Before the reformation and the schism of the Catholic Church, it had always been the duty of the Church and not of the state, to undertake the seven corporal works of mercy; feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, visit the sick, visit the prisoner, and bury the dead.¹ By dissolving these institutions, Henry had unwittingly created what would become a social disaster of biblical proportions. In essence, this act was rendering thousands of the poor and elderly without a home or shelter, it denied the country of much of the medical aid that has been offered by the church, it denied future generations of thousands of volumes of books and scriptures from the monastic libraries, as well as denied many an education who would have otherwise never received one without the help of the Church. The ultimate goal of my thesis is to prove my hypothesis that the dissolution of the monasteries by King Henry VIII was not merely a contributory factor in the need for the creation of poor laws, but the deciding factor (in a myriad of societal issues) for their creation. Footnote 1: Matthew 25 vv. 32-46.

Early modern neighbours were ubiquitous audiences to — and performers in — each other’s lives. Social historians have suggested that neighbours tended to possess surprisingly intimate information about each other, and they could use these insights to invade, encroach upon, and undermine those around them. To date, however, the relationships between neighbours (which are here termed ‘neighbourship’) have been narrowly located in the interactions between people living near to each other in domestic contexts. This dissertation proposes a significantly more capacious understanding of neighbourly dynamics by turning to a different archive: early modern plays that use particular theatrical devices — spectatorship, clothing, dialect, and stage properties — to work out the threats, obligations, and opportunities that come with sharing space and neighbourly knowledge. This dissertation draws on canonical and non-canonical plays from a range of genres and playwrights between the late sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, including Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Coriolanus, Jonson’s The Alchemist, Heywood’s little-known Jupiter and Io, Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday, and George Peele’s Edward I. Neighbourship was not defined by its domestic context, but by dynamics and internal structures, such as interchangeability and temporal iteration, that shaped early modern expectations about how this relationship manifested. The approaches in this dissertation build on social historical work by Lena Orlin, Catherine Richardson, B.S. Capp, and others, as well as theatre scholarship from Peter Womack, Jeremy Lopez, and Jennifer A. Low. There are two major interventions here: first, in the idea that the dynamics of neighbourship do not apply only between proximate humans, but also between ‘atypical’ neighbours — fairies, animals, languages, and nations — who offer focal points in respective chapters. These atypical entities challenge the normative understanding of neighbourship by taking its dynamics to an extreme, pushing theatrical audiences to the limits of their sympathetic identifications. The second intervention is in the argument that theatrical devices uniquely express and amplify the stakes of neighbourly dynamics. The temporal and spatial compression of the stage pushes unusual neighbours into greater proximity with each other, and the stage made manifest the complicated negotiations of similarity and difference that neighbourship entailed. Overall, this dissertation highlights the capacity of the early modern stage to transpose the dynamics of neighbourship across apparently disparate realms, drawing attention to theatrical manifestations of similarity and difference, belonging and alienation, and the transgression of borders.

Liao Weichun. / "August 2004." / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-268). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese.

SLOVENE NATIONAL THEATRE IN LJUBLJANA Author Report Of The Diploma Work Author: Bc. Petr Hýl Supervisor: doc. ing. arch. Zdeněk Makovský