Browsing by Subject "Shakespeare"
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Item The 2nd Earl of Essex and the history players : the factional writing of John Hayward, William Shakespeare, Samuel Daniel, and George Chapman(2012-12) Davies, Matthew Bran; Whigham, Frank; Loehlin, James; Barret, J.K.; Friedman, Alan; Levack, BrianRobert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth’s last favorite and the last man she executed for treason, has been harshly treated by posterity. Given his leading role at court in what Patrick Collinson calls the “nasty nineties,” Essex has taken much of the blame for the divisive factional politics of Elizabeth’s final decade. However, leading recent efforts to salvage Essex’s reputation, historian Paul Hammer has uncovered a sophisticated bureaucracy operated by highly educated scholars and led by an intelligent, cultivated statesman. A considerable number of high-profile literary figures, moreover, willingly engaged with this ambitiously expanding Essex faction. This thesis proposes that evidence of interference by the censor and the Privy Council, sensitive to a politicized historiography promoting the Earl’s interests chiefly on London’s stages, discloses the presence of a loose, autonomous federation of authors associated with the Essex and post-Essex factions between 1590 and 1610. This thesis considers the suspected works of an eclectic group of writers bonded by their ideological affiliations with Essex’s “radical moderatism”: civil lawyer John Hayward’s prose history of The Life and Raigne of Henrie IIII (1599); William Shakespeare’s second “tetralogy” (1595-99) dealing with the same historical period; Samuel Daniel’s closet drama of the downfall of the Greek general Philotas (1605); and innovative playwright George Chapman’s double tragedy set in France, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608). I situate these authors within the intellectual and public relations wing of the Essex circle in order to consider how they made contact with the center and with each other, and where they resided within the broader operation of the faction; what they offered and what they expected in return; how they shaped political thinking and how their dramaturgy developed as a consequence; whether they were attracted by the purse or the person; and to what extent they were artistically or ideologically motivated. In considering, finally, whether these writers worked in collaboration or alone, on message or off-the-cuff, as propagandists or political commentators, I illuminate the critically neglected role of the factional writer in early modern England.Item Appropriating Elizabeth : absent women in Shakespeare's Henriad(2010-05) Andrews, Meghan Cordula; Rebhorn, Wayne A., 1943-; Bruster, Douglas S.When scholars look for a Shakespearean analogue to Queen Elizabeth I, they often look no farther than his Richard II, the deposed and effeminate king with whom Elizabeth was known to compare herself. This report seeks to broaden our reading of Shakespeare's Henriad by arguing that, in fact, there are echoes of Elizabeth in both Henry IV and Henry V, successors to Richard II. These traces of Elizabeth reveal the Henriad's fantasy of a male-dominated political sphere as just that: a fantasy. Moreover, this appropriation of maternal or effeminate characteristics is not limited to the Henriad's rulers, but occurs several times in the Shakespearean canon. This absorption becomes another way for Shakespeare's plays to manage their anxiety over threatening women even as they appropriate the authority of an aging Elizabeth.Item Authors, Audiences, and Elizabethan Prologics(2011-02-22) Heil, Jacob AllenIn examining examples of prologues, inductions, and choruses from early modern drama, Authors, Audiences, and Elizabethan Prologics tries to frame a more comprehensive picture of dramatists? relationships with the plays they write and the audiences for whom they write them. It suggests that these various prologics are imbued with an intrinsic authority that provides something of a rubric, perceptible by both playwright and playgoer, through which one can measure the crucial negotiations with and within the shifting valences of dramatic representation in the early modern period. The project develops a way of thinking about the prologic as a hermeneutics unto itself, one which allows us to contextualize more adequately the manner in which playwrights conceptualize and construct their own relationship to nascent notions of authorship and authority. My first body chapter (Chapter II) considers the rhetorical construction of audiences? silences in various Elizabethan interludes, suggesting that such ideal silences register one?s contemplative engagement with the performance and, thus, work to