This thesis provides the first study of the representation, performance, and reception of Shakespeare’s ageing women in early modern and present-day England. It contributes an exposition of the physiology and theory of early modern ageing, drawing on this original material to make an argument for the ageing woman as a source of anxiety within the plays as they were originally staged, and as they are performed and received today. It finds the old and ageing woman in Shakespeare’s drama to be represented as physically and verbally excessive; the thesis also identifies a corresponding urge in the plays and in their reception towards the ageing woman’s containment and control. This containment is exercised in the text, the rehearsal room, the theatre, and the public space of performance reviews. My introduction determines my methodology and establishes the terms of reference for the project. The first chapter defines early modern old age and delivers a study of the early modern literature and theory of the ageing body. Each of the four subsequent chapters explores an ageing female character or characters through the lens of a theme: magic, motherhood, sexuality, and memory. The characters studied are drawn from The Merry Wives of Windsor, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, Coriolanus, King John, All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and Richard III. Some brief concluding remarks complete the thesis. The larger project of the thesis is a cultural study. Throughout, I am keen to learn how characters are talked about as well as written and performed. My effort to understand the work which Shakespeare’s older women are asked to carry out in the present day defines my methodology: I draw on prompt books, production recordings, reviews, costume, photographs, programmes, and interviews with actors and directors to aid my investigation, juxtaposing these with close study of the written plays and the early modern culture and knowledge which underpins them. The word count, exclusive of bibliography but inclusive of all footnotes and an appendix, is approximately 92,000.

This thesis studies the literary genre of pastoral between 1559 and 1647. The first of these dates is that of a work that changed the course of early modern pastoral, Montemayor’s Diana; and the second marks the English translation of Gomberville’s Polexandre, a pastoral romance which exemplifies the shifts in cultural values that re-shaped Montemayor’s model over the century that followed its publication. My study focusses on the significance for this genre of the ethical quality known to classical moral philosophy as otium, and translated in early modern English by words such as peace, leisure, retirement, ease and idleness. Otium has strong historical associations with the tradition of Virgilian pastoral. Its significance in early modern pastorals, however, has been largely overlooked, despite the fact that early modern interest in otium had been revitalised by the rediscovery of some of its most important classical discussions. This renewed interest in otium, I argue, was essential to the development of early modern pastoral. My argument challenges both old and new critical perspectives on pastoral, and engages with key issues in early modern culture which literary scholars have neglected. Older studies understood pastoral otium simply as idyllic retreat; newer ones accept this view, but argue against its privileged and quietist political implications, preferring to concentrate on the tradition of interpreting pastoral as political allegory. Otium’s principal connotations, however, were neither quiet nor idyllic. Though its restorative qualities were sometimes cautiously acknowledged, otium’s potential to corrupt was ever-present, and affected a range of areas including privacy, politics, moral psychology and medicine. When people wanted to imaginatively explore those effects, I argue, pastoral was the genre to which they were most likely to turn. Listening to what pastorals say about otium can play an important role in reconstructing this crucial and misunderstood aspect of early modern culture.

The aim of this paper is to describe the different ways in which syntactic means may be employed to serve as indicators of information structure and to trace the historical development these means underwent from the Early Modern English period up to the present. The research is based on a comparative approach to textual analysis, using two different English translations of Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy, one published in the early 17th century, the other near the end of the 20th . Both versions are analyzed in terms of the ways in which they express the same semantic content through different syntactic means, a special focus being placed on the sphere of individual clauses. Formal disparities between parallel syntactic units are investigated both from the grammatical and communicative perspective, mapping the effect of the differences in syntactic choices on the level of the functional sentence perspective. The study thus attempts to identify the extent to which the standardization of syntactic structures may be viewed as having exercised an influence over the communicative aspects of the language in the period between the grammatical systematization of the 16th and 17th centuries and the Present-day English standards.

