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The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers
to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is
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Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
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Disability and Theatrical Representation in Early Modern Repertory DramaGainey, Evyan January 2024 (has links)
My dissertation proposes that the history of early modern repertory theatre cannot be understood free from the history of disability. I argue that disability was a far more ubiquitous presence in early modern theatre than scholars have hitherto recognized. This is because playing companies represented disability through a manifold web of tools pervading the theatrical marketplace, including player identity, props, embodied acts, gestures, vocalizations, fragments of dialogue, and even the staging of locational places. Tracing disability’s overt and allusive ubiquity is essential for understanding how assessments of (dis)ability consistently informed spectators’ encountering and interpretation of staged drama.
Chapter One places period commentary on stage players in dialogue with Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, arguing that ability and able-bodiedness were valued and idealized by playing companies and audiences alike.
Chapter Two examines Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso, Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, and George Chapman’s The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, proposing that leading players’ consistent embodiment of disability troubled a firm binary between disability and able-bodiedness in theatrical performance, as players’ stage identities consistently bore the residues of disabled performance.
Chapter Three examines William Shakespeare’s Richard III and Othello, as well as Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen, arguing that even minute tics and gestures onstage evoked the memory of past and present disabled performance. Disabled characters were, this chapter argues, often self-consciously constructed upon one another in ways that allowed repertory theatre to both recount and rework its history of disabled representation.
Chapter Four examines the anonymous The Fair Maid of the Exchange, Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, and Robert Armin’s The Two Maids of More-Clacke, arguing that disability was essential to the conception of place in early modern theatre—especially within a repertory system in which “place” often depended upon tools of theatrical representation that bore the residues of past and present disabled performance.
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Too foul and dishonoring to be overlooked : newspaper responses to controversial English stars in the Northeastern United States, 1820-1870Smith, Tamara Leanne 30 September 2010 (has links)
In the nineteenth century, theatre and newspapers were the dominant expressions of popular culture in the northeastern United States, and together formed a crucial discursive node in the ongoing negotiation of American national identity. Focusing on the five decades between 1820 and 1870, during which touring stars from Great Britain enjoyed their most lucrative years of popularity on United States stages, this dissertation examines three instances in which English performers entered into this nationalizing forum and became flashpoints for journalists seeking to define the nature and bounds of American citizenship and culture. In 1821, Edmund Kean’s refusal to perform in Boston caused a scandal that revealed a widespread fixation among social elites with delineating the ethnic and economic limits of citizenship in a republican nation. In 1849, an ongoing rivalry between the English tragedian William Charles Macready and his American competitor Edwin Forrest culminated in the deadly Astor Place riot. By configuring the actors as champions in a struggle between bourgeois authority and working-class populism, the New York press inserted these local events into international patterns of economic conflict and revolutionary violence. Nearly twenty years later, the arrival of the Lydia Thompson Burlesque Troupe in 1868 drew rhetoric that reflected the popular press’ growing preoccupation with gender, particularly the question of woman suffrage and the preservation of the United States’ international reputation as a powerfully masculine nation in the wake of the Civil War.
Three distinct cultural currents pervade each of these case studies: the new nation’s anxieties about its former colonizer’s cultural influence, competing political and cultural ideologies within the United States, and the changing perspectives and agendas of the ascendant popular press. Exploring the points where these forces intersect, this dissertation aims to contribute to an understanding of how popular culture helped shape an emerging sense of American national identity. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that in the mid-nineteenth century northeastern United States, popular theatre, newspapers, and audiences all contributed to a single media formation in which controversial English performers became a rhetorical antipode against which “American” identity could be defined. / text
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