A re-evaluation of the king's writings combined with a detailed study of these Jacobean plays provides sufficient evidence to support the main contentions of this thesis. First, it presents the proposition that the interest of James in witches and witchcraft has been misjudged and frequently either maligned or disregarded. Second, it demonstrates that the king's views on witchcraft comprise a philosophy which is consistent with the balance of his political and religious thought and action. Third, it develops the idea that certain reflections of the king's interest in witchcraft are significantly evident in specific plays written during his reign.

John Hartwell Cocke was a Virginia planter and amateur architect whose style evolved from Jeffersonian Classicism to a revival of English Tudor-Stuart or Jacobethan architecture. This dissertation discusses the Cocke family's Elizabethan roots and advances four theses. The first of these theses is that John Hartwell Cocke implemented Thomas Jefferson's principles for the reform of Virginia architecture. Cocke's most ambitious project, a Jeffersonian Palladian mansion called Bremo, was in the planning stages by 1815. The second thesis is that Cocke's off-plantation buildings signals his break from the Palladianism of Thomas Jefferson in favor of the Jacobean style for his houses and his acceptance of classical Jeffersonian elements for public buildings. The third thesis proposes John Hartwell Cocke as the first practitioner of the Romantic Colonial Revival movement in America in his revival of Tudor-Stuart architecture. The fourth thesis is that John Hartwell Cocke's architectural legacy was expanded by Philip St. George Cocke, the second of his three sons, when the younger Cocke commissioned Alexander J. Davis to build Belmead and later promoted Davis among his circle of family and friends.

The early modern English masque is a hybrid form of entertainment that included music, dance, poetry, and visual spectacle, and for which there is no modern equivalent. This dissertation looks at four incarnations of the Elizabethan and Jacobean masque: the court masque, the masque embedded in the progress entertainment, the masque embedded in the commercial play, and the masque embedded in the commercial play performed at court. This study treats masques as a form of elite theatre (that is, theatre for, by, and about elite figures like monarchs and aristocrats) and follows them from the court to the countryside, through the commercial playhouse, and back again to the court in pursuit of a more nuanced picture of the hybridity and flexibility of early modern English performance culture.

Early modern literature and politics alike are littered with the language of the classical elements. In particular, elemental language comes to the fore in William Shakespeare and John Fletcher's plays produced in the mid-portion of King James's reign. In this thesis, I argue that Shakespeare and Fletcher to use the language of air, water, and fire, in Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, and Bonduca, to mediate contemporary political concerns plaguing English earth. This elemental language shows how Shakespeare and Fletcher voiced the British people's wavering hopes and fears concerning James's hopes for imperial expansion and his concurrent inability to maintain his realm's lands, finances, unity, and national image. Although recent scholars have begun to focus on how elemental language often functions to elevate authorial status and to personify emotions, there is little recognition of how early modern playwrights use elemental language to speak to Jacobean political concerns. Understanding the political underpinnings of elemental language allows for a better understanding of the discursive relationship between monarch, playwright, and subjects. / Master of Arts / This thesis explores how playwrights William Shakespeare and John Fletcher use the language of the classical elements, water, fire, earth, and air, to express early modern people's hopes and fears regarding the trajectory of the British nation. In particular, I analyze how Shakespeare and Fletcher use elemental language in their plays, Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, and Bonduca, to mediate fears of national degradation drawing from King James's imperial ambitions and mismanagement of the nation's natural and financial resources. I suggest that much like the people of today, early modern peoples also measured the success of their nation in terms of the well-being and stability of its elemental environment.

