This thesis examines the connections between Calvinism and early modern subjectivity as expressed in the drama produced during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. By looking at a range of theological, medical, popular, legal and polemical writings, the thesis aims to provide a new historical and theoretical reading of Calvinist subjectivity that both develops and departs from previous scholarship in the field. Chapter one examines the critical question of 'authority' in early modern Europe. I trace the various classical and medieval antecedents that reinscribed Christ with political authority during the period, and show how the Reformers' conception of conscience arises out of this movement. In chapter two, I offer a parallel reading of Reformed semiotics in relation to the individual's response to two specific loci of power, the Church and the stage. Chapter three brings the first two chapters together by outlining the development of Calvinist doctrine in early modem England. Chapter four offers a theoretical reading of the early modern 'unconscious' in relation to the construction of England as a Protestant nation state against the threat of Catholicism. In the next four chapters, I show how the stage provided the arena for the exploration of Calvinist subjectivities through readings of four early modern plays. Chapter five deals with Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and in particular the Calvinist conception of Christ interrogated throughout the play. Chapter six looks at The Revenger's Tragedy in relation to the question of masculine lineage and the Name-of-the-(Calvinist)-Father. Finally, in chapters seven and eight, I examine two of William Shakespeare's plays, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. In the first, I demonstrate how the play's concern with witchcraft brings about a parody of providential discourse that is crucial to an understanding of Macbeth's subjectivity. And in the second, I excavate the use of the biblical book of Revelation in Antony and Cleopatra in order to show how an understanding of the text's 'religious' concerns problematises more mainstream readings of the drama.

Traditionally in the field of aesthetics the genres of tragedy and comedy have been depicted in antithetical opposition to one another. Setting out from the hypothesis that antitheses are aspects of a deeper unity where one informs the construction of the other’s image this thesis questions the hierarchy of genre through a form of ludic postmodernism that interrogates aesthetics in the same way as comedy interrogates ethics and the law of genre. Tracing the chain of signification as laid out by Derrida between theatre as pharmakon and the thaumaturgical influence of the pharmakeus or dramatist, early modern comedy can be identified as re-enacting Renaissance versions of the rite of the pharmakos, where a scapegoat for the ills attendant upon society is chosen and exorcised. Recognisable pharmakoi are scapegoat figures such as Shakespeare’s Shylock, Malvolio, Falstaff and Parolles but the city comedies of this period also depict prostitutes and the unmarried as necessary comic sacrifices for the reordering of society. Throughout this thesis an attempt has been made to position Shakespeare’s comic drama in the specific historical location of early modern London by not only placing his plays in the company of his contemporaries but by forging a strong theoretical engagement with questions of law in relation to issues of genre. The connection Shakespearean comedy makes with the laws of early modern England is highly visible in The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure and The Taming of the Shrew and the laws which they scrutinise are peculiar to the regulation of gendered interaction, namely marital union and the power and authority imposed upon both men and women in patriarchal society. Thus, a pivotal section on marriage is required to pinion the argument that the libidinized economy of the early modern stage perpetuates the principle of an excluded middle, comic u-topia, or Derridean ‘non-place’, where implicit contradictions are made explicit. The conclusion that comic denouements are disappointing in their resolution of seemingly insurmountable dilemmas can therefore be reappraised as the outcome of a dialectical movement, where the possibility of alternatives is presented and assessed. Advancing Hegel’s theory that the whole of history is dialectic comedy can therefore be identified as the way in which a society sees itself, dramatically representing the hopes and fears of an entire community.

No description available.

Crime d’actualité au tournant du XVIe et du XVIIe siècle, le régicide est un objet de spéculations et un fait d’actualité en France et en Angleterre. Dans les deux royaumes, on débat de cette question sur fond de schisme religieux. Des théoriciens politiques réinventent la manière de parler de ce crime pour le légitimer et les dramaturges s’emparent de ce sujet problématique. Jacques de Fonteny met en scène le meurtre d’Henri III, Claude Billard de Courgenay celui d’Henri IV, Montchrestien représente l’exécution de Marie Stuart, Shakespeare et Marlowe mettent en scène les meurtres de Richard II et d’Edouard II. Au théâtre, le régicide est a priori un spectacle efficace, propre à provoquer de vives émotions chez le spectateur. Pourtant, ces représentations ne vont pas de soi. Comment, en effet, représenter un crime aussi énorme dans un contexte de crise politique ? Comment justifier le spectacle d’un meurtre d’une actualité aussi brûlante ? Les dramaturges négocient constamment entre des contraintes idéologiques et esthétiques, parfois contradictoires, qui pèsent sur la représentation. Ils empruntent souvent le détour par l’histoire. Plus le crime est inefficace politiquement, et plus il est efficace sur scène. La tyrannie du prince justifie sa mise à mort. Ses fautes morales transforment le régicide en châtiment acceptable et sa déchéance rend la scène pathétique. Un récit permet fréquemment de raconter la mort que l’on ne peut pas montrer sans risquer de décevoir le public. / The regicide is a topical crime between the sixteenth and the seventeenth-century. It is an object of many reflections and an actual event for french and english people. In both kingdom, there are debates on this issue while the schism has begun a reality. Because of the controversy, it is possible to speack about régicide as a punishment. Playwrighters perform this problematic subject. Jacques de Fonteny represent the murder of Henri Ird, Claude Billard de Courgenay represent Henri IVrth’s one, Antoine de Montchrestien represent the execution of Marie Stuart, Shakespeare and Marlowe perform the murders of Richard IInd et Edward IInd. A priori, such subject can move the audience. Nevertheless, such a performance isn’t an evidence. How, indeed, can a playwrighter show such an enormous crime during troubled period ? How can he justify the show in a crisis context ? Playwrighters have to consider ideological and aesthetic restrictions, which are sometimes in contradiction, to perform the murder of the sovereign. In many cases, they rewright history. Because the crime is usually ineffective as a politic action, it is effective for dramatic art. Tyranny justify that the prince is murdered. Some moral failures make this one acceptable. And because the king is falling, he appears as a pathetic victim for the spectators. When it is difficult to show the crime scene, the regicide is described by a messenger.

