The thesis undertakes pioneering work in the study of Web production, representation and consumption through its focus on ethnic minorities. The comprehensive crosssection of Web content discussed shows significant ethnic minority activity despite the apparent white, Western, male and middle class profile of cyberspace. This empirical dimension of the research not only complements the large body of theoretical work that has been done about cyberspace, but also uses theoretical models from a range of academic disciplines (especially media studies) to anchor its analysis of the Web. The particularities of the Web are investigated empirically through the involvement of a group of ethnic minority women, including myself, who were the research subjects. This demanded methodological innovation given the comparatively minimal empirical work that has been done on the Web and subsequently, the lack of any conventional approaches to studying this new technology. The research was also made methodologically complex through the educational environment and larger pilot study of which it was part, and the resulting matrix of power relations arising from it. But it also takes full advantage of these circumstances, and is self-reflexive in doing so, thus creating a robust examination of the Web centred on the experiences of women from ethnic minorities. The research subjects' interactions with the Web are not only the basis for exploring Web consumption, but their findings are discussed as the interface between producers and consumers, the point of representation. This in-depth consideration of Web content explores depictions of ethnicity in terms of the traditional representational practices of other media and how these have been reinvented and adapted for the Web. The Web texts also suggest how ethnic minorities are negotiating and diversifying their own representation on the Web in response to the limits of older media industries. The thesis does not theorise the Web as a technology of infinite possibility, because its empirical grounding highlights the constraints as much as the strengths of the medium in comparison to other technologies of representation. The limitations of access, representation and even to studying the Web are examined in detail without recourse to simplistic conclusions or recommendations.

The aim of the thesis is to document images of women in English and French theatre, between 1848 and 1914, which challenged the stereotypical image of women as passive wives and mothers in the'doll's house! The methodologies employed are not restricted to dramatic criticism, but draw upon a udder net of feminism, semiotics, and social history, in order to place the plays, roles and actresses in the theatre of their time. As a comparative study, it documents interchange, interaction and difference, between the theatre of England and France. The images are divided into three groups, viz., the 'female outcast', the 'third sex' and 'revolting women'. Section one documents a range of femme fatale images, including the courtisane; the Magdalen; Cleopatra, the royal seducer: Medea, the outcast queen, and the dangerous women of melodrama. The second section begins with studies of the male impersonators of music hall, notably Vesta Tilley, and the principal boys of Victorian and Edwardian pantomime. Male impersonation on the 'serious' stage is then considered, in a study of actresses in the cross-dressing role of Shakespeare's Rosalind, and Bernhardt's travesti roles, in particular her Hamlet. The third section considers the révolt6e of the social drama, and debate surrounding the rationale of motherhood, and the hostile reactions to the issues of abortion and infanticide. A chapter on Manchester's Gaiety theatre indicates the importance of the 'new theatres' in providing a udder and more realistic, representation of women, while the final study examines drama which portrayed the difficulties for women trying to survive independently of men, indicating the economic disadvantages and prejudices which drove many women into prostitution. Overall, the three groups of images represent three strategies for power and their success and failure is indicated and assessed. The capacity of theatre for social debate is highlighted, and the contribution of women in the creation of radical images is re-evaluated, thereby making a significant contribution to women's studies and to nineteenth century theatre studies.

This thesis attempts an analysis of some of the major themes and characteristics in Ford's work in the light of the interests and concerns of his dedicatees. The first part, after a discussion of the Ford canon and its chronology, considers four prominent aspects of his writing. The first chapter examines the dislike evinced by many of his characters for food, and the second the distrust of language so frequently registered in his work, and the way in which this leads ultimately to the writing of unsatisfactory plays. The next chapter then goes on to suggest that these two elements of Ford's plays may perhaps be linked by his perception of personality as fragmentarily located in disparate parts of the body, all exerting conflicting claims to represent the totality of the self. The last chapter of the first half of the thesis is concerned with the attempt in The Broken Heart to find an alternative, nonverbal means of communication, and also examines the possibility that the feeling conveyed in Ford's plays of the unsatisfactoriness of physical food may be connected with the sense of spiritual starvation in The Broken Heart. It is further suggested that this in turn might perhaps reflect a preference on Ford's part for the Catholic rather than the Anglican communion. The possibility of Ford having Catholic sympathies is further examined in the first chapter of the second half of the thesis, which explores the careers and family connections of Ford's dedicatees, including their close links with Catholicism. The second chapter attempts to show that Perkin Warbeck can be read as a panegyric on the ancestors of Ford's dedicatees, with the covert implication that the dedicatees, too, were worthy of greater political power and respect than they in fact enjoyed. The final chapter examines how this meaning might, like that of The Broken Heart, have been conveyed on the stage visually rather than verbally, and the conclusion then reviews the way in which Ford's attempt to forge a private language tested his theatre to its limits, and suggests that the unsatisfactory plays of his later years were an inevitable result of his perception of his dedicatees as, both deserving of success and unable to achieve it.

