Insanity, which has long been a favorite theme of Elizabethan drama, summoned the dramatist's imagination to wonderful creations -- creations that were fantastic and grotesque, but unforgettable.

This thesis examines spectrality in Elizabethan literature, focusing on the ghost as a figuration of disjuncture within contemporary constructions of the dead. Taking account of the cultural unease and uncertainties about the afterlife generated during the Reformation, I explore how particular conceptualizations of the dead manifest instabilities that move the figure of the ghost into the disturbing role of the spectre. The literature I examine ranges from Elizabethan translations of Seneca and key theological treatises to examples of the English revenge tragedy produced by Shakespeare, Marston, and Chettle. In drawing upon this cross-section of work, I highlight the resonances between varying forms of spectrality in order to explore ways in which the ghost incorporates, but also exceeds, the theatre’s requirement for dramatic excess. It thus becomes clear that the presence of the spectre extends beyond the immediate purposes of particular writers or genres to expose a wider disruption of the relation between, and ontologies of, the living and the dead. The theoretical apparatus for this project is drawn primarily from deconstruction and psychoanalytic theory, with attention to the uncanny as an area in which the two intersect and overlap. These modes of analysis usefully highlight areas of disturbance and slippage within the linguistic and conceptual structures by which the living and dead are defined and understood. In adopting this approach, I aim to expand upon and complicate existing scholarship concerning the figure of the ghost in relation to sixteenth-century theological, philosophical, mythological, and popular discourses and traditions. I do so by demonstrating that the emergence of the uncanny arises through a culturally specific haunting of the form and language of Elizabethan treatments of the dead. The spectre thereby emerges as a figure that is as much the product as the cause of instabilities and erosion within the Elizabethan construction and containment of the dead.

"True and Home-Born" intervenes in critical debates about early modern domestic tragedy, arguing that--far from being a form concerned exclusively with moral admonition or the domestic sphere--it is a centrally important site for dramatic experimentation and theorization at a key moment in England's evolving theatrical culture. Encompassing texts such as Arden of Faversham (1592), A Warning for Fair Women (1599), and A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607), the term groups plays that share an interest in "ordinary," nonaristocratic life, dramatize domestic events of a sensational and violent nature, and stage detailed and accurate representations of household settings and domestic ideology. While domestic tragedy has a significant forty-year theatrical history--comparable to the early modern revenge tragedy--and is associated with prominent dramatists such as Thomas Heywood, John Ford, and William Shakespeare, these plays continue to be regarded as marginal dramatic texts, mainly of interest as archives of early modern domestic ideology and experience. I argue, in contrast, that domestic tragedies represent a key strand in the development of English tragic drama. Their heightened reflexivity about their dramatic and tragic form suggests a deep and abiding interest in dramatic and theatrical matters: in how drama creates verisimilitude, how it represents "truth," and how it imagines and participates in a new, native, and national theatrical culture. The first half of "True and Home-Born" focuses on a number of plays traditionally identified as domestic tragedies, showing that their interests are not confined to the household, but extend to the dramatic and theatrical implications of faithfully recreating the reality of domestic experience on stage. Heywood and Shakespeare, I suggest, are particularly attuned to these implications, and develop and critique a form of theatrical verisimilitude in their respective engagements with the form. In the second half, I suggest that the subgenre's boundaries are more permeable than previous criticism has allowed. By considering both the revenge tragedy and history play subgenres in terms of the domestic, I show the extent to which domestic tragedy was fully imbricated in the period's dramatic traditions and theatrical culture. The revenge tragedies of Thomas Kyd and Shakespeare, I argue, turn to the household as a site in which to imagine a new form of revenge drama that differs from its classical forebears and is thus suited to the English stage. Finally, I contend that in a group of historical dramas that I call the "British history plays," focused on historical events set in ancient Britain, the domestic sphere becomes central to the staging of history, offering early modern historical dramatists a means of bridging the gap between ancient past and early modern present.

This thesis explores male prostitution in early modern culture and calls for a reconsideration of linguistic representations of sodomy and homoeroticism in literary and historical criticism. It argues that as a variant expression of homoeroticism, its examination unfolds significant ideological and cultural implications for established perceptions of male relations. As instructed by classical textuality and misogynistic stigmatization of prostitution, the boy prostitute becomes a relational category that eludes easy classification, emerging syntactically alongside the female whore in English culture. Adopting a social constructionist approach, this dissertation traces male prostitution's ambivalent representational properties in various genres and discourses, namely poetry, plays, historical narratives, theatre historiography, defamation accounts, philosophical diatribes and lexicography. The diverse vocabulary employed to describe homoerotic relations and identities is closely scrutinised in order to expose the metaphoricity and ambiguity embedded in such terms as ‘Ganymede', ‘ingle', ‘mignon' and ‘catamite'. An analysis of the terminology demonstrates the ways in which discursive systems of language, within specific historical and cultural contexts, have facilitated the concomitant textual emergence of the sodomite with the male prostitute. The Introduction establishes the theoretical framework through which male prostitution from the medieval period until the mid-twentieth century has been discussed in twentieth-century criticism. Chapter One assesses its textual appearance in early modern Italy, France and Spain, while it sets the parameters for its examination in seventeenth-century England. Chapter Two analyses the representation of the male prostitute in Donne's, Marston's and Middleton's satires and Chapter Three examines the theatrical institution and the ways in which theatre historiography misdirects discussions on sodomy and prostitution. The penultimate chapter focuses on textual constructions of the male prostitute in educational contexts and the final chapter addresses possible interrelations between prostitution, servitude, favouritism and friendship as represented within lexicography, slanderous discourse and historical narratives on King James and Francis Bacon.

