The texts and records of the household performances of early modern women collected and examined in this thesis, which together have not yet been the subject of any extended scholarly work, reveal that women performed in the household far more often and in many more ways than is yet acknowledged in scholarship. These texts and records also show that the household could be an amenable performance space for early modern women, both amateur and professional, aristocratic and not. This reconceptualization of the place of women’s performances in the household, I argue, necessitates an adjustment of received ideas of the ethical and moral status of those performances as well as a reevaluation of the household itself. I reassess the equation between theatrical performance and immorality and interrogate the “inheren[t] subversive[ness]” that one critic argues is found in all women’s household plays. While I maintain that women’s household performances could have multiple significations, this thesis focuses on performances that permitted women to shape their own reputations positively in household space, where women were agents influencing domestic life through their theatre. Chapter 1, the Introduction, outlines the critical field, positions women within the performance tradition of the household, and discusses the status of their performances, centering on the relationship between theatrical performance, agency, and feminine virtue. Chapter 2 focuses on royal progress entertainment, discussing the performances of domestic virtue of Queen Elizabeth’s female hosts which not only had the capacity to be received as virtuous, but worked to promote familial and class legitimacy. Chapter 3 talks about the banquets created and served by women, identifying those banquets as a form of theatre, and linking women’s creativity with their embodiment of domestic ideals through the performance of hospitality. Chapter 4 discusses touring women performers as accepted, acknowledged, and skillful theatre professionals who were licenced by the state to perform and who were permitted to perform in households and towns across England. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2007-09-27 15:08:00.304

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This research-creation thesis describes and analyzes the dramaturgical methodologies of verbatim theatre – a form of documentary theatre that uses transcripts as the dominant source of its dialogue – through the practical exercise of play writing. This paper marks the theoretical component of my thesis, which analyzes both the dramaturgical process and the historical context of my play Exhibit A. Using verbatim transcripts from legal evidence for its dialogue, the play examines the psychology of two teenage boys responsible for the brutal rape and murder of an 18-year-old Canadian woman in 2010. As documentary theatre emphasizes socio-political themes, this thesis considers the dramaturgical, aesthetic, and ethical considerations of verbatim theatre through my experience as a playwright and researcher. Acknowledging both the historical antecedents of documentary theatre and its contemporary examples, this thesis will define an original typology of verbatim theatre entitled the “Subcategories of Verbatim Theatre”. These subcategories are identified as Tribunal, Literary, Historical Drama, Expository and Participatory. Each privileges different types and usages of documents, which are further defined as being primarily related to “text” or “aural” based testimony. The thesis relates the dramaturgical principles of each subcategory to artistic choices made in Exhibit A. A description of the various incarnations of verbatim and documentary theatre, as well as an analysis of my experience as a documentary playwright examines the dramatic representation of reality as highly constructed in this form of theatre where the selection and editing of a documentary play's archive is a creative process that is not dissimilar from the creation of fictional drama. In that sense, the documentary genre can be said to present a dramatic representation of the playwright's subjective version of the truth. Exhibit A thus stands as my creative reconstruction of the evidence presented in the Kimberly Proctor murder trial.

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