京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(人間・環境学) / 甲第22515号 / 人博第918号 / 新制||人||220(附属図書館) / 2019||人博||918(吉田南総合図書館) / 京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生人間学専攻 / (主査)准教授 桒山 智成, 教授 廣野 由美子, 准教授 池田 寛子 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DGAM

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.

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Torture and the Drama of Emergency: Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare recovers the legal complexity of early modern torture and makes it central to an account of the anti-torture politics of the English stage. More people were tortured in the 1580s and 1590s than at any other time in England's history, and this sudden increase generated a backlash in the form of calls for the protection of liberties. Chapters on plays by Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare show how theater contributed to this backlash by means of its unique ability to present on the public stage the otherwise private suffering characteristic of state torture. Above all, these playwrights alerted audiences to the dangers posed by the concentration of absolute power in the hands of the monarch. The introduction and first chapter of Torture and the Drama of Emergency demonstrate that although torture was unknown to common law, it was executed in the context of a state of emergency. The second chapter presents Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy as resistance literature: rather than critiquing Spanish cruelty, as its setting implies, the play indicts English torture. Kyd uses the genre of revenge tragedy, enormously popular after and because of his play, to argue that torture is a form of revenge the state itself might carry out. Chapter three, on 1 and 2 Tamburlaine, argues that Tamburlaine transforms the world into a military camp by extending martial law to everyone, everywhere. Marlowe's portrayal of the creation and rise of this totalitarian regime depicts the nightmarish consequences for the people when the state's power to extend martial law remains unchecked. The final chapter, on King Lear, argues that in his most pessimistic play Shakespeare suggests there is no escape from the state's ability to seize absolute power in times of crisis. Lear's moving but tenuous declaration of human rights remains a dream that cannot survive the state of emergency created when he divides the kingdom. / text

This dissertation examines the early modern representation of the Ottoman sultan as merciless murderer of his own family in dramas depicting Islam that are also revenge tragedies or history plays set in empires. This representation arose in part from historical events: the civil wars that erupted periodically from the reign of Sultan Murad I (1362-1389) to that of Sultan Mehmed III (1595-1603) in which the sultan killed family members who were rivals to the throne. Drawing on these events, theological and historical texts by John Foxe, Samuel Purchas, and Richard Knolles offered a distorted image of the Ottoman sultan as devoid of pity for anyone, but most importantly family, an image which seeped into early modern drama. Early modern English playwrights repeatedly staged scenes in the dramas that depict Islam in which one member of a family implores another for pity and to remain alive. However, family killing became diffuse and was not the sole province of the Ottoman sultan or other Muslim character: the Spanish, Romans, and the Scythians also kill their kin. Additionally, they kill members of their own religious, ethnic, and national groups as family killing expands to encompass a more general self destruction, self sacrifice, and self consumption. The presence of the Muslim character, Turk or Moor, serves to underscore the political and religious significance of other characters' family killing. Part of the interest of English playwrights in the Ottoman history of family killing is that England had suffered its own share of family killing or the specter of it during the Wars of the Roses, the Babington Plot against Queen Elizabeth's life, and the martyrdom of many English during the Protestant Reformation. Through an analysis of such plays as Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy , William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus , and Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine I and II , among others, I argue that English playwrights represented family killing to contend with England's past of civil war, its Protestant Reformation present, and its political future. The dramas that depict Islam portray rulers who elevate empire building above kinship bonds and who feel no pity for those in their own kinship, national, or religious groups. The plays illustrate that the emotion, pity, leads a ruler to the just action of extending mercy and that the converse, lack of pity, leads a kingdom or empire to injustice and destruction. The plays ultimately declare empire building unjust because it is pitiless, creating an argument against empire for English audiences.