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“The lying’st knave in Christendom”: The Development of Disability in the False Miracle of St. Alban’s
Posted on April 1, 2013 | No CommentsWhat none of these studies have examined, however, is the performance of disability at the center of the St. Alban's episode. -
The Singing ‘Vice’: Music and Mischief in Early English Drama
Posted on March 25, 2013 | No CommentsAmidst non-textuality and the resulting shortage of extant scores to serve as documentation of musical activity, even the most restrained speculative approach still leads to the conclusion that music and musicians were crucial both to the emergence of the interlude as a genre of household entertainment and in the actual performance of interludes. -
Saints on Stage: An Analytical Survey of Dramatic Records in the West of England
Posted on March 25, 2013 | No CommentsThis essay provides an analysis of the known surviving records relating to mimetic representation of non-biblical saints in a broad region of western England, from the north (Cumberland, Westmorland) to the southern tip of Cornwall. The question of how many of these references can be considered 'scripted' drama is addressed, and other categories (pageant, costumed guild ridings, and festive customs such as boy bishop ceremonies) proposed. -
Devising the Revels
Posted on March 19, 2013 | No CommentsRevels were the result of collaboration by painters, sculptors, costume designers, poets, composers, artisans, and labourers in relation to whom an appointed supervisor (beginning in 1510 called the master of the revels) stood as what we might call executive producer and director. -
Exhuming Henry VIII’s Court: The Tudor Household on the Jacobean Stage
Posted on March 16, 2013 | No CommentsBy revisiting the recent past of Henry's reign, the plays construct the events as a historical past, distinct and separate from the present. Early modern performance presents, reshapes, and diverges from the collective memory of a diverse socio-economic populace. Plays about recent history offer both a form of remembrance and construction of a memory for the historical moment brought to life on stage. -
Play Houses: Drama at Bolsover and Welbeck
Posted on March 11, 2013 | No CommentsBetween 1590 and 1634, a period more or less exactly coterminous with the great age of English Renaissance drama, a group of remarkable houses took shape in the north Midlands of England, on the borders of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. -
The Meaning of Thunder and Lightning: Stage Directions and Audience Expectations
Posted on March 11, 2013 | No CommentsThe linking of thunder and lightening with supernatural figures was not theatrical in origin; rather, the effects were a theatrical reproduction of unnatural disruptions generally believed to accompany the appearance and actions of figures such as witches, devils, and conjurers in the real world of the audience. -
‘Thou glorious kingdome, thou chiefe of empires’: Persia in seventeenth-century travel literature
Posted on February 24, 2013 | No CommentsThe late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw a rise in European travel to Persia, and consequently in writings about such travel. -
Henry Hardware’s Moment and the Puritan Attack on Drama
Posted on February 18, 2013 | No CommentsHenry Hardware's Moment and the Puritan Attack on Drama Robert Tittler (Concordia University) Early Theatre, 1.1 (1998): 39-54 (paper). Article 4. Abstract Henry Hardware has become familiar to many theatre... -
Romeo and the Apothecary
Posted on February 11, 2013 | No CommentsSince the apothecary in the source is no more than a plot device, we might wonder why Shakespeare devotes so much space to him if he is only such a device in the play as well. -
Emergent Identity Masculinity and the Representation of Rape on the Early Modern Stage, 1590-1620
Posted on February 1, 2013 | No CommentsThis thesis is an investigation of the representation of the figure of the man who raped on the early modern stage. -
Actresses As Working Women In the Victorian Theatre
Posted on January 30, 2013 | No CommentsVictorian performers were an unusual socioeconomic group. Unlike other professionals they were recruited from all classes of society. While some performers demonstrated that hard work and sheer talent could overcomeany class disadvantages, there were others who spent their entire careers in poverty... -
The house is hers, the soul is but a tenant’: Material Self-Fashioning and Revenge Tragedy
