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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Contradictory Shakespeare: An Investigation Of Female Protagonists In Othello, Measure For Measure, And Pericles, Mingyue Xu Dec 2019

Contradictory Shakespeare: An Investigation Of Female Protagonists In Othello, Measure For Measure, And Pericles, Mingyue Xu

Student Theses and Dissertations

Unlike the stereotyped image of women in the Elizabethan era, in which women should submit to men’s control, Desdemona in Othello, Isabella in Measure for Measure, and Marina in Pericles present their powerful and brave characteristics when facing male dominance. More specifically, all three young women — Desdemona, Isabella and Marina — negotiate sexual and marital arrangements with their language intelligently, despite the fact that they sometimes lack self-determining power in the plays. That is to say, Shakespeare gives women rhetorical power while in certain circumstances, men cannot be persuaded. Such contradiction within how Shakespeare depicts his female …


Strict Restraints: Abstinence's Gender Problems In Measure For Measure, Joseph Makuc Apr 2019

Strict Restraints: Abstinence's Gender Problems In Measure For Measure, Joseph Makuc

History Honors Papers

Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure poses questions about sexual coercion and governmental corruption that resonate today. Recent scholarship has examined sexual abstinence in Measure for Measure in terms of its historical economic and religious context regarding Isabella. However, Angelo and the Duke, the play's other central characters, also make claims about the value of abstinence. I put these characters’ claims into dialogue with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and extensive scholarship on Shakespearean England. I argue that abstinence is the axis around which Measure’s main characters revolve, and that Measure locates these characters’ abstinences as competing performances of manhood and …


“More Free Than He Is Jealous”: Female Agency And Solidarity In The Winter’S Tale, Stacey K. Mooney Apr 2019

“More Free Than He Is Jealous”: Female Agency And Solidarity In The Winter’S Tale, Stacey K. Mooney

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

No abstract provided.


Misinterpretations Of The Taming Of The Shrew: Adaptations And Their Emphasis On Gender, Brianna Reisenwitz Apr 2019

Misinterpretations Of The Taming Of The Shrew: Adaptations And Their Emphasis On Gender, Brianna Reisenwitz

HON499 projects

Misinterpretations of The Taming of the Shrew: Adaptations and Their Emphasis on Gender focuses on modern adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew. Modern adaptations have a preoccupation with gender that was not necessarily present in the original play, and that is because they fail to include the induction scene. The works discussed are the book Vinegar Girl, the films Isi Life Mein, Deliver Us From Eva, 10 Things I Hate About You, and the television show BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told. In these adaptations, several gender focused themes are apparent. With the framing story, though, the play has many different interpretations, and …


The Unruly Womb In Early Modern English Drama: Plotting Women's Biology On The Stage, Ursula Potter Mar 2019

The Unruly Womb In Early Modern English Drama: Plotting Women's Biology On The Stage, Ursula Potter

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

This study provides an accessible, informative and entertaining introduction to women’s sexual health as presented on the early modern stage, and how dramatists coded for it. Beginning with the rise of green sickness (the disease of virgins) from its earliest reference in drama in the 1560s, Ursula Potter traces a continuing fascination with the womb by dramatists through to the oxymoron of the chaste sex debate in the 1640s. She illuminates how playwrights both satirized and perpetuated the notion of the womb’s insatiable appetite.


Idiot Science For A Blue Humanities: Shakespeare's The Comedy Of Errors And Deleuze's Mad Cogito, Steven Swarbrick Jan 2019

Idiot Science For A Blue Humanities: Shakespeare's The Comedy Of Errors And Deleuze's Mad Cogito, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

Can we imagine a Blue Humanities that takes the non-relation as a starting point for ecological thought? I believe we can. Following Shakespeare and Deleuze, this essay engages in a thought experiment that, if it is not too absurd, might, like the ship of fools of medieval times, unmoor the Blue Humanities from its current safe harbor by putting the thought of ‘our’ world under erasure. This is not a matter of turning thought around, such that, by turning to the sea, we turn thought away from calculation and instrumental reason and rediscover our true nature. Rather, the image of …