The Taming of the Shrew is an early comedy that exposes the oddities we take for granted: curious conventions, wild assumptions, gender roles, relationships, social status, fashion, and everything else we know so defectively. The given circumstances of the script and Petruchio are specific in choice, yet broad in interpretation. Petruchio, the catalyst behind Katherine’s character arc, needed to not only be believable in his ways, but likeable by the audience. This thesis examines the process required to successfully develop and bring to life the character of Petruchio to our modern audience. It includes historical background information on William Shakespeare and the origins of the play itself, Sanford Meisner’s Techniques (moment-to-moment analysis & actioning) and Konstantin Stanislavski’s system are included with the scored actor’s script, journals recorded by the actor to verify his victories and defeats during the six-week production process and critiques to support the success of the production.

William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is colored with religious overtones. His play incorporates elements of religious beliefs of Renaissance England. Aside from its historical basis, Shakespeare’s Macbeth alludes to stories from Scripture as well as Renaissance religious practices and beliefs, particularly regarding witchcraft, prophecy, and the dangers of sin. Through this myriad of sources, Shakespeare offers a vivid and grotesque depiction of a man demise due to his involvement with sin, offering a profound caution to his audience of the dangers of temptation and sin.

O presente trabalho tem por objetivo verificar se o conhecimento da linguagem artística pode ser um pressuposto para o conhecimento jusfilosófico, aclarando a compreensão de conceitos ou noções trabalhadas no bojo das teorias e sobrepujando o mero diálogo entre essas duas esferas. Isto porque a logopatia [ou conhecimento racional e afetivo], pelo seu próprio conceito, significaria o conhecimento universal tanto do ponto de vista do sujeito cognoscente [em razão do pensamento complexo do Homem que não é só sapiens, mas também é demens] quanto do próprio objeto cognoscível [em razão de considerá-lo à luz dos inúmeros fatores que sobre ele incidem, variáveis ou não, que também se traduzem por outros objetos cognoscíveis]. Se a postura logopática enseja uma universalidade que é própria da Filosofia, parece de todo óbvio que o conhecimento interdisciplinar entre Arte e Direito é uma necessidade para a própria produção jusfilosófica. Para ratificar a hipótese, elegeu-se o tema do poder, com suas inúmeras teorias críticas - especialmente as concepções de Michel Foucault, Niklas Luhmann, Pierre Bordieu, Tércio Sampaio Ferraz Jr. e Mara Regina de Oliveira - e a peça shakespeariana A Tempestade para viabilização da análise interdisciplinar. E diante desse método e dessa hipótese, não haveria pergunta melhor para definir o problema desta pesquisa que não a seguinte: É possível fazer uso da linguagem literária shakespeariana para abordar o tema do poder que surge formulado na linguagem jusfilosófica? / The present work aims to verify if the knowledge of the language arts could be a precondition for the jusphilosofical knowledge, clarifying the understanding of concepts or theorical notions and overcoming the mere dialogue between these two spheres. That is because logopathy [or rational knowledge and affective], by its very concept, it would mean universal knowledge both from the standpoint of the knowing subject [because of the complex thought of man who is not just sapiens, but is also demens] and the knowable object itself [due to consider the numerous factors bearing upon it, variable or not, wich also are other knowable objects]. If the logopathical posture gives rise a universality that is characteristic of philosophy, it appears obvious that the interdisciplinarity between art and law is a necessity for the jusphilosophical production itself. To confirm the hypothesis, it was elected the theme of \"power\", with its many critical theories - especially the ideas of Michel Foucault, Niklas Luhmann, Pierre Bourdieu, Tertius Sampaio Ferraz Jr. and Mara Regina de Oliveira - and Shakespeare\'s play The Tempest in order to enable the interdisciplinary analysis. And before that method and that hypothesis, there would be no better question to define the problem of this research than the following: Is it possible to make use of Shakespearean literary language to treat the issue of power that comes formulated in the jusphilosophical language?

