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.

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.

This is the first full-scale study of Robert Greene’s drama, offering a new interpretation of the dramatic oeuvre of one Shakespeare’s most neglected literary predecessors. Recent criticism has emphasised Greene’s pioneering role as an author of Elizabethan romance. Yet, in contrast to the numerous prose works which were printed during his life time, his drama, which was printed posthumously, has received little attention. Greene’s plays are visually magnificent: madmen wander on stage waving the severed limbs of their victims (Orlando Furioso, c. 1591), the dead are resurrected (James IV, c. 1590), tyrants gruesomely mutilate their subjects (Selimus, c. 1591-4), extravagant stage properties such as the mysterious brazen head prophesy to the audience (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, c. 1589), and sinners are swallowed into hell accompanied by fireworks (A Looking Glass for London and England, c. 1588). This thesis will examine the way in which these stage images evoke astonishment, which in turn encourages the audience to contemplate their symbolic significance. The triumph of Greene’s drama is not one of effects over affect; it lies in the interaction between effect and affect. My principal objective in this thesis is to develop a methodological strategy which will allow critics of non-Shakespearean plays, which frequently lack a substantial performance tradition, to study drama through the lens of performance. Engaging purposively with anachronism as an enabling mode of linking old and new, this thesis will draw analogies between the early modern stage and modern cinema in order to emphasise the relevance of early modern drama to today’s ocularcentric world, a relevance that more historical theoretical approaches would seek to deny. My opening chapter will try to establish Greene’s dramatic canon and assess the critical reception of Greene’s plays. Drawing on material from Greene’s entire oeuvre, Chapter Two will outline my methodological and conceptual approach. This chapter will include an extended analysis of Friar Bacon’s discussion of the ‘strategy with cunning shows’ in John of Bordeaux (JB. 735). Launching into detailed studies of specific spectacles, Chapter Three focuses on Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene’s collaborative effort, the biblical drama A Looking Glass for London and England. During the play, Prophet Jonah is ‘cast out of the whale’s belly upon the stage’ (LG. IV.i.1460-1). Focusing on this stage spectacle, this chapter seeks to emphasise the commercial appeal of this biblical drama. Examining another stage property, Chapter Four will explore the melodramatic and sensational potential of the tomb stage property in Greene’s James IV. Examining the apparent tension between the play’s two presenters, I will demonstrate that Bohan, a cynical Scot, and Oberon, the King of the Fairies, proffer two distinct, but not mutually exclusive, ways of conceiving of and interpreting theatrical spectacle. Completing my study of spectacular stage properties, Chapter Five examines the symbolic significance of the brazen head, which appears in two of Greene’s plays: Alphonsus, King of Aragon and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. In both plays, the brazen head becomes an object of excessive or supreme devotion as either a religious idol or a secular deity. The brazen head is perceived as monstrous not simply because it is a source of horror or astonishment but because it represents the misplaced veneration or worship of something other than God. Turning away from stage properties, my final two chapters look at how Greene exploited specific stage conventions. Directing my attention towards Greene’s Orlando Furioso (c. 1591), I will argue that the figure of Orlando Furioso bequeathed an enduring legacy to early modern theatrical discourse, contributing to the convention of the mad poet, which would be replicated and parodied by a new generation of dramatists. Orlando’s behaviour, which rapidly alternates between that of a madman and that of a poet, forces the audience to contemplate the link between the mania of the mentally ill and the melancholia of the creative genius. Ridiculing the concept of furor poeticus, Greene’s play interrogates the belief that great writers are divinely inspired by God through ecstatic revelation. My final chapter will explore the aesthetics of violence in Selimus. A relatively recent addition to the Greene canon, Selimus depicts the rise of an anti-hero amidst a cycle of brutal violence. My reading of this play posits Selimus as a surrogate playwright, arguing that the semiotics of dismemberment allows Greene to interrogate the concept of artistic autonomy. Widespread indifference to Greene’s work has facilitated critical blindness to the powerful aesthetic appeal of spectacle in early modern drama. This reassessment of Robert Greene’s dramatic oeuvre offers a new perspective on the aesthetics of spectacle in early modern drama.

This study addresses the problem critics have faced in identifying contemporary perceptions of the barber, surgeon and barber-surgeon in early modernity by examining the literature, predominantly the drama, from the period. The name ‘barber-surgeon’ is not given formally to any character in extant early modern plays; only within the dialogue or during stage business is a character labelled the barber-surgeon. Barbers and surgeons are simultaneously separate and doubled-up characters. The differences and cross-pollinations between their practices play out across the literature and tell us not just about their cultural, civic and occupational histories but also about how we interpret patterns in language, onomastics, dramaturgy, materiality, acoustics and semiology. Accordingly, the argument in this study is structured thematically and focuses on the elements of performance, moving from discussions of names to discussions of settings and props, disguises, stage directions and semiotics, and from sound effects and music, to voices and rhetorical turns. In doing so, it questions what it means in early modernity to have a developed literary identity, or be deprived of one. The barber-surgeon is a trope in early modern literature because he has a tangible social impact and an historical meaning derived from his barbery and surgery roots, and consequently a richly allusive idiom which exerted attraction for audiences. But the figure of the barber-surgeon can also be a trope in investigating how representation works. An aesthetic of doubleness, which this study finds to be diversely constructed, prevails in barbers’, surgeons’ and barber-surgeons’ literary conception, and the barber-surgeon in the popular imagination is created from opposing cultural stereotypes. The literature from the period demonstrates why a guild union of barbers and surgeons was never harmonious: they are opposing dramaturgical as well as medical figures. This study has a wide-ranging literary corpus, including early modern play texts, ballads, pamphlets, guild records, dictionaries, inventories, medical treatises and archaeological material, and contributes to the critical endeavours of the medical humanities, cultural materialists, theatre historians and linguists.

