<p> Utopias often elicit visions of full-fledged societies that operate more successfully in contrast to a society of the present based on a principle of cognitive estrangement where the daily routines of a new civilization strike readers as strange and advantageous. While William Shakespeare's drama rarely portrays radical societies that speak directly to the fantastic nature of utopia, it does feature moments that draw attention to desires for social change, presenting glimmers of the utopian impulse throughout his work. In this dissertation, I use utopia as critical approach for analyzing Shakespeare's comedies, romances, and tragedies, specifically <i>As You Like It, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet,</i> and <i>Macbeth.</i> While critics have approached the <i>The Tempest</i> as a utopian play, other works by Shakespeare do not receive much attention from this perspective. This dissertation addresses the lack of attention paid to other plays, illustrating the degree to which the health of the state as a theme featured prominently in his works. I argue that the desires expressed by characters in these plays capture the wishes and despairs of entire social ranks during the Elizabethan and Jacobean, connecting their wishes and fantasies to utopian and dystopian analysis. <i>As You Like It</i> and <i>The Tempest</i> feature utopic settings and address themes of colonialism and egalitarianism. Yet, rather than present locations of harmony, these plays explore the problems and contradictions that spring from the attempts to actualize a utopian climate. Characters in <i> The Taming of the Shrew,</i> <i>Twelfth Night</i>, and <i> Romeo and Juliet</i> possess radical aspirations, and they discover opportunities to transform their identities as it relates to their respective societies. However, these characters ultimately fail to rupture the ideologies of their societies. In my final chapter, I argue how dystopian themes arise from the depictions of tyranny and treachery in <i>Hamlet</i> and <i> Macbeth.</i> The transgressions of the Kings in both plays plague their kingdoms. Tackling Shakespeare from a utopian lens illustrates that rather than forming alternative, ideal societies, the concept can be understood as an ambiguous, unfinished dialectical process that strives for social betterment. </p>

<p> This paper aspires to perform an analysis of Early Modern character by thinking of character as a formative process, spanning playwriting to part-learning to dramatic performance. My analysis, which will focus on Shakespeare's <i> Coriolanus</i> and <i>Julius Caesar</i>, dismisses any notion of the Shakespeare play as holistic or complete text. I draw from Tiffany Stern and Simon Palfrey's <i>Shakespeare in Parts</i>, which establishes a methodology for the analysis of "part" or "cue" scripts, texts that feature a single character's lines amputated from the larger play. </p><p> In the Early Modern period, an actor's "part" or "side" would have included his own lines and the cues he needed to know to enter the scene or begin speaking. The part would have been learned in isolation, so the actor would have relied on cues to understand how his role fit into the larger play. I argue that the function of isolated parts and cues, or the last three to five words of any character's lines, is currently underestimated in critical analysis of Shakespeare texts, especially in literary close readings that focus on "character." </p><p> The textual space that Palfrey and Stern label the "cue space" continues to be underestimated, I imagine, because critics still view this space as an overly speculative construct. It is true that we cannot speak concretely about what an Early Modern actor would or would not have done, but we can highlight the implications of a potential performance decision. Cues, sites of stability surrounded by malleability, are ripe with potential performance decisions. By drawing from a methodology grounded in an understanding of parts and cues, we may more clearly contextualize the combative collaboration between actor and playwright through which character is formed.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-02, Section: A, page: 0582. Adviser: Carol Thomas Neely. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 176-198) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Nancy Blake. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 209-223) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

<p> This dissertation analyzes war discourse in sixteenth-century military handbooks and history plays with a focus on formal performances of martial rhetoric and the informal language used to rally audiences and justify war. Chapter One uses Rhetorical Genre Studies to classify the pre-battle oration as a social genre with common structures and themes, familiar not only to exhorting commanders and their soldiers but also to the general Renaissance populace. Establishing the pre-battle speech as a highly-conventionalized, even ritualized form of oratory, Chapter Two argues that performances of the genre are social actions in which audience familiarity elevates the speech act. This heightened valuation raises anticipation for the rhetorical moment and helps transform events like Elizabeth's Tilbury Speech and Henry V's Agincourt address into transcendent hero narratives. Chapter Three dissects formal justifications of war in William Shakespeare's <i>Henry V</i> and George Peele's <i> The Battle of Alcazar</i>. The chapter demonstrates a playwright's ability either to persuade an audience of legitimate cause, even in the face of possible war crimes, by systematically leading viewers through the rules of Just Cause Theory or to complicate legitimacy assumptions by disrupting the expected framework and destabilizing the systematic narrative. </p><p> The final two chapters examine informal motives in the trope of martial masculinity and in figurative language descriptions of war. Conducting a character analysis of official and surrogate martial commanders in Shakespeare's <i> 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI,</i> Chapter Four evaluates recurrent themes of effeminacy in the manuals. It connects anxieties about masculinity to questions of patriarchal power and uncertainties about sociocultural transitions occuring within an English society that at once idealized peace and vilified it as emasculating. Using Cognitive Metaphor Theory, Chapter Five uncovers similar anxieties embedded in the figurative expressions used to describe war in which warfare is conceptualized as natural and unpredictable, but England's men lack the knowledge and training to keep the country ordered and war-ready. This study advocates for an increased literary-historical awareness of war discourse and gives explicit evidence for connecting the treatises to early modern literature, an assumption that remains as-yet unproven by prevailing scholarship.</p>