The object of this thesis is to produce an academically rigorous historical study of the political and religious influences on the Alsatian language theatre. To achieve this end, four research targets were established, designed to produce Conclusions, the evidence of research being listed in the Bibliography. The research targets were each to express a part of the study, being: - Political history and culture of the region. - History and present political situation of the language. - History and politics of the theatre in the language. - Influence of the Church in the theatre in Alsace. Additionally, the thesis includes an analysis five Alsatian plays which I feel embody the spirit of the theatre in the language, as evidence of my assertions in meeting the research targets.

This thesis explores masochism as a performance trope investigating the relationship between the politics of cultural production and masochistic performance practices. By examining the work of a number of contemporary artists, particularly artists whose work is concerned with broaching or subverting the physical and psychical limits of the body, this thesis asserts that masochistic works present a provocation and resistance to patriarchal discourses of power, in particular those practices and disciplines of power/ knowledge responsible for the constitution of 'desirable' subjectivity. For the purposes of this thesis 'desirable' denotes both a Foucauldian sense of the 'docile' social subject conforming to the disciplinary technologies of society, combined with the idea of high modernity's capitalist driven economic dependence on the perpetuation of consumer 'desire'. In order to undertake this investigation, an understanding of theoretical and cultural masochism has been utilised in relation to certain forms of performance practice. Drawing upon an understanding of Julia Kristeva's notion of the abject and the cultural construction of the 'obscene' and their significance in relation to the constitution of the subject, this thesis analyses the points at which the abject, the obscene and the discourse of masochism intersect and interrogate acculturated ideas concerning the acceptable limits of re/presentation and the social subject. Through a discussion of the diverse range of perspectives on masochism, coupled with it's abject and 'obscene' inflections, this thesis considers the utility of masochistic actions in investigating contemporary subjectivity and its temporary, masochistically induced loss. In so doing this thesis extends its analysis to elaborate the cultural and socio-political significance of presenting/ representing alternative subjectivity through means of masochistic performances that work in opposition to the patriarchally constructed, sado-masochistic cultural economy of 'desire'.

The aim of this thesis has been to document the English careers of the two nineteenth-century Italian International actresses Adelaide Ristori and Eleonora Duse. The English careers of Duse and Ristori are discussed in the light of both the nineteenth-century debate which developed in England on the role and nature of the actress, and the reception of foreign stars on the English stage and the ensuing discussion on the way foreign theatre stars conformed to, or contravened, prevailing images of English womanhood. Chapter 2 looks into the role and status of the actress from the mid-nineteenth-century to the fin de siecle by deploying critical tools offered by feminist theatre criticism. It is an attempt to define the role of the nineteenth-century actress as a professional woman and draw attention to the voyeuristic nature of nineteenth-century theatre where actresses were put on display: on the one hand they were admired and visually possessed by their audiences, but on the other, they were doomed, as women who made a public show of their bodies, to be social outcasts. Chapter 3 attempts a chronology of foreign actresses on the English stage and focuses on their reception which provides a basis for comparison between English and foreign nineteenth-century actresses. Chapter 4 and 5 respectively, reconstruct Ristori's and Duse's English careers. Issues tackled in the previous chapters resurface here to provide a critical angle in trying to evaluate their reception in Victorian England. The conclusion endeavours to pull together the different lines of this study and points to possible lines of research to be pursed in the future in the field of women in theatre.