This thesis brings to light evidence for the circulation and first-hand reception of Aristotle's Poetics in sixteenth-century England. Though the Poetics upended literary thinking on the Continent in the period, it has long been considered either unavailable in England, linguistically inaccessible to the Greekless English, or thoroughly mediated for English readers by Italian criticism. This thesis revisits the evidentiary basis for each of these claims in turn. A survey of surviving English booklists and library catalogues, set against the work's comprehensive sixteenth-century print-history, demonstrates that the Poetics was owned by and readily accessible to interested readers; two appendices list verifiable and probable owners of the Poetics respectively. Detailed philological analysis of passages from Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie proves that he translated directly from the Greek; his and his contemporaries' reading methods indicate the text circulated bilingually as standard. Nor was Sidney’s polyglot access unusual in literary circles: re-examination of the history of Greek education in sixteenth-century England indicates that Greek literacy was higher and more widespread than traditional histories of scholarship have allowed. On the question of mediation, a critical historiography makes clear that the inherited assumption of English reliance on Italian intermediaries for classical criticism has drifted far from the primary evidence. Under these reconstituted historical conditions, some of the outstanding episodes in the sixteenth-century English reception of the Poetics from John Cheke and Roger Ascham in the 1540s to Sidney and John Harington in the 1580s and 1590s are reconsidered as articulate evidence of reading, thinking about, and responding to Aristotle's defining contribution to Renaissance literary thought.

This study seeks to provide historical and literary contexts for elderly characters from English play-texts c.1580 to 1625. Its primary aim, from a literary perspective, is to draw attention to the ways that a better understanding of elderly characterisation can enrich the appreciation of much-studied play-texts, and to indicate some interesting features of more obscure ones. Its secondary aim is to suggest the value, for social historians of old age in early modern England, of play-texts as social evidence. I have examined most of the published extant play-texts of the period, and have found approximately 150 of these to be relevant (the most important of these are listed in the Appendix). Because of the problems of handling all aspects of such a large amount of material, I have chosen to consider the plays chiefly as texts to be read, with little reference to their performative aspects. However, I analyse the dramas as literary as well as social documents. Specific plays provide illustrations for observations and support for various hypotheses about dramatic representations of the elderly. In some instances, I address plays which have received little critical attention. The thesis falls into two parts. In the first three chapters, I discuss the socio-historical, cultural and non-dramatic literary contexts for representations of elderly men and women in play-texts. In chapters four through seven, I examine elderly characters in specific role or relationship categories: as sovereigns and magistrates, in sexual and marital relationships, and as parents. In the final chapter, I offer a detailed analysis of The Old Law by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley.

The first rule of writing is an important one: writers should not plagiarize; what they write should be their own. It is taken for granted. But who made the rule? Why? And how is it enforced? This dissertation traces the history of proprietary authorship from the earliest distinctions between imitation and misappropriation in the humanist schoolroom, through the first recorded uses in English of the Latin legal term plagiary (kidnapper) as a metaphor for literary misappropriation, to an inchoate conception of literary property among a coterie of writers in early modern England. It argues that the recognition of literary misappropriation emerged as a result of the instrumental reading habits of early humanist scholars and that the subsequent distinction between authors and plagiarists depended more upon the maturity of the writer than has been previously recognized. Accusations of plagiarism were a means of discrediting a rival, although in this capacity their import also depended largely upon one’s perspective. In the absence of established trade customs, writers had to subscribe to the proprieties of the institutions with which they were affiliated. They were deemed plagiarists only when their actions were found to be out of place. These proprieties not only informed early modern definitions of plagiarism; they also helped define the perimeters of proprietary authorship. Authors who wished to make a fair profit from labours in print had to conform to the regulations of the Stationer’s Company, just as authors who maintained a proprietary interest in their manuscripts had to draw upon legal rhetoric, such as plagiary, in the absence of a legally recognized notion of authorial property. With new information technologies expanding the boundaries of proprietary authorship everyday, the proprieties according to which these boundaries were first defined should help teachers and researchers not only better to understand the nature of Renaissance authorship but also to equip their students for the future.

The first rule of writing is an important one: writers should not plagiarize; what they write should be their own. It is taken for granted. But who made the rule? Why? And how is it enforced? This dissertation traces the history of proprietary authorship from the earliest distinctions between imitation and misappropriation in the humanist schoolroom, through the first recorded uses in English of the Latin legal term plagiary (kidnapper) as a metaphor for literary misappropriation, to an inchoate conception of literary property among a coterie of writers in early modern England. It argues that the recognition of literary misappropriation emerged as a result of the instrumental reading habits of early humanist scholars and that the subsequent distinction between authors and plagiarists depended more upon the maturity of the writer than has been previously recognized. Accusations of plagiarism were a means of discrediting a rival, although in this capacity their import also depended largely upon one’s perspective. In the absence of established trade customs, writers had to subscribe to the proprieties of the institutions with which they were affiliated. They were deemed plagiarists only when their actions were found to be out of place. These proprieties not only informed early modern definitions of plagiarism; they also helped define the perimeters of proprietary authorship. Authors who wished to make a fair profit from labours in print had to conform to the regulations of the Stationer’s Company, just as authors who maintained a proprietary interest in their manuscripts had to draw upon legal rhetoric, such as plagiary, in the absence of a legally recognized notion of authorial property. With new information technologies expanding the boundaries of proprietary authorship everyday, the proprieties according to which these boundaries were first defined should help teachers and researchers not only better to understand the nature of Renaissance authorship but also to equip their students for the future.