Literature and theatre have traditionally used exempla based on historical or classical models as a fundamentally conservative rhetorical technique which aimed to reinforce pre-existing values. However, in the early modern period the reproduction of exemplary figures on stage also created the possibility that the authority of the dominant culture could be used to reinterpret exempla and the tradition they represented. In Troilus and Cressida, instead of presenting an internally consistent alternative version of the Troy story, Shakespeare presents a deconstructed narrative in which nothing is definitive or authoritative. Many of Troilus and Cressidas characters were traditionally presented as exempla, but in Shakespeares story they are divided between the exemplary self and the actual. Shakespeare reproduces and enhances the contradictions of earlier versions of the Troy story, so that the exempla which are supposed to signify a singular virtue instead point to a confusing variety of possible motives and interpretations. Their behaviour is indefinitely open to reinterpretation and resists a singular meaning. Cressidas inherently divided and contradictory nature undermines her traditional position as a negative exemplum with a clear, singular meaning. The contradiction she embodies also applies to the play as a whole. The limited viewpoint the audience is given in Troilus and Cressida and the ambiguity of the characters undermine both specific examples of exemplarity and broader ideas about the value of exempla. The play works to create confusion and multiplicity of meaning, posing questions for the audience to consider rather than providing definitive answers.

This dissertation examines the representation of adoption in early modern English drama in order to analyze the language of social and familial relations in early modern culture. I propose that although these plays often ultimately support the traditional idea of a birth family, adoption challenges conventional notions of the family by making artificial, non-consanguine relations appear natural, thereby exposing the family unit as a social construction. I suggest further that adopted characters complicate notions of biological inheritance through their negotiations of language, place, and power. My dissertation thus explores the connections between historical language use and social status in early modern England; it couples early modern rhetorical theories and treatises with modern linguistic theory, drawing upon recent sociolinguistic scholarship. The result is to show that understanding how language demarcates social position is essential to illuminating the cultural intricacies of the plays of the period. In Chapters 1 and 2, I investigate the social and economic repercussions of adoption. Chapter 1 discusses the previously overlooked cultural importance of horticultural metaphors of adoption in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and All’s Well That Ends Well. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which early modern culture explained adoption by depicting it in a particular kind of figurative language. Chapter 2 focuses on the economic consequences of, and motivations for, adoption in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. In my final two chapters, I scrutinize the relations between the early modern family and linguistic practice. Chapter 3 explores the connections between genetics, physical likeness, and language in Lyly’s Mother Bombie and Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. Finally, in Chapter 4 I investigate familial relation as a source of linguistic and social power. Middleton’s Women Beware Women, I argue, suggests that kinship exists within language and grants particular speakers linguistic and social authority.

Literature and theatre have traditionally used exempla based on historical or classical models as a fundamentally conservative rhetorical technique which aimed to reinforce pre-existing values. However, in the early modern period the reproduction of exemplary figures on stage also created the possibility that the authority of the dominant culture could be used to reinterpret exempla and the tradition they represented. In Troilus and Cressida, instead of presenting an internally consistent alternative version of the Troy story, Shakespeare presents a deconstructed narrative in which nothing is definitive or authoritative. Many of Troilus and Cressidas characters were traditionally presented as exempla, but in Shakespeares story they are divided between the exemplary self and the actual. Shakespeare reproduces and enhances the contradictions of earlier versions of the Troy story, so that the exempla which are supposed to signify a singular virtue instead point to a confusing variety of possible motives and interpretations. Their behaviour is indefinitely open to reinterpretation and resists a singular meaning. Cressidas inherently divided and contradictory nature undermines her traditional position as a negative exemplum with a clear, singular meaning. The contradiction she embodies also applies to the play as a whole. The limited viewpoint the audience is given in Troilus and Cressida and the ambiguity of the characters undermine both specific examples of exemplarity and broader ideas about the value of exempla. The play works to create confusion and multiplicity of meaning, posing questions for the audience to consider rather than providing definitive answers.

