This dissertation argues for the reappraisal of Jacobean boy actors by acknowledging their status as youths. Focussing on the repertory of The Children of the Queen’s Revels and using the acting and playwriting career of Nathan Field as an extensive case-study, it argues, via an investigation into cultural and theatrical bodily excess, that the theatre was a profoundly significant space in which youth culture was shaped and problematised. In defining youth culture as a space for the assertion of an identity that is inherently performative, the theatre stages young men’s social lives to reflect the performativity of masculinity in early modern culture. Chapters One to Three focus on the body of Nathan Field by investigating the roles that he performed in the theatre to claim that the staging of bodily excess amounted to an effort to inculcate correct paths of masculinity. Chapters Four and Five offer detailed analysis of the plays written by Nathan Field, finding that Field was keen to champion positive aspects of youth culture and identity by reforming bodily excess on stage. Chapter One asserts that George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois (1603) identifies the protagonist’s excessive violence as a failure to adhere to humanist teachings; a sign that youth culture is dependent upon the lessons learnt in school, whereas Chapter Two finds that Eastward Ho (1605) condemns the monstrous youthful drunken body before encouraging the audience to value apprenticeship as a positive site of youth identity. Chapter Three argues that John Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess (1607) reveals a range of polluted young bodies to demonstrate the importance of moderating the humoral fluctuations of youth before Chapter Four finds Field to be a conservative dramatist who ridicules excess with explicit didactic intentions in his Woman is a Weathercock (1610) and Amends for Ladies (1611). Finally Chapter Five locates aspects of excessive service in Field and Fletcher’s The Honest Man’s Fortune (1613) to problematise aspects of youth culture, friendship and eroticism. The dissertation concludes with a retrospective appraisal of Field’s multifarious identities that championed youth culture, morality and celebrity.

This thesis presents a study of the production and reception of English writing on witchcraft from the period 1560-1660 using the methodologies of the history of the book and the history of reading. The body of works under consideration includes scholarly treatises, news pamphlets, drama and ballads. The origins, literary contexts, production, dissemination and reception of these works are considered across the period. Analysis of reception involves consideration of contemporary library holdings, citations in print, binding and contemporary annotations; this section is based on study of the holdings of a number of research libraries in England and North America. The study supports the conclusions of recent research into scholarly writing on witchcraft, which has suggested that such writing was more thoroughly embedded in its intellectual context than has previously been appreciated; this study provides more evidence for this view and expands it to include the other genres of witchcraft writing under consideration. The study concludes that the concept ‘witchcraft writing' is not a useful one for our understanding of this material. Conclusions are also offered about the relative impact of individual works, and about the impact of this body of writing as a whole. While general works stand out (the treatises of Reginald Scot, William Perkins and James I, as well as many Continental treatises), the overall impression is that writing on witchcraft was not successful commercially. This supports the conclusion that witchcraft writing was not as representative of early modern belief more generally as has been previously thought.

This thesis explores gendered embodiment in early-modern England as a 'semiotic field' onto which were transcribed anxieties about the contingent nature of individual and national 'masculine' identity in an era of social and religious change and flux. I examine how the construction of an emergent 'Englishness' is articulated through the employment of eroticised metaphors of religious and national opposition. Anxieties about the threat to English national stability are feminised in order to contain and distance them, where the trope of the 'worrying feminine', in the Biblical archetype of the ambitious and sexually promiscuous Whore of Babylon, becomes an 'over-coded' entity representing a spectrum of anxieties surrounding internal and external religious threats to the self-constituted identity of English Protestant masculinity. In contrast to this, chaste female virtue in the form of the Bride of Christ is used, frequently in conjunction with the trope of the 'motherland', to privilege the righteousness of the Protestant masculine agenda against a perceived lack of proper monarchical rule. Together with the insights of literary criticism and history, I draw on models from gender and identity theory and cultural theory of the body, to engage with a series of six 'moments' from 1530 to 1640. Plays by Bale, Sackville and Norton, Shakespeare, Dekker, Heywood, Middleton, Davenport, Brome, Richards and Quarles are analysed in conjunction with Spenser's poetry and polemical works by Knox, Aylmer and Stubbes. I explore the ways in which the antithetical tropes are employed and how this reflects, interacts with and works against shifting social and cultural preoccupations. I conclude that the elaborate and over-insistent emphasis upon individual and national masculine supremacy is undermined by the irreconcilable contradictions inherent in its gendered construction. I argue that these disjunctures are nonetheless revealing, since the disentangling and examination of their complexities enables new and productive insights into the cultural climate of the period.