The most popular cantos from the Orlando Furioso in Elizabethan England center on the (in)fi delity of women. Cantos 5, 28, and 43 were appropriated, translated, or adapted in the following works: Peter Beverly’s Historie of Ariodanto and Jenevra, Sir John Harington’s Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse, Thomas Lodge’s Catharos, “The Squire of Dames’s Tale” in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Robert Greene’s The Historie of Orlando Furioso, Robert Tofte’s Two Tales, translated out of Ariosto, and William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. No other cantos from the Orlando Furioso received this amount of literary attention in England, and this paper will explore why these writers were fi xated on these particular episodes, and how they transferred the embedded gender dynamics of these tales from the context of the Este court to their target culture.

No description available.

The essay presents the scholarly controversy over the correct attribution of the works by “Shakespeare”. The main alternative author is Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford. 16th century conventions allowed noblemen to write poetry or drama only for private circulation. To appear in print, such works had to be anonymous or under pseudonym. Overtly writing for public theatre, a profitable business, would have been a degrading conduct. Oxford’s contemporary fame as an author is little matched by known works. Great gaps in relevant sources indicate that documents concerning not only his person and authorship but also the life of Shakspere from Stratford, the alleged author, have been deliberately eliminated in order to transfer the authorship, for which the political authority of the Elizabethan and Jacobean autocratic society had motive and resources enough. A restored identity would imply radical redating of plays and poems.                       To what extent literature is autobiographical, or was in that age, and whether restoring a lost identity from written works is legitimate at all, are basic issues of the debate, always implying tradition without real proof versus circumstantial evidence. As such arguments are incompatible, both sides have incessantly missed their targets. The historical conditions for the sequence of events that created the fiction, and its main steps, are related. Oxford will be in focus, since most old and new evidence for making a case has reference to him. The views of the two parties on different points are presented by continual quoting from representative recent works by Shakespeare scholars, where the often scornful tone of the debate still echoes. It is claimed that the urge for concrete results will make the opinion veer to the side that proves productive and eventually can create a new coherent picture, but better communication between the parties’ scholars is called for. / Literary Degree Project

This dissertation addresses the profound influence that the shared experience of humans and animals had on the poetics of early modern drama. With reference to a selection of early modern comedies and a range of non-literary texts that includes natural history encyclopedias and animal husbandry manuals, I argue that the vernacular knowledge of animals shaped the early modern imagination generally and the early modern playwright's imagination particularly. I propose an original approach to early modern literature, one which urges integrating a consideration of the real-world referent for animal representation, the collective life lived by humans and animals, and the poetics of early modern drama. / In my introduction, I take up the dissertation's general claims about the ethical and historiographical dimension of interpreting early modern animal representation. I continue to work at this theoretical level in Chapter One, where I consider how the animal-focused disciplines of sociobiology and ecology can help and hinder readers interpret early modern drama. In the following chapters, I work closely with a selection of early modern plays, contexts, and literary and theatrical devices. Chapter Two focuses on a web of comic plays that feature instantiations of animals in stage properties and actor's gestures. The web of plays in Chapter Two includes the anonymous Mucedorus; Lording Barry's Ram Alley; John Fletcher's Women Pleased; Thomas Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament ; William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford's The Witch of Edmonton; Shakespeare's Love's Labor Lost; and Shakespeare and Fletcher's Two Noble Kinsmen. Chapter Three is devoted to the anthropomorphism of the allegorical representations of animals in Ben Jonson's plays Volpone and The Alchemist. In my reading of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in Chapter Four, I move on to consider animals whose representation is removed from reality not merely by anthropomorphism, but also by magic. All of these instances of representation draw animals into a sphere of existence that is commonly understood as the exclusive domain of humans at the same time that they draw humans in the other direction, which is to say into the muck and mire that is the origin of all life.

This study explores the problem of female defense in relation to the constitution of women as disempowered speaking subjects within the dominant rhetorical structures of early Stuart literature. The discourse of male rhetoricians defines a subordinate place for women in the order of language. The English formal controversy arguments over the nature of women in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries similarly deploy tropes of male precedence and female subordination to restrain women in the symbolic order and to inhibit any form of female discourse. In order to construct an effective defense a female apologist must reconstitute herself by working within and subverting these constraints. Early Stuart drama provides numerous instances in which women confront and contest the pre-established limits for female speech in their efforts to defend themselves and/or their sex. However, in the dramas selected for this scrutiny, despite the forceful defense strategies that female characters use in their attempts to negotiate their negative positions in language, they are ultimately marginalized. My final chapter therefore examines the rhetorical strategies whereby in her life and writing one woman author, Elizabeth Cary, successfully appropriated and transformed the gendered tropes into compelling female defenses.

No description available.