This thesis examines the functions of music in the extant repertory of a single playing company, the Admiral’s Men, at their primary venues between 1594 and 1621. Music’s effectiveness as a theatrical tool depends upon the presence of an audience willing and able to be affected by it. The mimetic relationship between representation in the playhouse and musical practices in the non-dramatic world allows that ability. This thesis traces the dissemination of musical behaviors and ideas to potential playgoers and offers a critical analysis of the evidence of musical performance and discourse in the repertory. Contrary to the long-standing reputation of the company as appealing primarily to a rough and rowdy audience (particularly at the first Fortune), the use of music throughout the repertory suggests the continuous presence of a socially diverse and musically literate body of theatrical patrons.

Suspense and surprise, as common and crucial elements of interest realised in literary fiction, are analysed closely in a sample of short stories, so as to develop a detailed explanation of how these forms of interest are created in literary texts, and to propose models for them. Creating suspense involves more conditions, necessary and optional, and more complication than surprise: the several optional conditions mainly serve to intensify the feeling of suspense the reader experiences. Surprise requires two necessary and sufficient conditions, with only a couple of optional conditions to maintain or ensure coherence in the text. The differences are considered attributable to a more fundamental difference between suspense and surprise as emotions. Suspense can be regarded as a progressive emotion, whereas surprise is a perfective emotion. As such, suspense as an interest is considered as a process-oriented interest, while surprise is an effect-oriented one. Suspense is mostly experienced while reading and has the reader involved with the story. Surprise drives the reader to reassess the story in the new light it throws on events and to look for some further message; this is often a main aim of the literary fiction which ends in surprise.

William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money, published in three extant early modern editions in 1616, 1626 and 1631, began to receive the literary attention it deserves in the 1990s. Fuller contextual and bibliographical enquiries have yet to be offered, which this edition seeks to redress. The Introduction begins by identifying Haughton’s biographical details, before moving on to issues in dating Englishmen’s composition. It then offers a survey of the play’s generic, historical, and cultural contexts. A reconstruction of theatrical practices is provided. Provisional studies of the underlying manuscript, a hypothetical Q0, and Q1 are offered. Editorial methods are discussed, together with brief descriptions of Q2, Q3 and later editions. The modern-spelling edited Text that follows conforms, with noted exceptions, to the guidelines of Arden Shakespeare Third Series. The Commentary provides glossing, discusses readings and textual cruces, and highlights Haughton’s use of sources, proverbs, and literary, cultural and biblical allusions. Two appendices present information on Q1’s running title descriptions and a census of extant copies for Q1–3. A DVD at the back of the second volume contains a digital facsimile of the base text.

The purpose of this research is to investigate Thomas Hardy’s relation to the Gothic tradition, especially that deriving from the classic period 1760-mid-1820s. The main novels chosen for such an investigation are Two on a Tower, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Parallels with the following texts form the heart of the thesis: Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, William Godwin, Caleb Williams, Matthew Lewis, The Monk, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer. This investigation has been instigated by three major elements noted in the criticism on Hardy’s literary art in general and on his tragedies in particular. First, although Hardy scholars employ terminology pertaining to the Gothic and romance genres in describing Hardy’s plots, characters and settings, very few of them make a direct and explicit connection to the Gothic novel. Second, the few who do broach the Gothic elements in Hardy’s fiction limit their understanding of the kind of Gothic Hardy employs mainly to the second quarter of the nineteenth century and onwards. Moreover, they seem to be more willing to admit such influence in his minor works, obfuscating the influence of Gothic discourse on his major novels. Therefore, this research will attempt to investigate Hardy’s involvement with Gothic discourse and examine the ways in which the characteristic settings, drama and character-types of such discourse are domesticated, complicated and made more subtle in Hardy’s work. Finally, it envisages further investigation into Hardy’s work in its relation to his architectural knowledge and his philosophic views of life in general, and his views of humanity’s place in it in particular.

This study investigates William Butler Yeats’s relationship to the issues of colonialism and anti-colonialism and his stance as a postcolonial poet. A considerable part of Yeats criticism has read him either as a revolutionary and anti-colonial figure or a poet with reactionary and colonialist mentality. The main argument of this thesis is that in approaching Yeats’s position as a (post)colonial poet, it is more fruitful to avoid an either / or criticism and instead to foreground the issues of change, circularity, and hybridity. The theoretical framework is based on Homi Bhabha’s analysis of the complicated relationship between the colonizer and the colonized identities. It is argued that Bhabha’s views regarding the hybridity of the colonial subject, and also the inherent complexity and ambiguity in the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized can provide us with a better understating of the Irish poet’s complex interactions with Irish nationalism and British colonialism. By a close reading of some of Yeats’s works from different periods of his long career, it is shown that most of the time he adopted a double, ambiguous, and even contradictory position with regard to his political loyalties. It is suggested that the very presence of tensions and uncertainties which permeates Yeats’s writings and utterances should warn us against a monolithic, static, and unchanging reading of his colonial identity. Finally, it is argued that a postcolonial approach which focuses on the issue of diversity and hybridity of the colonial subject can increase our awareness of Yeats’s complex role in and his conflicted relationship with a colonized and then a (partially) postcolonial Ireland.