This study, contextualized within the critical debate on Shakespearean dramatic character, examines how the “character effect”— or the audience’s impression of a character’s ontological reality— is produced. Approaching character from the perspective of linguistic pragmatics, I contend that character effects are produced by the counterpoint between characters’ pragmatic use of language and the allegorical meanings that underpin characters’ utterances in a theatrical context. These allegorical meanings, which Shakespeare conveys through his characters to the audience, dialogically interact with characters’ textually or historically scripted roles and converge with their speech to create the impression that characters control language and have extra-textual lives of their own. I thus demonstrate that the interiority ascribed to character is a function of its anteriority. Following the introductory chapter, which lays out the critical history of Shakespearean character and a pragmatic methodology, each of the remaining chapters explores the particular speech habits of a complex and larger-than-life Shakespearean character who is also a self-conscious user of language. Chapter 2 examines how Falstaff’s conversational implicatures produce the character effect of his vitality. Chapter 3 looks at how Cleopatra’s performative use of report creates her sexual charisma. Chapter 4 focuses on how Henry V’s rhetorical argumentation works to create the effect of his moral ambivalence. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2013-06-28 14:41:27.453

Thesis advisor: Mary T. Crane / Thesis advisor: Andrew Sofer / Spatial Dramaturgy and Domestic Control in Early Modern Drama explores the social components of early modern domestic architecture and the spatial practices that helped to dramatize them. Each chapter examines a particular domestic feature—doors, windows, galleries, studies—and considers its role in a variety of early modern plays. Methodologically, I bridge the gaps between literary study, dramaturgy, and history by analyzing the palimpsest of the physical stage (e.g., the upper playing balcony) and the fictional spaces produced in performance (e.g., Juliet’s window). My work takes its influence from literary scholars, primarily Lena Cowen Orlin and Patricia Fumerton; theater historians, primarily Tim Fitzpatrick, Alan Dessen, Leslie Thompson, and Mariko Ichikawa; and architectural historians, primarily Mark Girouard and Alice T. Friedman. Bringing together these fields of study allows me to reconsider the theory of the unlocalized early modern stage that has largely dominated scholarly and theatrical approaches to early modern theater for half a century. In my first chapter, “Doors and Keys: Enclosure and Spatial Control,” I argue that doors and keys operate in productive tension with the spatial flexibility of the “unlocalized” stage, troubling the fantasy of domestic spatial control in plays such as A Woman Killed With Kindness and The Comedy of Errors. In my second chapter, “Windows: Locus, Platea, and Contested Authority,” I explore the way window scenes in plays such as Romeo and Juliet and Women Beware Women provide a liminal space between house and street where the tiring house façade and the apron of the stage could intersect. My third chapter, “Galleries: Feigned Soliloquy and Interiority,” shows how playwrights used gallery settings to stage feigned soliloquy, exposing the limits of private speech and the struggle to access another person’s most inner thoughts. My final chapter, “Studies: Hauntings and Impossible Privacy,” looks at plays that feature ghosts or devils in studies, such as Doctor Faustus and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, to argues that these supernatural elements reflect the ease with which playwrights could violate presumably protected spaces. In turn, these hauntings explore the danger presented in early modern humanism: that the most haunted place of all is one’s own mind. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Student Number : 8701228T - PhD thesis - School of Literature and Language Studies - Faculty of Humanities / The argument that unfolds throughout this thesis represents the development of my own understanding of the Renaissance conception and application of alchemical theories and philosophies, especially as it applies to my appreciation of the works of two of the crucial figures of the period – Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. These men were far more than entertainers. They were committed to their art as an essential component in the shaping and maintenance of the societal conscience. As dramatist-philosophers, they not only treated issues of topical interest and debate around the individual in relation to individual, and the individual in relation to the larger worlds of nature and politics, but also provided learned and insightful comment on the possible nature and function of the individual soul/mind in relation to itself. My deepening sensitivity to and comprehension of early modern alchemical philosophies and practices as apt analogies for psychological development led me to believe that Jonson and Shakespeare, separately though similarly, externalized, or dramatized, the inner trajectory of self-knowledge. This thesis, then, represents my own exploratory expedition into Renaissance epistemological thought as embodied in various alchemical texts. The correlations between alchemy and early modern psychologies become more apparent with each chapter. In the opening chapters, the historical and intellectual context for an hypothesis of a Renaissance psychology is set out. Chapter Three focuses on Renaissance conceptions of self-knowledge. The classical dictum of nosce teipsum is explored in relation to a range of contemporary alchemical arguments about the nature of philosophy and knowledge. In Chapter Four, I present a proposal of a Renaissance ‘model’ of psychological development, which may be seen to be analogous to the alchemical process as widely understood and depicted in the literature of the time. The fifth chapter is a ‘bridge’ between the foregoing thesis and the expository analysis of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and Shakespeare’s The Tempest: it particularizes the foregoing argument and attempts to come to some apprehension of Jonson’s individual conception of self-knowledge and psychological development. The sixth chapter demonstrates this apprehension in relation to Jonson’s The Alchemist. Shakespeare’s The Tempest is thus seen as being in direct conversation with both Jonson’s The Alchemist, and with the philosophical and artistic trends of the period. In Chapter Seven, I explore the evidence that Shakespeare was drawing from a ‘common pool’ of intellectual material with Jonson. However, I also suggest that Shakespeare presents a differing, though in some ways complementary, view of self-knowledge. Both Shakespeare and Jonson, I propose, are drawing on alchemical language and imagery to present contrasting characterizations of human potential and evolution. In effect, the respective dramatic texts present two distinct conceptualizations of the ‘philosopher’s stone’, which, in turn, suggests two models of human perfectibility that seem to be poles apart. These two works, however, are undeniably related and mutually effective within the Renaissance crucible of alchemy.

