dialogue with the internationally acclaimed REED Project, and draws on the information collated by the editors of the volumes for Bristol and Gloucestershire. A parallel examination of the entries into municipal records of the three towns, and the areas around them, in conjunction with genealogical and topographical evidence, has allowed for an interpretation of the data in a wide regional context, revealing that although each town tolerated players in their municipal spaces, with the officials personally entertaining the companies on some occasions, the reception of the companies varied significantly from town to town and across the historic period.

This thesis investigates the relationship between female performers, mass culture and the avant-garde in fin-de-siecle Paris. The work of the dancers, Jane Avril and Loïe Fuller, has received critical attention as the representation of either the popular stage or of early modernist experimentation, but not as an example of the site where these two artificially constructed classifications coalesced. This study seeks to fill that gap by offering a framework through which the experimental performance of these mass-cultural, female celebrities can be renegotiated in its immediate historical context. The argument is framed within the inherent dualism of the ideology and social constructions that shaped the fin de siecle. These binaries are considered alongside the cultural transformations that were demanded by the rapidly developing commodity culture of the period; a process that reveals the progressive destabilisation of these values and ideas as the new century approached. Chapter one engages with the theoretical concepts of the gaze that have framed approaches to voyeurism and objectification during the period. Chapter two discusses the problematic relationship between feminism and corporeality, a theme that is extended in chapter three with an investigation of responses to the new social role of the female celebrity. Chapter four focuses on the dancer Jane Avril and reveals the manner in which her performance subverted the contemporary associations between femininity, insanity and eroticism. Chapter five concludes this thesis with an exploration of the centrality of the work of Loïe Fuller to autonomous female performance and the avantgarde.

This thesis suggests an approach to landscapes both in and as performance, in order to explore how identity and belonging are sited and performed in contemporary South Africa. I deploy an inter-disciplinary concept of landscape, drawing from the work of Tim Ingold (2000), who defines landscape as 'a plenum' and argues that we engage with landscapes through a performative process of 'way-finding.' With this in mind, I position myself as a participant-observer in this thesis, and through a process of way-finding aim to 're-trace invisible maps' of identity in a selection of examples ranging from the theatrical to the everyday. Throughout my discussion I analyse how specific performances reflect/resist certain histories and social constructions of belonging. The thesis is divided into three thematic sections which explore how various cultural practices, or forms of 'mapping', attempt to make the world 'knowable', at the same time indicating what escapes or exceeds the limits of their own codes of representation. The first section entitled Fortress City investigates identity formation as a spatially situated process in Cape Town, using the example of the public arts festival Infecting the City and focusing on the period 2009-2011 when it was curated by Brett Bailey. In the second section Frontier Nations, I discuss the temporality of landscape by juxtaposing how collective/national memory and subjective/personal memory both emerge in and through performance. I compare two speeches made by Presidents Mandela and Zuma in Grahamstown in 1996 and 2011 respectively, and contrast the political rhetoric on nationhood with Brett Bailey’s use of mythic time in an experiential site-specific performance Terminal (2009). In the last section Corporeal Networks, I argue that the body acts as primary generator of meaning, identification and belonging. I discuss Juanita Finestone-Praeg’s Inner Piece (2009) a physical theatre work which tackles issues of violence and representation.

Literary scholars agree that William Shakespeare used Samuel Daniel's First Four Books of the Civil Wars as a source for his play Richard II, launching an interaction between the authors that lasted for many years. What has not been recognized, however, is that they may have influenced each other's works on English history before the publication of Daniel's epic poem. Textual, bibliographical and biographical evidence suggests that Daniel borrowed from some of Shakespeare's earliest works, the Henry VI plays, while writing The First Four Books, and that Shakespeare could have used a pre-publication manuscript of The Civil Wars to write Richard II. A review of extant versions of The Civil Wars, the Henry VI plays and Richard II reveals a complex relationship between the authors as they wrote and revised works on the Wars of the Roses while both had connections to the Countess of Pembroke and the Earl of Essex. This analysis illuminates the works while disclosing one of the first instances of Shakespeare's plays inspiring another artist, challenging images of Daniel as a poet who disdained theater and Shakespeare as a playwright who cared only about the popularity of his works on stage.

