Mary Reynolds / Caption title / Typescript / M.A. Florida State College for Women 1908

Memoria (licenciado en ciencias jurídicas y sociales) / Autor no autoriza el acceso completo de su documento

This dissertation makes a case for the Shakespearean stage in the modern Anglo-American tradition as a distinctive laboratory for producing and navigating theories of emotion. The dissertation brings together Shakespeare performance studies and the newer fields of the history of emotions and cultural emotion studies, arguing that Shakespeare’s enduring status as the playwright of human emotion makes the plays in performance critical sites of discourse about human emotion. More specifically, the dissertation charts how, since the late nineteenth century, Shakespeare performance has been implicated in an effort to understand emotion as it defines and relates to the “human” subject. The advent of scientific materialism and Darwinism involved a dethroning of emotion and its expression as a specially endowed human faculty, best evidenced by Charles Darwin’s 1871 The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. Shakespeare’s poetic, formal expression of the passions was seen as proof of this faculty, and nowhere better exemplified than in the tragedies and in the passionate displays of the great tragic heroes. The controversy surrounding the tragic roles of the famous Victorian actor-manager Henry Irving illustrates how the embodied, human medium of the Shakespearean stage served as valuable leverage in contemporary debates about emotion. The dissertation then considers major Shakespearean figures of the twentieth century, including Harley Granville Barker, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, and Peter Brook, whose “stages” similarly galvanize and reflect contestation and change in what William Reddy has called “emotional regimes” or Barbara Rosenwein “emotional communities.” For each of these figures, a specific emotional paradigm is at stake in staging Shakespeare and particularly Shakespearean tragedy. I engage with a range of sources, from performance reviews to popular psychology, to locate these canonical moments in Shakespearean performance history as flashpoints in a cultural history of emotion.

The purpose of this study is to treat one aspect of Shakespeare's political views, his views on monarchy as found in the two great English history tetralogies, and to compare them to the monarchical views of his age.

“Desifying Shakespeare” focuses on the sharp spike in Shakespeare performances in India in the last three decades (1993-2018), a period of time that coincides with the advent of globalization, the liberalization of India’s economy, and the emergence of the field of Global Shakespeare. By mobilizing the bilingual portmanteau desify, a word that simultaneously references the abstract and aspirational nation (des) and the quotidian process of making local or native in popular culture, this project argues that these self-consciously Indian productions or “desified Shakespeare” disclose contemporary Indian ideas and inquiries of the nation. The dissertation thus works to demonstrate the discursive overlaps and tensions between race, caste, religion, gender, language, color, and nationality, categories that are historically contingent, fluid, and performative. Each chapter centers around the affordances and appropriations of a different Shakespeare play and its iterations in contemporary India: Romeo and Juliet and the neighborhood as nation, Othello and the performativity of caste, Hamlet and the borderlands,Twelfth Night and diaspora space. “Desifying Shakespeare” thus marks the overlap and tension between the intensely local, the triumphantly national, and the universally global. Over the past two decades, the rise of the Hindu Right in India has resulted in Indian public discourse marking a return to and renewed investigation of the nation and its paronyms: national and nationalism. While the Hindu Right propounds a triumphalist and homogenous narrative of the nation, “Desifying Shakespeare” troubles this narrative by turning to performance, which I argue negotiates the tension between the des or the nation and desifying or the process of making local, concepts that both overlap and oppose each other. Prior studies on Shakespeare in India have relied heavily on the consequences of Shakespearean adaptations’ colonial origins, often restricted to analyses of single productions. However, “Desifying Shakespeare” shifts, in its methodology, to emphasize a synoptic view of Shakespeare in India, its multiple vectors of influence—colonial, global, postcolonial, and transnational—and its diverse areas of overlap. While the tendency within the field of Global Shakespeare is to dismiss the nation in favor of the local and the transnational, this project argues that the local and the transnational are entwined in the contemporary notions of the nation. “Desifying Shakespeare” works to provide an alternative theorization of adaptation by using the portmanteau desify—a word that performs the very action it describes. A combination of des, the Hindi word for country/nation (implicitly understood to mean Indian), and the English suffix “—fy” denoting the transformation or the process of making into, desify is itself a word that desifies the English for change. An analysis of desification, thus involves a shift from a privileging of the putative original to an approach that considers a wider web of influences spanning different media, genres, languages, and sources. Running through this dissertation is a theorization of language in performance, moving between the concepts of neighboring, regional, vernacular, and dialect. “Desifying Shakespeare” thus shifts away from the dominant postcolonial metaphors of narration and imagination to emphasize the role of embodied performance in determining and upending a national identity. How the des is constructed in these productions provides an alternative to a neat narrative of the nation that moves beyond the Indian context to provide a model for Global Shakespeare criticism more broadly.

At the end of the sixteenth century, London was grappling with an unprecedented environmental crisis: rapid population growth produced rampant pollution, land mismanagement, and epidemic disease; entire species of fish disappeared from the Thames; and the city’s growing demands for food and fuel depleted the nation’s natural resources. This dissertation locates innovative responses to these new environmental pressures on the early modern stage. Shakespeare and his contemporaries, I argue, shaped early attitudes and expectations about the ecology of London and its sustainability. Each chapter of “Urban Ecology” focuses on a different resource problem plaguing early modern London—food scarcity, decayed waterways, air pollution and a shortage of space to bury the dead—and shows how groups of plays addressed them using the material and imaginative resources of dramatic form. In constructing stories in which these ecological issues figure prominently, and in offering their own creative responses to these problems, early modern playwrights display a nuanced understanding of London’s environment as a co-fabrication between human and nonhuman forces, even before the terms “ecosystem” or “ecology” had emerged in scientific discourse. To make this co-fabrication visible, “Urban Ecology” reads early modern plays alongside a rich archive of archaeological evidence that re-situates the theater industry as a both a product of and active participant in the London ecosystem. I show how playing companies contributed to urban air pollution by burning noxious sea coal to produce spectacular effects that attracted paying customers; the Bankside playhouses, located on reclaimed marshland, were vulnerable to the Thames and its patterns of tidal flooding; and food sourced from both local and global supply chains was regularly sold during performances. By reconstructing this complex interplay between drama and its environment, this dissertation begins to center the early modern theater industry in the history of ecological thought.

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