legitimize early drama. The prologues to John Lyly?s plays?my subject in Chapter III?exemplify the desire to legitimize, instead, the playwright. Reading Lyly?s plays alongside his letters of petition to Queen Elizabeth and Sir Robert Cecil, one can see the manner in which Lyly creates an authorial persona rooted in his rhetorical skills. In Chapter IV I examine Shakespeare?s sparse but measured use of prologues to manipulate his audiences? preconceptions of theatrical conventions and to guide them toward a consideration of what it means to have interpretive agency, how far that agency extends, and where to locate the limits of narrative in the necessarily liminal domain of the theater. Finally, I argue in Chapter V that Thomas Nashe?s Summer?s Last Will and Testament expands the prologic space, mimicking in the playspace the critical, interactive stance that he assumes in the printed marginalia of his prose writing. This is to say that Summer?s Last Will echoes?or in many cases prefigures?the authorial anxieties that Nashe expresses elsewhere in his work, and chief among them is an anxiety over the interpretational agency of the reader and auditor.Item Chaucer's Jailer's Daughter(2015-05) Snell, Megan Angela; Scala, Elizabeth, 1966-; Bruster, DouglasWe know that Shakespeare read Chaucer, but we do not know exactly how he read Chaucer. Established models of source studies require solid "proof," but this paper proposes a more liquid conception of influence that permeates a work in unexpected ways. The Jailer's Daughter, the seemingly un-Chaucerian alteration to The Knight's Tale frame of the Shakespeare and Fletcher play, The Two Noble Kinsmen, acts as the case study of such permeation. Only a single line in the lengthy Knight's Tale offers a parallel figure for this character: the Knight narrates that Palamon escapes prison "By helpyng of a freend," and in the play the Jailer's Daughter frees Palamon from her father's prison. Because it does not supply dialogue, a name, or even a gender to the "freend," The Knight's Tale has long been presumed to offer Shakespeare and Fletcher little beyond this event to inspire the play's more substantive subplot. I argue that the Jailer's Daughter offers a surprising means of connection not only to The Knight's Tale, the obvious source text, but also to the other tales of the First Fragment of The Canterbury Tales, which "quite" the tale of courtly love that precedes them. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, she embodies what the Knight disallows in his narration of the tale, leaking madness and feminine desire into the play's foundation. This structure ultimately suggests how Shakespeare works characterologically, channeling the complexity of a source such as Chaucer fluidly through a unit of character.Item Document clustering with nonparametric hierarchical topic modeling(2015-05) Schaefer, Kayla Hope; Williamson, Sinead; Zhou, MingyuanSince its introduction, topic modeling has been a fundamental tool in analyzing corpus structures. While the Relational Topic Model provides a way to link, and subsequently cluster, documents together as an extension of the original Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model, this paper seeks to form a document clustering model for the nonparametric alternative to LDA, the Dirichlet Process. As the structure of Shakespeare's tragedies is the focus of this work, we specifically cluster documents while modeling the text using a Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP), which allows for a mixture model with shared mixture components, in order to capture the natural topic clustering within a play. Using collapsed Gibbs sampling, the effectiveness of the clustered HDP is compared against that of LDA and an HDP without document clustering. This is done using both log perplexity and a qualitative assessment of the returned topics. Furthermore, clustering is performed and analyzed individually on speeches from each of ten tragedies, as well as with a combined corpus of acts.Item Embodied mind & sixteenth-century poetry : Wyatt, Vaughan Lock, & Shakespeare(2013-05) Radley, Noël Clare; Wojciehowski, Hannah Chapelle, 1957-Abstract: Instead of assuming that sixteenth-century poetry is a form of transcendence, and instead of defining poetry as an expression of inner life or character, this dissertation argues that there are ways to interpret poetry as a tool that helped sixteenth-century subjects understand and process embodied experience. How do we know that sixteenth-century poetry was a function of the material world and the body? The evidence is in the word selections, themes, and tropes created by poets themselves. By closely examining their writings, we can trace the negotiations between sixteenth-century poetic traditions, senses, and