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This thesis presents a study of playhouse spaces and the theatre industry in early modern England, and how they developed from 1560-1670. The period considered spans the English civil wars and Commonwealth to complicate the notion of a cessation of theatrical activity in 1642, and argues against the division of theatre history into distinct Renaissance and Restoration periods. The study builds on recent scholarly trends which have productively read early modern playing companies as consistent cultural entities with individual identities, by extending and applying this methodology to playhouse spaces. As such, this thesis proposes that all early modern playhouses had unique identities, and suggests that the frequent division into amphitheatre and indoor playhouses can produce an oversimplified binary with homogenising consequences. Moreover, it argues that a problematic, undertheorized hierarchy of playhouses exists; a key factor being the strength of the playhouse's connection to Shakespeare, which has led to the prioritisation of the Globe in particular. This thesis problematises the metrics which have been used to assess the importance of playhouses; it offers alternative factors but also suggests it is more important to ascertain unique aspects of playhouse identities than to create a hierarchy between them. Case studies of the Curtain (c.1577-c.1625), Salisbury Court (1629-1666) and Gibbons' Tennis Court (1653-c.1669) demonstrate how distinct aspects of playhouses' identities can be established by proposing dimensions of their unique reputations based on their known repertories. Collectively, these studies also demonstrate how playhouse space developed over time. This study concludes that each of these playhouses have been undervalued in scholarly narratives. By producing substantial accounts of these neglected spaces this thesis contributes towards a rebalancing of emphasis in early modern scholarship, and it also demonstrates that a wider reappraisal of early modern playhouse space is necessary in the future.

This thesis explores male prostitution in early modern culture and calls for a reconsideration of linguistic representations of sodomy and homoeroticism in literary and historical criticism. It argues that as a variant expression of homoeroticism, its examination unfolds significant ideological and cultural implications for established perceptions of male relations. As instructed by classical textuality and misogynistic stigmatization of prostitution, the boy prostitute becomes a relational category that eludes easy classification, emerging syntactically alongside the female whore in English culture. Adopting a social constructionist approach, this dissertation traces male prostitution's ambivalent representational properties in various genres and discourses, namely poetry, plays, historical narratives, theatre historiography, defamation accounts, philosophical diatribes and lexicography. The diverse vocabulary employed to describe homoerotic relations and identities is closely scrutinised in order to expose the metaphoricity and ambiguity embedded in such terms as ‘Ganymede', ‘ingle', ‘mignon' and ‘catamite'. An analysis of the terminology demonstrates the ways in which discursive systems of language, within specific historical and cultural contexts, have facilitated the concomitant textual emergence of the sodomite with the male prostitute. The Introduction establishes the theoretical framework through which male prostitution from the medieval period until the mid-twentieth century has been discussed in twentieth-century criticism. Chapter One assesses its textual appearance in early modern Italy, France and Spain, while it sets the parameters for its examination in seventeenth-century England. Chapter Two analyses the representation of the male prostitute in Donne's, Marston's and Middleton's satires and Chapter Three examines the theatrical institution and the ways in which theatre historiography misdirects discussions on sodomy and prostitution. The penultimate chapter focuses on textual constructions of the male prostitute in educational contexts and the final chapter addresses possible interrelations between prostitution, servitude, favouritism and friendship as represented within lexicography, slanderous discourse and historical narratives on King James and Francis Bacon.

The object of this thesis is to produce a critical edition of Lording Barry's play Ram Alley (first published in 1611 by Robert Wilson and printed by George Eld). This edition will consist of (a) an annotated, modernised spelling version of the text, that text being based on a bibliographic study of the first quarto, and (b) an introduction which will cover: the printing of the first quarto, the life of Lording Barry and his critical reception, the play's place in and contribution to early Jacobean city comedy (particularly in relation to the use of wit and bawdy in masculine self-definition), and the problems of annotating a text which is so reliant for its humour on bawdy innuendo. The annotation will be very much fuller than is normal for an edition of an early modern play text, aiming to provide not just explanation but also commentary on and contextualisation of the language, contemporary and cultural references, characterisation, and action. This play is something of a by-way in the early Jacobean drama, and, like its author, is little known. It is, however, a competent example of the type of comedy produced for the private theatres and reflects, therefore, on the work of other, better known dramatists, in particular Thomas Middleton. In terms of original contribution to the field of study, this thesis will, it is hoped, add to our knowledge and understanding of: 1. the text of Ram Alley 2. the production of the first quarto of Ram Alley 3. the working practices of the printer, George Eld (who was also responsible for the first quarto of Troilus and Cressida and of Shakespeare's Sonnets) 4. the nature and hermeneutics of wit in Ram Alley 5. approaches to editing early modern dramatic comedy 6. Jacobean city comedy as a genre.

