The image of the prison looms large in early modern literature. By the sixteenth century, the prison was as much a part of everyday life as the public theatre. Although scholars have recently focused on the prison as a cite of cultural production, the depictions of fictionalized prison have not received much attention. Early modern drama in particular frequently resorts to prison as the setting for political struggle, inviting further discourse on authority and its sources. In this thesis, I argue that the prison's liminality allows early modern playwrights to explore the nature of royal privilege. I analyze Marlowe's Edward II, Shakespeare's Richard II, Shakespeare's The Tempest, and Fletcher's The Island Princess through the cultural and historical lens of imprisonment, determining that the prison is a space where relations and power dynamics between the king and his subjects can be questioned and subsequently condemned, upheld, or transformed. / Master of Arts / Much like modern art and popular culture, sixteenth-century English drama comments on both everyday life and political climate of its time. One image that appears frequently in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is the prison. In many plays, the prison appears as a crucial backdrop for political struggle. Setting the action within a prison allows the playwright to ask a series of questions regarding the nature of authority and privilege. In this thesis, I analyze Marlowe's Edward II, Shakespeare's Richard II, Shakespeare's The Tempest, and Fletcher's The Island Princess, focusing on the figure of the royal prisoner.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/99086 |
| Date | 22 June 2020 |
| Creators | Omirova, Dana |
| Contributors | English, Cleland, Katharine, Ng, Su Fang, Hodges, Kenneth |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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