In this thesis I have undertaken a close reading of texts by William Walwyn, Abiezer Coppe and James Nayler. In reading Nayler, I have also engaged with texts by Richard Farnsworth and Richard Baxter. My approach has been to consider these writings in their own terms and right, rather than merely as contextual sidelights on literary or social matters. I believe that all writing expresses aesthetic concerns and social attitudes. I hope my study will contribute to a necessary and continuing project of recovering such voices, so often marginalised and considered either as symptoms of mental disorder, or simply of no literary value. I have applied Bakhtinian perspectives and Discourse Analysis in my readings, although I hope not to the detriment of the writers' own understanding of their work, as I am reluctant to impose ahistorical interpretations on the writings of a previous era. I believe many misunderstandings arise from such procedures. I have not wished to apply a strategic reading to these texts, but rather to recover what they meant for their writers and readers at the extraordinary moment which produced them. I have attempted to integrate them in their own historical context, to explain difficulties arising in their interpretation, to explore their theology and social message, and as far as possible to relate them to the literary history from which they have been largely divorced. The thesis is not intended as a general review of pamphlet literature, of which there are several valuable examples, but as exploration and explanation of specific writings by representatives of the 'Radical Protestant' movements known as Levellers, Ranters and Quakers.

This thesis considers the life and poems of John Milton, particularly his biography and critics contained in Paradise Lost and its inspiring influence on others' work, such as Wordsworth's The Prelude.

Hardy approached the problem of nineteenth-century realism as an ontological and literary concern largely through images of perception. This thesis suggests that Hardy adopted an innovative approach in an effort to identify the term, and argues that his subversive contribution to the Great Debate occasioned the necessary impetus for the experimental fictions of the twentieth century. In rejecting the orthodox, aesthetic prescriptions established by such authorities as George Eliot and Henry James, it is suggested that Hardy released the Victorian novel from its restricting reliance on ostensibly objective fact and paved the way for a more subjective interpretation of reality and a more introspective kind of narrative. It is contended that Hardy's literary response to a range of optical treatises encouraged his challenging reinterpretation of reality. As a preparatory measure, 'A Pair of Blue Eyes' metaphorically petrifies the perspective; 'Far from the Madding Crowd' interrogates Ruskin's theory of moral perception; 'The Return of the Native' looks at phenomena through an intellectual lens; 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' judges a reality filtered through a sartorially-inclined public eye instructed by Carlyle; 'The Woodlanders', the turning point in the sequence, observes with an eye disillusioned by the evolutionists; 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles' creates a reality from the affective eye championed by Comte and Fourier; 'Jude the Obscure' wanders blindly between two literary eras, perceptual incoherences, and dislocations between phenomenal and noumenal compromising the narrative's formal integrity. This thesis maintains that, through an idiosyncratic frame of referentiality as well as regard, Hardy transforms the objective, material world into his own versions of reality, and triumphs over oppressive facts by subjectively appropriating them. Each of Hardy's works offers an alternative yet equally viable perceptual angle from which the creation, form, and function of reality as a psychological, practical, ontological, and literary concern can be judged.

This thesis studies the subject of Spiritualism in relation to the life and work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Introduction refers briefly to the controversial phenomenon of Spiritualism in the nineteenth century, and the problems relating to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's belief and active interest in the subject. Chapter One traces the rise of Spiritualism in Victorian times from its ancient origins, concentrating on the life of the famous medium D. D. Home. Chapters Two and Three describe Elizabeth Barrett Browning's experience of the phenomenon, and the following four chapters discuss her poetry within the context of her spiritualistic beliefs. Although she rarely referred specifically to Spiritualism in her work, she was much preoccupied with death, the notion of immortality, the nature and condition of the human soul and of the spiritual life; Chapters Four, Five, Six and Seven do not seek to detect spiritualistic elements in all of her poems, but to explore her handling of these related themes, and her interest in Death as an important thematic element in her work, and as a source of much of her imagery.

Old English poetry is centred on the concept of community and the importance of belonging. Landscape was a component of any community since, during the period when Old English poetry was being composed and written down, the landscape was a far more important constituent of daily life than it is for the majority of people today. Landscape dictated the places that could be settled, as well as the placing of the paths, fords, and bridges that joined them; it controlled boundaries, occupations, and trading routes. In the poetry of the period landscape, as part of the fabric of community, is the arbiter of whether each element of a community is in its proper place and relationship to the others. It is the means of explaining how a community is constructed, policed, and empowered. Erring communities can be corrected or threats averted through the medium of landscape which also positions communities in place and time. Landscape is presented as the cause of dissension in heaven, the consequent creation of hell, and the key to comprehension of the fundamental difference between them. The linguistic landscapes of Old English poetry are a functional component of the meaning inherent in the narratives.