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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Racial Poetics: Early Modern Race And The Form Of Comedy, Yunah Kae
Racial Poetics: Early Modern Race And The Form Of Comedy, Yunah Kae
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation writes a premodern history of race as an alternative literary history of comedy. This project argues that early modern generic changes in comic conventions reflect and produce a logic of race, which assign relational positions of knowingness and unknowing as naturally immutable. Renaissance comedies resembled epistemological laboratories in which to theorize the notion of knowledge itself, and the comedies of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Dekker, Middleton, and Rowley abound in theatrical technologies which create and explore differences in knowing and ignorance. Blackened skin function as a signifier of preclusion from the humanist knowledge-reservoir of “poesy”; the foreign stink wafting …
Negotiating Space: Spatial Violation On The Early Modern Stage, 1587-1638, Gregory W. Sargent
Negotiating Space: Spatial Violation On The Early Modern Stage, 1587-1638, Gregory W. Sargent
Doctoral Dissertations
Recent criticism proves the malleability of theatrical space as a lens through which the discussion of Renaissance drama proliferates. Negotiating Space works towards the articulation of the importance of space in the representational mimesis of performance by examining moments of violence, violation, misuse, and misappropriation. I draw a connection between the lived, material sites of the plays’ action and the ideological import of representing those spaces dramatically using a focus on violation. Though much good scholarship exists detailing London-centric approaches to dramatic space, this study discursively reifies identifiable staged spaces to connect with the lives of theatrical patrons no matter …
The Reflexive Scaffold: Metatheatricality, Genre, And Cultural Performance In English Renaissance Drama, Nathaniel C. Leonard
The Reflexive Scaffold: Metatheatricality, Genre, And Cultural Performance In English Renaissance Drama, Nathaniel C. Leonard
Open Access Dissertations
The critical discussion of metatheatre has historically connected a series of reflexive dramatic strategies - like soliloquy, chorus, dumb show, the-play-within-the-play, prologue, and epilogue - and assumed that because these tropes all involve the play's apparent awareness of its own theatrical nature they all have similar dramaturgical functions. This dissertation, by contrast, shows that the efficacy derived from metatheatrical moments that overtly reference theatrical production is better understood in the context of restaged non-theatrical cultural performances. Restaged moments of both theatrical and non-theatrical social ritual produce layers of performance that allow the play to create representational space capable of circumventing …
How Should I Act?: Shakespeare And The Theatrical Code Of Conduct, Ann E. Garner
How Should I Act?: Shakespeare And The Theatrical Code Of Conduct, Ann E. Garner
Open Access Dissertations
This dissertation examines the intersection of English Renaissance drama and conduct literature. Current scholarship on this intersection usually interprets plays as illustrations of cultural behavioral norms who find their model and justification in courtly norms. In this dissertation, I argue that plays present behavioral norms that emerge from this nascent profession and that were thus influenced by this profession and the concerns of the people who worked in it, rather than by the court. To do so, I examine three behavioral norms that were important to courtiers, specifically Disguise, Moderation and Wit through the work of the English Renaissance theater’s …