Thesis--Dorpat. / Includes bibliographical references.

Inaug.-diss.--Berlin. / Vita. No more published?

Thesis--Dorpat.

Critical examinations of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus almost always occlude questions of the domestic. Yet, a major portion of the play’s action takes place in a house and the methods of the characters’ revenge can be construed as domestic. More simply, in Titus, household properties and domestic rituals are transformed into instruments of vengeance. With a particular focus on the cultural and historical conditions governing literary production in early modern England, this thesis draws on previous scholarly work and examines the intersection of domesticity and revenge in Titus. The thesis is divided into two sections, each of which addresses different, though overlapping, ways in which domesticity – broadly speaking – operates in the play. The first section examines the play’s two competing revenge plots, demonstrating that not only are they domestic in nature, but also that many of the play’s features align closely with generic traits and devices integral to plays classified as “Domestic Tragedies.” The second section focuses on Titus Andronicus’ Senecan roots and examines carefully the function(s) of the domestic setting in Titus as well as Seneca’s Thyestes, one of Shakespeare’s sources. I explore the ways in which the play’s domestic setting is distinctly Senecan and discuss Shakespeare’s alterations to his Latin source. While the house becomes a site of domestic and dynastic anxiety in both Seneca’s Thyestes and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s play evinces a concern with domestic privacy that Seneca’s does not.

For my MFA internship requirement, I currently serve as an acting intern at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater in Partnership with UCF. I was cast as Lavinia in OST’s spring production of Titus Andronicus, and I will use this as my thesis role. It will be the very last show of my MFA career, and it will provide an exceptional opportunity for me to utilize all the skills learned during my three years of MFA classes and training. Jim Helsinger, Artistic Director at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida, will direct the production. I intend to approach this role in a manner very similar to my MFA coursework: through vocal work, physical work, and research. Lavinia is a Shakespearean character; Shakespeare is immediately associated with language. However, Lavinia is interesting because the role’s vocal work will require both verbal and non-verbal experimentation. I will be able to utilize the various language tools and techniques I have learned in my MFA voice classes to approach Shakespeare’s text; but Lavinia has her tongue cut off halfway through the show, so I anticipate additional vocal, non-verbal contributions to make the role unique. Physicality will also play a large part of my acting work in this particular role, more so, perhaps, than in a typical Shakespearean ingénue. Because Lavinia is verbally silenced, her body must also speak. No approach to a Shakespeare role would be complete without character work, and research will play a large part of this role in particular. Mr. Helsinger encourages his interns to watch other productions of the same character and to perform visual research from which to pick iv and choose. I also plan to do research on violence against women and its significance in both the play and real life in order to better inform my vocal and physical choices. By delving into this role, I plan to explore several questions. What exactly makes up the voice, as heard or interpreted by an audience, of a Shakespearean character? How has my graduate study prepared me for this role? What techniques work for my own personal process as an actor? How do the voice, mind, and body combine to inform a character’s arc, and which of these will prove most powerful to an audience’s understanding of that character’s journey? Is it possible to retain the audience’s attention in a Shakespearean, text-oriented, production without using words? I hope to answer these questions through the process of combining, in one character, all of the aspects of my MFA journey.

In offering readings of Shakespeare’s tragic women on film, this thesis explores bodies that are caught between signifiers of absence and presence: the woman’s body that is present with absent body parts; the woman’s body that is spoken about or alluded to when absent from view; the woman’s living body that appears as a corpse; the woman’s body that must be exposed and concealed from sight. These are bodies that appear on the borderline of meaning, that open up a marginal or liminal space of investigation. In concentrating on a state of ‘betweenness’, I am seeking to offer new interpretive possibilities for bodies that have become the site of much critical anxiety, and bodies that, due to their own peculiar liminality, have so far been critically ignored. In reading Shakespeare’s tragic women on film, I am interested specifically in screen representations of Gertrude’s sexualised body that is both absent and present in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Desdemona’s (un)chaste body that is both exposed and concealed in film adaptations of Othello; Juliet’s ‘living corpse’ that represents life and death in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; the woman’s naked body in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971) that is absent from Shakespeare’s play-text; and Lavinia’s violated, dismembered body in Julie Taymor’s (Titus, 1999) and Titus Andronicus, which, in signifying both life and death, wholeness and fragmentation, absence and presence, something and nothing, embodies many of the paradoxes explored within this thesis. Through readings that demonstrate a combined interest in Shakespeare’s plays, Shakespeare films, and Shakespeare criticism, this thesis brings these liminal bodies into focus, revealing how an understanding of their ‘absent presence’ can affect our responses as spectators of Shakespeare’s tragedies on film.

No description available.

Titus Andronicus is infamously Shakespeare’s first, and bloodiest, tragedy, but only a few scholars link this violence with the Renaissance culture of anatomy and dissection. Although scholars mention the anatomical language in Titus Andronicus, their analyses stop short of more fully developing the rich relationship between dissection and Shakespeare’s play. To remedy this oversight, this paper explores the debt that Titus Andronicus owes to contemporary anatomy and dissection culture by comparing Titus Andronicus (est. 1590) with Andreas Vesalius’s revolutionary anatomy textbook, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543). Specifically, this paper will identify four major intents of the Fabrica: 1) to display, 2) to instruct, 3) to interpret, and 4) to aestheticize the interior of the human body, and illustrate how these four traits figure in the representation of Lavinia’s body in the play. By mirroring the Fabrica’s four intents in both anatomy text and play, as well as examining the Fabrica’s images and text itself, this analysis reveals a pertinent difference. While in many ways Titus Andronicus celebrates the De Humani Corporis Fabrica, the play applies a heavy dose of skepticism to Vesalius’s underlying epistemological assumption that the body is knowable.

No description available.

Shakespeare references humoral medical theory and social definitions of gender throughout much of his work. His references to medical practices like purging, the siphoning of excessive emotional fluids to bring the body into balance, are more than allusions to medical theories. Shakespeare's works unveil and challenge early modern approaches to emotional experience, most particularly when it comes to traumatic experiences that overwhelm comprehension. In Titus Andronicus (1592), The Rape of Lucrece (1593), Hamlet (1603), King Lear (1608), and Macbeth (1606), Shakespeare invokes humoral theory to articulate the early modern traumatic experience and to criticize the efficacy of purging in representations of trauma. For Shakespeare, the siphoning of destabilized emotions, through metaphorical and rhetorical practices, has dangerous consequences for bodies coded as feminine.