the material world. I explore these negotiations through three sixteenth-century poets whose works may be considered paradigmatic of the larger cultural movements that shaped their world: Sir Thomas Wyatt, the diplomat and courtier-poet in the reign of Henry VIII; Anne Vaughan Lock, a Marian exile who translated Calvin and published devotional poetry at the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I; and William Shakespeare, whose sonnet sequence published in 1609 responded to Elizabethan cultural arts at a time of energy and change. The three poets engaged in this project are distinct in class, gender, and history, and thus, each chapter is a case study that surveys embodiment in a unique context. But the reason the three poets are viewed together (and the tie that binds them) is that they all wrote serial poems, or verse sequences. When compared across the project, important connections emerge about the cognitive power of serial poems. I argue that verse sequences are dexterous as well as able to perform cognitive "heavy lifting." Whether it was Vaughan Lock and Wyatt who dilated scriptural exemplars and carved space for emerging evangelical ideas, or Shakespeare, who much more clearly wrote inventive verse, sixteenth-century writers used the sequence to test new possibilities and integrate prior knowledge. In this diachronic reading of poetic embodiments, we can begin to see verse sequences as a technology that merges compelling perceptual observation with high abstraction, and that allows for opposing ideas to take place across the text, resolving rigid binaries and synthesizing opposites. Although my project attempts to view the poets together, each chapter provides evidence of significant differences across sixteenth-century poets. Although Wyatt and Vaughan Lock both utilized serial poems to test evangelical beliefs regarding conscience and penitence, they signal opposing impulses when it comes to gendered power. Moreover, Shakespeare's sonnets are more ostensibly amatory than religious in their overall intent. Shakespeare's metaliterary discourses, moreover, mobilized the serial format as an even more reflexive form. The project may be a skeletal map of the space between the evangelical procedures of conscience (which were themselves very reflexive) and Shakespearean procedures of mind. By comparing these differences, we may cast light on the ways in which psalm paraphrase (as a mode and a sequential format) influenced English amatory verse sequences. The dissertation works to address unstudied connections between diverse poets from the period of Henry VIII through the early reign of James I. But the dissertation also forges new routes in Renaissance studies, by proposing directions and methods for studying literary embodiment. I believe that sixteenth-century embodiment is best viewed through the lens of religious history and print technology. Moreover, I argue that the study of sixteenth-century embodiment should also incorporate contemporary historical ideas about the mind. By engaging both New Historicism and the discourse of embodied cognition from neuroscience, finally, the project creates a comparative view of cognition, translating between empirical methods and historicist techniques in English studies.Item Essays on Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Shakespeare(2016-04) Faden, Allie; Grant, Rebecca; Greenwood, Cynthia; Hill, Darcy; Plamer, JohnThe following video contains the session “Essays on Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Shakespeare” from the 2016 Second International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Thought at Sam Houston State University. The papers presented in this session are “The Audience Sets the Tone: Voice in Parliament of Fowles and The Squire’s Tale” by Allie Faden, “Feminism and The Decameron: Boccaccio’s Exploration of Gender Equality” by Rebecca Grant, and “Exploring the Bawdy Court Ethos in Measure for Measure’s Design: Putting the Church Court’s Newly Stringent Laws Governing Sex and Betrothal on Trial” by Cynthia Greenwood.Item Exploring teaching Shakespeare with fan fiction(2013-05) Evans, Mathew, M.A.; Resta, Paul E.; Hughes, JoanAlthough students are exposed to the works of Shakespeare extensively from 9th -12th grade and sometimes at the postsecondary level, teachers are pressed to make the literature relevant and interesting for their classes. Fan fiction, which are stories written by amateurs out of a strong feeling of admiration and appreciation for an existing work, present numerous avenues to engage students with classic literature. I developed a fan fiction website called the Stratford Tattler which reimagines Shakespeare’s characters and world as if they were modern day celebrities which the website covers