This dissertation examines three generations of the Beeston family and its revolutionary impact on the developing world of seventeenth-century London theatre management. Like other early modern businesses, the Beeston enterprise thrived on commercial innovation, the strategic cultivation of patronage, and a capacity to perpetuate itself dynastically. England’s mid-century political crisis disrupted the family’s commercial supremacy but its management system would endure as the de facto standard structuring successful theatre business long after the Restoration. Following a critical introduction to the early history of theatrical management, the thesis’s four chapters chart the creation and institution of the Beeston management model. Chapter One examines the early career of Christopher Beeston, a minor stageplayer from Shakespeare’s company in the 1590s who set out ambitiously to reshape theatrical management at Drury Lane’s Cockpit playhouse in 1616. Chapter Two analyzes Beeston’s later career, particularly his unique appointment as “Governor” of a new royal company in 1637. New evidence suggests that the office was a reward for service to the aristocratic Herbert family and that traditional preferment was therefore as important as market competition to the creation of the Caroline paradigm of autocratic theatrical “governance.” Chapter Three explores the overlooked career of Elizabeth Beeston who, upon inheriting the Cockpit in 1638, became the first woman in English history to manage a purpose-built London theatre. New evidence concerning her subsequent husband, Sir Lewis Kirke, an adventurer to Canada, ship-money captain, and Royalist military governor, indicates political ideology motivated their joint effort to keep the Beeston playhouse open during the civil wars. Chapter Four addresses the question of why the larger Beeston enterprise eventually collapsed even as the management system it refined continued to support later theatrical entrepreneurs. During the Interregnum, contemporaries anticipated that William and George Beeston, Christopher’s son and grandson, would eventually dominate a renascent London stage; however, managers such as William Davenant and Thomas Betterton ultimately adapted the Beeston system more efficiently to the political environment after 1660. Thereafter, exhausted patronage, lost assets, and the abandonment of family tradition marked the end of the Beestons’ influential association with the London stage.

This dissertation examines three generations of the Beeston family and its revolutionary impact on the developing world of seventeenth-century London theatre management. Like other early modern businesses, the Beeston enterprise thrived on commercial innovation, the strategic cultivation of patronage, and a capacity to perpetuate itself dynastically. England’s mid-century political crisis disrupted the family’s commercial supremacy but its management system would endure as the de facto standard structuring successful theatre business long after the Restoration. Following a critical introduction to the early history of theatrical management, the thesis’s four chapters chart the creation and institution of the Beeston management model. Chapter One examines the early career of Christopher Beeston, a minor stageplayer from Shakespeare’s company in the 1590s who set out ambitiously to reshape theatrical management at Drury Lane’s Cockpit playhouse in 1616. Chapter Two analyzes Beeston’s later career, particularly his unique appointment as “Governor” of a new royal company in 1637. New evidence suggests that the office was a reward for service to the aristocratic Herbert family and that traditional preferment was therefore as important as market competition to the creation of the Caroline paradigm of autocratic theatrical “governance.” Chapter Three explores the overlooked career of Elizabeth Beeston who, upon inheriting the Cockpit in 1638, became the first woman in English history to manage a purpose-built London theatre. New evidence concerning her subsequent husband, Sir Lewis Kirke, an adventurer to Canada, ship-money captain, and Royalist military governor, indicates political ideology motivated their joint effort to keep the Beeston playhouse open during the civil wars. Chapter Four addresses the question of why the larger Beeston enterprise eventually collapsed even as the management system it refined continued to support later theatrical entrepreneurs. During the Interregnum, contemporaries anticipated that William and George Beeston, Christopher’s son and grandson, would eventually dominate a renascent London stage; however, managers such as William Davenant and Thomas Betterton ultimately adapted the Beeston system more efficiently to the political environment after 1660. Thereafter, exhausted patronage, lost assets, and the abandonment of family tradition marked the end of the Beestons’ influential association with the London stage.