Posted on January 27, 2013 | No CommentsPlaying dead, however, is not merely a staging issue, though performance of a single character in two simultaneous but separate locations is a legitimate concern, both metaphysical and staging, since playing dead also poses eschatological and ontological challenges to neoplatonism, stoicism, and Christian theology, frameworks within which many Jacobean and revenge plays are conceived. -
‘An honest dog yet’: Performing The Witch of Edmonton
Posted on January 24, 2013 | No CommentsAt the climax of Dekker, Ford, and Rowley’s 1621 tragedy The Witch of Edmonton, the devil treats a young morris dancer named Cuddy Banks to a discourse on the relationship between the everyday world in which Cuddy lives and the demonic realm over which he himself reigns. -
Vengeance, Variously: Revenge Before Kyd in Early Elizabethan Drama
Posted on January 20, 2013 | No CommentsAccordingly, this essay will respond to Broude’s call for ‘a systematic study of revenge tragedy’s dramatic antecedents in England’. -
Miraculous Rhetoric: The Relationship between Rhetoric and Miracles in the York ‘Entry into Jerusalem’
Posted on January 20, 2013 | No CommentsI argue that the York playwright juxtaposes overt references to verbal persuasion with depictions of miracles to highlight the differences between the uncertainty of his audience’s world and the miraculous certainty of the biblical narrative performed before them. -
The Kirk, the Burgh, and Fun
Posted on January 16, 2013 | No CommentsThis complex web of interests and principles produces individual ironies, and the paper contrasts the activity of Haddington's one-time schoolmaster and play director, James Carmichael, who, as he reformist minister of the town, was chosen to subdue the author of a local May play (here named for the first time). -
The Purgation Of The Hero In Shakespearean Tragedy
Posted on January 6, 2013 | No CommentsIn each play, when the hero has seen the failure of his subjective passion, the nature of the universal Good, upon which all goods, natural and human depend, begins to appear. -
Renaissance plays as a useful source for the comparison between English and Croatian early modern medicine
Posted on January 3, 2013 | No CommentsAs Renaissance made no particular distinction between arts and sciences, plays of that time provide a very common source of medical narrative. -
The Reasons of Misrule Revisited: Evangelical Appropriations of Carnival in Tudor Revels
Posted on December 17, 2012 | No CommentsI want to suggest that this delightful anamorphic image, coupled with the Gallery’s dry commentary, provides an ironic but apt metaphor for the critical tradition addressing Edward’s reign and its theatrical spectacle: only when viewed from a one-sided point of view – in hindsight, from the anachronistic vantage point of an Anglo-American tradition inflected by subsequent protestantism – can the boy king, his often riotous court spectacle, and mid-Tudor evangelicals in general be made to resemble a ‘correct’ portrait of the protestant sobriety, indeed the dour puritanism, of later generations. -
Shakespeare’s Richard II: Machiavelli for the Good of England
Posted on December 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe name Machiavelli has negative connotations, and this way of thinking is not new. Throughout Europe, in Shakespeare’s time and earlier, Machiavellianism was associated with unscrupulous abuse of power, and Machiavellian methods were seen as immoral and evil. -
The Sad Death of a King: The Legacy of Richard the Second
Posted on December 15, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis will examine the manner in which Shakespeare drew upon existing sources material to depict a king whose inherent character flaws made him unworthy of his crown. -
Othello’s Alienation
Posted on November 25, 2012 | No CommentsAlthough I agree broadly with the arguments of Jones and Hunter, it seems to me important to appreciate the particularityof Shakespeare'sportrait and its resistance both to negative stereo- typing and abstractuniversalizing. There is little question that in choosing Othello for his protagonist Shakespearesought to create a realistic portrait of a Moor. -
Shakespeare’s Use of the Supernatural
Posted on October 31, 2012 | No CommentsTherefore, this thesis aims to approach this issue from a different perspective and will deal with the concept of the Supernatural only in three selected plays of William Shakespeare and will present a comparison with three pieces of drama by different authors. -
The Curse of Macbeth
Posted on October 11, 2012 | No CommentsWilliam Shakespeare wrote Macbeth sometime between 1603 and 1606 for King James I (Macbeth). -
