The Machiavellian villain has long been the subject of discussion among critics of the Elizabethan drama. This essay attempts to analyse with some precision evidence from history and the drama of the relationship of the literary to the real political figure. It attempts to indicate the answer to the questions: In what way does the sinister stage personality symbolize the real experience of the Elizabethans ? What is the relationship of this character to that of the prince delineated by Machiavelli ? Niccolo Machiavelli, whose name has been attached to the typical sixteenth century unscrupulous and diabolically cunning cloak and dagger murderer and politician was in fact the founder of modern political science. He was a responsible and esteemed servant of the foremost city state of his time in Italy, and his theses on princely rule and on the principles underlying republican government have established themselves as texts in the courses of universities. It would appear, then, that the Machiavellian of the Elizabethan stage requires some explaining. An examination of the history of English government during the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries reveals that the practice of the kings and chief ministers of England was governed by the precepts on power that Machiavelli so brilliantly set forth in his writings; and investigation of the popular reaction to the practices he exposed makes clear that it took a sharp turn toward the close of the sixteenth century, when the bogey of Machiavellian villainy asserted Itself in England, appearing in its most spectacular form in the plays of the last two decades of that century and the first decade of the seventeenth. It becomes apparent from a consideration of the facts of history and of the record of public opinion that the Machiavellian villain epitomized the fear of the ambitious Individual experienced by a despotism faced on two sides by a threat to its claim to absolute power; and that the menace that threatened the Tudors from the reactionary nobility on the one hand and from the upstart merchant aristocracy on the other found dramatic expression in the extravagant, ruthless, self-seeking villain who inevitably was characterized by the name of the theoretician of that absolute princely rule by which alone the confusions of the end of the medieval era could be resolved into a new and more advanced order of society. Such paradoxes are not unknown in history. The great dramas of Elizabethan England present not only the Machiavellian Barabas, the prototype for all subsequent villains in the cloak and dagger tradition, they present al so such figures as Richard, Duke of York, Henry IV, Henry V and the brilliant dialogue of Volumnia In Coriolanus, proofs, every one of them, that the sound political science of Machiavelli upon which the Tudor monarchs built their institutions and formulated their laws also reached the people through the stage, although these latter characterizations were not associated with the name of Machiavelli. The conclusion arrived at from a careful examination of a selected number of plays by Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare is that the true Machiavellian prince was most effectively represented in drama by the great princes in the historical plays of Shakespeare, and particularly in the figure of Henry V in the play of that name; and that the essence of the Machiavellian thesis on The Prince was poetically most succinctly and explicitly phrased in the dialogue of Volumnla in Coriolanus. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This essay deals with the London citizen in Elizabethan drama from 1590-1620. In it I have tried to give a picture of the citizen's possession, habits and beliefs as they appear in the plays of the period. In the introduction I defined the terms I used, defended the limits of the essay,and discussed the sources. I set forth, also, the method that I followed in arranging the material. I divided the essay into two sections. In the first I gave the background for the plays by describing,in-chapter one, the development of the citizen class; In chapter two, the appearance of London; In chapter three, the ideals of the sixteenth century citizen. In the second section I discussed various portions of the citizen's life and supported my conclusions by many references to the drama. The second section was based almost directly on the plays. The fourth chapter was the one exception. In it I discussed the playwrights' contribution to the middle class drama and their attitudes towards the citizens. The fifth chapter illustrated the third one and, on the whole, followed the same plan. I included in it, however, references to the vices into which the citizen was led by two, eager a pursuit of his ideals. Chapter six dealt with Elizabethan business management and chapter seven with the position of the citizen's womenfolk. Under business management, I considered the merchant adventurer, the loan merchant or usurer, the craftsman and the apprentice. In the following chapter I examined the citizen's attitude towards women and its reflection in the drama. The houses and gardens, food and drink, jewels and clothing of the London citizen were the subjects of chapter eight. Religion and superstition was the heading for chapter nine and Morals and Mores for chapter ten. In the former I gave illustrations of the Londoner 's attitude towards Puritans and Roman Catholics and examples of blue citizen's amazing belief in all forms of magic. The tenth chapter contained references to theft, murder,and adultery as well as to smoking, swearing, drinking and playgolng. The succeeding two chapters were concerned,firstly, with the Londoner's opinion of social welfare and, secondly, with his concept of the state. Under these headings I discussed laws against vagrants; imprisonment for debt, insanity or immorality, and references to the citizen's ideal state. In the thirteenth chapter I listed the amusements of the middle class and examined the citizen's response to the theatre, plays, books, games, puppet shows, dances,and songs. In the second last chapter I attempted to define the conventional Elizabethan opinion of various trades and professions. In my conclusion I recapitulated the points that I had made throughout the essay. I drew attention to the constant appearance of two attitudes towards the citizen, mentioned again the reasons that I gave for them, and stated,once more, my opinion of their respective truths. I repeated that I thought a middle course had to be taken between the two attitudes. Then, I discussed briefly the artistic value of the middle class drama and concluded that it it possessed little, if any, literary merit and contained, few memorable figures. I spoke, finally, of the plays'value as social documents. I said that they contained much information on details of food and drink, but added that only in the early part of the period could they be said to reflect the citizen's ethos completely. From 1610 on the drama seemed to me to be too one-sided to be very reliable or of much value in helping one form a balanced picture of the London citizen's attitude of mind. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