The popular image of Richard III remains, even today, deeply indebted to Shakespeare's portrayal; however, the century following the publication of Shakespeare's play in 1597 witnessed a fresh and vibrant re-evaluation of this character in a diverse range of texts from poems and history works to pamphlets. While many authors still perpetuated the negative Tudor image, original writings challenged this ingrained view and resulted in a more nuanced assessment of Richard III than the one pervading the sixteenth century. The present thesis investigates a range of seventeenth-century texts about Richard III which shed new light on the reception of Shakespeare's play, bring unique testimony to the contemporary understanding of tyranny, and capture specific social and political anxieties of the period: the end of the Tudor dynasty, the conflict between the Crown and Parliament culminating in the Civil Wars, and the execution of Charles I. These texts offer a fuller picture of the contemporary literary-political climate, while illuminating the role of historical memory in forming national consciousness, including the forging and dismantling of myths. The thesis analyses seventeenth-century responses to Richard III in historiography, legal and constitutional debates, poetry, plays, and the visual arts. The first two chapters demonstrate that historians and legal theorists during the Stuart reign and the Civil Wars proved unexpected advocates of Richard III. Challenging the traditional narrative of Tudor chronicles, they reappraised Richard's election by parliament and his moderate taxation policies and contrasted them with the controversial high-taxation programmes of the Stuarts. The third chapter offers a re-evaluation of Richard's portraits which betray hitherto unnoticed marks of ageism as a symbol of governmental inadequacy. The chapter explores visual art as a distinct incarnation of historical commentary. Chapter four examines the depictions of Richard's conscience in poems by Richard Niccols and Christopher Brooke. The final two chapters analyse two extensive poems on Richard III. John Beaumont's 'Bosworth Field' (1629) offers an original account of the battle and Richard III as a study of patriotism and leadership. Thomas Wincoll's Plantagenets Tragicall Story (1649) transforms Richard III into a vehicle of anti-Cromwellian political allegory in the time of the regicide. By reconstructing the life of Wincoll, a royalist poet from a puritan family, the chapter outlines the contradictory nexus of convictions which underlie Civil War literature. Overall, my thesis argues that Richard III evolved from the plainly negative tyrant of Tudor chronicles to a more complex figure, resulting in a more original and balanced portrayal of his character in the seventeenth century.

Because Shakespeare borrowed so many ideas and devices from other writers, we wonder whether he also borrowed the trick of double time from some of his predecessors; therefore one of the purposes of this study is to discover whether or not this device was original with Shakespeare. In this study I have considered the works of John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, and George Peele because these four seem to have influenced Shakespeare more than did any of the other of his immediate predecessors. To discover what influence, if any, these men had upon Shakespeare ts treatment of time is not, however, the only purpose of this study; for I am also interested in the characteristics of the works of these men for their own values, independent of any influence which they may have had on the works of Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare and Sarah Kane are playwrights who for drastically different reasons have left indelible impacts upon the theatrical world. A key factor in each of their plays is the presentation of violence. Shakespeare uses violence for observable, orthodox reasons of driving the plot forward, while Kane uses it for sensory effect, social commentary, and for subverting traditional narrative expectations. This study examines how violence and fighting work as dramaturgical tools in these playwrights’ work, by individual examination, juxtaposition, and the use of other pieces of drama to inform these two differing schools of theatrical violence.

