The scholars who assert that motherhood acquires new favor in the early modem period and the critics who contend that male subjectivity and patriarchy in Shakespeare's plays depend on the repudiation of the mother both base their perspectives on an understanding of motherhood which is too monolithic. To contribute to a more historically specific understanding, I draw on the work of numerous historians and examine humanist and reformist writings, the Corpus Christi cycles, and two Shakespearean plays. I find that the medieval "calculative" and "incarnational" versions of motherhood enabled women to exercise considerable control over their sexuality and fertility and clout in their families and communities, and that the Corpus Christi cycles served as a mechanism to extend multiple facets of these versions of the maternal. While the early modern period inherited the expansive, medieval versions of motherhood, the "new," restrictive form of motherhood advocated by the humanists and reformers helped to devalue the inherited forms, promote a greater spiritual, physical, and economic dependence of women on men, and enlarge the scope of the paternal at the expense of the maternal. My examination of Macbeth demonstrates that the play employs Scottish history so as to heighten attention to the risks produced by Elizabeth I's and James I's adaptations of the competing versions of motherhood available in the early modern period. It suggests that James's adaptation is especially conducive to instability, since it generates a contradiction in the hereditary system of political power-the simultaneous need for and exclusion of women/mothers. This contradiction coupled with the diminution of the feminine/maternal makes it more likely that murder will be construed as an alternative means of being "born" into the succession. Whereas Macbeth shifts from constructions more aligned with incarnational and calculative mothers to constructions more affiliated with new mothers, Coriolanus appears nearly throughout to be informed by the contest over motherhood. By exploring this contest, I add to the understanding of the economic, political, familial, and theatrical aspects of the play, and make it possible to suggest that Coriolanus demonstrates peace is achieved when a version of motherhood resembling the expansive, medieval forms is embraced.

The scholars who assert that motherhood acquires new favor in the early modem period and the critics who contend that male subjectivity and patriarchy in Shakespeare's plays depend on the repudiation of the mother both base their perspectives on an understanding of motherhood which is too monolithic. To contribute to a more historically specific understanding, I draw on the work of numerous historians and examine humanist and reformist writings, the Corpus Christi cycles, and two Shakespearean plays. I find that the medieval "calculative" and "incarnational" versions of motherhood enabled women to exercise considerable control over their sexuality and fertility and clout in their families and communities, and that the Corpus Christi cycles served as a mechanism to extend multiple facets of these versions of the maternal. While the early modern period inherited the expansive, medieval versions of motherhood, the "new," restrictive form of motherhood advocated by the humanists and reformers helped to devalue the inherited forms, promote a greater spiritual, physical, and economic dependence of women on men, and enlarge the scope of the paternal at the expense of the maternal. My examination of Macbeth demonstrates that the play employs Scottish history so as to heighten attention to the risks produced by Elizabeth I's and James I's adaptations of the competing versions of motherhood available in the early modern period. It suggests that James's adaptation is especially conducive to instability, since it generates a contradiction in the hereditary system of political power-the simultaneous need for and exclusion of women/mothers. This contradiction coupled with the diminution of the feminine/maternal makes it more likely that murder will be construed as an alternative means of being "born" into the succession. Whereas Macbeth shifts from constructions more aligned with incarnational and calculative mothers to constructions more affiliated with new mothers, Coriolanus appears nearly throughout to be informed by the contest over motherhood. By exploring this contest, I add to the understanding of the economic, political, familial, and theatrical aspects of the play, and make it possible to suggest that Coriolanus demonstrates peace is achieved when a version of motherhood resembling the expansive, medieval forms is embraced. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

<div>When, each holiday season, William Shakespeare’s newest plays were presented for King James I of England and his court, they shared the stage with propagandistic performances and ceremonies intended to glorify the monarch and legitimate his political ideals. Between 1608 and 1613, however, the King’s son, Prince Henry Frederick, sought to use the court stage to advance his own, oppositional ideology. By examining the entertainments through which James and Henry openly competed to control this crucial mythmaking mechanism, the present investigation recreates the increasingly unstable conditions surrounding and transforming each of Shakespeare’s last plays as they were first performed at court. I demonstrate that, once read in their original courtly contexts, these plays speak directly to each stage of that escalating rivalry and interrogate the power of ceremonial display, the relationship between fiction and statecraft, and the destabilization of monarchically imposed meaning, just as they would have then.<br></div>

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.