In the four early modern revenge tragedies I study, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, the ubiquitous depictions of corporeal violence underscore the authors’ skepticism of the human tendency to infuse bodies – physical manifestations of both agency and vulnerability – with symbolism. The revengers in these plays try to avenge the death of a loved one whose disfigured body remains unburied and often continues to occupy a place on stage, but their efforts to infuse corpses with meaning instead reveal the revengers’ perverse obsession with mutilation as spectacle. In Chapter one, I show how in The Spanish Tragedy Thomas Kyd portrays the characters’ assertions of body-soul unity to be arbitrary attempts to justify self-serving motives. Although Hieronimo treats Horatio’s dead body as a signifier of his own emotions, he displays it, alongside the bodies of his enemies, as just another rotting corpse. In Chapter two, I explore how in Titus Andronicus, William Shakespeare questions the efficacy of rituals for maintaining social order by depicting how the play’s characters manipulate rituals intended to celebrate peace as opportunities to exact vengeance; Titus demands human sacrifice as not just an accompanying element, but a central motive of rituals ostensibly intended to signify commemoration. In Chapter three, I read The Revenger’s Tragedy as illustrating Thomas Middleton’s characterization of the depiction of corporeal mutilation as an overused, generic convention; the play’s revenger, Vindice, attributes multiple, constantly shifting, meanings to the rotting skull of his lover, which he uses as a murder weapon. In Chapter four I argue that in The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster destabilizes spectators’ interpretive capacities; within this play’s unconventional dramatic structure, the main characters use somatic imagery to associate bodily dismemberment with moral disintegration. Corpses, the tangible remains of once vigorous, able-bodied relatives, serve as central components of respectful commemoration or as mementos of vengeance, yet these dead, often gruesomely mutilated bodies also invite repulsion or perverse curiosity. Thus, rather than honoring the deceased, revengers objectify corpses as frightening spectacles or even use them as weapons.

No description available.

Closure is one of the most important putative goals for highly structured Renaissance verse. Elements of structure—for example, sophisticated prosody or the embedding of a poem within a web of intertextual relationships—determine how poets work toward closure. This project explores how verse forms and genre manifest poets’ attempts to create resolution, and, significantly, how often the challenges of the process instead become the object of focus. Developing a New Formalist approach that focuses on how literary forms are inherently responsive (both to the social conventions that inform various genres and to the expressive goals of individual authors), I examine texts in four important Renaissance poetic genres: epyllion (William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis [1593]), satire (Joseph Hall’s Virgidemiae [1598, 1599]), religious lyric (George Herbert’s The Temple [1633]), and pastoral elegy (John Milton’s Epitaphium Damonis [1639] and Lycidas [1637, 1645]). These works illuminate some of the most significant strategies of authors who often meditate on the appeal of definitive, resolved conclusions and also on the complex ways their works become conditioned by the hope and struggle for resolution.

No description available.

This thesis analyses the culture of printed images during the Elizabethan period, particularly those images of a religious nature. Focusing on images which depict invisible beings (i.e. angels, God, demons etc.), the thesis addresses the assumption that Protestant England all but completely eradicated religious visual imagery from society. Examining images that were first created and printed in Elizabethan England as well as older images which had been recycled from earlier texts and others imported from Europe, the research offers an analysis of Protestant printed imagery between 1558 and 1603. Questions of how images were read, altered, augmented, copied and transmitted across time and space have been posed. What was depicted and how? How were religious images used? What was their understood role in early modern print culture? How did Protestants distinguish between church images to be destroyed and printed images to be read? In this, the images have been historically contextualised within both the theological and cultural milieu of Calvinist theology, the growing international marketplace of print and early modern English society. Attention has been paid to how images were received by readers and how they may have been seen. Emphasis is placed upon the role of the printed image as both a representation and an agent of culture, as well as an integral aspect of the printing industry. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to explain how printed images were employed and utilised by both printer and reader in the context of an iconoclastic English Reformation.