In this thesis I examine the representation of parents and schoolmasters and the conflicts between them in vernacular drama in Reformation England. This was a period of growth in public schooling and a time when numerous treatises on education and childrearing were in circulation in England. Prevailing pedagogical theory privileged the schoolmaster's authority over that of the parents, and set paternal authority over that of the mother. It sought to limit maternal power to the domestic sphere and the infant years, yet the drama examined here suggests that mothers, not fathers, were usually the parent in control of their children's education. The conflicts inherent in these oppositions are played out in drama dealing with schooling and childrearing; each of the works examined here participates in and contributes to public debate over school education and parenting practices in early modern England. The thesis conducts a close textual and contextual analysis of the representation of schoolmasters and parents and of parent-school relations in seven English plays. A variety of dramatic genres is represented: public drama (Love's Labour's Lost, Patient Grissill, The Winter's Tale), school drama (Nice Wanton, July and Julian, The Disobedient Child), and private royal entertainment (The Lady of May). The plays are explicated in terms of the Tudor school culture and the negotiation of authority between fathers, mothers and schoolmasters. The thesis draws extensively on sixteenth-century school dialogues and vulgaria and on education treatises, which were available in English in Tudor England, in particular the writings of Erasmus, Vives, Ascham, Mulcaster, Elyot, Brinsley and Becon. School records provide information on school conditions and curricula, the duties and qualities of schoolmasters and the role of schools in civic and public performances. The thesis addresses issues of gender, childrearing, public education and parental and pedagogical authority in the second half of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

