Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Crisis Of Friendship: Calculation And Betrayal In Shakespeare’S The Merchant Of Venice And Othello, The Moor Of Venice, Kristi Rene Sexton

Masters Theses

The idea that friendship is an illusory connection that may only exist in philosophers’ writings was a subject of interest for many of the early modern writers. Writers like Thomas Elyot, Thomas Churchyard, and Michel de Montaigne attempted to uphold idealized traditions of friendship; conversely, Shakespeare, along with writers such as Francis Bacon, presented early modern perceptions of idealized friendship only to confront and challenge the precepts. In The Merchant of Venice and Othello, the Moor of Venice, Shakespeare expresses a sometimes cynical yet realistic approach toward idealized friendship. He exposes the problem of upholding the idealized early modern …

"What's The Use Of Trying To Read Shakespeare?": Modes Of Memory In Virginia Woolf's Fiction And Essays, Sara Remedios Bloom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation maps the relationship between Virginia Woolf’s fiction and essays, and William Shakespeare’s person and plays. I argue that Woolf’s writing is intended as an interactive practice of cultural memory, challenging her readers to become responders and to engage critically with the canon. I further argue that Woolf offers herself as inheritor of a literary practice that actively seeks to shape the values and social ideology of the time. The introduction defines three modes of memory operating in Woolf’s work: memory as opiate; memory as political instrument; and memory as dialectic. The first chapter shows the cultural memory of …

A Natural History Of Teasing: British Women Writers And The Shakespearean Courtship Narrative, 1677-~1818, Mary Vance

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation considers the complex roles that nascent Bardolatry, the rise of women

writers, and the persistence of satiric impulses played in engineering the teasing relationships of eighteenth-century courtship fiction. I argue that in a period reputedly dominated by sentiment, women’s comedy largely hinged on anti-sentiment, particularly in its appropriation of the antithetical wooing practices so pervasive in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. Such a perspective endows female authors (and their protagonists) to assume control of the discursive field and resituates the love story into a love game. I begin by tracing the continued influence of the Elizabethan culture of jest, aligning …

Shadows Of Empire: The Displaced New World Of Antony And Cleopatra, Christopher Kane

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

"The Sense Of An Ending": The Destabilizing Effect Of Performance Closure In Shakespeare's Plays, Megan Lynn Selinger

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What makes a good ending? How do we know when something ends? In performance, it is difficult to characterize that nebulous and highly subjective — yet nonetheless theatrically powerful — “sense” of an ending. Previous scholarly work on Shakespearean endings, even when emphasizing performance, has largely focused on understanding endings from a narrative viewpoint, questioning how endings reach textual closure. These works examine the lingering questions or problems at the end of Shakespeare’s texts, and discuss how performance tackles these issues.

This dissertation takes performance as its starting point. It argues that Shakespearean performance endings naturally trouble textual conclusiveness, as …

Shakespeare, Orson Welles, And The Hermeneutics Of The Archive, Benjamin Lynn Wagner

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines certain theoretical underpinnings of the historical processes by which Shakespeare's history plays became the de facto collective memory of the events they depict, even when those events are misrepresented. The scholarly conversation about this misrepresentation has heretofore centered on Shakespeare's potential political motivations. I argue that this focus on a political, authorial intent has largely ignored the impact these historical distortions have had over the subsequent 400 years. I propose that, due to Shakespeare's unique place in the historical timeline of the development of collective memory, Shakespeare's historical misrepresentation in the history plays is a byproduct of …

Behind The Stakes, Between The Lines, Beyond The Pun: A Critical Deconstruction Of Humor In William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, And Other Popular Comedies, Jaime Libby

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

Humor is a powerful rhetorical device employed at all levels of human discourse—from casual banter to political debate. Still, despite humor’s global prevalence, its historical transgressiveness, and its distinct potential both to neutralize and critically engage highly fraught issues, humans do not often pause to ask how humor works. And what does its working tell us about our humanness? This thesis explores the operation of humor in literature and performance, using tools provided by structuralist, deconstructive, and postmodern critical arenas, to reveal how humor’s fundamental structures invite humans to entertain new perspectives and practice empathy. The study considers irony, the …

The Performance Of Melancholy: Understanding The Humours Through Burton, Jonson, And Shakespeare, Lindsey N. Betts

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis aims to explore the relationships between dramatic texts and the Elizabethan topic of the humours. It covers Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Jonson's plays Every Man Out of His Humour and Every Man in His Humour, and Shakespeare's plays Hamlet and As You Like It. Each of these works provides a glimpse into society and its opinions specifically on melancholy, from its most basic and complex definitions to how it is perceived and addressed.

The Scholar Magician In English Renaissance Drama, Ashley M. Minnis-Lemley

Scripps Senior Theses

In this paper, I will explore the rise and fall of the scholar magician or sorcerer, both as a popular dramatic subject and as an arc for individual characters, and the ways in which these figures tied into contemporary fears about the intersection of religion and developing scientific knowledge.