This dissertation analyzes undertheorized grammatical and linguistic details of Shakespeare’s language. Using tools derived from the fields of linguistics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis, I trace the ways that Shakespeare’s speakers represent themselves in language, and how they position themselves relative to their interlocutors. Grounding my study in a selection of Shakespeare’s works in which questions of self-positioning are particularly fraught, I argue that the nuances of grammar that undergird the linguistic performance of Shakespeare’s speakers encode significant clues about interaction and interpersonal relationships. I maintain that the minute details of linguistic encounters, easily overlooked words such as modal verbs (particularly shall and will) and deictic markers (words such as I, this, and now), hold important information about speakers’ perceptions of themselves, their interlocutors, and their environment. Attention to such details, and to charged moments of linguistic encounter in which speakers must negotiate their modes of self-positioning, helps to illuminate the troubled processes of self-representation and changing self-perception. Chapter one focuses on Shakespeare’s sonnets, and suggests that these poems provide a productive model for the examination of the nuances of speech and interactive dialogue. I anchor my discussion in the particular resonance of the word shall in the sonnets, and explore the ways in which the sonnet speaker attempts to preserve linguistic control relative to a threatening interlocutor. The second chapter extends these concerns to consider how the speakers of Troilus and Cressida respond to a wide network of potentially threatening interlocutors. In this chapter, I focus on linguistic encounters such as arguments and gossip to examine the risks that speakers encounter when they enter the fray of communal discourse. My third chapter turns to Coriolanus to consider moments of aggressive linguistic collisions, in which speakers vie for the right to speak a potent and contested word such as shall. The fourth and final chapter analyzes Richard II through the frame of deictic markers and grammatical modes of self-reference to consider the protective strategies afforded by language in moments of crisis.

The works of William Shakespeare reflect the society in which he lived, and they can therefore be studied for the light they shed upon certain aspects of this society that may otherwise have been ignored or misrepresented by other surviving documents. This is especially true of prostitution. Women in this shifting English society were marginalized, and the prostitute occupied an especially precarious place since her profession identified her as an outsider, legally and morally. Surviving historical documents address the legality or morality of this institution, but fail to reveal how it was perceived by society as a whole. Shakespeare receives much praise for his keen observations of human behavior, so his plays can be seen as a type of historical document themselves. I am interested in how the characters of prostitutes function in his oeuvre and whether they uphold or subvert the attitudes implied by the other existing documents and scholarship on the topic.

“Shakespeare and the Drama of Politic Stratagems” focuses on how Shakespeare dramatically explores strategic issues similar to those discussed by Machiavelli and other early modern politic authors. The thesis is structured in order to tackle the diverse nature of strategy while developing and expanding on its most essential issues. The first chapter deals with the amoral and dangerous political world of the first tetralogy, a world in which one must be strategic in order to survive. Since not every strategist engages in the same kind of strategy or even agrees about what the best strategy might be, the second chapter outlines the different characteristics of Shakespeare’s strategists. These strategists can sometimes achieve success on their own, but no one can survive alone indefinitely, and the third chapter thus outlines the importance of strategic alliances and the dangers of making the wrong alliance. The fourth chapter deals with the numerous kinds of enemies that a strategist must contend with. Not all enemies fight in the same way, so a strategist must be on guard against an enemy’s deceptions, the focus of the fifth chapter. Even if these obstacles are overcome, even the most successful strategists will almost inevitably fail at some point or another. That failure may be due to some flaw in their schemes, or it may be due to the extreme difficulty of achieving success indefinitely. The final chapter deals with the perennial conflict between virtù and fortuna and thus the limits of politic stratagems. Machiavelli’s works can be seen as an epicenter of strategic thinking in the early modern period, and so they act as a guide through complex, contradictory, but ultimately rewarding issues of strategy and their consequences. Machiavelli serves as both analogue and foil, for while Shakespeare dramatizes similar strategic ideas, his dramatizations reveal greater truths about what is at stake when one explores the nature and consequences of politic stratagems. This thesis demonstrates the multiple factors that make strategy so dynamic and useful to a young dramatist in the process of discovering his own interests in the art of politics and the art of drama.