This interdisciplinary thesis explores how music is used in the art of healing in two distinct ways in the early modern period: namely, through the use of performed music accompanying the healing process itself, and as ‘speculative music', the latter providing a philosophical model for understanding the interplay of music with body, mind and soul. Redefining an existing enquiry in a specific way, my research seeks to enhance an understanding of the construction of a therapeutic modality that revitalizes the ancient belief in the healing powers of music, manifest since antiquity through the classical legends of Orpheus and Pythagoras. The Pythagorean hypothesis – that earthly music reflected the celestial harmony of the spheres – was believed to govern the internal music of the human body, giving credence to the notion of the harmonious balancing of the four bodily humours. Tracing the tradition of healing music from antiquity, I argue that Marsilio Ficino's paradigmatic magico-musical philosophy refashions the Pythagorean and Neoplatonic explanations of music's curative potentiality, offering a new interpretat ion of music's effective power to heal the rift between body and soul. I examine how this Ficinian interpretation is discernible in the work of Robert Fludd, Michael Maier, William Shakespeare, Robert Burton and Thomas Campion. I analyse their observations of the body's physical and emotional response to music's healing power. Drawing on early modern models that appropriate the rhetoric of the music of the spheres, I argue that a cultural moment is established in which the motifs and tropes of Neoplatonic love and the healing power of music culminate in allegories of philosophical contemplation and spiritual fulfilment in the Jacobean court masques. In conclusion, my thesis's examination of music as a healing modality provides a historical framework to support the contemporary use of music as a recognized therapeutic intervention.

This thesis considers the different ways Persia was perceived in early modern England. Persia, understudied in recent scholarship, played an important role in the early modern English imagination, both as a classical civilization and as a counterweight to the Ottoman threat to Christendom. This classical heritage and anti-Ottomanism, when intersected with a Persian Muslim identity, resulted in a complex phenomenon. This thesis is an attempt to understand the various cross currents that constructed this complex image. Chapter One discusses English interest in classical Persian themes in the wake of Renaissance humanism. It focuses on three classical ‘Persian' plays featuring Achaemenid Kings; Cambyses, Darius and Cyrus, and investigates how classical Persia became a focus of interest for Elizabethan playwrights. Chapter Two moves to the wars between the Ottomans and Safavids and how they fascinated many English writers of the time. Paying specific attention to Usumcasane in Marlowe's Tambulaine plays, the chapter suggests the significance of Persian references in the play and offers a new interpretation of the notorious Qur'an burning scene. Chapter Three analyses John Thomas Minadoi's Historie of Warres betweene the Turkes and the Persians and shows the significance of Christian knowledge of schism in Islam for Catholic-Protestant debates. Chapter Four concentrates on the representation of Persia in Romance texts from late Elizabethan England and shows that despite being hailed as an anti-Ottoman power, Persia's anti-Christian Islamic identity, which was also suggested by Minadoi, becomes manifest in the alliance of ‘Sultan' and ‘Sophy' against the Crusaders. Chapter Five combines two crucial moments in Anglo-Persian encounters: Jenkinson's trading mission and the ‘travailes” of the Sherley brothers. Through an analysis of the play The Travailes of the Three English Brothers, the argument of the chapter is that it represents the cumulative experience of Englishmen in Persia in the early modern period.