The view of black Africans that emerges from Renaissance drama is shaped entirely by stereotypes, and is overwhelmingly negative. There is a general reluctance in the scholarly community to challenge the stereotype as a major organising principle in shaping negative images of African dramatic characters. My argument is that the stereotype is a powerful tool in the hands of self-interested parties, and must be recognised as capable of maiming and distorting the experiences of those it sets out to construct, as the one-sided, eurocentric representations of African characters in Renaissance drama reveal. Chapter One reviews the history of European attitudes to black skin colour, focusing briefly on England's public displays of other nations, cultures, and people, on the visual art tradition, and mainly on English Renaissance travel literature which, I believe, was the largest single influence on dramatists' imaginations. The chapter establishes that English anti-black polemics and the stereotyping of black Africans was heightened during the Renaissance, mainly because constructions of otherness were a large part of England's national self-fashioning. Chapter Two explores traditional meanings of blackness as well as the aesthetic and moral aspects of otherness, and attempts to show how the stereotypical assumptions and value judgments encoded in the rhetoric of blackness are allegorically manipulated to suit the needs of Christian England while Africa suffers erasure. Chapters Three and Four foreground the idea that the physical presence of black African characters on the stage becomes a sign of an entire set of actual and imagined differences by which England constructs her view of Africans as prime, visible signifiers of cultural difference. Chapter Four goes a step further and looks at those dramatic texts in which seemingly fixed categories are revealed as unstable, especially when overlaps in race, gender, and social rank come into play. The representation of black African characters on the English Renaissance stage thus reveals a definite correlation between the dominant culture's fears and anxieties over the perceived threat posed by the black African other, its insistence on a self-representation as a distinctly superior culture, and its subsequent and systematic production of Africa and Africans as indelibly other. For the dominant culture to be able to define, produce, and maintain itself as superior, it must, of necessity, strive to keep the other in a position of chronic inferiority, hence the persistent appeal to stereotypes.

This thesis examines artistic and literary images of murderous women in popular print published in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. The construction of murderous women in criminal narratives, published between 1558 and 1625 in pamphlet, ballad, and play form, is examined in the context of contemporary historical records and cultural discourse. Chapter One features a literature review of the topic in recent scholarship. Chapter Two, comprised of two subsections, discusses representations of early modern women in contemporary literature and criminal archives. The subsections in Chapter Two examine early modern treatises, sermons, and essays concerning the nature of women, the roles and responsibilities of wives and mothers, and debates about marriage, as well as a review of women tried for murder in the Middlesex assize courts between 1558 and 1625. Chapter Three, comprised of four subsections, engages in critical readings of approximately 52 pamphlets, ballads, and plays published in the same period. Individual subsections discuss how traitorous wives, murderous mothers, women who murder in their communities, and punishment and redemption are represented in the narratives. Woodcut illustrations printed in these texts are also examined, and their iconographic contributions to the construction of bad women is discussed. Women who murder in these texts are represented as consummately evil creatures capable of inflicting terrible harm to their families and communities, and are consistently discovered, captured, and executed by their communities for their heinous crimes. Murderous women in early modern popular literature also provided a means for contemporary men and women to explore, confront, and share in the depths of sin, while anticipating their own spiritual salvation. Pamphlets, plays, and broadsides related bawdy, graphic, and violent stories that allow modern readers a glimpse of the popular culture and mental world of Renaissance England.

