This thesis undertakes a close study of a single manuscript of the early 1320s, written at the priory of Fineshade, Northamptonshire. The manuscript contains a short chronicle and several documents related to the failed baronial rebellion of 1321-22. I argue that, in collaboration with the priory’s patrons, the Engayne family, the chronicler responds to the current situation with an attempt to create meaning from a time of crisis. In the process, he attempts to shape his material through patterns of style and thought inherited from both chronicle and hagiographical traditions, to make the present conform to the known and understood shape of the past. His success is limited by his inability to establish sufficient distance from traumatic events, a difficulty that many chroniclers seemed to encounter when they attempted to turn current events into meaningful historical narrative.

This thesis undertakes a close study of a single manuscript of the early 1320s, written at the priory of Fineshade, Northamptonshire. The manuscript contains a short chronicle and several documents related to the failed baronial rebellion of 1321-22. I argue that, in collaboration with the priory’s patrons, the Engayne family, the chronicler responds to the current situation with an attempt to create meaning from a time of crisis. In the process, he attempts to shape his material through patterns of style and thought inherited from both chronicle and hagiographical traditions, to make the present conform to the known and understood shape of the past. His success is limited by his inability to establish sufficient distance from traumatic events, a difficulty that many chroniclers seemed to encounter when they attempted to turn current events into meaningful historical narrative.

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This thesis undertakes a close study of a single manuscript of the early 1320s, written at the priory of Fineshade, Northamptonshire. The manuscript contains a short chronicle and several documents related to the failed baronial rebellion of 1321-22. I argue that, in collaboration with the priory’s patrons, the Engayne family, the chronicler responds to the current situation with an attempt to create meaning from a time of crisis. In the process, he attempts to shape his material through patterns of style and thought inherited from both chronicle and hagiographical traditions, to make the present conform to the known and understood shape of the past. His success is limited by his inability to establish sufficient distance from traumatic events, a difficulty that many chroniclers seemed to encounter when they attempted to turn current events into meaningful historical narrative.

This thesis undertakes a close study of a single manuscript of the early 1320s, written at the priory of Fineshade, Northamptonshire. The manuscript contains a short chronicle and several documents related to the failed baronial rebellion of 1321-22. I argue that, in collaboration with the priory’s patrons, the Engayne family, the chronicler responds to the current situation with an attempt to create meaning from a time of crisis. In the process, he attempts to shape his material through patterns of style and thought inherited from both chronicle and hagiographical traditions, to make the present conform to the known and understood shape of the past. His success is limited by his inability to establish sufficient distance from traumatic events, a difficulty that many chroniclers seemed to encounter when they attempted to turn current events into meaningful historical narrative.

This study purports to examine several areas of similarity between the chronicle history plays by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Edward II and Richard II are alike in many ways, most strikingly in the similarity of the stories themselves. But this is a superficial likeness, for there are many other likenesses--in purpose, in artistry, in language--which demonstrate more clearly than the parallel events of history the remarkable degree to which these plays resemble each other.

This dissertation enhances Marlovian studies by advancing ongoing scholarly efforts to demystify Marlowe’s stereotypical image as an outsider of his era. Specifically, it aims to challenge the prevailing perception of Christopher Marlowe as a subversive maverick, often delineated in contradistinction to William Shakespeare, England’s so-called national poet. Situating Marlowe in the context of nation-building in early modern England, this dissertation explores how Marlowe participated through his writing in the construction of English national identity. Through reading Marlowe’s five plays, Dido Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine the Great Part One, Tamburlaine the Great Part Two, Edward II, and The Jew of Malta, my dissertation reveals that Marlowe’s ideal England is a political entity of complete sovereignty, a new empire of unprecedented achievement, and an imagined community ruled by its monarch and governors with good governance. With its emphasis on the inseparable fusion of nation and empire and the inevitable incorporation of outsiders, such English nationhood, I suggest, is an eighth form of nationhood in addition to the seven others proposed by Richard Helgerson. It is neither Patrick Cheney’s counter-nationhood nor completely Helgerson’s nationhood under royal absolutism. Since the monarch and patriotism are at its centre, Marlowe’s ideal English nationhood does not differ greatly from depictions offered by other contemporary writers. I argue that Marlowe shares more commonality with other authors of his era than has previously been understood, at least in terms of writing English nationhood. I propose that we should explore such commonality, rather than fetishizing Marlowe’s peculiarity, to gain a more nuanced, fuller image of Marlowe, who has long been obscured by his arguably more renowned contemporaries. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation reexamines Christopher Marlowe’s stereotypical image in current scholarship as an outsider of his era by looking at how Marlowe writes about England in the context of early modern nation-building. Focusing on Marlowe’s five plays, Dido Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine the Great Part One, Tamburlaine the Great Part Two, Edward II, and The Jew of Malta, my readings reveal that what Marlowe envisions through his writing is an English nation marked by complete autonomy, remarkable achievement, and good governance. At the heart of this nationhood lies the patriotism similarly expressed by other Elizabethan writers in their literary fashioning of English nationhood. I argue that Marlowe, in this regard, shares more commonality with his contemporaries than has previously been understood. Exploring this commonality allows us to revalue the historical position of Marlowe, who has long been obscured by arguably more renowned writers of his day.

This project aims to take the investigation of food in early modern drama, in itself a relatively new field, in a new direction. It does this by shifting the critical focus from food-based metaphors to food-based properties and food-producing cook characters. This shift reveals exciting, unexpected, and hitherto unnoticed contexts. In The Taming of the Shrew and Titus Andronicus, which were written during William Shakespeare’s inn-yard playhouse period, the playwright exploits these exceptionally aromatic venues in order to trigger site-specific responses to food-based scenes in these plays. Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair brings fair-appropriate gingerbread properties onstage. When we look beneath the surface of this food effect to its bread and wine ingredients, however, it reveals a subtext that satirizes the theory of transubstantiation. Jonson expands on this theme by using Ursula’s cooking fire (a property staged in Jonson’s representation of Smithfield’s Bartholomew Fair) to engage with the prison narrative of Anne Askew, who was burned to death in front of Bartholomew Priory on the historic Smithfield for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation. This thesis also investigates water, which, for early moderns, was a complex and quasi-mystical liquid: it was a primary element, it washed sin from the world during the Great Flood, it was a marker of status, it was a medicine, and it was a cookery ingredient. Christopher Marlowe not only uses dirty water to humiliate his doomed monarch in Edward II, but he also uses it to apportion blame to the king for his own downfall. In Timon of Athens, Shakespeare draws on the theory of the elements to cast Timon as a man of water, who, Jesus-like, breaks up and divides (or splashes around) his body at his “last” supper. Fully-fledged cook characters were a relative rarity on the early modern stage. This project looks at two exceptions: Furnace in Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts and the unnamed master cook in John Fletcher’s The Tragedy of Rollo, Duke of Normandy. Both playwrights use their respective gastronomic geniuses to demonstrate the danger that lower-order expertise poses to the upper classes when society is in flux. Finally, this project demonstrates that a link existed between ornate domestic food effects and alchemy. It shows how Philip Massinger’s The Great Duke of Florence and Thomas Middleton’s Women, Beware Women use food properties associated with alchemy to satirize notions of perfection in their play-worlds.