This thesis examines the reciprocity of literary and legal cultures, and seeks to enhance understanding of cultural and socio-legal constructions of morality in early modern England. Identifying the tensions in an institutional legality in which both secular pragmatism and moral idealism act as formulating principals, it interrogates the sense of disjuncture that arises between imaginative concepts of moral justice and their translation into the formal structures of law. Chapter 1 investigates representations of rape in light of the legislative changes of the 1570s, and addresses the question of how literature shapes the legal imaginary of immorality. Literary models, notably Shakespeare's The Rape Of Lucrece (1594), and George Peele's Tale of Troy (1589), are examined together with the texts of Edward Coke and Thomas Edgar to argue that lawyers' mythopoeic interpretative strategies produce a form of legal fiction in relation to sexual crime. These strategies are contextualised in Chapter 2 in relation to the education and literary-legal culture at the Inns of Court, and the thesis progresses to an examination of the inns' literary and dramatic output – notably that of Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorbuduc, and Arthur Broke's contemporaneous revels' masque, Desire and Lady Bewty (1561-2) – to establish how the legal fraternity wielded significant authority over Tudor sexual politics, moral signification, and interpretative practices. Chapters 3 and 4 explore legal and ethical challenges heralded by the Jacobean accession, particularly those posed by the Somerset scandal. Analysis of histories, letters, and court satire, together with Thomas Campion's The Lord Hay's Masque (1607), and George Chapman's Andromeda Liberata (1614) and The Tragedy of Chabot (1639), illuminates the period's textual negotiations of legal, political, and personal ethics, and offers a revealing picture of the moral paradoxes produced by the opacity of the parameters between the personal and political lives of the ruling elite.

This thesis investigates the shifting representation of trash and trifles in the literature and art of sixteenth and early seventeenth century England. It connects previously disparate critical fields – religion, politics, national identity, travel, literary criticism – in order to offer new perspectives on the period. The investigation of the terms ‘trash' and ‘trifles' at the centre of this project reinstates a crucial literary perspective to the historical study of early modern England's crises in spiritual and material value, whilst retaining a keen awareness of the importance of interconnected historical contexts ranging from the mercantile to the spiritual and the cultural. I have traced the connected development of the terms trash and trifles across the period 1519-1614, and closely examined their use in response to various crises in value, whether spiritual or mercantile. How writers of polemic and drama develop a language in which to articulate such crises, and the ways in which that language necessarily combines elements of both the spiritual and the mercantile, is a central theme. Key elements of this development are marked by Queen Katherine Parr's invective about the mercantile corruption of spiritual treasure with material papal ‘tryfles'; Sir Thomas Smith's assertion of the spiritual immorality of material ‘trifles'; Thomas Harriot and John White's presentation of the mercantile and spiritual benefit of exporting trash and trifles to the New World; and in the staging of trash and trifles in a series of late sixteenth and early seventeenth century plays which, I argue, were in part designed to mount a defense against anti-theatrical allegations regarding the effeminate valuelessness of playing. This thesis illustrates how the deployment of the terms trash and trifles in early modern England can be productively used to trace the shaping of the Protestant English commonwealth as a destinct, secure and valuable entity in an unstable and increasingly global post-Reformation world.

This thesis investigates how the size, structure and function of the family presented in Shakespeare's plays relates to an early modern understanding of the importance and function of the family. By examining domestic manuals, pamphlets, treatises and diaries from the early modern period, I establish what was considered normative domestic behaviour at the time and analyse Shakespeare's plays through these contemporary attitudes, specifically their treatment of privacy, household structure and medical beliefs surrounding reproduction and gynaecology. This thesis seeks to focus on the way in which people's positions in the family change over time, from infancy to adulthood, and how these relationships are represented in Shakespeare's plays. Beginning with marriage, where the family is first formed; I examine Othello and Macbeth, and show how the marriages in these plays, while tragic, are cherished and valued. Succession was integral to the legacy and sustainability of a family, which is the topic of the next chapter, in which I explore the notions of how children are conceived and raised in Richard III and The Winter's Tale. The transition from childhood into adulthood was fraught with change in both housing and legal circumstances, and this struggle in adolescence is clearly depicted in Romeo and Juliet, which comprises the third chapter. Aside from the familial relationships of husband and wife and parent and child, the most influential relationships were those of siblings, which I investigate in a number of plays in the fourth chapter. Finally, I focus on the traditional and complicated nuclear families in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet and Coriolanus, and analyse how the family is highlighted and valued in each of these plays. The thesis concludes that throughout Shakespeare's work, the family is privileged over war, nobility and absolute patriarchal control, emphasising that it is vital to understanding and analysing Shakespeare's plays.