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Browsing by Subject "Shakespeare"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    The Afterlives of Shakespeare's Tragedies
    (2016-06) McHugh, Caitlin
    When Charles II reopened London theaters and granted patents to William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew, English theater was at a low. Although players persisted since the official closure of the theaters, they were punished for illegal performances with the destruction of their costumes and playhouses. New innovations, such as changeable scenery, machines, and the like, meant that Davenant and Killigrew were starting from scratch, lacking costumes and playhouses to accommodate their needs. One possible reading of the inclusion of pre-1642 plays in the repertoire is that they offered the opportunity to stage productions quickly and to make simple changes for entertainment’s sake. I question this narrative by examining Shakespeare’s tragedies. I explore how late-seventeenth-century adapters of Shakespeare revitalize his work to speak to the trauma of the English Civil Wars and the potential of the English stage. I argue that the modifications made to Shakespeare’s tragedies did not simply cater to changing technologies and tastes. These works show evidence of a drive to provide less ambiguous versions of Shakespeare’s plays with obvious moral messages, most of which comment on the politics of the Restoration. These plays illustrate the potential of English theater as a space for audience education. I reimagine these adaptations as responses to, and attempts to revitalize, the reputation of English theater. In order to illustrate Shakespearean adaptation as a response to the state of theater, I place four of Shakespeare’s tragedies (Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, and Othello) in two different contexts: the instability of Restoration theater and the critical writings of their adapters. The closure of the theaters developed out of a long anti-theatrical prejudice, and the political crises of the late 1670s and early 1680s only increased the difficulty of maintaining the new theater duopoly. In these circumstances, many prominent writers spent time describing criteria for an effective drama. They used prefatory writing to explain their intent and theories. They envisioned a new era for tragedy and drama after the Restoration: one where tragedy took its place on the stage as a finely wrought piece of art and an effective means of moral education.
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    “As you from crimes would pardoned be”: Prison Shakespeare and the Practices of Empowerment
    (2020-05) Dreier, Jenna
    My research investigates the growing community of prison arts programs in which people who are currently incarcerated work with outside practitioners to study and perform Shakespeare. Since the 1980s, there has been a steady increase in the popularity of performing Shakespeare in prison, and as this trend continues to change the landscape of prison arts programming across the country, I analyze specific practices that professional artists, practitioners, and participants have used to decolonize the study of Shakespeare and to foster a more empowering and inclusive engagement with his plays. Throughout this dissertation, I use four primary case studies based on extensive field work research to analyze how Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted to speak to incarcerated people’s experiences of oppression as severely marginalized subjects in twenty-first century America. As an intersectional feminist, I analyze these case studies specifically in relation to the forms of oppression created by the imperialist white- supremacist capitalist patriarchy that operates in the United States and that has played a pivotal role in producing the epidemic of mass incarceration. This project proceeds from the belief that a recognition of these multiple and overlapping systematic inequalities is not only relevant, but vital, to analyzing the myriad of potential resonances of Shakespeare in U.S. prisons. In addition to foregrounding the oppressive power dynamics that operate in U.S. prisons, this dissertation is unique in that it also attends closely to oppressive power dynamics within the plays themselves. While advocates have written persuasively about the specific potential that Shakespeare’s plays hold for empowering prison theater participants and audiences, I emphasize the role that professional artists, practitioners, and participants have played in developing practices that illuminate and remedy the shortcomings of Shakespeare’s plays as instruments of social justice. This dissertation is therefore a nuanced examination of 1) how the circumstances of prison performance render newly visible the oppressive power dynamics and damaging social currents that surface in the study and performance of Shakespeare’s plays and 2) the artistic or pedagogical practices used to address, subvert, or overturn these power dynamics and social currents. Ultimately, Shakespeare serves the project of empowerment because of the canonical, elite status of the texts and as a name brand accepted by the gatekeepers of correctional institutions, but a vital step in the pursuit of empowerment in Prison Shakespeare programs is the use of subversive practices which harness the cultural power of these canonical texts while making them more inclusive of the interests of incarcerated communities.
