Early modern neighbours were ubiquitous audiences to — and performers in — each other’s lives. Social historians have suggested that neighbours tended to possess surprisingly intimate information about each other, and they could use these insights to invade, encroach upon, and undermine those around them. To date, however, the relationships between neighbours (which are here termed ‘neighbourship’) have been narrowly located in the interactions between people living near to each other in domestic contexts. This dissertation proposes a significantly more capacious understanding of neighbourly dynamics by turning to a different archive: early modern plays that use particular theatrical devices — spectatorship, clothing, dialect, and stage properties — to work out the threats, obligations, and opportunities that come with sharing space and neighbourly knowledge. This dissertation draws on canonical and non-canonical plays from a range of genres and playwrights between the late sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, including Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Coriolanus, Jonson’s The Alchemist, Heywood’s little-known Jupiter and Io, Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday, and George Peele’s Edward I. Neighbourship was not defined by its domestic context, but by dynamics and internal structures, such as interchangeability and temporal iteration, that shaped early modern expectations about how this relationship manifested. The approaches in this dissertation build on social historical work by Lena Orlin, Catherine Richardson, B.S. Capp, and others, as well as theatre scholarship from Peter Womack, Jeremy Lopez, and Jennifer A. Low. There are two major interventions here: first, in the idea that the dynamics of neighbourship do not apply only between proximate humans, but also between ‘atypical’ neighbours — fairies, animals, languages, and nations — who offer focal points in respective chapters. These atypical entities challenge the normative understanding of neighbourship by taking its dynamics to an extreme, pushing theatrical audiences to the limits of their sympathetic identifications. The second intervention is in the argument that theatrical devices uniquely express and amplify the stakes of neighbourly dynamics. The temporal and spatial compression of the stage pushes unusual neighbours into greater proximity with each other, and the stage made manifest the complicated negotiations of similarity and difference that neighbourship entailed. Overall, this dissertation highlights the capacity of the early modern stage to transpose the dynamics of neighbourship across apparently disparate realms, drawing attention to theatrical manifestations of similarity and difference, belonging and alienation, and the transgression of borders.

‘The Ophelia Versions: Representations of a Dramatic Type from 1600-1633’ interrogates early modern drama’s use of the Ophelia type, which is defined in reference to Hamlet’s Ophelia and the behavioural patterns she exhibits: abandonment, derangement and suicide. Chapter one investigates Shakespeare’s Ophelia in Hamlet, finding that Ophelia is strongly identified with the ballad corpus. I argue that the popular ballad medium that Shakespeare imports into the play via Ophelia is a subversive force that contends with and destabilizes the linear trajectory of Hamlet’s revenge tragedy narrative. The alternative space of Ophelia’s ballad narrative is, however, shut down by her suicide which, I argue, is influenced by the models of classical theatre. This ending conspires with the repressive legal and social restrictions placed upon early modern unmarried women and sets up a dangerous precedent by killing off the unassimilated abandoned woman. Chapter two argues that Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen amplifies Ophelia’s folk and ballad associations in their portrayal of the Jailer’s Daughter. Her comedic marital ending is enabled by a collaborative, communal, folk-cure. The play nevertheless registers a proto-feminist awareness of the peculiar losses suffered by early modern women in marriage and this knowledge deeply troubles the Jailer’s Daughter’s happy ending. Chapter three explores the role of Lucibella in The Tragedy of Hoffman arguing that the play is a direct response to Hamlet’s treatment of revenge and that Lucibella is caught up in an authorial project of disambiguation which attempts to return the revenge plot to its morality roots. Chapters four and five explore the narratives of Aspatia in The Maid’s Tragedy and Penthea in The Broken Heart, finding in their very conformism to the behaviours prescribed for them, both by the Ophelia type itself and by early modern society in general, a radical protest against the limitations and repressions of those roles. This thesis is consistently invested in the competing dialectics and authorities of oral and textual mediums in these plays. The Ophelia type, perhaps because of Hamlet’s Ophelia’s identification with the ballad corpus, proves an interesting gauge of each play’s engagement with emergent notions of textual authority in the early modern period.