This thesis considers the idea of the 'metaphysical' in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury women's poetry, notably by exploring the female-voiced lyrics affiliated with Marie Maitland (d. 1596) in the Scottish manuscript verse miscellany, the Maitland Quarto (c. 1586). The study aims to reintegrate important strands of Renaissance culture which have been lost by too exclusive a focus on English, male writing and contexts. For many literary historians the 'metaphysical' refers overwhelmingly to Dryden's pejorative categorization of Donne and his followers. However, Sarah Hutton has recently shown how the 'metaphysical' can be traced to an Aristotelian Neoplatonism, whereby influential fifteenth-century thinkers such as Marsilio Ficino were conflating the spiritual and material for political purposes. For the queer Renaissance critic, Michael Morgan Holmes, the 'political' pertains to individual spiritual-material desires which can undermine hegemonic definitions of the natural and unnatural. Building on this, my thesis illuminates 'metaphysics' in the work of Maitland, Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645), Constance Aston Fowler (1621?-1664) and Katherine Philips (1632- 1664). These poets use the physical and spiritual bonds between women to explore the nature of female space, time and identity. Hutton's and Holmes's definition of the 'metaphysical' has special applicability for these poets, as they tacitly deconstruct the patriarchal construction of the virgin/whore and offer their own configuration of the spiritual-sensual woman. While critics have foregrounded a male metaphysical tradition in the early modern period, this study proposes that there is a 'dissident' female metaphysical strand that challenges the 'dominant' male discourses of the time. Over the last few decades, feminist scholars, notably, Lorna Hutson, Barbara Lewalski, Kate Chedgzoy, Carol Barash and Valerie Traub have reinstated the work of Lanyer and Philips in the English canon of Renaissance writing. More recently Sarah Dunnigan has drawn attention to the importance of the Scots poet and compiler, Maitland. Moreover, Helen Hackett has indicated that the writings of Fowler force us to rethink the roles of women in early modern literary culture. I take this further in two ways. First, I examine these poets' relationship to the 'metaphysical', the importance of which has been underestimated by critics, despite Dryden's original gendered use of the term. Secondly, I propose that these writers are responding to a 'polyglottal' female metaphysical tradition that develops in Renaissance Europe through a female republic of letters. I also assess the difficulties in belonging to a 'female tradition' in an era where female authorship was necessarily affected by misogynistic attitudes to women as writers. The research re-contextualizes the work of these women by examining the philosophical ideologies of Aristotle, Ficino, Marguerite of Navarre, Donne, Sir Richard Maitland, Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth Melville, Olympia Morata, Herbert Aston, Katherine Thimelby, St Teresa of Ávila and Andrew Marvell. By juxtaposing these four poets and reading them from within this philosophical-political context, the thesis sheds new light on the nature of early modern female intertextuality, whilst challenging male Anglocentric definitions of the 'Renaissance'.

This thesis consists of two components: a 70,000-word verse novel and a 50,000-word critical component that has arisen out of the research process for that novel. Creative Component: The Marlowe Papers The Marlowe Papers is a full-length verse novel written entirely in iambic pentameter. As with verse novels such as The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth, or The Emperor's Babe by Bernadine Evaristo, its inspiration, derivation, conventions and scope owe more to the prose novel than to the epic poem. Though there is as yet no widely-accepted definition, a verse novel may be distinguished from an epic poem where it consists, as in this case, of numerous discrete poems, each constituting a ‘chapter' of the novel. This conception allows for considerable variations in form and tone that would not be possible in the more cohesive tradition of the epic poem. The Marlowe Papers is a fictional autobiography of Christopher Marlowe based on the idea that he used the pseudonym ‘William Shakespeare' (employing the Stratford merchant as a ‘front'), having faked his own death and fled abroad to escape capital charges for atheism and heresy. The verse novel, written in dramatic scenes, traces his life from his flight on 30 May 1593, through the back-story (starting in 1586) that led to his prosecution, as we similarly track his progress on the Continent and in England until just after James I accedes to the English throne. The poems are a mixture of longer blank verse narratives and smaller, more lyrical poems (including sonnets). Explanatory notes to the poems, and a Dramatis Personae, are included on the advice of my creative supervisor. Critical Component: Writing Marlowe As Writing Shakespeare This part of the thesis explores the relationship between early modern biographies and fiction, questioning certain ‘facts' of Marlovian and Shakespearean biography in the light of the ‘thought experiment' of the verse novel. Marlowe's reputation for violence is reassessed in the light of scholarly doubt about the veracity of the inquest document, and Shakespeare's sonnets are reinterpreted through the lens of the Marlovian theory of Shakespeare authorship. The argument is that orthodox and non-Stratfordian theories might be considered competing paradigms; simply different frameworks through which interpretation of the same data leads to different conclusions. Interdisciplinary influences include Kuhn's philosophy of scientific discovery, post-modern narrativist history, neuroscience, psychology, and quantum physics (in the form of the ‘observer effect'). Data that is either anomalous or inexplicable under the orthodox paradigm is demonstrated to support a Marlovian reading, and the current state of the Shakespeare authorship question is assessed. Certain primary source documents were examined at the Bodleian Library, at the British Library, and at Lambeth Palace Library. Versions of Chapters 2, 3 and 4, written under supervision during this doctorate, have all been published, either as a book chapter or as a journal article, within the last year (Barber, 2009, 2010a, b).