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    “Bless Us All, ‘Tis A Mad World”: Mad Tom O’ Bedlam, Music, And The Politic Of Noise In Seventeenth-Century London
    (2022-03) Nelson, Joseph
    Music and noise often operated as divergent sonic experiences for those living in seventeenth-century London. The degree to which people thought of music as noise often depended on the stylistic conventions of heavily class-inscribed music such as courtly dances. Music for rural dances, including folk/traditional music, was far more often associated with disorderly characters such as beggars and vagabonds. However, music and noise operated on a spectrum of sonic experiences that often ran parallel to notions of social and political disorder. This dissertation explores the connections between music, sound, and the politics of noise through a study of Poor Tom o’ Bedlam, or Mad Tom, and the sonic environment of Bethlem Hospital. This includes a history of Tom from the sixteenth-century rogue pamphlets and William Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606) to Restoration broadside ballads and eighteenth-century political pamphlets. Through analysis and close reading of music, images, and texts associated with Mad Tom, it becomes clear that the circular associations of madness, noise, and disorder in his songs run parallel to wider attitudes toward the poor, street culture, and class in London. Finally, these associations survived well into the eighteenth century and still impact how people think of madness, noise, and politics today.
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    The Form of Selfhood: Elegy and Self-Presentation in Early Modern England
    (2018-06) Olson, Asa
    In early modern England, “elegy” did not simply denote funeral poetry, as it does today. Rather, it referred to the erotic poetry of Ovid, Propertius, and Tibullus. These classical Roman authors self-consciously defined their poems as nequitia, “worthless,” in contrast with epic’s thematic gravity. However, in early modern England, this ostensibly trifling genre exerted just as much influence as the epic. “The Form of Selfhood” argues that the composition of elegies, due to the genre’s central role in early modern education, structured the consciousness of young English writers. In Rome, elegists had challenged epic’s superiority by underscoring elegy’s interest in subjectivity, personal affairs, and erotic persuasion. Elegy’s appeal to young men’s psychological experiences, as well as its oratorical and epistolary premises, eventually made it a standard genre in early modern grammar schools. While works like Castiglione’s The Courtier emphasized rhetoric’s importance for self-presentation, elegies modelled ethopoeia or how to make a persona. Furthermore, Ovid’s elegies, which present him from his amorous youth to his tearful exile, demonstrated how poetry might enable the (typically male) student to craft the gendered, professional, and political terms of his own subjectivity. In early modern England, elegy was institutionalized as a form to constitute and interrogate the self. This project thus develops studies of the reception of classical texts while reexamining our perception of early modern England’s classical canon. Literary scholars have scrutinized how canon formation reflects social dominance of certain race, gender, and cultural identities. I examine how the age, gender, and educational experiences of young male readers shaped the canon of Greek and Roman classics in early modern England. Classical reception studies typically foreground Virgilian genres (pastoral, georgic, and epic) when charting classical influence in early modern England. Epic, especially, has been prioritized as a vehicle for early modern conceptions of nation and empire. However, the emphasis of epic and Virgilian influence on English writers like Shakespeare and Milton in their “mature” phases obscures their use of elegy in their youth. Moreover, it obscures what young readers, both then and now, typically enjoy in this poetry: its erotic-persuasive utility, irreverent humor, and dramatic nature. In their youth, authors such as Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton use elegy to fashion identities around conflicts in love, friendship, and civic responsibilities. Furthermore, these poems reveal early literary and professional ambitions by which we can reconceptualize each of these poets’ reputations. Shakespeare’s use of elegy in The Two Gentlemen of Verona reveals his skepticism of Ovid as a model of self-presentation during a time otherwise marked by his Ovidianism; Donne’s elegies interrogate ideas of a fragmented, contingent self through the concept of sincerity; and Milton’s elegies reveal his attempt to fashion himself as a grave poet and make sense of his own self-division.
