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This thesis brings the performativity of William Shakespeare’s plays into focus; in presenting an alternative approach to his works, I show how literary criticism can be reinvigorated. Dramatic works demonstrate that, in their theatrical world, everything is mutable, and capable of evolving and changing, negating stability or reliability. Why, then, should what I term monogeneric approaches (forms of analysis that allocate one genre to plays, adopting a priori ideas as opposed to recognising processes of dramatic construction) to criticism remain prevalent in Shakespearean scholarship? Performativity, as defined by Judith Butler, is a concept that focuses on the dynamic constitution of a subject, rather than on the end result alone (whether ‘female’ for gender, or, for example, ‘comedy’ for plays). In establishing an analogical relationship between the performativity of gender and the performance of dramatic works, I offer new, interpretive possibilities for dramatic works, moving away from monogeneric methods. Constructing a method of analysis based on performativity allows an approach that recognises and privileges dramatic dynamism and characterisation. The role of female characters is vital in Shakespeare’s works: we see defiant, submissive, calculating, principled and overwhelmingly multifaceted performances from these characters who, I argue, influence the courses that plays take. This thesis joins a conversation that began in 335BCE with Aristotle’s Poetics. In acknowledging and interrogating previous scholarship on genre in Shakespeare’s works, I trace monogeneric themes in analysis from Aristotle, through A.C. Bradley, through to later twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics. I challenge the practice of allocating genre based on plot features, including weddings and deaths; such actions are not conclusively representative of one genre alone. To enable this interrogation, I establish relationships between theories such as Nicolas Bourriaud’s work on artistic exchange; Jacques Derrida’s hypothesis on participation and belonging; and feminist research by scholars including Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Performance analysis is a vital component of this thesis, alongside textual analysis. In a number of cases, multiple performances of a dramatic work are considered to illustrate the fascinating variety with which the text is translated from page to stage and the impact of different directorial decisions. I use the term ‘textual analysis’ to include the varying editions of Shakespeare’s plays, and to consider that every Complete Works publication is not, in fact, complete. The existence of quarto texts makes clear an important process of dramatic evolution, particularly when dramatic works and their allocated genres shift between quarto and Folio versions. Such textual instability highlights the difficulties inherent in applying singular identities to dynamic works. In locating performativity at the core of dramatic works and emphasising the key role of female characters, this thesis brings performance to the fore and presents an alternative ‘lens of interpretation’ for readers, watchers, teachers and scholars of Shakespeare.

In offering readings of Shakespeare’s tragic women on film, this thesis explores bodies that are caught between signifiers of absence and presence: the woman’s body that is present with absent body parts; the woman’s body that is spoken about or alluded to when absent from view; the woman’s living body that appears as a corpse; the woman’s body that must be exposed and concealed from sight. These are bodies that appear on the borderline of meaning, that open up a marginal or liminal space of investigation. In concentrating on a state of ‘betweenness’, I am seeking to offer new interpretive possibilities for bodies that have become the site of much critical anxiety, and bodies that, due to their own peculiar liminality, have so far been critically ignored. In reading Shakespeare’s tragic women on film, I am interested specifically in screen representations of Gertrude’s sexualised body that is both absent and present in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Desdemona’s (un)chaste body that is both exposed and concealed in film adaptations of Othello; Juliet’s ‘living corpse’ that represents life and death in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; the woman’s naked body in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971) that is absent from Shakespeare’s play-text; and Lavinia’s violated, dismembered body in Julie Taymor’s (Titus, 1999) and Titus Andronicus, which, in signifying both life and death, wholeness and fragmentation, absence and presence, something and nothing, embodies many of the paradoxes explored within this thesis. Through readings that demonstrate a combined interest in Shakespeare’s plays, Shakespeare films, and Shakespeare criticism, this thesis brings these liminal bodies into focus, revealing how an understanding of their ‘absent presence’ can affect our responses as spectators of Shakespeare’s tragedies on film.

For almost a century Shakespeare’s work has been viewed primarily under a supremacy of performance with an insistence that Shakespeare wrote his work to be staged, not read. This prevailing view has ensured that most responses in Shakespearean research fit within this line of enquiry. The recent argument that Shakespeare was a literary dramatist who wrote for readers—as well as audiences—has met with resistance. This thesis first exposes the very literate world Shakespeare lived in and his own perception of that world, which embraces a writer who wrote for readers. The material evidence of readers begins in Shakespeare’s own lifetime and grows steadily, evidenced by the editorial methods used to facilitate reading, the profusion of books specifically for readers of general interest, and the thousands of lay reading circles formed to enjoy and study the plays. Readers of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries are shown to have spontaneously responded to the works as literature, as reading Shakespeare aloud within a family or social circle has a tenacious history. For three hundred years after Shakespeare’s death it was readers and Shakespeare reading groups who created and maintained Shakespeare’s legacy as a literary icon and national hero. The history of millions of lay readers reading aloud in community was engulfed by the transition of the texts into academia and performance criticism until by the 1940s Shakespeare reading groups were virtually non-existent. A new genre of editorial practice can support a re-emergence of community reading and point toward a greater acceptance of Shakespeare as a literary dramatist, enlarging the field of Shakespearean scholarship and criticism. A prototype of a Readers’ Edition of a Shakespearean play specifically edited and designed for reading aloud in groups is included with this thesis.

The problem with which this investigation is concerned is that of the warrior-hero ideal as it evolves in Shakespeare's English and Roman plays, and its ultimate failure as a standard for exemplary conduct. What this study demonstrates is that the ideal of kingship that is developed in the English histories, especially in the Second Tetralogy, and which reaches its zenith in Henry V, is quite literally overturned in three Roman plays--Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. The method of determining this difference is a detailed analysis of these groups of plays. This analysis utilizes the body of Shakespearean criticism in order to note the almost total silence on what this study shows to be Shakespeare's growing disillusionment with the hero-king ideal and his final portrait of this ideal as a failure. It is the main conclusion of this study that in certain plays, and most particularly in the Roman plays, Shakespeare demonstrates a consciousness of something more valuable than political expediency and political legality. Indeed, the tragedy of these political heroes lies precisely in their allegiance to the standard of conduct of the soldier-king. Brutus, Antony, and Coriolanus, among others, suffer defeat in their striving to capture a higher reality. This investigation demonstrates that the concept of honor has lost its value in the social matrix of political machinations.