The object of this study has been to present as complete a picture of the Salisbury Court theatre as evidence permits. Throughout the thesis, an effort has been made to avoid being influenced by preconceived impressions of the 'Elizabethan’ or the ‘Caroline’ theatre, in the hope that variations between the Salisbury Court and generalised impressions of theatres of the times might be brought to light.

This thesis explores how the changing masculinities of the 21st century have affected how young men connect to musical theatre as a genre that has been stereotypically seen as gay. The investigation is first located in the theoretical framework of masculinities, utilising the concepts of the male sex role, hegemonic masculinities and inclusive masculinity to chart how the performance of the male gender has changed over the past century. The project then adopts an empirical approach to a group of 161 men and 25 women, establishing a methodological framework for correlating sexual orientation with attitudes towards musical theatre. There is a further honing of this methodology through the adoption of Jenifer Toksvig's 'The Fairytale Moment' exercise, which identifies how each participant connects to narrative through a core emotional drive. Finally, this data is tested through three case studies of how individual participants connect to 'Les Misérables', 'Wicked' and 'Soho Cinders', concluding that the emotional content of musical theatre is now as desirable to straight men as it is to women and LGBT men.

My thesis explores Restoration repertory theatre in the 1670-71 season, examining all of the new and revived works performed, including the premières of plays by dramatists such as Behn, Dryden, Shadwell, and Wycherley. These canonical writers are studied alongside the lesser-known works of playwrights including John Crowne, Edward Howard, Elizabeth Polwhele, and Elkanah Settle. Offering new readings of neglected plays by resituating them within their theatrical, literary, and political contexts, I use contemporary evidence from diaries, letters, pamphlets, and parliamentary records to demonstrate how theatre was inextricably bound with wider circumstances. Tracing the interaction between the playhouses, print, manuscript, and court cultures, my thesis argues that it was in this season that drama became evermore focused on King Charles II and his court, as playwrights looked for answers to increasingly pressing dramatic and political questions and offered cautious, and often cautionary, comments on the monarch. Analysing the main anxieties and impulses evident within drama, including the political influence of the royal mistresses, the emergence of female playwrights, worry about the succession, and the contentious influence of libertine ideology, my thesis concludes with a discussion of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal, a play that looks back to, and reflects on, the 1670-71 season.

This thesis investigates the relationship between dramatic performance and space at English royal palaces between 1509 and 1642. I argue that palatial performance spaces, including, but not limited to, great halls, great chambers, banqueting houses, and tiltyards, created meaning in relation to one another. Underlying the history and evolution of the performance spaces I examine is the pressing notion that spaces represented different sites of meaning for spectators already accustomed to the spatial languages of palaces and great households. The venues/rooms/chambers themselves performed for inhabitants, and as court drama developed throughout this period, so did their spaces. Part one examines performance spaces in palaces understood to be the “greater” palaces of the realm and in those maintained primarily by consorts and royal children. Part two focuses primarily on how banqueting houses evolved into essential royal buildings in England. As these buildings became performance sites, court presentations of drama shifted from household-based indicators of hospitality to representations of prestige by the monarch. The final section, chapters five and six, examines how all of the architectural and dramatic frameworks discussed in the first four chapters were exemplified at Whitehall, the most important palatial venue of the period.

This thesis offers an account of how verse drama, despite the entrenched cultural significance of Shakespeare, came over time to occupy a marginal, often maligned position within English theatre. The introduction establishes its critical-creative methodology: I approach the question not only as a critic, but as a practitioner exploring what T. S. Eliot called ‘the possibility of a poetic drama’ in the modern world. The first chapter demonstrates how verse dramatists over the last thirty years have been inhibited by continuous comparison to Shakespeare. The remainder of the thesis argues more broadly that verse drama between the Restoration and the present day has articulated itself directly in response to an evolving understanding of Shakespearean drama. Chapter Two examines Shakespeare’s own dramatic verse as a model which skilfully exploits the dialectic between norm and variation made possible by a shared metrical framework to stage conflicts between individuals and communities. Chapters Three to Five explore in turn how verse dramatists between 1660 and 1956 engaged with the same dialectic, both politically and prosodically. The thesis closes with an extended reflection on my own practice as a contemporary poet-playwright, discussing three scripts where I experimented with counterpointing individuals and communities through dramatic verse.