Although it is generally accepted that the Morality Plays greatly influenced Elizabethan drama, this statement is often followed by the rider that they are dull and lifeless and that their chief legacy is a sense of moral earnestness which also characterises the best Elizabethan drama. The aim of this thesis has been to read the Morality Plays closely and in an appreciative spirit in order to find out what significant contribution they do make to the techniques of Elizabethan drama and to a proper understanding of it. Chapter I discusses the earliest complete Morality, The Castle of Perseverance, which is the longest and most comprehensive of all the Moralities. The chapter tries to show what a Morality is about and how it differs from the great mediaeval cyclus, the Mystery Plays. It is also an attempt to relate the early Morality Play to other mediaeval literature and to show that it is closely linked to the homeletic literature of the period. Chapter II is a study of three Moralities of the period 1500- 1520. There are fewer Moralities in this period and the plays chosen show a marked similarity to The Castle of Perserverance in their structure, although they differ from the earlier Moralities in their attitude to their subject matter and in their portrayal of the different allegorical characters. The plays under discussion are Nature, Mundus et Infans and Magnyfycence Chapter III; the period after 1535 was a period of great political and religious upheaval and this chapter discusses the plays written for propaganda purposes in the strife between Catholic and Protestant. John Bale's Three Laws, an anti-Catholic play, was chosen because Bale is a startlingly original dramatist who makes use of techniques derived from the liturgy and from emblematic devices, and because he tries to mould the Mystery Plays and the History Plays into a Morality framework. The other plays The Conflict of Conscience was chosen because of its affinity to Dr Faustus and also because it tries to show the psychomachia in psychological, personal terms rather than in a general allegorical manner. Chapter IV discusses three later Moralities, Cambyses, Horestes and Appius Virginia, which portray historical or fictional characters in situations of conflict. They were chosen because they seem to show that the Morality Plays laid the bases for the Elizabethan tragic situation and the Elizabethan tragic hero. With such diverse material, it is difficult to trace a clear line of development from one play to the next, but each group of plays has its own contribution to make to our understanding of Elizabethan drama.

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This dissertation makes a case for the Shakespearean stage in the modern Anglo-American tradition as a distinctive laboratory for producing and navigating theories of emotion. The dissertation brings together Shakespeare performance studies and the newer fields of the history of emotions and cultural emotion studies, arguing that Shakespeare’s enduring status as the playwright of human emotion makes the plays in performance critical sites of discourse about human emotion. More specifically, the dissertation charts how, since the late nineteenth century, Shakespeare performance has been implicated in an effort to understand emotion as it defines and relates to the “human” subject. The advent of scientific materialism and Darwinism involved a dethroning of emotion and its expression as a specially endowed human faculty, best evidenced by Charles Darwin’s 1871 The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. Shakespeare’s poetic, formal expression of the passions was seen as proof of this faculty, and nowhere better exemplified than in the tragedies and in the passionate displays of the great tragic heroes. The controversy surrounding the tragic roles of the famous Victorian actor-manager Henry Irving illustrates how the embodied, human medium of the Shakespearean stage served as valuable leverage in contemporary debates about emotion. The dissertation then considers major Shakespearean figures of the twentieth century, including Harley Granville Barker, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, and Peter Brook, whose “stages” similarly galvanize and reflect contestation and change in what William Reddy has called “emotional regimes” or Barbara Rosenwein “emotional communities.” For each of these figures, a specific emotional paradigm is at stake in staging Shakespeare and particularly Shakespearean tragedy. I engage with a range of sources, from performance reviews to popular psychology, to locate these canonical moments in Shakespearean performance history as flashpoints in a cultural history of emotion.

A complete study of the principle would take into consideration other literary types besides the drama, but since, historically, the drama takes precedence over those other types, and since the first important controversy on the subject arose in England in connection with tragedy, I have considered it best to limit the material undertaken here to that form of dramatic art. Further than that, the study will be limited to some of the leading tragedies of the Elizabethian age, excluding those of Shakespeare, for it was the use or misuse of poetic justice in these plays which formed the basis of the famous Dennis-Addison controversy in the early eighteenth century. Poetic justice had become a highly formalized idea by that time, and Addison became a defender of the liberties of the dramatist and insisted that the reputation of English writers of tragedy should not be injured by the enforcement of such an arbitrary rule as Den is and his fellow critic proposed. Since that time, the field over which the battle of the theory might be waged has decreased in size. Shakespeare is no longer condemned for having brought Desdemona to an unhappy death. The moder, especially, has turned from the old accepted idea of “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall also be reap”, and has taken a particular pleasure in turning it upside down. How we see that there is no planned plot for our lives. The narrow sense of tragedy that once held us when we saw justice overtake him who deserved his fate has given way before another sense of tragedy, one which apprehends that perhaps the greatest tragedy may be founded upon the very inscrutability of our lives. We no longer believe in the old dogma of poetic justice. Even so, poetic justice, whether it be modern or ancient, always has the fundamental problem of art with which to contend. That problem is, rightly enough, should it be the purpose of art to please, or to instruct? Dependent upon the answer to this question, is another problem: should the principle of poetic justice be accepted or rejected? Only this much may be said: it seems reasonable to expect that the absolute conformity to a strict form of poetic justice would injure the best interests of art and aesthetics as badly as the absolute violation of the doctrine would affect the conception of morality. A compromise seems inevitable.

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In this dissertation, I explore the ways in which contemporary theatre stages possibilities and crises of embodiment. In order to penetrate the complex relationships between character, performer, text, and production, I coin a critical term: theatrical bodysnatching. This term refers to a dissonance or power struggle made manifest in performance, in which a performer’s body seems to resist the character it inhabits in ways that enhance, rather than detract from, the thematics of a theatrical production. In order to demonstrate the power of theatrical bodysnatching, I analyze playtexts, theatrical performances, reviews, and performer interviews. I argue that theatre is a medium optimally suited for staging sociopolitical dialogue because it models a kind of self-reflexive critique, in which performing bodies both embrace and resist the demands of the playtext. As a result, theatre creates a provocatively charged experience for spectators and performers, in which both parties are thematically implicated in the aims and preoccupations of a given play. Just as the performer’s body does not dissolve but instead accomplishes the crucial work of ideological exposure, the audience also becomes a marked, integrated presence and source of commentary in these bodysnatching plays. In this dissertation, I harness a particular selection of Anglophone drama from the late 20th to early 21st century in order to demonstrate how the often uncanny, subversive nature of live performance allows for radical reconsiderations of embodiment. By examining the ways in which these strangely iterated characters— and the performers who portray them— unfold onstage, theatrical bodysnatching poses urgent questions of exploitation, agency, and resistance.