This thesis is an attempt to identify and reposition the work of a number of women playwrights whose work was produced on the London Stage between 1918-1962. The existing academic assumption about these playwrights is either that they have no significant place in a history of the drama, or that their work was not rooted in feminist ideology. The thesis sets out to analyse their work in the context for which it was created; a time in which both women's lives and the British theatre, were transformed by war, cultural change and a change in their status within the public domain. As such, the plays are examined in relation to social, cultural and ideological developments and change, which particularly affected both women's lives and the perception of what it meant to be a woman. Similarly, the emergent theories of femaleness and femininity, which grew in number during the period under examination and are outlined in the thesis, have a relevance to a reading of the dramatic texts in question. There are, as far as I am aware, no other detailed studies of plays by women playwrights of the period analysed here. As such, it is hoped that this thesis constitutes at least the beginnings of such a study. Some of the plays quoted here, were treated in less detail and within a far less theoretical framework in a Masters thesisWhich was submitted in 1988.

Most studies of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre focus upon the drama and playhouses of London. However, if we are to have a fuller understanding of English Renaissance theatre and its place in early modem English culture, the wider world of regional English drama must also be taken into account. Playing places and vernacular play performances outside early modern London and its liberties are therefore made the subject of this thesis. The dissertation offers the first detailed account of regional playing spaces and their use for play performances in English in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period. The thesis opens with an introduction in which provincial playing and staging conventions are discussed in general. Each subsequent chapter concentrates upon playing practices and performances in a representative space, focusing upon buildings (and the grounds of buildings) used for regional dramatic performances (e. g. town halls, schools and colleges, country houses). The chapters are illustrated with transcriptions from primary records and case-studies of known performances in specific spaces. I have supplemented study of published and unpublished dramatic records transcribed for the Records of Early English Drama Project (based at Toronto University) and the Malone Society with extensive primary research amongst those Elizabethan and Jacobean records yet to be transcribed or printed. Visual evidence is also included, furnishing a visual archive for scholars of early modem theatre spaces in England. Research in many archives remains to be done. The survey of early modern English provincial theatre offered in this dissertation is therefore introductory. The aim has been to provide a starting point for those studying this rich and under-researched aspect of English Renaissance dramatic culture in the future.

This thesis is a collation and discussion of productions of Ben Jonson's plays in England between 1977 and 2000. It focuses on mainstream theatre productions. Therefore, amateur and Fringe productions, adaptations and productions by small-scale theatre companies are not included. It contains previously unreleased material of interviews with theatre practitioners who have been instrumental in staging the productions covered. Whilst scholarship has concentrated on recent productions of Shakespeares, tudies in Jonsonianp erformanceh ave been neglected.W ith the recent resurgence in popularity of Jonson's texts in the English theatre repertoire, it is now pertinent to assessth e methodsu sed to staget he work of this playwright. This thesis focuses only on the staging of texts presented between the two dates; this does not cover all of Jonson's texts. Contained in two volumes, Part One raises issues of performance, whilst in Part Two productions are considered within chapters on each play. An Afterword (in Volume One) considers the future of production and the action needed to be taken for future progression in performance and performance studies. The Appendix (in Volume One) contains detailed venue information. The thesis is intended as a documented record of productions, in order to stimulate future research into Jonsonian performance methods. By examining recent productions the failures and successeso f the contemporaryt heatre's approacht o Jonsonh ave been noted. This will contribute to an understanding of how Jonson's texts continue to work on stage. The title of this thesis comes from Bartholomew Fair, a play that addressesth e need to assimilatet he presentationo f theatre within contemporary concerns.

This study arose out of an awareness that contemporary performance theories and production techniques were not appropriate to the plays of Howard Barker. The first section, a comparison of Barker with Edward Bond, attempts to 'situate' the former with reference to a major dramatist of the seventies and early eighties. This reveals a number of significant differences, including almost diametrically opposed conceptions of the function of drama. In the second section, I consider Barker against a wider background of deconstructive and postmodernist thinking. As opposed to Bond's Brechtian notion of a Rational theatre, I argue that Barker's theatre is irrational and suggest that irrational interaction is Seduction. Barker's plays are considered from the point of view of a theory of seduction - in particular Jean Baudrillard's. There follows a review of a range of discourses on performance by influential practitioners such as Stanislavsky. Although seduction is identifiable in all their practices, it is almost universally denied or shunned - except by Grotowski. Also the focus of acting technique is invariably on the actor/character relation with little consideration of interaction with others. The third section considers in some detail two plays by Barker - JUDITH and THE CASTLE, analysing them from a seductive perspective.