Deeds Against Nature: women and Crime in Street Literature of Early Modern England
Posted on October 9, 2012 | No CommentsIn early modern England, when news in printed form designed for a large- scale readership was only beginning to develop, accounts of murders committed by women assumed an importance entirely disproportionate in relation to their actual occurrence. -
The Pageant of History: Nostalgia, the Tudors, and the Community Play
Posted on October 9, 2012 | No CommentsDuring the first half of the twentieth century, although these events have attracted little scholarly attention to date, English cathedral cities, market towns and hamlets put on a large number of historical pageants, habitually preoccupied with what the English think of as the Tudor period. -
Eat, drink, man, woman: Food, eating, and social formations in Renaissance culture and drama
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsThis dissertation explores the ways in which representations of food and eating in the drama and culture of Early Modern England contribute to its social formation. -
After marriage: The literature and culture of divorce in England, 1515-1650
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe following pages will argue that in the latter sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the idea of divorce, of marriage's breakdown and dissolution, was as important a concept as that of the marital union itself. -
The Grotesque Body: Early Modern Representations of Women and the Subversion of the Elizabethan World Picture
Posted on September 2, 2012 | No CommentsThe language of some tragic heroines from the English Renaissance is the first subversive strategy that contributes to uncover the oppressive doings of the hegemonic group. -
Reading Silk: England’s Search for a National Identity, 1590-1630
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsIn this thesis, I plan to demonstrate that silk becomes a tool for nation building. While at first the English peoples’ insatiable appetite for silk creates an identity crisis of sorts for England, with the conflicting desires to emulate foreign practices and also to remain steadfast to the nation, silk is eventually recognized as a material that has the power to unite the English people. -
Places to Hear the Play: The Performance of the Corpus Christi Play at York
Posted on August 19, 2012 | No CommentsAt the beginning of the tradition, the pageants were linked to the religious procession on Corpus Christi Day. In the city og York this procession was organised by the Corpus Christi Guild as a separate event from the celebration of the minister. -
Blunting lances and razing towers : masculine performance and early Tudor reforms
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsIn 1531, at the height of Henry VIII’s reign, a respected knight with a rising fortune and a gift for letters endeavored to find a metaphor that would help illustrate the characteristics of true nobility. -
‘The art of dancing, demonstrated by characters and figures’: French and English sources for court and theatre dance, 1700-1750
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsIn the early seventeenth century, during the reigns of James I and Charles I, England developed its own court entertainment in the masque - many of them devised by the dramatist and poet Ben Jonson in collaboration with the architect and designer Inigo Jones. -
Emasculated subjects and subjugated wives: discourses of domination in John Banks’s Vertue Betray’d (1682)
Posted on July 22, 2012 | No CommentsBetween 1681 and 1704, John Banks prepared for the stage four tragedies dealing with British history; three of them were centered on the meteoric rise and fall of doomed queens: Anne Boleyn, Mary Queen of Scots and Lady Jane Gray. -
Female Body as Geosomatic Apotrope in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Middleton
Posted on July 19, 2012 | No CommentsAs a geographic trope transposed to literary discourse, discovery remains closely linked to the desire for possession. Postcolonial criticism has sought to deconstruct the feminized and sexualized discourses of geographic places and spaces as objects of desire, invasion, and annexation. -
Staging Executions: The Theater of Punishment in Early Modern England
Posted on July 6, 2012 | No CommentsIn 1571, the first permanent structure for public hangings was constructed at Tyburn. Attending public hangings at “Tyburn tree,” as well as other forms of public punishment was a popular pastime in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Events we would now call “entertainment” in early modern England were fairly limited. -