This dissertation examines beggars, gypsies, rogues, and vagrants presented in early modern English drama, with the discussion of how these peripatetic characters represent the discourses of vagrancy of the period. The first chapter introduces Tudor and early Stuart governments' legislation and proclamations on vagabondage and discusses these governmental policies in their social and economic contexts. The chapter also deals with the literature of roguery to point out that the literature (especially in the Elizabethan era) disseminated such a negative image of beggars as impostors and established the antagonistic atmosphere against the wandering poor. The second chapter explores the anti-theatrical aspect of the discourses of vagrancy. Along with the discussion of early playing companies' traveling convention, this chapter investigates how the long-held association of players with beggars is addressed in the plays that are dated from the early 1570s to the closing of the playhouses in 1642. In the third chapter I read Shakespeare's King Lear with the focus on its critical allusions to the discourses of vagrancy and interpret King Lear's symbolic experience of vagrancy in that context. The chapter demonstrates that King Lear represents the spatial politics embedded in the discourses of vagrancy and evokes a sympathetic understanding of the wandering poor. Chapter IV focuses on Beggars' Bush and analyzes the beggars' utopian community in the play. By juxtaposing the play with a variety of documents relating to the vagrancy issue in the early seventeen century, I contend that Beggars' Bush reflects the cultural aspirations for colonial enterprises in the early Stuart age. Chapter V examines John Taylor's conceptualization of vagrancy as a trope of travel and free mobility, and discusses the "wanderlust" represented in A Jovial Crew: Merry Beggars as an exemplary anecdote showing the mid seventeenth century's perceptions on vagrancy and spatial mobility. Thus, by exploring diverse associations and investments regarding vagrants, this study demonstrates that the early modern discourses of vagrancy have been informed and inflected by shifting economic, socio-historical, and national interests and demands.

The aim of this study is to demonstrate the destructive effects of infidelity in the old-aged husband-the young wife marriages which end up with tragedy. In John Ford&rsquo / s Love&rsquo / s Sacrifice (1633) and Lope de Vega&rsquo / s Punishment Without Revenge (1631), tragedy turns out to be the inevitable consequence of the plays since the motives of jealousy, honour, revenge and love converge and lead people to commit sinful crimes. Within this scope, the first chapter of the thesis is devoted to the historical information about the state of English and Spanish theatres together with the biographies of the playwrights. In the second chapter, the tripartite relationship between jealousy, revenge, and honour is dealt with based upon examples from the primary sources in a historical framework. The reasons and results of these themes are studied through the characters in the plays. The third chapter covers the theme of love, its history and its influence on characters. In this chapter, the nature of love between the characters and its consequences are examined. The conclusion asserts that the old-aged husband and the young wife create a mismatched union and accompanied with the motives of honour, jealousy and revenge, the institution of marriage breeds tragic consequences. The analysis of the above mentioned themes is based on a historical context and it is also concluded that although Love&rsquo / s Sacrifice (1633) and Punishment Without Revenge (1631) belong to the Renaissance age, both plays bear the influences of the Greco-Roman drama tradition. Thus, the similarities and differences between classical and Renaissance tragedy are demonstrated.

This dissertation examines beggars, gypsies, rogues, and vagrants presented in early modern English drama, with the discussion of how these peripatetic characters represent the discourses of vagrancy of the period. The first chapter introduces Tudor and early Stuart governments' legislation and proclamations on vagabondage and discusses these governmental policies in their social and economic contexts. The chapter also deals with the literature of roguery to point out that the literature (especially in the Elizabethan era) disseminated such a negative image of beggars as impostors and established the antagonistic atmosphere against the wandering poor. The second chapter explores the anti-theatrical aspect of the discourses of vagrancy. Along with the discussion of early playing companies' traveling convention, this chapter investigates how the long-held association of players with beggars is addressed in the plays that are dated from the early 1570s to the closing of the playhouses in 1642. In the third chapter I read Shakespeare's King Lear with the focus on its critical allusions to the discourses of vagrancy and interpret King Lear's symbolic experience of vagrancy in that context. The chapter demonstrates that King Lear represents the spatial politics embedded in the discourses of vagrancy and evokes a sympathetic understanding of the wandering poor. Chapter IV focuses on Beggars' Bush and analyzes the beggars' utopian community in the play. By juxtaposing the play with a variety of documents relating to the vagrancy issue in the early seventeen century, I contend that Beggars' Bush reflects the cultural aspirations for colonial enterprises in the early Stuart age. Chapter V examines John Taylor's conceptualization of vagrancy as a trope of travel and free mobility, and discusses the "wanderlust" represented in A Jovial Crew: Merry Beggars as an exemplary anecdote showing the mid seventeenth century's perceptions on vagrancy and spatial mobility. Thus, by exploring diverse associations and investments regarding vagrants, this study demonstrates that the early modern discourses of vagrancy have been informed and inflected by shifting economic, socio-historical, and national interests and demands.