like an online tabloid. While I wrote fan fiction articles and developed the website, I received feedback, which in turn formed an iterative design. Three university Shakespeare scholars, two high school English teachers, and one legal expert on copyright provided the bulk of the feedback and advice. Over six months, I incorporated their suggestions as the project evolved from trying to build a participatory community to developing a stand-alone learning environment which teachers could readily incorporate in their classroom. The final result includes a website with teacher resources, namely a teacher’s guide with recommendations and lesson plans directed at high school English teachers, along with a model article of fan fiction that stays true to Shakespeare’s original text, a quality that most of the aforementioned experts who participated in the project found necessary for fan fiction to be educational. The teacher’s guide also includes guidelines for avoiding copyright infringement when repurposing existing digital images. Along with these teacher resources, the insights of my participants and my experience writing fan fiction as related in this report hopefully provide a first step toward high school English teachers being create their own fan fiction website and engage students with classic literature.Item Generative metaphor: filiation and the disembodied father in Shakespeare and Jonson(2009-12) Penuel, Suzanne Marie; Bruster, Douglas; Loehlin, James; Moore, Timothy; Rebhorn, Wayne; Chapelle Wojciehowski, HannahThis project shows how Jonson and Shakespeare represent dissatisfactions with filiation and paternity as discontents with other early modern discourses of cultural reproduction, and vice versa. Chapters on six plays analyze the father-child tie as it articulates sensitivities and hopes in remote arenas, from usury law to mourning rites, humanism to Judaism, witchcraft to visions of heaven. In every play, the father is disembodied. He is dead, invisible, physically separated from his child, or represented in consistently incorporeal terms. In its very formlessness, the vision of paternity as abstraction is what makes it such a flexible metaphor for Renaissance attitudes to so many different forms of cultural cohesion and replication. The Shakespeare plays treat the somatic gulf with ambivalence. For Shakespeare, who ultimately rejects a world beyond the impermanent material one, incorporeality is both the father's prestige and his punishment. But for Jonson, the desomatization more often indicates paternal privilege. Jonson wants filiation and fathering to counteract the progression of history, and since time destroys the concrete, abstraction and disembodiment are necessary for the process to work. His plays initially envision a paternally imagined rule of law achieving permanence for those under it. But Volpone undermines Every man in his humour's fantasy of law, and The staple of news dismantles it still more. Ultimately, in Staple's schematically represented father and son, a pair whose reunion allows them a courtroom triumph, Jonson resorts to an abstractly figured paternity itself to justify other abstractions, legal and literary. As with law in Jonson, so for religion and the supernatural in Shakespeare. Shakespeare's body of work eventually renounces the religious faith whose representation it interweaves with portraits of children and fathers. It does so first in Merchant's intimidating Judaism and hypocritical Christianity, then in Twelfth night's more subtly referenced Catholicism, mournful and aestheticized, and finally in The tempest's various abjurations. Monotheism vanishes altogether in the last play, replaced by a dead witch and multiple spirits and deities who do the bidding of a conjuror who plans to give them up. Both playwrights ultimately reduce their investment in other forms of cultural transmission in favor of more intimate parent-child structures, embodied or not.Item "King hereafter" : Macbeth and apocalypse in the Stuart discourse of sovereignty(2010-05) Foran, Gregory Augustine; Rumrich, John Peter, 1954-; Whigham, Frank F.; Mallin, Eric S.; Ng, Su Fang; Levack, Brian P.