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    Iatrochemical healing in Shakespeare and Donne: the diseased and cured body in the English Literary Imagination, 1590-1638
    (2013-04) Larkin, Christopher Ross
    English authors near the beginning of the seventeenth century explore and exploit tensions between traditional Galenic and newer Paracelsian models of contagion and cure. Medicine is both a subject and a metaphor. Shakespeare and Donne are skeptical about medicine's ability to cure. They treat new ideas cautiously yet allow room for the potential utility of chemical medicines and modern anatomies. Shakespeare engages the Galen-Paracelsus debate in All's Well That Ends Well, ultimately presenting an alchemical female healer superior to both schools. Comparison with King John and The Merry Wives of Windsor reveals Shakespeare's move away from traditional humoral medicine so satirized in the period toward a newer medicine based on chemical models of contagion and cure. The later plays then drift away from the debate toward concepts of cosmic sympathies. Donne's poetry and prose works demonstrate a medical understanding of the ailing body that allows him to test and exceed the boundaries of both metaphor and the human body. Attention to anatomical detail provides Donne with rich imagery for exploring his complex personal brand of dualism. In the ecstatic writings, including Ignatius His Conclave and Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Donne shows complicated condemnation and exaltation of chemical medicines as both physic and metaphorical vehicle. Francis Bacon's New Atlantis presents a utopian quasi-scientific community that includes explicit research facilities for chemical medicines. Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy demonstrates the limitations of humoral medicine and explicitly encourages laboratory alchemy for the production of nonorganic medicines.
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    The “Print o’Life”: Transitions of Text and the Early Modern Stage
    (2024) Biesel, Clara
    Although printing first came to England nearly a century before Shakespeare’s birth, within his lifetime, the use of print quadrupled. This project considers the affective responses visible in Shakespeare’s plays and a pair of contemporary texts (Helkiah Crooke’s anatomy textbook Mikrokosmographia and Martin Billingsley’s handwriting manual The Pen’s Excellencie) as individuals react to the cultural transition from texts produced primarily by hand to texts produced by machine. When read in parallel, these texts reveal a striking ambivalence present in their society as individuals come to grips with how a new technology is changing their understanding of themselves, evoking anxiety over an imagined future and nostalgia for an imagined past. In the context of this transition, richly embodied metaphors consider books imagined as bodies and bodies read as though they were books. The metaphors present bodies and books as though similar enough to be interchangeable, but those using these metaphors (in plays and elsewhere) fail to sustain the comparison. As books replace a physical, “in-person experience” with the printed word, the texts themselves reveal a sense of loss. Be it an anatomist unfolding the interior of a human cadaver which is missing, or direct instruction from a calligraphy teacher demonstrating the proper technique of the hand and the pen, or the living, collaborative, embodied performance of a play, these texts reveal the nostalgia and anxiety about the change towards the printed form. This project pulls together themes and methods from a variety of scholarly fields including print and book history, technology and medical humanities, studies of embodiment (including questions of race and gender), epistemology or knowledge studies, as well as performance, strengthening the connections and intersections between them.
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    The Real World Represented": Identity Politics and Diverse Representation in Shakespeare and Young Adult Lit"
    (2021-06) Johnson, Melissa
    “The Real World Represented”: Identity Politics and Diverse Representation in Shakespeare and Young Adult Lit examines how YA authors of the twenty-first century use fan practices to explore identity and expand diverse representation in their adaptations of Shakespeare for adolescent raders. The first chapter of “The Real World Represented” examines novels and short stories that adapt Hamlet and Macbeth to feature adolescent female lead characters. Questions of masculine identity dominate both Hamlet and Macbeth, which are also both among the most frequently taught plays in high school English classes. Through female focused adaptations, YA authors provide their young readers the opportunity to experience and understand the events of each play from young, female perspectives, as well as affirm that these perspectives are just as valuable as those of male characters. My analysis of a variety of novels, including Caroline B Cooney’s Enter Three Witches (2007), Lisa Klein’s Ophelia (2006) and Lady Macbeth’s Daughter (2009), and Robin Talley’s As I Descended (2016) demonstrates the many ways YA authors respond to the problematic aspects of female representation within Shakespeare’s works and empower young female readers by including their voices in some of his most well-known and frequently encountered plays. The second chapter explores the element of romantic love in YA adaptations of Shakespeare. Several YA adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, such as Jenny Trout’s Such Sweet Sorrow (2014) and Melinda Taub’s Still Star-Crossed (2013) take inspiration from Shakespeare’s characterization of the young couple as “star-crossed” and present romantic love as a powerful and inevitable force for their young