Inaug.-diss.--Berlin. / Vita.

Inaug.-diss.--Berlin. / Vita.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [294]-319).

Inaug.-Diss.--Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität zu München. / Bibliography: p. 242-246.

Thesis--Copenhagen.

Speech acts described as forms of “complaint”—lamentations, accusations, supplications—permeate early modern theatrical tragedy. “Shakespeare and the Drama of Complaint” explores and theorizes the largely unexamined relationship between complaint and tragedy in light of the fact that in the early modern period, “complaining” was cultural shorthand for ineffective, effeminate, and shameful responses to loss and injury. Focusing on familiar Shakespearean tragedies such as Richard III, Richard II, Hamlet, and King Lear, as well as contemporaneous plays by other writers, including Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, and Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s Maid’s Tragedy, I argue that complaint was at the very heart of the way the genre of tragedy was conceptualized in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As I show, speeches and scenes of complaint were central to the construction of tragic plots and characters, and to the genre’s didactic and affective objectives. But the intersection of tragedy with complaint is more than simply formal and stylistic. I argue that through its engagement with a dazzling array of rhetorical modes and literary forms of complaint, tragedy recuperates “complaining” as a valuable mode of social expression and action. The first half of “Shakespeare and the Drama of Complaint” focuses on plays that attribute ethical value and political efficacy to complaining—to articulating individual and collective grief and grievance, alone and in community with others. Its first chapter explores the ethical dimensions of the existential complaints of the characters of King Lear in relation to what I call the “complaint-shaming” rife in Stoic and Calvinist moral philosophy. My second chapter, picking up on Lear’s notion of complaining as an act of bearing witness to the suffering of others, looks at the plays of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy, and particularly Richard III, as unconventional revenge tragedies in which reiterated speech acts of complaint are politically powerful and efficacious. The second half of the project pivots to plays that take up the interpellative and affective force of complaint within their narratives in order to reflect on the particular agency, and social value, of tragedy itself: my third chapter reads Hamlet as a meditation on how the structure of complaint, incorporated into tragic narrative, might strike theatrical audiences’ consciences, while my final chapter, on Richard II, shows how performances of complaint, even if they do nothing else, might move audiences to tears. As a staging ground for complaint, the early modern theater and its tragic shows oriented audiences to respond to and participate in social modes of complaining—and taught them to be more sophisticated spectators and consumers of tragedy.

Inaug.-diss.--Giessen. / Lebenslauf.

No description available.

Inaug.-diss.--Giessen. / Lebenslauf.

This dissertation makes a case for the Shakespearean stage in the modern Anglo-American tradition as a distinctive laboratory for producing and navigating theories of emotion. The dissertation brings together Shakespeare performance studies and the newer fields of the history of emotions and cultural emotion studies, arguing that Shakespeare’s enduring status as the playwright of human emotion makes the plays in performance critical sites of discourse about human emotion. More specifically, the dissertation charts how, since the late nineteenth century, Shakespeare performance has been implicated in an effort to understand emotion as it defines and relates to the “human” subject. The advent of scientific materialism and Darwinism involved a dethroning of emotion and its expression as a specially endowed human faculty, best evidenced by Charles Darwin’s 1871 The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. Shakespeare’s poetic, formal expression of the passions was seen as proof of this faculty, and nowhere better exemplified than in the tragedies and in the passionate displays of the great tragic heroes. The controversy surrounding the tragic roles of the famous Victorian actor-manager Henry Irving illustrates how the embodied, human medium of the Shakespearean stage served as valuable leverage in contemporary debates about emotion. The dissertation then considers major Shakespearean figures of the twentieth century, including Harley Granville Barker, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, and Peter Brook, whose “stages” similarly galvanize and reflect contestation and change in what William Reddy has called “emotional regimes” or Barbara Rosenwein “emotional communities.” For each of these figures, a specific emotional paradigm is at stake in staging Shakespeare and particularly Shakespearean tragedy. I engage with a range of sources, from performance reviews to popular psychology, to locate these canonical moments in Shakespearean performance history as flashpoints in a cultural history of emotion.