“‘King Hereafter’” posits Shakespearean theater as a gateway between Reformation England’s suppressed desire to rid itself of monarchy and that desire’s expression in the 1649 execution of King Charles I. Specifically, I argue that Macbeth darkly manifests a latent Protestant fantasy in which the kings of the earth are toppled in a millenarian coup. Revolution- and Restoration-era writers John Milton and William Davenant attempt to liberate or further repress Macbeth’s apocalyptic republicanism when they invoke the play for their respective causes. Shakespeare’s text resists appropriation, however, pointing up the blind spots in whatever form of sovereignty it is enlisted to support. I first analyze Macbeth (1606) in its original historical context to show how it offers an immanent critique of James I’s prophetic persona. Macbeth’s tragic foreknowledge of his own supersession by Banquo’s heirs mirrors James’s paradoxical effort to ground his kingship on apocalyptic promises of the demise of earthly sovereignty. Shakespeare’s regicidal fantasy would be largely repressed into the English political unconscious during the pre-war years, until John Milton drew out the play’s antimonarchical subtext in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649). Yet the specter of an undead King Charles, I argue in chapter two, haunts Milton just as Banquo’s ghost vexes Macbeth because Milton’s populist theory of legitimate rule continues to define sovereignty as the right to arbitrary violence. In chapter three, I show how Sir William Davenant’s Restoration revision of Macbeth (c.1664) reclaims the play for the Stuart regime by dramatizing Hobbes’s critique of prophetic enthusiasm. In enlarging upon Macduff’s insurgency against the tyrant Macbeth, however, Davenant merely displaces the rebellious potential of the rogue prophet onto the deciding sovereign citizen. Finally, my fourth chapter argues for Milton’s late-career embrace of Shakespearean equivocation as a tool of liberty in Samson Agonistes (1671). Samson’s death “self-killed” and “immixed” among his foes in a scene of apocalyptic destruction challenges the Hobbesian emphasis on self-preservation and the hierarchical structures on which sovereignty itself depends for coherence. Milton’s mature eschatological vision of the end of sovereignty coincides with his artistic acceptance of the semantic and generic ambiguities of Shakespearean drama.Item The long line of the Middle English alliterative revival : rhythmically coherent, metrically strict, phonologically English(2012-05) Psonak, Kevin Damien; Cable, Thomas, 1942-; Henkel, Jacqueline M.; Hinrichs, Lars; Lesser, Wayne; King, Robert D.This study contributes to the search for metrical order in the 90,000 extant long lines of the late fourteenth-century Middle English Alliterative Revival. Using the 'Gawain'-poet's 'Patience' and 'Cleanness', it refutes nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars who mistook rhythmic liveliness for metrical disorganization and additionally corrects troubling missteps that scholars have taken over the last five years. 'Chapter One: Tame the "Gabble of Weaker Syllables"' rehearses the traditional, but mistaken view that long lines are barely patterned at all. It explains the widely-accepted methods for determining which syllables are metrically stressed and which are not: Give metrical stress to the syllables that in everyday Middle English were probably accented. 'Chapter Two: An Environment for Demotion in the B-Verse' introduces the relatively stringent metrical template of the b-verse as a foil for the different kind of meter at work in the a-verse. 'Chapter Three: Rhythmic Consistency in the Middle English Alliterative Long Line' examines the structure of the a-verse and considers the viability of verses with more than the normal two beats. An empirical investigation considers whether rhythmic consistency in the long line depends on three-beat a-verses. 'Chapter Four: Dynamic "Unmetre" and the Proscription against Three Sequential Iambs' posits an explanation for the unusual distributions of metrically unstressed syllables in the long line and finds that the 'Gawain'-poet's rhythms avoid the even alternation of beats and offbeats with uncanny precision. 'Chapter Five: Metrical Promotion, Linguistic Promotion, and False Extra-Long Dips' takes the rest of the dissertation as a foundation for explaining rhythmically puzzling a-verses. A-verses that seem to have excessively long sequences of offbeats and other a-verses that infringe on b-verse meter prove amenable to adjustment through metrical promotion. 'Conclusion: Metrical Regions in the Long Line' synthesizes the findings of the previous chapters in a survey of metrical tension in the long line. It additionally articulates the key theme of the dissertation: Contrary to traditional assumptions, Middle English alliterative long lines have variable, instead of consistent, numbers of beats and highly regulated, instead of liberally variable, arrangements of metrically unstressed syllables.Item Marlovian parody and asinine heroism in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Dido, Queen of Carthage(2014-05) Cressler, Loren Michael; Mallin, Eric Scott; Barret, Jennifer KWilliam Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream, which has previously been denied a dramatic source, in fact features a deep engagement with Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage on both structural and thematic grounds. I suggest that MND features a conscious, parodic engagement with Dido that derives from both the overriding Ovidian mode in which both plays are written, and more importantly from Shakespeare's direct parodying of the romantic plot features in Dido, a play that itself parodies Virgil's Aeneid and undermines its pius Aeneas. Shakespeare's deployment of multiple Marlovian techniques--in a nearly identical fashion to Marlowe's--generates a comic appropriation of Marlowe's story- line that constitutes interpretation of and commentary upon Dido and the stakes of Aeneas' heroism in Marlowe's play. Shakespeare adapts a number of dramaturgical methods from Marlowe: instantiations of triangular erotic desire; "gender inversion" and the pursuit of men by women; substitution and conflation of maternal and erotic relations; infantilization of male lovers; and wooing queens with Cupid's polarizing arrows. Each of these dramatic techniques figures prominently in both Dido's relationship with Aeneas and Bottom's with Titania. Shakespeare's comic subplot about the interaction between Bottom and Titania can thus be read as a microcosmic, mock-epic retelling of the main plot of Dido. Rather than a subplot that parodically or comically rehearses the events of MND's main plot, Shakespeare writes a subplot that is tangential to the play's main action and in it interprets Dido as a comic storyline with potential to defer or avoid the harm caused by Aeneas' abandonment of Dido. Bottom's tryst with Titania parodies Dido by using multiple Marlovian tactics directly from Dido and Aeneas' affair, yet lowering the stakes of erotic entanglement in order to suggest a feasible alternative to Aeneas' catastrophic departure from Carthage. Within MND, Bottom and Titania's tryst serves as a counterpoint to the sometimes violent silencing--and consistent male domination--of women in Athens proper under Theseus' ruthless patriarchy. By parodying Marlowe's Aeneas and foregrounding Duke Theseus' past abuses of woman, Shakespeare interrogates classical heroism and suggests a benign form of heroism in the character Bottom.Item Old English Literature and Renaissance Drama(2016-04) Smith, Ryan; Probasco, Deseree; Hill, Dracy; Plamer, JohnThe following video contains the session entitled “Old English Literature and Renaissance Drama” from the 2016 Second International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Thought at Sam Houston State University. The papers presented in this session are "'Heaven swallowed the smoke ‘~The Shaping of Heaven, Hell, and the Hall in Beowulf “ by Deseree Probasco, and “Shifting Philosophies: Prospero from Medieval Servant to Renaissance Master” by Ryan SmithItem Providing multiple points of entry into literary texts(2013-05) Rizwana, Saki; Olsen, Daniel M., 1963-My research is located at the intersection of design and education, focusing specifically on middle and high school literature. Using educational psychology research, particularly in the areas of motivation and engagement, I have explored various ways to deliver traditional literary texts. The hope is to engage students in literature they might normally find boring. Multiple points of entry into the text was a method used in conceptualizing the solutions because it allowed readers to visualize how the text can relate to them as individuals. The solutions provided represent a small portion of what can be done in the intersection of education and design; they are only limited to the number of stories students are required to read in school.Item Renaissance vertical reading from vers rapporté to Shakespeare's Sonnets(2011-08) Robert-Nicoud, Vincent Corentin 1987-; Wojciehowski, Hannah Chapelle, 1957-; Bruster, Douglas SIn her analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Helen Vendler points out Shakespeare's systematic repetition of keywords and reiteration of meaningful words in the couplet, which she calls couplet ties. This thesis seeks to frame Vendler's discovery by considering its literary context. Shakespeare's repetition of keywords induces a mode of reading that disregards the conventional, linear organization of the poem and establishes vertical connections between significant words. This vertical reading is tightly connected to the widespread tradition of vers rapporté, or recursive verse. Retracing the history of vers rapporté from its probable origin in the classical art of memory to its most complex adaptation in Shakespeare's Sonnets reveals the evolution of reading and writing practices during the Renaissance period. Combining literary history and theory, cognitive archaeology, and formal analysis, this thesis attempts to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the