This dissertation follows a collection of agentive objects around and through the networks of humans and nonhumans in four disparate works of English literature: the Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood, William Shakespeare's narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, Thomas Hardy's novel The Woodlanders, and Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials. Applying the emergent discourses of object-oriented analyses, I posit the need for a critique that considers literary objects not as textual versions of real-world objects but as constructs of human imagination. What happens when we treat nonhuman or inanimate objects in literature as full characters in their own right? What work do nonhumans do to generate the story and the characters? How does our understanding of the human characters depend on the nonhuman ones? Most importantly, what motivates the agency of the fictive nonhuman? I argue that in this particular collection of texts, nonhuman agency stems from authorial nostalgia for the Garden of Eden: a time long past in which humans, nonhumans, and God existed in perfect harmony. Each text preserves this collective memory in a unique way, processing the myth as the author's cultural moment allows. The Dream of the Rood chapter uncovers the complex network of mirrors between the poet, the fictive Dreamer, the True Cross who speaks to the Dreamer, and the reader(s) of the poem. I use Jacques Lacan's stages of psychosexual development to trace the contours of this network, and I demonstrate how the poet's Edenic vision takes the form of an early medieval feast hall in heaven in which God presides over a banquet table like Hrothgar over Heorot. The Rape of Lucrece chapter posits that a series of domestic actors (weasels, wind, door locks) join with various "pricks" in the poem in an attempt to protect Lucrece from her rapist, Tarquin. Through these objects, I investigate the limits of women's speech and its efficacy before concluding with a consideration of the poem's Edenic vision, a Humanist paradise-on-earth, in the guise of the Roman Republic. The next chapter follows a shorn section of hair through The Woodlanders as it performs various functions and is assigned responsibility and power by several different human characters in the novel. The hair acts within a network of "man-traps" that illustrate the dangers of human artifice in an industrial era, and it reveals to readers Hardy's certainty that we will never reclaim Eden in our postlapsarian world. Finally, I navigate the fantastic worlds of His Dark Materials with the aid of three powerfully agentive objects: a golden compass, a subtle knife, and an amber spyglass. The first and second, I insist, resist not only their user's intentions but also their author's, because they are imbued with so much life and power that the narrative cannot contain them. The spyglass, by contrast, performs exactly as it was designed to do, and reveals the secret of the perfectly symbiotic world of the creatures called mulefa, who model for us a very contemporary new Eden that is populated by hybrids, sustained by materialism and sensuality, and presided over by earthly individuals rather than an omniscient Creator. Pullman's trilogy brings us back to the Garden but insists that our fallen state is our triumph rather than our tragedy.

Thesis (M.A.)--State University of New York at New Paltz, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 129-135). Online version available via the SUNY New Paltz Sojourner Truth Library : http://hdl.handle.net/1951/37396.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2006. / Title from PDF title page screen. Advisor: Russ McDonald; submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (p. 394-433).

This dissertation examines beggars, gypsies, rogues, and vagrants presented in early modern English drama, with the discussion of how these peripatetic characters represent the discourses of vagrancy of the period. The first chapter introduces Tudor and early Stuart governments' legislation and proclamations on vagabondage and discusses these governmental policies in their social and economic contexts. The chapter also deals with the literature of roguery to point out that the literature (especially in the Elizabethan era) disseminated such a negative image of beggars as impostors and established the antagonistic atmosphere against the wandering poor. The second chapter explores the anti-theatrical aspect of the discourses of vagrancy. Along with the discussion of early playing companies' traveling convention, this chapter investigates how the long-held association of players with beggars is addressed in the plays that are dated from the early 1570s to the closing of the playhouses in 1642. In the third chapter I read Shakespeare's King Lear with the focus on its critical allusions to the discourses of vagrancy and interpret King Lear's symbolic experience of vagrancy in that context. The chapter demonstrates that King Lear represents the spatial politics embedded in the discourses of vagrancy and evokes a sympathetic understanding of the wandering poor. Chapter IV focuses on Beggars' Bush and analyzes the beggars' utopian community in the play. By juxtaposing the play with a variety of documents relating to the vagrancy issue in the early seventeen century, I contend that Beggars' Bush reflects the cultural aspirations for colonial enterprises in the early Stuart age. Chapter V examines John Taylor's conceptualization of vagrancy as a trope of travel and free mobility, and discusses the "wanderlust" represented in A Jovial Crew: Merry Beggars as an exemplary anecdote showing the mid seventeenth century's perceptions on vagrancy and spatial mobility. Thus, by exploring diverse associations and investments regarding vagrants, this study demonstrates that the early modern discourses of vagrancy have been informed and inflected by shifting economic, socio-historical, and national interests and demands.