Este trabalho, composto de três volumes (I. Historiografia; II. Seleção de textos críticos; e III. Catálogo bibliográfico), tem como objetivo apresentar um panorama da recepção de Ibsen no Brasil. O primeiro volume traz uma avaliação da fortuna crítica de Ibsen no Brasil, passando pelas idéias teatrais do século XIX, pela modernização do teatro nos anos 1940, até chegar às tendências críticas contemporâneas. O segundo traz os textos mais relevantes para o entendimento da obra do dramaturgo, publicados no Brasil entre 1895 e 2002. Por fim, o terceiro apresenta os dados bibliográficos sobre as traduções brasileiras das peças do autor; sobre as montagens realizadas no teatro e na tv; sobre os livros, capítulos de livros, prefácios e textos publicados em periódicos sobre o dramaturgo. Com esse percurso, buscou-se compreender o modo de assimilação do teatro ibseniano pela crítica brasileira, levando em consideração as influências estrangeiras, especialmente a francesa. Ao mesmo tempo, procurouse ressaltar os momentos de ruptura com essa tradição, sobretudo a partir das reflexões de Antonio de Alcântara Machado, Otto Maria Carpeaux e Anatol Rosenfeld, que deram uma nova orientação para a leitura das peças de Ibsen. / This work, composed of three volumes (I. Historiography; II. Selection of critical texts; and III. Bibliographical catalogue), presents an overview of the reception of Ibsen in Brazil. The first volume is an assessment of the rich and varied criticism Ibsen received in Brazil within the context of the theatrical ideas of the nineteenth century, the modernization of the theatre in the 1940s, until the contemporary level of critical trends. The second selects the most relevant texts in order to understand the works of the playwright, which were published in Brazil from 1985 and 2002. Finally, the third presents bibliographical information on Brazilian translations of his plays; on adaptations carried through in theatre and on TV; in books, book chapters, prefaces and texts published in periodicals about the playwright. Through this route, an attempt was made to understand the way Ibsenian theatre was assimilated by Brazilian critics, taking into account foreign influences, especially of French origin. At the same time, we attempt to highlight examples of breaking from such tradition, especially considering the thoughts of Antonio de Alcântara Machado, Otto Maria Carpeaux and Anatol Rosenfeld, who gave us another approach to the studies of Ibsen\'s plays.

This thesis is about the ways in which Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s play The Changeling has been edited, performed, and archived in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It proposes a more integrated way of looking at the histories of performances and texts than is usually employed by the institutions of Shakespeare and early modern studies. Crucially, it suggests that documented archival remains of performance should be admitted as textual witnesses of a play’s history, and given equal status with academic, scholarly editions. I argue that—despite at least a century of arguments to the contrary—performance is still considered secondary to text, and that this relationship needs to become more balanced, particularly since the canon has begun to expand and early modern plays beyond Shakespeare have begun to see more stage time in recent years. In addition, I begin to theorise social media as archives of performance, and begin to suggest ways forward for archiving the performance of early modern drama in the digital turn. In order to support these arguments, I offer a series of twentieth- and twenty-first-century productions of The Changeling as case studies. Through these case studies, I seek to make connections between The Changeling as text, The Changeling as performance, and the various other texts and performances that it has interacted with throughout its life since 1961. In presenting analyses of these texts and performances side-by-side, within the same history, I aim to show the interdependency of these two usually separated strands of early modern studies and make a case for greater integration of the two in both editorial, historiographical, and performance practices.

The female characters in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI and Richard III; Rowley’s All’s Lost by Lust; Fletcher’s The Tragedy of Valentinian; Rowley, Dekker, and Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton; and Brome and Heywood’s The Late Witches of Lancashire curse their enemies because, as women, they have no other way to fight against the injustices they experience. At once an extension of the early modern belief that words are “women’s weapons,” and dangerously beyond the feminine ideal of silence, the curse, as a performative speech act, resembles the physical weapons wielded by men in its potential to cause serious harm. Using Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performative and J. L. Austin’s theory of performative utterances, this thesis argues that curses function as part of the cursing woman’s performative identity, and by using speech as a weapon, the cursing woman gains a measure of social agency within the social order even if she cannot change her place within it.