literary, cultural and cognitive foundations of Renaissance vertical reading and writing practices with a focus on French and English sonneteers.Item Rituals of Rehabilitation: Learning Community from Shakespeare Behind Bars(2014-12-02) Davis, KarenIn a panoptic society like ours, prison arts programs can guide us in the task of revitalizing human values and building ethical communities. The quasi-ritual practice of theater, especially, has the potential to develop community among its participants. This thesis takes Shakespeare Behind Bars, a prison Shakespeare program at Luther Luckett Correctional Complex, as a practical guide in addressing our alienation and developing ethical communal relations. This investigation considers the operation of ritual and ritualized practices within the playtext of Shakespeare?s Much Ado about Nothing and the 2014 SBB production, the structure of the SBB program, and the inmate actors? everyday interactions in order to see the relationships among imaginative play, ritualized practices, and our construction of ethical communities. I argue that SBB models genuine communal engagement and helps inmate actors develop rehabilitative modes of being with others that reinforce the moves of ethical life. Shakespeare?s Much Ado explores the power of ritual to rebuild after a moral wrong. I contend that the SBB production delivers practical answers to interpretive quandaries in the scholarship concerning Claudio and the efficacy of ritual. Outside the boundaries of ritual proper and the dramatic stage, Catherine Bell (Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice) and Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life) show how incorporating the transformative power of ritual into everyday practice reinstates human and ethical significance in routines that become mechanistic within the prison system. I argue that SBB demonstrates?in their approach to appropriating a canonical script and in their everyday greetings?how ritualized activities aid in resisting the dehumanizing effects of a power structure that values efficiency over personal relationships. Ritualized practice carries meaning that the dominant discourse cannot subsume. The ambiguity of these practices then holds the potential to unify participants, creating community and organizing a redemptive social order. SBB actors enact their own rehabilitative rituals that aid in creating a liminal space where it becomes possible to reconstruct meaningful ethical relations. The result is a transformative experience for the inmates and the audience, revealing, by extension, a means of moving toward ethical rehabilitation for the isolated modern subject, as well.Item Shakespeare's first Hamlet : the 1602 Spanish Tragedy additions(2015-08) Thompson, Maley Holmes; Bruster, Douglas; Loehlin, James; Mallin, Eric; Marcus, Leah; Wojciehowski, HannahWhile scholars have argued that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was modeled after two earlier plays by Thomas Kyd—the so-called Ur-Hamlet and The Spanish Tragedy—this dissertation finds a middle step in this trajectory of influence: the systematic character revision of the role of Hieronimo in the 320 anonymous lines added to the 1602 Spanish Tragedy quarto. The increasingly persuasive arguments for Shakespeare’s hand in these Additions offer an opportunity to explore the implications of this specific emendation, which is represented here as a small-scale exercise for Shakespeare and Richard Burbage to attempt and rehearse more modern, philosophical personations of grief and madness before their great undertaking of Hamlet. This dissertation reads the Shakespearean Additions to The Spanish Tragedy alongside Hamlet to trace Shakespeare’s developing style and to demonstrate how the Additions may be seen as Hamlet’s verbal and thematic precursor. In its introduction and six chapters, this project provides several reinterpretations of primary records relevant to Shakespeare’s theatrical career in a roughly chronological narrative of The Spanish Tragedy’s stage history, ultimately viewing the play’s multiple revisions and revivals as a creative point of departure between competitive companies and players.Item Shakespeare's writing practice : literary' Shakespeare and the work of form(2011-05) Lamb, Jonathan Paul; Rebhorn, Wayne A., 1943-; Bruster, DouglasIn its introduction and four chapters, this project demonstrates that Shakespeare responded to—and powerfully shaped—the early modern English literary marketplace. Against the longstanding critical limitation of the category “Literature” that restricts it to the printed book, this dissertation argues that the literary is not so much a quality of texts as a mode of exchange encompassing not merely printed books but many other forms of