No description available.

Studies of the English Renaissance reveal a patriarchal structure that informed its politics and its literature; and the drama especially demonstrates a patriarchal response to what society perceived to be the problem of women's efforts to grow beyond the traditional medieval view of "good" women as chaste, silent, and obedient. Thirteen comedies, whose creation spans roughly the same time frame as the pamphlet wars of the so-called "woman controversy," from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, feature women who have no public power, but who find opportunities for varying degrees of power in the private or domestic setting.

This dissertation examines how early modern English playwrights employ absence to enrich their representations of the unknown, including witchcraft and the supernatural. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries magical themes were often dramatized through visual and linguistic excess. Whether this excess was manifested through the use of vibrant costumes, farcical caricatures, or exaggerated dialogue, magic was often synonymous with theatricality. Playwrights such as William Rowley, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare, however, challenge stereotypical depictions of magic by contrasting excessive magic with the subtler power of restrained or off-stage magic. Embedded in the fantastical events and elaborate plots of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, absence, whether as an unstaged thing or person or an absent ideology, becomes a crucial element in understanding how playwrights represented and understood occult issues during the early modern period. Further, when gendered feminine, magical absences serve to combat oppressive silences within scripts and provide female subjects with an unimpeded and inherently magical space from which to challenge pre-established patriarchal systems of control. Each chapter in this dissertation, therefore, appraises the magical possibilities that theatrical absences provide to women as a platform from which to develop their narrative voice. Partnered with a complementary discussion of Jonson’s The Masque of Queens and two thematically linked witchcraft cases, my first chapter argues that Mistress Ford uses the complete stage absence of both a witch and a queen in The Merry Wives of Windsor to reform her community and critique her society’s unjust categorization of women. In chapter two, I examine a series of “vanishing acts” in The Birth of Merlin and argue that Rowley’s female characters use their final moments on stage to contextualize their impending absences for audiences as moments of magical defiance rather than defeat in the face of male tyranny. In my final chapter, I look at how magical objects, such as the handkerchief in Shakespeare’s Othello or the belt in Jonson’s The Sad Shepherd resist the absence of their female creators and continue to provide physically absent or dead women with magical agency. By structuring my dissertation on these three specific gradations of absence, I provide a nuanced analysis of the purposes these dramatic omissions serve by focusing on how these shades of absence subtly alter the ways in which we interpret and define early modern magical belief. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Réalisé en cotutelle avec l'Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense / L'émergence d'un « 'esprit' capitaliste » (Weber) en Angleterre et en France au tournant des XVIe-XVIIe siècles a favorisé la reconfiguration des rapports entre avaritia et cupiditas, qui déterminent tout le champ sémantique de l'usure et de l'intérêt. Cette thèse postule que cette évolution est sensible dans la comédie française et anglaise de l'époque, plus particulièrement chez les dramaturges qui ont marqué l'imaginaire collectif en mettant en scène des personnages avares. À partir d'un type comique issu à la fois du théâtre antique et du canon religieux bien établi dans l'Occident chrétien, l'appréhension nouvelle de l'argent comme objet et comme signe permet de construire une véritable figure moderne de l'avarice. Les protagonistes de chaque pièce, Shylock, Volpone (Mosca) et Harpagon, sont suspendus entre un or quasi divin, et l'univers plus ou moins connu de l'argent, medium en passe de devenir l'équivalent universel de tout bien, qu'ils pensent maîtriser grâce à leur trésor. S'ils s'intègrent parfaitement à la fluidité moderne des échanges économiques, culturels et sociaux, ils participent aussi à leur dévalorisation, par une activité et un discours proprement usuraires. Leur entourage tente de soumettre cette « labilité » des valeurs (Simmel) suscitée par l'économie de l'usurier-avare à un nouvel ordre, cosmique, éthique ou politique. Le conflit se résout devant la justice, instance discriminatoire externe et prétexte à la mise en abyme du jugement social. L'analyse des dénouements permet dès lors de comprendre le travail de chaque auteur sur la forme et la fonction de la comédie, à travers le texte, les genres, ou une esthétique de l'espace. Elle montre que chacun s'attache à valoriser l'apport de son art au public, dans une période de crise socio-économique. / The emergence of a capitalist ‘spirit’ (Weber) in England and France at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries played a leading role in reconfiguring the relation between avaritia and cupiditas which determine the whole semantic field of usury and interest. This thesis postulates that this evolution is perceptible in French and British comedy at that time, in particular for some of the playwrights who staged miserly characters imprinted in our collective imagination. Starting from a comic type as common in Greek and Roman drama as it was in the well-established religious canon in the Christian West, a new understanding of money as object and as sign leads to the construction of a truly modern figure of avarice. Shylock, Volpone (Mosca) and Harpagon, hang on to a almost divine idea of gold and the more or less known world of money, medium they think they control through their treasure, and which is about to become the universal equivalent of any good. Those characters fit perfectly into this modern dynamic of economic, cultural and social exchanges, but they also contribute, with their strictly usurious speech, to its depreciation. Their entourage tries to tame this « lability » of values (Simmel) generated by the economy of the usurer-miser to a new order – a cosmic, ethical or political order. Conflicts are resolved by a court of law, external discriminatory authority and pretext for the mise-en-abyme of social judgment. The analysis of these denouements allows one to understand the work of each author in the comic form and function, through the text, the genres, or an aesthetic of space. It shows how much each author strived to value the contribution of his art to the public, in a time of socio-economic crisis.

