Texte remanié de: Th. Ph. D.--Université de Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle, Espagne, 2001. / Bibliogr. p. 223-247. Index.

Because Shakespeare borrowed so many ideas and devices from other writers, we wonder whether he also borrowed the trick of double time from some of his predecessors; therefore one of the purposes of this study is to discover whether or not this device was original with Shakespeare. In this study I have considered the works of John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, and George Peele because these four seem to have influenced Shakespeare more than did any of the other of his immediate predecessors. To discover what influence, if any, these men had upon Shakespeare ts treatment of time is not, however, the only purpose of this study; for I am also interested in the characteristics of the works of these men for their own values, independent of any influence which they may have had on the works of Shakespeare.

In examining examples of prologues, inductions, and choruses from early modern drama, Authors, Audiences, and Elizabethan Prologics tries to frame a more comprehensive picture of dramatists’ relationships with the plays they write and the audiences for whom they write them. It suggests that these various prologics are imbued with an intrinsic authority that provides something of a rubric, perceptible by both playwright and playgoer, through which one can measure the crucial negotiations with and within the shifting valences of dramatic representation in the early modern period. The project develops a way of thinking about the prologic as a hermeneutics unto itself, one which allows us to contextualize more adequately the manner in which playwrights conceptualize and construct their own relationship to nascent notions of authorship and authority. My first body chapter (Chapter II) considers the rhetorical construction of audiences’ silences in various Elizabethan interludes, suggesting that such ideal silences register one’s contemplative engagement with the performance and, thus, work to legitimize early drama. The prologues to John Lyly’s plays—my subject in Chapter III—exemplify the desire to legitimize, instead, the playwright. Reading Lyly’s plays alongside his letters of petition to Queen Elizabeth and Sir Robert Cecil, one can see the manner in which Lyly creates an authorial persona rooted in his rhetorical skills. In Chapter IV I examine Shakespeare’s sparse but measured use of prologues to manipulate his audiences’ preconceptions of theatrical conventions and to guide them toward a consideration of what it means to have interpretive agency, how far that agency extends, and where to locate the limits of narrative in the necessarily liminal domain of the theater. Finally, I argue in Chapter V that Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament expands the prologic space, mimicking in the playspace the critical, interactive stance that he assumes in the printed marginalia of his prose writing. This is to say that Summer’s Last Will echoes—or in many cases prefigures—the authorial anxieties that Nashe expresses elsewhere in his work, and chief among them is an anxiety over the interpretational agency of the reader and auditor.

The thesis traces the evolving attitudes towards rhetoric in the highly-rhetorised English-language prose of the late sixteenth century by focusing on a term that was itself subject to significant change: 'wit'. To wit's pre-existing denotations of intellectual acumen, capacity for reason and good judgement was added a novel meaning, related to the capacity for producing lively speech. As a term encompassing widely divergent meanings, many Elizabethan and early Stuart works explored 'wit' as a central theme or treated the term as significant to explorations of the human mind, its capacity for rhetoric, and the social and moral dimensions of this relationship. The research centres on how 'wit' is seen and how it corresponds to rhetorical wittiness as produced in practice, and questions the implications of this for understanding the social and moral dimensions of the authorial wit. By focusing on the early vernacular manuals of rhetoric by author such as Thomas Wilson and Roger Ascham, on Lyly's and Greene's euphuist prose, and on Thomas Lodge's and Sir Philip Sidney's prose defences of poetry, the first half of the thesis explores the term's conceptual ambiguity. Potentially both reformative and deceptive, this ambiguity becomes a useful tool for the author looking to construct a profitable persona as a Wit, or a brilliant-yet-unruly master of rhetoric. The second half of the research notes how 'wit' tends to outlive its usefulness as a multivalent term in later writings when these seek to move away from the social commodification of an author's rhetoric. Examining Sidney's theological and political aims in The New Arcadia, Thomas Nashe's carnivalesque questioning of the idea of profit, and Francis Bacon's systematic interpretation of Nature, the research suggests that rhetoric and 'wit' maintain both their significance and their ambiguity into the seventeenth century. A meta-rhetorical signpost, 'wit' comes to reflect through its use and disuse both the issues at hand and the inherent self-reflexivity of any attempt to deal directly with rhetoric.