representation. Whether writing for the stage, the page, or both, Shakespeare borrowed from and influenced other writers, and it is these specifically formal transactions that make his works literary. Thus, we can understand Shakespeare’s literariness only by scrutinizing the formal features of his works and showing how they circulated in an economy of imaginative writing. Shakespeare self-consciously refashioned words, styles, metrical forms, and figures of speech even as he traded in them, quickly cornering the literary market between 1595 and 1600. Shakespeare’s practice as a writer thus preceded and made possible his reputation both in the theater and in print.Item The Shakespearean additions to the 1602 Spanish tragedy(2011-05) Thompson, Maley Holmes; Bruster, Douglas; Loehlin, JamesIf Shakespeare contributed the additions to the 1602 edition of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish tragedy, he did so at the time he was writing Hamlet. The additions were written anonymously, but contemporary references to playwrights and their works, publication records, and documented theatrical transactions have provoked the authorship controversy for centuries. Recent studies have attempted "fingerprinting” and "DNA" analysis of verbal structures to solve the case once and for all, but this study moves beyond the (impossible) task of trying to "prove" that Shakespeare wrote the additions and instead seeks to recreate a hypothetical scenario to show why and how Shakespeare may have written them. Using the loose structure of a modern recreation of a cold-case crime, this study contextualizes the additions and the authorship controversy they have inspired, situating the case in its earlier manifestations and in present-day criticism. It will be shown why Shakespeare would have been the ideal candidate to revise The Spanish tragedy: he was familiar with Kyd's work, was known for revitalizing older works, knew the players, and was a writer for hire. It will be argued that the publisher of the additions, Thomas Pavier, followed Shakespeare throughout his career and saw a marketing opportunity to capitalize on three trends: title pages that advertised newness, nostalgia for old texts, and a market for Shakespearean language. This essay will trace the hypothetical steps to see how Shakespeare's additions might have been written, dispersed, rehearsed, acted, and printed. Ultimately, the additions will be situated as a hypothetical middle step between Kyd’s Ur-Hamlet, The Spanish tragedy, and Shakespeare's Hamlet.Item Speaking England: nationalism(s) in early modern literature and culture(2009-06-02) Morrow, Christopher L.This dissertation explores conceptions of nationalism in early modern English literature and culture. Specifically, it examines multiple definitions of nation in dramatic works by William Shakespeare (Cymbeline), John Fletcher (Bonduca), Thomas Dekker (The Shoemaker's Holiday), and Robert Daborne (A Christian Turned Turk) as well as in antiquarian studies of England by William Camden (Britannia and Remains Concerning Britain) and Richard Verstegan (Restitution of Decayed Intelligence). This dissertation argues that early modern English nationalism is a dynamic phenomenon that extends beyond literary and historical genres typically associated with questions of national identity, such as history plays, legal tracts, and chronicle histories. Nationalism, this dissertation demonstrates, appears in Roman-Britain romances and tragedies, city comedies, and both dramatic and prose accounts of piracy. Nation appears in myriad voices - from ancient British queens to shoemakers and pirates. And the nationalisms they articulate are as varied as the genres in which they appear as nation is negotiated both across and within these works. Furthermore, this dissertation illustrates that not only are concepts of nation and national identity being explored, the very terms on which to construct nation are being defined and re-defined. Nation is variously filtered through a myriad of issues including the influence of the monarch (particularly James I), origin, language, gender, class, ethnicity, religion and national rivals. This dissertation also discusses works which move us beyond our pre-conceived notions about nation by advocating more corporate cosmopolitan models. The models are based on such qualities as membership, occupation, productivity and the pursuit of wealth rather than birth order or location. These corporate and piratical nationalisms extend beyond the confining geopolitical borders of most concepts of nation. Early modern English nationalism is not singularly defined by the monarch, the church, the legal system, or even antiquarian studies of Britain and England. It is not singularly defined by any one voice or text.