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Thesis (Ph. D)--University of Oklahoma, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references.

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This thesis explores the spectrum of signification of disability, impairment and embodied difference in medieval drama. Drama is an important medium in which to explore what the body is used to signify as it provides an extra dimension in the physical embodiment and performance of these physical and spiritual conditions. Despite the value of medieval drama in understanding the significations of physical and psychological affliction, it remains a neglected area of scholarly research. In order to understand the meaning of dramatic representations of disability and impairment, it is necessary to explore the spectrum of signification attached to these conditions, since they could elicit such unstable and ambivalent responses. In this endeavour, this thesis consults medical, historical and cultural sources in addition to play-texts and performance evidence in order to understand the construction and representation of specific types of physical and psychological affliction in medieval drama, and what these conditions are used to signify through the body. Over the four chapters of this thesis I examine the ageing body (chapter 1); the unconverted Jewish body (chapter 2); the disease of leprosy (chapter 3); and wounds, mutilation and dismemberment (chapter 4). The play-texts I use deliberately draw upon a wide range of characters and personified abstractions, from the moral and the sacred to the immoral and the profane, from biblical drama to morality plays. These diverse conditions and identities allow an overarching insight into their use and meanings in medieval drama. Similarly, the diverse range of characters allows me to consider how the body is used to reflect the moral and spiritual condition of a character through the embodied mode of dramatic performance. For each of my chapters, the conditions I discuss possess ambivalence in their contrasting meanings, which binds the thesis together as a whole in acknowledging the changing and contrasting significations of disability, impairment and embodied difference according to the context.

The Book of Job was extremely popular in the Middle Ages, especially in England, because of its role in liturgy as well as lay religious devotion. I argue that the Book of Job was heavily influential in the writing of the medieval morality plays Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, Wisdom, and Everyman. In the plays, the dramatists mirrored many of Job's structural and artistic elements, creating direct parallels between the Biblical text and the morality plays. The authors also relied on Job's ideological framework to establish their own arguments, forming not only a textual but ideological linkage. Yet the most intriguing connection between Job and the morality plays is their function within the medieval religious context; the Hebrew Book of Job is used as a model for the Christian morality plays. By examining the role of Job in medieval England, I demonstrate how the figure of Job can be used as a Christian rather Jewish model. The influence of the Book of Job is central to the morality plays' structures, artistic techniques, and ideological arguments. I argue that, as other Scriptural books acted as patterns for the medieval cycle and mystery plays, the Book of Job stood as a pattern for the medieval morality plays.

This thesis examines the figure of the oral storyteller as depicted in various Old Norse literary sources written down during the High Middle Ages, the majority in Iceland, between the mid-twelfth and early fourteenth centuries. It comprises a literary-critical discussion of how storytellers and the art of storytelling are imagined, interpreted and represented within these texts. Where possible, connections are drawn between genres, and across considerable temporal and geographical distances, in order to illustrate the strength and endurance of cultural preoccupations with disguise, narrative structure and the role of intermediaries in different historical and creative contexts. The central contention is that the eddic poets and saga authors shared a common and profound sensitivity to the metatextual dimension of the storytelling endeavour in which they were engaged, and that this sensitivity manifested itself in strikingly similar ways across the whole period. The thesis is structured thematically, rather than chronologically, in order to foreground enduring cultural trends. The first chapter discusses the metatextual tendencies of the eddic poets, noting their recurring interest in disguise and the assertion (or appropriation) of an identity by characters who feature in their stories. It also includes an analysis of Vǫluspá which suggests that the poem lends itself to recitation by multiple performers. Chapter Two analyses depictions of public storytelling in the sagas and the relationship between writer and oral reciter as presented in the prologues and epilogues composed to ‘frame’ a number of these texts. Chapters Three and Four contain close readings of passages from the Sagas of Icelanders and eddic poetry, which demonstrate how certain characters, often of low social status, temporarily take on the mantle of a storyteller and perform their accounts of events so as to illuminate the texts' broader interest in the mechanics of literary narrative.

My dissertation explores the presence of physiognomy, which is the reading of faces and bodily affects to determine a person’s character. I investigate plays originally produced for the early English stage, ranging from the late Middle Ages to the Restoration. In this work I argue that the bodies within the selected plays exist as texts that are to be interpreted by readers and audience members alike. While embodiment theory has done excellent work in explaining the corporeality of the pre-modern body, it does not consider the body as a textual construction. My work aims to fill such a gap. My main methodology is historicist, both old and new. I employ the former insofar as I incorporate primary texts relevant to understanding physiognomy and its workings on the early English stage. I also use New Historicism since I cover many influences on physiognomy, including theology, politics, and philosophy of the mind. The first chapter probes the York Cycle’s biblical play The Conspiracy, as well as the morality play Mankind. I claim that physiognomy highlights the participatory aspects of both plays, as each contains bodies that help audiences learn of true piety. In the second chapter, I discuss Shakespeare’s problem plays All’s Well that Ends Well and Hamlet. I posit that the genre of problem play can best be understood as including works that contain incomplete or inaccurate physiognomic readings. For my final chapter, I analyze the tragicomedies Marriage a-la-Mode, by John Dryden, and The Widow Ranter, by Aphra Behn. I insist that examining the physiognomic readings can help us unite the dialectics between and among the multiple plots within each play. Over the course of these three chapters, I conclude that the body-as-text, understood through physiognomy, allows modern readers to better grasp pre-modern understandings of internality as it evolved from the Middle Ages to the Restoration. In addition, I contend that genre often dictates the ways in which bodies are constructed textually. In summary, the contributions of my work can be listed as the following: (1) I provide examples of how physiognomy can be used to support a variety of methodologies, including Marxism, feminism, and deconstruction. (2) I offer a more thorough history of physiognomy, ranging from the late Middle Ages to the Restoration. (3) My work with genre is unique among current scholarship that engages with physiognomy. In my conclusion, I suggest paths forward with this project, such as the use of other methods for interpreting the body as a text, consisting of anatomy, physiology, and allegory.

