This thesis explores the circumstances leading up to and surrounding the executions of London Separatist leaders Henry Barrow and John Greenwood on 6 April, 1593. Occurring after a lengthy prison term punctuated by official examinations conducted by authorities, the executions took place only after the men had been twice reprieved, performed so early as to avoid a crowd yet still in the appointed place of public execution. Focusing on Henry Barrow and the London Separatists, this thesis explores how a national climate of fear and violence led to a greater crackdown on religious dissidents, and argues that the strange circumstances of Barrow’s execution might be attributed to a reluctance to punish a fellow Protestant in the same manner as a Catholic recusant, and the great differences of opinion among both ecclesiastical and temporal state officials regarding the punishment of religious dissent. Though Conformist officials and authoritarianism would ultimately triumph over Puritan efforts to speed reform in the Church of England, the case of Henry Barrow illustrates the fractured state of opinion which was present even among the highest reaches of government.

The object of this thesis is to produce a critical edition of Lording Barry's play Ram Alley (first published in 1611 by Robert Wilson and printed by George Eld). This edition will consist of (a) an annotated, modernised spelling version of the text, that text being based on a bibliographic study of the first quarto, and (b) an introduction which will cover: the printing of the first quarto, the life of Lording Barry and his critical reception, the play's place in and contribution to early Jacobean city comedy (particularly in relation to the use of wit and bawdy in masculine self-definition), and the problems of annotating a text which is so reliant for its humour on bawdy innuendo. The annotation will be very much fuller than is normal for an edition of an early modern play text, aiming to provide not just explanation but also commentary on and contextualisation of the language, contemporary and cultural references, characterisation, and action. This play is something of a by-way in the early Jacobean drama, and, like its author, is little known. It is, however, a competent example of the type of comedy produced for the private theatres and reflects, therefore, on the work of other, better known dramatists, in particular Thomas Middleton. In terms of original contribution to the field of study, this thesis will, it is hoped, add to our knowledge and understanding of: 1. the text of Ram Alley 2. the production of the first quarto of Ram Alley 3. the working practices of the printer, George Eld (who was also responsible for the first quarto of Troilus and Cressida and of Shakespeare's Sonnets) 4. the nature and hermeneutics of wit in Ram Alley 5. approaches to editing early modern dramatic comedy 6. Jacobean city comedy as a genre.

This interdisciplinary thesis explores how music is used in the art of healing in two distinct ways in the early modern period: namely, through the use of performed music accompanying the healing process itself, and as ‘speculative music', the latter providing a philosophical model for understanding the interplay of music with body, mind and soul. Redefining an existing enquiry in a specific way, my research seeks to enhance an understanding of the construction of a therapeutic modality that revitalizes the ancient belief in the healing powers of music, manifest since antiquity through the classical legends of Orpheus and Pythagoras. The Pythagorean hypothesis – that earthly music reflected the celestial harmony of the spheres – was believed to govern the internal music of the human body, giving credence to the notion of the harmonious balancing of the four bodily humours. Tracing the tradition of healing music from antiquity, I argue that Marsilio Ficino's paradigmatic magico-musical philosophy refashions the Pythagorean and Neoplatonic explanations of music's curative potentiality, offering a new interpretat ion of music's effective power to heal the rift between body and soul. I examine how this Ficinian interpretation is discernible in the work of Robert Fludd, Michael Maier, William Shakespeare, Robert Burton and Thomas Campion. I analyse their observations of the body's physical and emotional response to music's healing power. Drawing on early modern models that appropriate the rhetoric of the music of the spheres, I argue that a cultural moment is established in which the motifs and tropes of Neoplatonic love and the healing power of music culminate in allegories of philosophical contemplation and spiritual fulfilment in the Jacobean court masques. In conclusion, my thesis's examination of music as a healing modality provides a historical framework to support the contemporary use of music as a recognized therapeutic intervention.

This thesis considers the different ways Persia was perceived in early modern England. Persia, understudied in recent scholarship, played an important role in the early modern English imagination, both as a classical civilization and as a counterweight to the Ottoman threat to Christendom. This classical heritage and anti-Ottomanism, when intersected with a Persian Muslim identity, resulted in a complex phenomenon. This thesis is an attempt to understand the various cross currents that constructed this complex image. Chapter One discusses English interest in classical Persian themes in the wake of Renaissance humanism. It focuses on three classical ‘Persian' plays featuring Achaemenid Kings; Cambyses, Darius and Cyrus, and investigates how classical Persia became a focus of interest for Elizabethan playwrights. Chapter Two moves to the wars between the Ottomans and Safavids and how they fascinated many English writers of the time. Paying specific attention to Usumcasane in Marlowe's Tambulaine plays, the chapter suggests the significance of Persian references in the play and offers a new interpretation of the notorious Qur'an burning scene. Chapter Three analyses John Thomas Minadoi's Historie of Warres betweene the Turkes and the Persians and shows the significance of Christian knowledge of schism in Islam for Catholic-Protestant debates. Chapter Four concentrates on the representation of Persia in Romance texts from late Elizabethan England and shows that despite being hailed as an anti-Ottoman power, Persia's anti-Christian Islamic identity, which was also suggested by Minadoi, becomes manifest in the alliance of ‘Sultan' and ‘Sophy' against the Crusaders. Chapter Five combines two crucial moments in Anglo-Persian encounters: Jenkinson's trading mission and the ‘travailes” of the Sherley brothers. Through an analysis of the play The Travailes of the Three English Brothers, the argument of the chapter is that it represents the cumulative experience of Englishmen in Persia in the early modern period.

This thesis examines the reciprocity of literary and legal cultures, and seeks to enhance understanding of cultural and socio-legal constructions of morality in early modern England. Identifying the tensions in an institutional legality in which both secular pragmatism and moral idealism act as formulating principals, it interrogates the sense of disjuncture that arises between imaginative concepts of moral justice and their translation into the formal structures of law. Chapter 1 investigates representations of rape in light of the legislative changes of the 1570s, and addresses the question of how literature shapes the legal imaginary of immorality. Literary models, notably Shakespeare's The Rape Of Lucrece (1594), and George Peele's Tale of Troy (1589), are examined together with the texts of Edward Coke and Thomas Edgar to argue that lawyers' mythopoeic interpretative strategies produce a form of legal fiction in relation to sexual crime. These strategies are contextualised in Chapter 2 in relation to the education and literary-legal culture at the Inns of Court, and the thesis progresses to an examination of the inns' literary and dramatic output – notably that of Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorbuduc, and Arthur Broke's contemporaneous revels' masque, Desire and Lady Bewty (1561-2) – to establish how the legal fraternity wielded significant authority over Tudor sexual politics, moral signification, and interpretative practices. Chapters 3 and 4 explore legal and ethical challenges heralded by the Jacobean accession, particularly those posed by the Somerset scandal. Analysis of histories, letters, and court satire, together with Thomas Campion's The Lord Hay's Masque (1607), and George Chapman's Andromeda Liberata (1614) and The Tragedy of Chabot (1639), illuminates the period's textual negotiations of legal, political, and personal ethics, and offers a revealing picture of the moral paradoxes produced by the opacity of the parameters between the personal and political lives of the ruling elite.

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published_or_final_version / Literary Studies / Master / Master of Arts