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This dissertation explores how late medieval and early modern English culture understood the possibilities of experience inherent within our dying moments. I argue that, rather than approaching the moment of death as exclusively terrible, unbearable, or meaningless, as some literary scholars have claimed, many could instead hope to find within such moments the opportunity for what Erasmus called “glimmerings”—new revelations, actions, and experiences of the world. I explore how the drama of Shakespeare and Marlowe investigates both the promises and illusions of the glimmering worlds cast up in one’s dying moments. This project draws on the thought of Hannah Arendt to elucidate the actions, forms of life, and worlds that can be undertaken and sustained in the circumstances of dying. In Chapter One, I uncover the late medieval roots of an association between dying moments and worldly awareness, expressed in fifteenth-century English texts such as Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ, Thomas Hoccleve’s Learn to Die, the morality play The Castle of Perseverance, and Desiderius Erasmus’s Preparation to Death. My second chapter argues that sixteenth-century ars moriendi texts such as Thomas Lupset’s Way of Dying Well, Thomas Becon’s Sick Man’s Salve, The Book of Common Prayer’s “Order for the Burial of the Dead,” and John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments each provide strategies of dying that preserve both self and world from the deteriorating force of mortality. Chapter Three moves from theological to dramatic inquiries into the moment of death, examining how Marlowe’s tragedies The Jew of Malta and Doctor Faustus scrutinize the risks of dying in conditions of exposure, in contrast with the sheltering protections of dying in a little room. My fourth chapter takes up Shakespearean tragedy to illustrate how King Lear evaluates and dramatizes the consequences of William Perkins’ Salve for a Sick Man, which contends that we are unable to undertake meaningful action in our final moments. In my last chapter, I show how Shakespeare’s late plays, Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, consider whether, in the presence of death, one can claim flourishing life and feel at home in the world.

This dissertation examines social mobility as treated in stage comedies and litigation records circa 1603-1625. It argues that, in a historical context where rising in the world often awakened disapproval, stage representations of advantageous marriages negotiated cultural debates concerning socioeconomic change, political hierarchy, and individual aspirations. To understand the diverse meanings of social advancement, this study traces the discursive and narrative resemblances between two sets of texts: nearly two hundred Star Chamber cases that contested marital status incompatibility, and plays by Middleton, Jonson, Chapman, and their peers that dramatize intense competitions for marriages that could elevate characters in wealth and prestige. Pierre Bourdieu provides methods for approaching the multi-dimensional early modern social field with its many forms of status, and Frederic Jameson offers ways to consider the relation of fictional narratives to social and ideological problems. Using these theorists to align the two sets of texts, this dissertation reveals how London's theaters offered complex fantasies of achievement that balanced individual ambition against prevailing assumptions about gender, status, and social order. The Introduction traces relevant historical contexts, while Chapter One outlines the polyphonic features of the texts under investigation and culminates in an analysis of George Chapman's use of multiple temporal schemes in The Widow's Tears to represent a fantasy marriage as both an upstart's rise and a dynastic renewal. Chapter Two examines legal records to reveal how victims of alleged courtship frauds evoked a broad cultural script that represented social exogamy as a threat to the ruling elite. Chapters Three and Four focus on masculinity, arguing that both male defendants and playwrights like Thomas Middleton and Lording Barry responded to the cultural contradictions of social mobility by privileging alternative metrics of masculine worth and alternative trajectories of advancement. Chapter Five shows how female defendants positively rearticulated available negative stereotypes about women, especially servants, marrying up; in similar fashion Ben Jonson's The New Inn portrays a maidservant's engagement to an aristocrat as a triumph of merit. Finally, the Appendix examines one extensive case in which dozens of witnesses variously interpreted the scandalous elopement--or kidnapping--of a rich London woman. / 2019-08-01T00:00:00Z

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