characters. Within the last few years, authors of these adaptations, including Rachel Caine (Prince of Shadows, 2014) and Barbara Dee (Star-Crossed, 2017) have used this idea of love to equate the romantic experiences of LGBTQ+ teens with those of their heterosexual peers in terms of legitimacy and importance. Romeo and Juliet holds a place of high regard in our cultural consciousness as a work that epitomizes romantic love, and adapting this play through the perspectives of LGBTQ+ characters sends the message that love is not dependent upon gender or sexual orientation, thus validating the relationships of teens who identify this way. The third chapter of “The Real World Represented” analyzes YA adaptations of Shakespeare that address the issue of race. Similarly to adaptations surveyed in previous chapters, Grace Tiffany’s (2005) novels, Ariel and The Turquoise Ring, McKelle George’s Speak Easy, Speak Love, and Cat Winterson’s 2016 novel The Steep and Thorny Way use several different approaches to retell Shakespeare’s The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, and Hamlet, respectively, from the points of view of racial or ethnic minority characters. These adaptations bring racial injustices to the forefront and include them in the many important struggles that shape human experience through their connection to Shakespeare. These Shakespearean works are, in turn, rejuvenated through their demonstrated relevance to multiple racial and ethnic identities and diversified to reflect our modern society as it actually exists. The final two chapters of my dissertation shift focus slightly onto the formats that encourage more active participation from young adult readers and audiences, including webcomics and social media sites that thrive on reader and user participation, “choose-your-own-adventure” style comic books that invite readers to select what happens next from multiple options throughout the book, and fanfiction, or retellings of Shakespeare’s works created by fans and shared for fun and community rather than profit. Chapter four examines sequential art adaptations of Shakespeare, including the comic book series Kill Shakespeare and No Holds Bard, which break from the realistic picture that scholars have given us of who Shakespeare was and present imaginative characterizations of him and the context in which he wrote his famous plays and poems. These series remove the rigid constructs often placed around how we think of Shakespeare and allow for young adult readers to expand their impressions of him and by extension, his works. This chapter also considers “choose-your-own-adventure” style comic books that invite readers to select what happens next from multiple options throughout the book, and the web comic Good Tickle Brain, which adapts Shakespeare’s plays in humorous and irreverent ways and serves to mitigate some of the intimidation young adults often feel when faced with reading and understanding Shakespeare. Chapter five engages with fanfiction, and the ways in which authors of fanfiction, many of them young adults, use the medium to shape Shakespeare to question and challenge aspects of his works that they find problematic and reflect their own needs, desires, and identities. Overall, these Shakespearean adaptations use forms of media outside of novels and short stories to open pathways to more creative interpretation of and even active engagement with Shakespeare’s works, providing a sense of empowerment through autonomy for young adults.
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    Satirizing The Audience: Shakespeare And The Uses Of Obscurity, 1594-1601
    (2020-05) Juberg, Marc
    This dissertation examines Shakespeare’s techniques of formal obscurity in four plays: Love’s Labour’s Lost, As You Like It, Hamlet, and Troilus and Cressida. Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Juberg shows, attached specific satirical and aesthetic functions to deliberately obscure writing. As satire migrated from page to stage in the last decade of the 16th century, Shakespeare recombined the generic codes and conventionally confusing language of print satire to create his own type of satirical theater, with which he challenged prevailing norms of literary and theatrical interpretation and tested the limits of audience understanding.
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    Things Fall Apart: Decapitation and the Quest for Certainty in Early Modern English Literature
    (2022-05) Price, Laura
    This project considers the motif of decapitation in Early Modern English literature as an embodied metaphor for the quest for certainty. By investigating decapitation as a physical manifestation of the disintegrative and reintegrative process of the quest’s narrative structure, this project examines how Early Modern authors use the motif of decapitation as a way to work out, through an embodied metaphor, what it means to face, wrestle with, and ultimately come to terms with uncertainty. The texts that form the basis for this study include: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Sir Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, and William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. The recurrence of decapitation in these texts emphasizes the physicality of the knower and the physical dimension of the effect that knowing has on the knower. By associating the disintegrative and reintegrative nature of the quest for certainty with decapitation, these authors insist on an intimate relationship between the physical and the intellectual, the embodied experience and the epistemological process. Ultimately, this project contends that the consistent restoration of head and body is indicative of an Early Modern desire to find stability in the midst of upheaval, while remaining honest about the limitations of that stability.