Despite a wealth of scholarship on the Tudors’ printed and visual propaganda, little has been written on how the population received this material. Doubts over how far either media penetrated a largely illiterate society with questionable access to the visual arts have likely been partly responsible, but as studies increasingly disprove these assumptions the need to address this gap becomes more pressing. After establishing that the governments from Henry VIII to Elizabeth were interested, to varying extents, in propagating particular messages to their subjects, this thesis employs a diverse range of sources to analyse popular responses to official pamphlets, portraits and other visual iconography. Primarily using inventories, the ownership of these different types is examined, in particular exploring the mixed motives that underlay the display of monarchical portraits and royal devices. Broadly positive reactions to propaganda are then discussed, similarly uncovering the different, potentially subversive reasons that drove people to accept government materials. The evidence of marginalia in surviving copies of polemical works is then used to show both the different approaches taken to reading official books, and how people engaged with several specific pamphlets, illuminating the success of particular arguments and propagandistic techniques. Finally, negative reactions to government images and books are investigated, highlighting not only opposition but, conversely, more evidence of propaganda’s positive impact. Analysing reception in these ways not only permits judgements about the extent and nature of propaganda’s success; it also provides valuable insights into important historiographical debates, like the progress of the English Reformation and the potential emergence of a public sphere, besides more generally revealing widely-held attitudes that underpinned sixteenth-century society and conditioned the relationship between rulers and ruled.

In contradistinction to critical trends which have rendered Milton’s thought disembodied, this thesis studies how seventeenth-century material culture informed Milton’s poetry and prose at the epistemic level and by suggesting a palette of forms for literary play. The first chapter explores the early modern culture of fruit. At the epistemic level, practices of fruit cultivation and consumption inform Milton’s imagination and his vocabulary, thereby connecting their historic-material lives with their symbolic ones. Milton further turns commonplace gestures of fruit consumption into narrative devices that frame discussions of agency, aspiration, sinful and right practice. The second chapter examines two floral catalogues to discover how they find shape through the epistemologies of flowers, ceremony, and decorative arts. Here material culture shapes literary convention, as one catalogue is found to secret ceremonial consolation in its natural ingenuousness, while the other’s delight in human physicality upsets the distinctions between inner virtue and outer ornament, faith and rite. In the third chapter, urban epistemologies of light, darkness, movement, and space are examined through urban phenomena: skyline, suburbs, highways, theft, and waterways. By interpellating contemporary debates, these categories anatomise fallen character, intent, action, and their consequences. Milton’s instinctive distaste for urban nuisances is interesting in this Republican figure and is subversive of some ideologies of the text. Discursive and material aspects meet again in the fourth chapter in a discussion of his graphic presentations of geography on the page. Usually prone to analyses of textual knowledge, they are also informed by the embodiment of knowledge as material object. Milton’s search for a fitting cartographic aesthetic for the Biblical narrative and for the rhetoric of his characters leads him to an increasing consciousness of the ideologies energising these material forms. The fifth chapter explores Milton’s engagement with forms of armour and weapons. Military preferences for speed and mobility over armour help Milton explore the difference between unfallen and fallen being. Milton also uses his inescapably proleptic knowledge of arms and armour as a field of imaginative play for representations that are both anachronistic and typological. These lead to a discussion of imitation in the mythic imagination. In each of these studies, we witness Milton’s consciousness of his temporal and proleptic location, and his attempts to marry the temporal and the pan- or atemporal. In the conclusion I suggest that Milton’s simultaneous courting of the atemporal while he is drawn to or draws on temporal material culture imply an incarnational aesthetic.

This thesis considers the civic elite in Coventry during the Reformation, from 1530-1580. It describes how the presence of a longstanding civic and political culture, dating back to the late middle ages, helped to mitigate religious change and bring other economic and social priorities to the fore during this period. The thesis looks at contemporary understanding of ideas of the city, including civic history and political power, as well as the economic forces which shaped the civic government?s interaction with other political hierarchies and the broader social world of the kingdom. It is argued that, although the corporation was keen to protect and define the political and physical boundaries of the city, they lived in an environment that was permeable to outside influence and the presence of geographically broad social and political networks. Urban political disputes are also examined, with the aim of elucidating those principles which ensured the smooth running of civic government and the control of the city by the corporation and the civic elite. Religious disagreements during the 1540s and 1550s are examined in detail, to show why, despite the potential for turmoil, the city never saw the breakdown of order or the political hierarchy. The spread of protestantism during later decades is dissected, alongside attempts to maintain urban religious provision at an acceptable standard, and to preserve the structures and hierarchies of civic religion. The thesis concludes that, even in cities like Coventry, where the effects of the dispute and dissonance that came with the growth of a new religion were strongest, it was possible for the traditional moral rules of urban governance to ensure that the city was an ordered and successful society well into the latter half of the sixteenth century.