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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Shakespeare's Problem Comedies As Self-Critique, John-Paul Spiro
Shakespeare's Problem Comedies As Self-Critique, John-Paul Spiro
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
I argue that Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well reveal underexplored features common to Shakespeare’s comedies. Often interpreted as “problem plays,” they are more representative of the genre than previously acknowledged. I suggest that Shakespeare wrote them to de-nature and de-familiarize his own practices. The plays present the coercion inherent in the normativizing of marriage as the basis for social and political order. The “happiness” achieved—or at least gestured towards—at the end of Shakespearean comedy restricts human possibilities and is often presented as an imposition or injunction rather than a reflection of spontaneous, collective emotion. In particular, …
Intelligent Bodies And Embodied Minds: Reading Religious Performance In Middle English Writing From Syon Abbey, Nicholas Love, William Langland, And John Gower, Paul Holchak
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation argues for a new reading of the relationship that texts have to performance, bodies have to agency, and that social construction has to literary criticism as these matters relate to the study of religious practice in late medieval England. The project first asks what it meant to participate in religious practice in two, early fifteenth-century Middle English prose texts, The Myroure of Oure Ladye and The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. The former work is a gloss of the Divine Service performed by the Brigittine sisters at Syon Abbey, and the latter consists of …