I argue that, during the Jacobean and Caroline periods, the three dramatic forms of closet drama, masque, and commercial theatre participated in recreating and critiquing conduct manual vocabularies of speech and silenceparticularly those aimed at women. Using narratology, gender theory, and cultural materialism to examine drama, my dissertation traces representations of womens speech and silence through the three dramatic forms to reveal a shared concern about why, how, and when women used or withheld their voices. This concern links the literary and performance histories of commercial plays like _The Tamer Tamed_, masques like _Tethys Festival_, and closet dramas like _The Tragedie of Mariam_, all of which embody female speech and silence. These works not only use women as subject matter and engage female viewers; they also invite women to actively collaborate in the dramatic process, providing instruction and space for constructing feminine subjectivity, authorship, and performativity. The dramatic forms and womens silent performances exist within a reflexive relationship. Just as the connections among dramatic forms allow women to perform across them, so too do womens performances reveal the intense interrelations of the forms. Rather than functioning as distinct genres, the dramatic forms converge as a single body that creates a narrative about womens voices and how women transgressed conduct recommendations to actively shape representations of their own cultural positions. Ultimately, the narrative emerges from a synthesis of the three forms and reveals that separation is anachronistic and hinders our ability to understand Stuart dramas cultural commentary.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-06052009-092233 |
| Date | 10 June 2009 |
| Creators | Nesler, Miranda Garno |
| Contributors | Leah S. Marcus, Lynn Enterline, Kathryn Schwarz, Michael Neill |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-06052009-092233/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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