Adultery in Early Stuart England
Posted on July 6, 2012 | No CommentsBut spectacles of sexual transgression could not only be seen in theatres. Rhymes and broadside ballads sung at street corners or markets, or hung up on walls of taverns and private houses told of lusty bachelors and maidens, of unfaithful, slothful, or violent husbands and wives. -
Galley-foists, Lord Mayors’ Shows, and Early Modern English Drama
Posted on June 24, 2012 | No CommentsWhat is a ‘galley-foist’? According to OED, it is ‘a state barge, esp. that of the Lord Mayor of London’. This definition appears to be wrong however, certainly for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or at the very least so misleading as to require serious qualification. -
‘Ripeness is all’: the death of Elizabeth in drama
Posted on April 22, 2012 | No CommentsAs the life of Elizabeth I began to wane, rumours repeatedly circulated that her possible successor, James VI of Scotland, would not wait peacefully until her death, but intended to seize the English throne forthwith. -
All the World’s a Stage: Pageantry as Propaganda at the Court of Elizabeth I, 1558-1569
Posted on April 11, 2012 | No CommentsIn order to strengthen her position and unite the country during her first decade as queen, Elizabeth and her council launched an organized and effective propaganda campaign and cultivated an image that focused her subjects’ loyalty on her. She accomplished this through the use of spectacle, drama, and pageantry, specifically in her coronation procession, the performance of plays and masques at court, and annual progresses. -
Warning, Familiarity and Ridicule: Tracing the Theatrical Representation of the Witch in Early Modern England
Posted on February 1, 2012 | No CommentsThe image of the witch and the vehicle of the theatre seem to be a natural fit. The spectacle inherent in the supernatural aspects of the witch provided a wealth of vivid opportunities for the employing the latest in scenic and technical advances and for experimenting with the possibilities for new special effects. -
All Singing, All Dancing
Posted on November 22, 2011 | No CommentsSexually explicit jigs were a major part of the attraction of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration stage, as Lucie Skeaping explains. -
Ophelia’s Mistreatment and Ignored Monastic Opportunities
Posted on October 16, 2011 | No CommentsAn examination of her relationship with Polonius and Laertes will culminate with an inspection of the relationship between Ophelia and Laertes, using the feminist theory employed by Virginia Wolf -
‘I do mistake my person all this while’: Blindness and Illusion in Richard III
Posted on October 3, 2011 | No Comments‘I do mistake my person all this while’: Blindness and Illusion in Richard III Rutter Giappone, Krista Bonello (University of Kent) Skepsi: Bad Behaviour in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Volume... -
Historicising Shakespeare’s Richard II: Current Events, Dating, and the Sabotage of Essex
Posted on May 5, 2010 | No CommentsHistoricising Shakespeare’s Richard II: Current Events, Dating, and the Sabotage of Essex Fitter, Chris Early Modern Literary Studies 11.2 (September, 2005) Abstract This essay unfolds three, interlinked arguments. First, on... -
Who Knows Who Knows Who’s There? An Epistemology of Hamlet (Or, What Happens in the Mousetrap)
Posted on May 4, 2010 | No CommentsWho Knows Who Knows Who’s There? An Epistemology of Hamlet (Or, What Happens in the Mousetrap) Roth, Steve Early Modern Literary Studies 10.2 (September, 2004) Abstract There is one singular... -
Shakespeare and the Public Discourse of Sovereignty: “Reason of State” in Hamlet
Posted on April 29, 2010 | No CommentsShakespeare and the Public Discourse of Sovereignty: “Reason of State” in Hamlet DiMatteo, Anthony Early Modern Literary Studies 10.2 (September, 2004) Abstract Hamlet marks a turning point in Shakespeare's evolving... -
“Caparisoned like the horse”: Tongue and Tail in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew
Posted on April 29, 2010 | No CommentsCaparisoned like the horse": Tongue and Tail in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew Sloan, LaRue Love Early Modern Literary Studies 10.2 (September, 2004) Abstract Critics commenting on Petruchio's diseased... -
“He is turned a ballad-maker”: Broadside Appropriations in Early Modern England
Posted on April 23, 2010 | No Comments"He is turned a ballad-maker": Broadside Appropriations in Early Modern England Fisher, Joshua B. Early Modern Literary Studies 9.2 (September 2003) Abstract Responding to an enduring critical heritage that often...