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The incest prohibition, though ostensibly "universal," has inspired a wide range of explanations and definitions both within and between cultures. Intense debate sprung up around the incest taboo during the matrimonially tumultuous reign of Henry VIII, leading to the great interest in this theme, which flourished on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages. Although Shakespeare contributed a number of works to the incest canon, King Lear does not treat the incest motif overtly such that many critics have ignored its crucial role in that play. A synthetic theoretical approach is useful in exploring the wide-reaching implications of father-daughter love in Lear, which challenges the parameters of the incest prohibition. / King Lear's effort to obstruct the marriage of Cordelia in the first scene constitutes a violation of the incest prohibition according to Levi-Strauss's notion of exogamy. To this violation, Cordelia contributes her belief that marriage requires only partial withdrawal of love from her father. Lear's unfulfilled love for his daughter Cordelia, whom he figures into wife and mother roles, exhibits oedipal traits and seeks gratification in Goneril and Regan. Lear experiences their "unnatural" refusal of his desires as emasculating sexual rejection, which manifests as the disease and guilt of transgression. He understands virtuous love as fatally tainted by sexual desire; the theme of love-as-death gains momentum. The tempest emerges as an agent of justice and punishment. Lear and Cordelia's reunion reasserts the themes of adulterous love and love-as-death, foreshadowing their shared death. Their subsequent capture introduces an expanded notion of the father-daughter relationship, including the possibility of conjugal love, which is consummated in their marriage in death.

Most people place their sincerest hopes for emotional fulfillment on a rewarding family life. The "loved ones" that constitute our nuclear and extended familial worlds are the primary beneficiaries of our affections and of the fruits of our labors. In return for the primacy we accord our family members, we expect their behavior to demonstrate their loyalty to the clan. However, at a certain point obligations to the family can conflict with the needs of the individual. In this thesis I examine how filial duties influence the plights of the tragic heroines in Sophocles's Antigone and Shakespeare's King Lear. Both Antigone and Cordelia organize their lives around the virtue of family honor, and yet the strength of these commitments is not sufficient to spare them from their respective, calamitous ends. Their unwavering dedication to the sanctity of family bonds leaves them susceptible, as individuals, to great harm.

William' s Window se traduirait probablement par "veduta sur William [Shakespeare]". Car il s'agit bien d'une ouverture pratiquée, sinon sur un tableau, du moins dans un livre: le Premier Folio de 1623. Contenant à lui seul trente-six des trente-huit (ou trente-neuf) pièces attribuées à Shakespeare, ce livre demeure l'édition princeps des études Shakespeariennes. Notre étude consiste essentiellement en une analyse graphique -ou un catalogue raisonné -du métathéâtre de Shakespeare. Métathéâtre dont l'un des principaux effets esthétiques serait cette mise-en-abyme du processus dramatique lui-même (où la représentation se met elle-même en représentation). Comme notre sous-titre l'indique, nous tâchons d'établir combien le théâtre de Shakespeare était métathéâtral par le biais notamment de ce que nous appelons sa transparence ou son auto-réflexivité représentative (pour les théoriciens de l'art, son opacité). Les pages qui suivent rendent compte (en anglais, hélas) de trois lectures du Folio, chacune d'entre-elles ayant pour but d'extraire autant d'exemples que possible d'un certain type de transparence. La première lecture (chapitre 1) porte sur les engins métathéâtraux en tant que tels (pièces-dans-la-pièce et déguisements) et résulte en un catalogue visuel de leur récurrence à l'intérieur de la structure même des pièces. La seconde lecture (chapitre 2) répertorie tous les termes faisant référence au théâtre, et la troisième (chapitre 3) tous ceux portant sur la représentation mimétique. Le catalogue du premier chapitre, et les deux répertoires des chapitres suivants préservent l'ordre des pièces ainsi que les catégories du Folio. Leurs données, cependant, sont rassemblées et reproduites à nouveau, chronologiquement cette fois, dans le dépliant en annexe. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Shakespeare, Premier Folio (First Folio), Métathéâtre, Analyse graphique (coupe formelle).