Hamlet's tragedy is constructed as a perspective of matter that is destined for decay, and this "objective," or "object-focused," mode of viewing the material world enhances theatrical and theological understandings of the play's props, figurative language, and characters. Hamlet's "objective mode" evokes early modern materialist philosophies of vanitas and memento mori, and it is communicated in theatre through semiotic means, whereby material items stand for moral ideas according to an established sign-signified relation. Extending an objective reading to Hamlet's characters reveals their function as images, or two-dimensional emblems, in moments of slowing narrative time. In the graveyard scene (5.1), characters and theatrical props cooperate to materialize the objective perspective. As a prop, Ophelia's corpse complicates the objective mode through its semantic complexity. Thus, she stands apart from other characters as one that both serves to construct and to deconstruct the objective mode. Hamlet's tragic outlook, which depends upon an understanding of matter as destined for decay, and of material items as ends in themselves rather than vehicles for spiritual transformation, is an early modern notion concurrent with theological debates surrounding the Eucharist. Drawing upon art-historical, linguistic, feminist, theological, and theatrical approaches, this thesis contributes to concurrent discourse on Hamlet's tragic genre.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(人間・環境学) / 甲第21167号 / 人博第839号 / 新制||人||202(附属図書館) / 29||人博||839(吉田南総合図書館) / 京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生文明学専攻 / (主査)教授 水野 眞理, 教授 髙谷 修, 准教授 桒山 智成, 教授 丸橋 良雄 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DGAM

This is a linguistic study that will apply theories as a way of understanding the contexts of aspects of the play King Lear by William Shakespeare, as they relate to the possession, and exercise of power. It focuses on targeting and exploring the language of the play and how it impacts characters’ behaviour to gain or sustain power. To do this, specific theoretical frameworks have been applied, including semantics and pragmatics in the analysis of a passage. Examples from the opening scene of King Lear are displayed in order to answer three research questions. Among the findings are differences in the selection of nouns and pronouns with references to authority such as when females tend to overuse “I”, “love” and “lord” when conversing. This research discovered that semantic approaches therefore can be used to explain how Shakespeare portrays, for example, gender differences between the characters by his selection of words, metaphors, and metonymic expressions. Since Lear does not speak in the same manner as his later self as he would have done when at the heights of his power, his linguistic shift mirrors his shift in status following abdication. The analysis also draws certain conclusions with regard to implicatures that are derived from the use of vagueness and ambiguity as outlined in the field of pragmatics, including Speech Act Theory, Deixis and Grice´s Cooperative Principle. However, this essay argues that Grice´s Theory of Implicature and his Maxims can be insightful when analysing Shakespearean dramas, especially floutings and violations of the Maxim of Manner. By applying approaches from the fields of semantics and pragmatics this study concludes that the findings relate to Shakespearean works in general and other works from that period and genre.

Discipline was an enduring concept in the works of John Milton (1608-1674), yet its meaning shifted over the course of his career: initially he held that it denoted ecclesiastical order, but gradually he turned to representing it as self-willed pious action. My thesis examines this transformation by analysing Milton’s complex engagement in two distinct periods: the 1640s and the 1660s-70s. In Of Reformation (1641), Milton echoed popular contemporary demands for a reformation of church discipline, but also asserted through radical literary experimentation that poetry could discipline the nation too (Chapter 1). Reflecting his dislike for intolerant Presbyterians in Parliament and the Westminster Assembly, the two versions of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643 and 1644) reconsider discipline as a moral imperative for all men, rooted in domestic liberty (Chapter 2). Although written long after this period, the long poetry that Milton composed after the Restoration reveals his continued interrogation of the concept. The invocations of the term ‘discipline’ by Milton’s angels in Paradise Lost (1667) sought to encourage dissenting readers to faithfulness and co-operation (Chapter 3). Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (1671) advance the concept in the language of ‘piety,’ emphasising that ‘pious hearts’ are the precondition for godly action in opposition to contemporary Anglican ‘holy living’ (Chapter 4). In analysing Milton’s shifting concept of discipline, my thesis contributes to scholarship by showing his sensitivity to contemporary mainstream religious ideas, outlining the Christian—as opposed to republican or Stoic—notions of praxis that informed his ethics, and emphasising the disciplinary aspect of his doctrinal thought. Overall, it holds that in discipline, as word and concept, Milton expressed his faith in the capacity of writing to change its reader, morally and spiritually.

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.