This dissertation explores how the mythological heroines from Ovid‘s Heroides and Metamorphoses were cataloged, conflated, reconceived, and recontextualized in vernacular literature; in so doing, it joins considerations of voice, authority, and gender with reflections on Tudor technologies of textual reproduction and ideas about the book. In the late medieval and Renaissance eras, Ovid‘s poetry stimulated the imaginations of authors ranging from Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower to Isabella Whitney, William Shakespeare, and Michael Drayton. Ovid‘s characteristic bookishness—his interest in textual revision and his thematization of the physicality and malleability of art in its physical environments—was not lost upon these postclassical interpreters who engaged with his polysemous cast of female characters. His numerous English protégés replicated and expanded Ovid‘s metatextual concerns by reading and rewriting his metamorphic poetry in light of the metaphors through which they understood both established networks of scribal dissemination and emergent modes of printed book production. My study of Greco-Roman tradition and English bibliofictions (or fictive representations of books, their life cycles, and the communication circuits in which they operate) melds literary analysis with the theoretical concerns of book history by focusing on intersections and interactions between physical, metaphorical, and imaginary books. I posit the Tudor book as a site of complex cultural and literary negotiations between real and inscribed, historical and fictional readers, editors, commentators, and authors, and, as my discussion unfolds, I combine bibliographical, historical, and literary perspectives as a means to understanding both the reception of Ovidian poetry in English literature and Ovid‘s place in the history of books. This dissertation thus contributes to a growing body of book history criticism while also modeling a bibliographically enriched approach to the study of late medieval and Renaissance intertextuality.

This dissertation explores how the mythological heroines from Ovid‘s Heroides and Metamorphoses were cataloged, conflated, reconceived, and recontextualized in vernacular literature; in so doing, it joins considerations of voice, authority, and gender with reflections on Tudor technologies of textual reproduction and ideas about the book. In the late medieval and Renaissance eras, Ovid‘s poetry stimulated the imaginations of authors ranging from Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower to Isabella Whitney, William Shakespeare, and Michael Drayton. Ovid‘s characteristic bookishness—his interest in textual revision and his thematization of the physicality and malleability of art in its physical environments—was not lost upon these postclassical interpreters who engaged with his polysemous cast of female characters. His numerous English protégés replicated and expanded Ovid‘s metatextual concerns by reading and rewriting his metamorphic poetry in light of the metaphors through which they understood both established networks of scribal dissemination and emergent modes of printed book production. My study of Greco-Roman tradition and English bibliofictions (or fictive representations of books, their life cycles, and the communication circuits in which they operate) melds literary analysis with the theoretical concerns of book history by focusing on intersections and interactions between physical, metaphorical, and imaginary books. I posit the Tudor book as a site of complex cultural and literary negotiations between real and inscribed, historical and fictional readers, editors, commentators, and authors, and, as my discussion unfolds, I combine bibliographical, historical, and literary perspectives as a means to understanding both the reception of Ovidian poetry in English literature and Ovid‘s place in the history of books. This dissertation thus contributes to a growing body of book history criticism while also modeling a bibliographically enriched approach to the study of late medieval and Renaissance intertextuality.