Thesis (doctoral)--Philipps-Universität Marburg, 1932. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 53-54).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of English Language and Literature, Aug. 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 161-167). Also available on the Internet.

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It is my contention that those critics are right who hold that the Q text of the Merry Wives of Windsor is a reported text -- that is, that some stage of its transmission was memorial. I certainly cannot believe that Q represents a Shakespearian first draft and F a Shaskepearian revision, or that Q is a farce interlude adapted from F. Limitations of space prohibit discussion of the possibility that Q is a stenographic report. But the problem of Elisabethan shorthand has been thoroughly investigated by competent scholars, and their findings convince me that there was no contemporary system capable of reproducing the best reported parts of Q from performance in the theatre. Surely, on the basis of the shorthand theory, we should have to assume an extraordinarily low standard of accuracy in the actors of Shakespeare’s company to account for the wholesale memorial corruption also observable in Q. The only reasonable hypothesis seems to me to be that the ‘gross corruption, constant mutilation, meaningless inversion and clumsy transposition’ in Q are solely the result of inept memorial reconstruction. It is my further belief that Q is a report of an original in substantial agreement with the F text. I propose now to adduce fresh evidence pointing to the conclusion that the Q text is indeed memorial; at the same time attempting to show that the theories which represent Q as a first sketch of the F text or a farce interlude adapted from F are untenable. [...]

This thesis undertakes a study of Shakespeare's sonnets that seeks to locate them in the determinate historical circumstances of the moment of their production. Subjectivity in the sonnets is read as the location of a series of conflicts which are ultimately socio-historical in nature. Contemporaries identified the sonnet form as a discourse of the aristocracy, especially in its manifestation of courtly love. Shakespeare's sonnets attempt to manage the pressures that the history of the late sixteenth century impose upon this discursive formation from within the genre itself. The first and second chapters of the thesis set out the historical framework within which the generic requirements of the sonnet were played out, and discuss the tensions which result. Chapter three reads the first seventeen sonnets in the light of this work, arguing against a view of these particular poems as a homogeneous group of marriage sonnets. These sonnets set out the homosocial considerations that underpin the relationship between the addressor and the young nobleman in a way that foreshadows the conflicts that are played out in later poems. Chapter four traces these conflicts in terms of the subjectivity of the young man, noting that the historical crisis in the ideology of the aristocracy renders his subject-position unstable. Chapter five relates this result to the related subjectivity of the adressor, the poetic persona of the poems, and reads his position as noting the disjunctions in the dominant ideology, while nevertheless being unable to move away from its interpellation of his position. Chapter six notes the consequent disruption of gendered identity, both for the "dark lady" and the poetic persona himself. The conclusion argues for a materialist perspective on the sonnets' problematising of subjectivity in the Renaissance.

The present study explores the role and social status of children in the plays and in the sonnets by Shakespeare. I have attempted to trace the tension between accepted societal attitudes of the time and the underlying sympathy and compassion for children made manifest in the text through dramatic situation and language. / In the Histories and in the Tragedies, children are seen as pawns in adult power plays, while a disregard for a child's natural developmental progress is made apparent in both the Histories and the Comedies. Nevertheless at times, and particularly in the Tragedies and in the Romances, the actual children in the plays become agents of reconciliation and regeneration; in Macbeth, the victimized children acquire the status of a powerful symbol. The Sonnets, which deal with childhood as an abstract idea, foreshadow this synthesis of actuality and metaphoric tenor.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington. / Bibliography: l. [178]-181.