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The thesis studies the relationship of playwright, actor and audience in Beaumont and Fletcher plays from the period 1607 -c. 1625. The major concern of the thesis is with the involvement of the audience in the dramatic action or emotional pattern of the plays. In order to discuss this audience participation which is suggested as the primary focus of the dramaturgy of Beaumont and Fletcher, the thesis first attempts to establish the most usual audience of the plays. The private audience of the Second Blackfriars Playhouse is described as typical of the wealthy, often aristocratic audience for whom Beaumont and Fletcher wrote and whose taste both.determined many of the characteristics of Fletcherian plays and was itself influenced by those plays. As a result of this relationship between Beaumont and Fletcher and their spectators, it is suggested that the playwrights had a significant role to play in the evolution of the English drama from the Elizabethan theatre to the Restoration theatre. In fact, the sort of theatre which the Caroline theatregoers of 1625 were demanding of Fletcher was precisely the style of "heroic", romantic theatre which he had taught them to appreciate with Philaster in 1610. Philaster is seen as the play in which the earlier, unsuccessful attempts by each playwright merged, in collaboration, into a formula for popular success and an approach to the theatre which was totally histrionic. [footnote omitted] Assuming this audience and its tastes, fashions and behaviour patterns, the thesis investigates Beaumont and Fletcher's satire of the audience, suggesting that Fletcherian satire was directed not at individuals, but at groups in Jacobean society, most of which they could assume to be present in the playhouse. Beaumont and Fletcher were able, again through a thorough understanding of their audience, to work the various groups, prejudices and affections of their spectators against each other so that the satire was not directed from the stage to the auditorium, but in a total pattern throughout the playhouse. The emotional patterning of the plays is discussed as the centre of the Fletcherian design. The elaborate series of effects and often inappropriate stimuli by which Beaumont and Fletcher created a striking, involving emotional system is described. A King and No King and Valentinian are analyzed to demonstrate the emotional patterning. The participation of the audience within the dramatic action is then discussed. The thesis suggests that the audience performs as a corporate character in the plays and traces the complex, histrionic effects by which they are encouraged to do so. The use of disguise and the aside are specifically studied in this light. Finally, the larger implications of audience involvement are considered. Within the social milieu in which the plays are situated, Beaumont and Fletcher create a fictional world of the playhouse in which the involvement of the audience and actors become the whole action of a closed, microcosmic universe. These various, histrionic aspects work together to make the Beaumont and Fletcher plays exciting, if highly artificial creations that were popular in Jacobean England, are important in theatre history, and are of continuing theatrical interest today. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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This thesis is an analysis of the comic and tragicomic styles that are evident in plays written by Beaumont and Fletcher.

A number of recent successful authorship studies have relied on a statistical analysis of language features based on function words. However, stylometry has not been extensively applied to Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic questions. To determine the effectiveness of such an approach in this field, language features are studied in twenty-four plays by Shakespeare and eight by Fletcher. The goal is to develop procedures that might be used to determine the authorship of individual scenes in The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII. Homonyms, spelling variants and contracted forms in old-spelling dramatic texts present problems for a computer analysis. A program that uses a system of pre-edit codes and replacement /expansion lists was developed to prepare versions of the texts in which all forms of common words can be recognized automatically. To evaluate some procedures for determining authorship developed by A. Q. Morton and his colleagues, occurrences of 30 common collocations and 5 proportional pairs are analyzed in the texts. Within-author variation for these features is greater than had been found in previous studies. Univariate chi-square tests are shown to be of limited usefulness because of the statistical distribution of these textual features and correlation between pairs of features. The best of the collocations do not discriminate as well as most of the individual words from which they are composed. Turning to the rate of occurrence of individual words and groups of words, distinctiveness ratios and t-tests are used to select variables that best discriminate between Shakespeare and Fletcher. Variation due to date of composition and genre within the Shakespeare texts is examined. A multivariate and distributionfree discriminant analysis procedure (using kernel estimation) is introduced. The classifiers based on the best marker words and the kernel method are not greatly affected by characterization and perform well for samples as short as 500 words. When the final procedure is used to assign the 459 scenes of known authorship (containing at least 500 words)almost 112 95% are assigned to the correct author. Only two scenes are incorrectly classified, and 4.8% of the scenes cannot be assigned to either author by the procedure. When applied to individual scenes of at least 500 words in The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII, the procedure indicates that both plays are collaborations and generally supports the usual division. However, the marker words in a number of scenes often attributed to Fletcher are very much closer to Shakespeare's pattern of use. These scenes include TNK IV.iii and H8 I.iii, IV.i-ii and V.iv.

‘The Ophelia Versions: Representations of a Dramatic Type from 1600-1633’ interrogates early modern drama’s use of the Ophelia type, which is defined in reference to Hamlet’s Ophelia and the behavioural patterns she exhibits: abandonment, derangement and suicide. Chapter one investigates Shakespeare’s Ophelia in Hamlet, finding that Ophelia is strongly identified with the ballad corpus. I argue that the popular ballad medium that Shakespeare imports into the play via Ophelia is a subversive force that contends with and destabilizes the linear trajectory of Hamlet’s revenge tragedy narrative. The alternative space of Ophelia’s ballad narrative is, however, shut down by her suicide which, I argue, is influenced by the models of classical theatre. This ending conspires with the repressive legal and social restrictions placed upon early modern unmarried women and sets up a dangerous precedent by killing off the unassimilated abandoned woman. Chapter two argues that Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen amplifies Ophelia’s folk and ballad associations in their portrayal of the Jailer’s Daughter. Her comedic marital ending is enabled by a collaborative, communal, folk-cure. The play nevertheless registers a proto-feminist awareness of the peculiar losses suffered by early modern women in marriage and this knowledge deeply troubles the Jailer’s Daughter’s happy ending. Chapter three explores the role of Lucibella in The Tragedy of Hoffman arguing that the play is a direct response to Hamlet’s treatment of revenge and that Lucibella is caught up in an authorial project of disambiguation which attempts to return the revenge plot to its morality roots. Chapters four and five explore the narratives of Aspatia in The Maid’s Tragedy and Penthea in The Broken Heart, finding in their very conformism to the behaviours prescribed for them, both by the Ophelia type itself and by early modern society in general, a radical protest against the limitations and repressions of those roles. This thesis is consistently invested in the competing dialectics and authorities of oral and textual mediums in these plays. The Ophelia type, perhaps because of Hamlet’s Ophelia’s identification with the ballad corpus, proves an interesting gauge of each play’s engagement with emergent notions of textual authority in the early modern period.