Les quarante "Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages" constituent l'immense majorité du corpus dramatique de langue française du XIVe siècle. Malgré cette importance historique majeure, ces pièces n'ont jusqu'à aujourd'hui pas fait l'objet d'une étude littéraire spécifique. Victimes du manque de légitimité poétique que l'on prête au théâtre médiéval en général, mais aussi tributaires de leur apparente simplicité, ces drames présentent pourtant de nombreuses similarités qui témoignent de l'homogénéité stylistique du corpus. Envisageant tour à tour le corpus en tant que texte, spectacle et livre, le présent travail vise donc à rendre raison de sa concertation dramaturgique. L'étude se donne d'abord pour objet de repérer les lois implicites du recueil : tandis qu'une analyse en synchronie permet de dégager les lois structurelles et discursives du corpus, une étude en diachronie permet de comprendre ses lois de composition, élaborées au fil du temps et des expériences scéniques. C'est finalement dans le dialogue incessant entre la scène et les spectateurs que s'élabore la spécificité du Miracle dramatique, dont la dramaturgie propose une approche singulièrement subtile de son public. Cette relation étroite entre la scène et les spectateurs se poursuit lors du passage des pièces de l'espace scénique à l'espace du livre. Mises en drame, en scène et en texte, ces quarante histoires miraculeuses offrent finalement l'évidence de la profonde cohérence de leurs transpositions successives. Témoignages de la vocation éducative des confréries, elles s'avèrent être de riches et étonnants objets de théâtre, dont la portée esthétique ne s'est pas tout à fait éteinte. / The forty "Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages" stand for the immense majority of the dramatic French-language corpus of the fourteenth century. Despite this major historical importance, these plays have not been the subject of a specific literary study. Despised for the lack of poetic legitimacy attributed to medieval theater in general and for their apparent simplicity, these dramas present many similarities which show the evidence of the stylistic homogeneity of the corpus. Considering in turns the corpus as a text, a show and a book, this work aims to reveal the dramaturgical project behind the plays. First of all, this study intends to identify the implicit laws of the collection. A synchronic analysis allows to identify the structural and discursive laws of the corpus, while a diachronic study reveal its laws of composition, created by succesives scenic experiences. Finally, the specificity of the dramatic Miracle appears to be based on this constant dialogue between the stage and its audience. This close relationship continues as the pieces move from the stage space to the book space. Dramas, stagings and texts, these forty miraculous stories offer the evidence of the deep coherence of their successive transpositions. As these plays are proofs of the brotherhoods' educational vocation, they turn out to be amazing theater objects, whose aesthetic significance has not quite extinguished.

This dissertation explores how late medieval and early modern English culture understood the possibilities of experience inherent within our dying moments. I argue that, rather than approaching the moment of death as exclusively terrible, unbearable, or meaningless, as some literary scholars have claimed, many could instead hope to find within such moments the opportunity for what Erasmus called “glimmerings”—new revelations, actions, and experiences of the world. I explore how the drama of Shakespeare and Marlowe investigates both the promises and illusions of the glimmering worlds cast up in one’s dying moments. This project draws on the thought of Hannah Arendt to elucidate the actions, forms of life, and worlds that can be undertaken and sustained in the circumstances of dying. In Chapter One, I uncover the late medieval roots of an association between dying moments and worldly awareness, expressed in fifteenth-century English texts such as Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ, Thomas Hoccleve’s Learn to Die, the morality play The Castle of Perseverance, and Desiderius Erasmus’s Preparation to Death. My second chapter argues that sixteenth-century ars moriendi texts such as Thomas Lupset’s Way of Dying Well, Thomas Becon’s Sick Man’s Salve, The Book of Common Prayer’s “Order for the Burial of the Dead,” and John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments each provide strategies of dying that preserve both self and world from the deteriorating force of mortality. Chapter Three moves from theological to dramatic inquiries into the moment of death, examining how Marlowe’s tragedies The Jew of Malta and Doctor Faustus scrutinize the risks of dying in conditions of exposure, in contrast with the sheltering protections of dying in a little room. My fourth chapter takes up Shakespearean tragedy to illustrate how King Lear evaluates and dramatizes the consequences of William Perkins’ Salve for a Sick Man, which contends that we are unable to undertake meaningful action in our final moments. In my last chapter, I show how Shakespeare’s late plays, Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, consider whether, in the presence of death, one can claim flourishing life and feel at home in the world.

It is important to remember that the categories of medieval performance were established far removed from their period in history. As a genre, the morality play includes a wide diversity of time, geography, content and performance styles. Such disparities have made it difficult to develop a comprehensive definition, without which comparisons between works cannot be consistent. As scholarship continues to explore these works in context of their performance, it becomes increasingly important to identify which performance styles best inform their production. In examining The Castle of Perseverance within the parameters of pas d’armes, new meanings can be drawn from its text. Instead of simply incorporating the conventions of tournament staging, the play exposes the faults of the secular societies they were intended to promote. Currently it is impossible to determine definitely that The Castle of Perseverance was intended to be a subversion of the pas d’armes. There is no identified author or even record of a single performance in medieval times. Yet the circumstantial evidence within the text supports the theory of subversion. Further research is still needed on the performance of The Castle of Perseverance within the appropriate historical context in order to better understand its place within the larger canon of medieval drama.