The promotion of Shakespeare to the centre of the English literary canon was largely facilitated by ten major eighteenth-century editions of his plays: by Nicholas Rowe (1709), Alexander Pope (1723-25), Lewis Theobald (1733), Thomas Hanmer (1744), William Warburton (1747), Samuel Johnson (1765), George Steevens (1766), Edward Capell (1767-68), Johnson and Steevens (1773) and Edmond Malone (1790). The popularity of Newtonian science in eighteenth-century England helps to explain the mentality that impelled this energetic enterprise. In their Prefaces, the editors describe Shakespeare as a Newton-like genius who understood the underlying principles of human nature and expressed them through his characters. Shakespeare, however, unlike Newton, was not a systematic thinker, and the editors are critical of his language and of his tendency to cater to the low tastes of the Elizabethan theatre. They view him as a genius who understood fundamental truths about human nature and, at the same time, metaphorically, as nature itself---a site of heterogeneity and confusion where the editor must find hidden knowledge. They figure themselves as, scientists charged with the task of altering, restoring and annotating Shakespeare's writings. In the editions leading to and including that of Johnson, the editors' focus is on the universality of Shakespeare's discoveries. The early editors promote a transcendental image of Shakespeare as a timeless genius who rose above the relatively barbaric age in which he lived. The two editors following Johnson, however, place an increasing emphasis on Shakespeare's Englishness. While the idea of Shakespeare as a universal genius persists, Steevens and Capell also view him as a specifically English figure whose writings are to a large extent a product of his society. This nationalist emphasis goes hand in hand with an increasingly historical approach to the annotation and textual restoration of Shakespeare. The development of editing as a professional scientific vocation culminates with Malone, who augmented the editorial apparatus with thoroughly researched accounts of Shakespeare's life and theatre. The persistent emphasis on knowledge in the editors' work helps to account for the rise of Shakespeare's canonicity in relation to the Newtonian truth-seeking project of the eighteenth century.

This thesis attempts to resuscitate the use of the much-disparaged term "problem plays" to describe Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure; three works which, I argue, share a strong and unifying thematic interest in the vexed relationship between individual sexual desire and social cohesion. Although each of these plays offers a unique perspective on this conflicted interaction, I attempt to demonstrate through close readings of each work that the broad trajectory traced by the problem plays is a movement from the festive comedies' idealistic faith in the possibilities of both romantic and generic "happy endings," to the bleak cynicism which characterizes the great tragedies' depictions of sexual relationships and social structures. Finally, I point to the romances, particularly The Winter's Tale, which, I argue, rework the problem plays' interest in sexuality and social order in such a way that the growing pessimism and inconclusiveness of these earlier works is transformed into aesthetically balanced narratives of romantic reconciliation and social integration.

This thesis studies the human rights philosophy presented during the first productions of Shakespeare's plays, putting it in touch with that reflected in United Nations human rights law and the political theory of John Rawls. Its opening chapter discusses twentieth-century scholarship exemplary of the criticism relevant to human rights ideas in Shakespeare. The sixteenth-century historical context, so emphatically identified by historians with the institution of modern freedom, is kept in sight throughout, and provides, with the cultural context (especially the semantic context), the key to detailed explications, of four plays: King John, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet and All's Well That Ends Well. Interpreted by these means, the first two plays are seen to have enacted, at the time of their first performances, the religious strife that ironically gave birth both to the ideal of freedom of conscience and ideological complications restricting its implementation. The latter plays unfolded arguments concerning the relationship between epistemology and freedom of conscience. The questions addressed in these four plays range from the relationship between social stability, moral values, and the practicability of freedom of conscience to the criteria whereby coercion and abuse of freedom of conscience may be distinguished from legitimate exercise of freedom of expression. The characteristics of epistemologies enhancing the implementation of freedom of conscience and the educational process that promotes the moral attributes and social conditions necessary for the adoption of these are delineated. The freedom of conscience theory the plays proposed for those members of their first audiences attuned to its metaphoric language is remarkably thought-provoking as regards current challenges in human rights philosophy and law, and reinforces the argument that literature, and in particular theatre, have vital roles in social change and intellectual development.