Première femme à publier un roman en Angleterre, Lady Mary Wroth (1587 ?-1651 ?) est l’auteur d’une œuvre profondément marquée par la mélancolie. En 1621, soit la même année que la première édition de l’Anatomie de la mélancolie de Robert Burton, elle publie sous son propre nom un roman pastoral, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, suivi d’un recueil de poèmes intitulé Pamphilia to Amphilanthus en référence au couple central du roman. De la représentation du paysage à la structure narrative en passant par les symptômes physiques et psychologiques que manifeste l’ensemble des personnages, la mélancolie est partout dans ce roman. Maladie érudite et culturelle propre à une élite sociale mais réservée aux hommes lorsqu’elle révèle les génies, objet d’une véritable mode dans l’Angleterre du dix-septième siècle, la mélancolie devient pour Lady Mary Wroth l’instrument privilégié de la légitimation de son projet romanesque. Le roman se caractérise en effet par une poétique de la mélancolie qui se traduit par la mise en scène réflexive de l’écriture, par une écriture noire typiquement maniériste dans laquelle l’auteur s’affirme en se niant. Mais la mélancolie est aussi dans ce roman le symptôme d’un monde en crise dans lequel les valeurs morales qui ont triomphé à l’époque élisabéthaine, telles que l’héroïsme martial, sont désormais obsolètes. Le roman présente le sombre tableau d’un monde déchu sans espoir de rachat. En imitant aussi systématiquement l’Arcadie de Sidney – dont Wroth était la nièce –, l’Urania met en scène une nostalgie littéraire qui souligne l’incapacité de l’auteur à égaler ses modèles, mais fait parallèlement de cet aveu d’échec l’affirmation de sa propre légitimité. / Lady Mary Wroth (1587 ? -1651 ?), who was the first woman to publish a prose romance in England, authored works that are pervaded by melancholy. In 1621 – the same year as the first edition of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy – she published a single volume containing her pastoral romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania and a sonnet sequence entitled Pamphilia to Amphilanthus which refers to the main couple in the romance. Melancholy is an overwhelming presence in Urania, as it appears not only in the setting and in the characters’ bodies and minds, but in the narrative structure of the romance as well. In seventeenth-century England, there was a well-known fashion for melancholy, which was seen as a sign of nobility and cultural genius, but only as far as men were concerned. Lady Mary Wroth uses melancholy to legitimize her authorial position inside the romance. Urania, indeed, is characterized by a poetics of melancholy which appears both in a self-conscious representation of the writing process and in a black, mannerist style which enables Wroth to make a claim for the legitimacy of her works by denying her own agency in them. Melancholy also functions as the symptom of moral decline, as the moral values which triumphed in the Elizabethan period, such as martial heroism, now appear irrevocably obsolete. The romance portrays a fallen world which reveals no hope of redemption whatsoever. In its systematic imitation of Sidney’s Arcadia, Urania showcases a literay nostalgia which enables Wroth to affirm her own authorial position by demonstrating her inability to equal her models.

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)

Since classical times, the witch has remained an eerie, powerful and foreboding figure in literature and drama. Often beautiful and alluring, like Circe, and just as often terrifying and aged, like Shakespeare’s Wyrd Sisters, the witch lives ever just outside the margins of polite society. In John Marston’s Sophonisba, or The Wonder of Women the witch’s ability to persuade through the use of language is Marston’s commentary on the power of poetry, theater and women’s speech in early modern Britain. Erichtho is the ultimate example of a terrifying woman who uses linguistic persuasion to change the course of nations. Throughout the play, the use of speech draws reader’s attention to the role of the mouth as an orifice of persuasion and to the power of speech. It is through Erichtho’s mouth that Marston truly highlights the power of subversive speech and the effects it has on its intended audience.

Concentrating on six plays in the 1610s, this thesis explores the ways theatrical visual effects described as “strange” channel the period’s moral anxieties about rhetoric, technology, and scepticism. It contributes to debates in repertory studies, textual and material culture, intellectual history, theatre history, and to recent revisionist considerations of spectacle. I argue that “strange” spectacle has its roots in the materialisation of morality: the presentation of moral ideas not as abstract concepts but in physical things. The first part of my PhD is a detailed study of early modern moral philosophy, scepticism, and material and textual culture. The second part of my thesis concentrates on Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (1609-10) and The Tempest (1611), John Webster’s The White Devil (1612), and Thomas Heywood’s first three Age plays (1611-13). These spectacular plays are all written and performed within the years 1610-13, a period in which the changes, challenges, and developments in both stage technology and moral philosophy are at their peak. I set these plays in the context of the wider historical moment, showing that the idiosyncrasy of their “strange” stagecraft reflects the period’s interest in materialisation and its attendant moral anxieties. This thesis implicitly challenges some of the conclusions of repertory studies, which sometimes threatens to hierarchise early modern theatre companies by seeing repertories as indications of audience taste and making too strong a divide between, say, “elite” indoor and “citizen” outdoor playhouses. It is also aligned with recent revisionist considerations of spectacle, and I elide divisions in criticism between interest in original performance conditions, close textual analysis, or historical-contextual readings. I present “strangeness” as a model for appreciating the distinct aesthetic of these plays, by reading them as part of their cultural milieu and the material conditions of their original performance.