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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Recognizing Traps And Frightening Wolves: Foxes And Lions As A Representative Of Machiavellian Political Ideology In Shakespeare’S Comedies, Grace A. Powell Apr 2024

Recognizing Traps And Frightening Wolves: Foxes And Lions As A Representative Of Machiavellian Political Ideology In Shakespeare’S Comedies, Grace A. Powell

Student Scholar Showcase

While William Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets have been discussed time and time again over the past few centuries, one topic that has been less traversed is the connection between his Comedies and Niccolò Machiavelli’s political ideologies. This project will explore references of lions and foxes in Shakespeare’s Comedies and the leaders and monarchs within them to determine how beliefs about Machiavelli’s political ideology influenced Shakespeare’s literature and became symbols for leadership and power. This project will be important for gaining historical context on Machiavellian political discourse and how it was represented in the contemporary dramatic literature of William Shakespeare. I …


Hell's Black Intelligencers: Representing Clandestine Labor On The Early Modern Stage, Evan Alexander Hixon Jul 2022

Hell's Black Intelligencers: Representing Clandestine Labor On The Early Modern Stage, Evan Alexander Hixon

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation, "Hell's Black Intelligencers: Representing Clandestine Labor on the Early Modern Stage," builds upon critical scholarship pertaining to early modern service and political theory to interrogate the imagined economic and social functions of clandestine service in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Webster. Drawing heavily on the works of András Kiséry, David Schalkwyk, Elizabeth Rivlin, and Michael Neill, I look at the exchange of service between spy and spymaster as an accumulation of social and cultural capital. Thinking through spying in this light, this dissertation explores how playwrights represent these service relationships which fall outside of systems of patronage-driven …


Love And Romance In Early Modern British Literature, Sophia Szeneitas May 2022

Love And Romance In Early Modern British Literature, Sophia Szeneitas

Senior Honors Projects

This paper seeks to describe and analyze the way in which themes of love and romance were presented in literature in early modern Britain, and how those may differ from or be similar to romantic themes in the media of today. The works being analyzed include plays by William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, as well as some of Shakespeare’s sonnets. A few different lenses will be explored, including the interaction that love could have with the societal power structure and hierarchy present within the literature (such as the ways in which someone being the lover of a powerful person might …


Homoerotic Medievalism: Looking At Queer Desire In The Homosocial Relationships Of Chaucer’S “The Knight’S Tale” And Fletcher And Shakespeare’S The Two Noble Kinsmen, Juan P. Espinosa Mar 2022

Homoerotic Medievalism: Looking At Queer Desire In The Homosocial Relationships Of Chaucer’S “The Knight’S Tale” And Fletcher And Shakespeare’S The Two Noble Kinsmen, Juan P. Espinosa

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to explore queer interiority within the heteronormative social constructions of late medieval England. Queer interiority is not an occurrence of modernity, but rather a response to social constructions that date back to the Middle Ages. It is essential to account for queerness in the Middle Ages because authors like Chaucer promote the successive resurfacing of queer characters within heteronormative social constructions. Writing during the queer reign of Richard II, Chaucer constructs the interior identities of Palamon and Arcite as a reflection of the king and the political norms of England. Inspired by Chaucer, authors …


In This Harsh World, We Continue To Draw Breath: Queer Persistence In Shakespeare And Hamlet, Beck O. Adelante Oct 2021

In This Harsh World, We Continue To Draw Breath: Queer Persistence In Shakespeare And Hamlet, Beck O. Adelante

Access*: Interdisciplinary Journal of Student Research and Scholarship

Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most famous and most often (mis-)quoted works. The central and titular character has likewise been an endless source of academic and artistic inquiry and exploration since nearly the creation of the work itself. However, this paper argues that a crucial and enlightening piece of the puzzle has, until recently, been left unexplored for the most part, considered a frivolous or non-serious pursuit: Hamlet’s and Hamlet’s queerness. Using historical research and evidence, close readings of the text, and examples of recent productions that have taken this element seriously, this paper argues that to fully understand the …


Alchemical Word-Magic In 'The Winter’S Tale', Rana Banna Feb 2021

Alchemical Word-Magic In 'The Winter’S Tale', Rana Banna

Accessus

Within alchemical writing there is both a religious and scientific register in simultaneous coexistence. The linguistic symbols of alchemy are themselves to be understood as chemical matter embedded in the world by divine providence: a principle manifest in the doctrine of signatures. The natural world offers a complex but ultimately resolvable hermeneutic challenge to the natural scientist, whose job it becomes to be a reader of the book of nature wherein the Creator has inscribed a legible, if often allusive, meaning and purpose. This paper will proceed to explore how early modern alchemical-thinking impacted attitudes towards language and meaning …


Wherein To Catch The Conscience Of The Queen: Dystopian Politics In Elizabethan Drama, Helen Fielding Jul 2020

Wherein To Catch The Conscience Of The Queen: Dystopian Politics In Elizabethan Drama, Helen Fielding

Senior Honors Theses

Though established English history portrays Elizabeth I (1533-1603) as uniting England under the new Protestant religion, recent historical evidence reveals that extensive counter-currents still existed. This thesis examines how the politico-religious beliefs of Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights manifest themselves in their drama, particularly through imagery and allusions. It draws especially from Frances Yates to assert that imagery of white magic, Christian Cabala, and alchemy in these dramatists’ works refers to the pure imperial reform movement of Elizabeth’s reign, and also from Clare Asquith to illuminate a reading of Shakespeare as a playwright who encoded in his plays a Catholic message …


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 …


Anna Larpent And Shakespeare, Fiona Ritchie May 2018

Anna Larpent And Shakespeare, Fiona Ritchie

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Anna Larpent (1758-1832) is a crucial figure in theater history and the reception of Shakespeare since drama was a central part of her life. Larpent was a meticulous diarist: the Huntington Library holds seventeen volumes of her journal covering the period 1773-1830. These diaries shed significant light on the part Shakespeare played in her life and contain her detailed opinions of his works as she experienced them both on the page and on the stage in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London. Larpent experienced Shakespeare’s works in a variety of forms: she sees Shakespeare’s plays performed, both professionally and by …


In Anthropocene Air: Deleuze's Encounter With Shakespeare, Steven Swarbrick Jan 2018

In Anthropocene Air: Deleuze's Encounter With Shakespeare, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.


Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse Jun 2017

Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Literary Theories of Circumcision” investigates a school of thought in which the prepuce, as a conceptual metaphor, organizes literary experience. In every period of English literature, major authors have employed the penis’s hood as a figure for thinking about reading and writing. These authors belong to a tradition that defines textuality as a foreskin and interpretation as circumcision. In “Literary Theories of Circumcision,” I investigate the origins of this literary-theoretical formulation in the writings of Saint Paul, and then I trace this formulation’s formal applications among medieval, early modern, and modernist writers. My study lays the groundwork for an ambitious …


Ecologies Of The Passions In Early Modern English Tragedies, Roya Biggie Feb 2017

Ecologies Of The Passions In Early Modern English Tragedies, Roya Biggie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ecologies of the Passions recovers a neglected model for understanding early modern relationality, one that turns the seemingly inward experience of emotion outward toward the environment. Drawing on early modern medical texts, I argue that the period’s dramatists imagine bodies as humorally vulnerable to other bodies, both human and nonhuman, within dynamically affective environments. As such, my project illustrates the intimate configurations of human and nonhuman life in early modern tragedies. Building upon recent work in the emerging fields of ecocriticism and affect theory, I argue that the period’s dramatic literature exposes the porous fluidity of the Galenic body—its embeddedness …


“But I Must Also Feel It Like A Man”: Redressing Representations Of Masculinity In Macbeth, Caitlin H. Higgins Apr 2016

“But I Must Also Feel It Like A Man”: Redressing Representations Of Masculinity In Macbeth, Caitlin H. Higgins

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

The most popular characters in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, second only to Macbeth himself, are the Weird Sisters. Despite being called “Sisters” the women are oddly androgynous and there is very little in their physical appearance or behavior to indicate their gender. Even more importantly, there is nothing to indicate their place in the Scottish patriarchy of which Macbeth and Banquo are firmly established. As the first actors to appear on stage and arguably the manipulators of Macbeth’s fate, the genderless Weird Sisters would have disturbed deeply rooted understandings of gender definition and hierarchy in viewers. This disturbance allows Shakespeare …


From England's Bridewell To America's Brides: Imprisoned Women, Shakespeare's Measure For Measure, And Empire, Alicia Meyer Apr 2015

From England's Bridewell To America's Brides: Imprisoned Women, Shakespeare's Measure For Measure, And Empire, Alicia Meyer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines the experience of largely single women in London’s house of correction, Bridewell Prison, and argues that Bridewell’s prisoners, and the nature of their crimes, reveal the state’s desire for dependent, sexually controlled, yet ultimately productive women. Scholars have largely neglected the place of early modern women’s imprisonment despite its pervasive presence in the everyday lives of common English women. By examining the historical and cultural implications of early modern women and prison, this thesis contends that women’s prisons were more than simply establishments of punishment and reform. A closer examination of Bridewell’s philosophy and practices shows how …


"A Great Man's Madness": An Inquiry Into Sanity And Gender In Jacobean Tragedy, Vittoria Mollo Jan 2015

"A Great Man's Madness": An Inquiry Into Sanity And Gender In Jacobean Tragedy, Vittoria Mollo

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis delves deep into an analysis of madness in two seventeenth century tragic plays: William Shakespeare's Macbeth and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. The first portion of the dissertation will provide historical background and context. The rest will be a critical literary analysis centered around the argument that both plays present an inextricable connection between loss of mental clarity and gender.


Reading With The Grain: On Vin Nardizzi’S Wooden Os: Shakespeare’S Theatres And England’S Trees, Steven Swarbrick Jan 2014

Reading With The Grain: On Vin Nardizzi’S Wooden Os: Shakespeare’S Theatres And England’S Trees, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.


Grafting Onto `The Jew': The Importance Of Being Jew-Ish To Early Modern English Christian Identity, Joan Blackwell Wedes Jan 2014

Grafting Onto `The Jew': The Importance Of Being Jew-Ish To Early Modern English Christian Identity, Joan Blackwell Wedes

Wayne State University Dissertations

The dissertation examines how Jewish figures in early modern plays, prose, and poetry moved beyond the uncomplicated medieval image of murderous villain and towards a more reasoned consideration of the Jew's position in Christianity as well as in English life. While there has been significant scholarship on early modern representations of Jews, particularly in drama, these studies have not examined how Paul's Letter to the Romans, in forming much of Reformation doctrine, was also crucial in forming attitudes towards and representations of literary and living Jews. My project uniquely combines history, biblical studies, and literary analysis to reveal how early …


The Empty Link: Zen Meditative Harmonics And Intimations Of Enlightenment In Pope1s Essay On Man And Shakespeare's Merchant Of Venice, John G. Rudy Jan 2014

The Empty Link: Zen Meditative Harmonics And Intimations Of Enlightenment In Pope1s Essay On Man And Shakespeare's Merchant Of Venice, John G. Rudy

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Commenting on its status as "unmistakably a poem of its period;' Frank Brady complains that Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man . has not fared as well among readers as have other representative epics, specifically The Prelude and Paradise Lost: "While we still retain enough of the Romantic attitude toward life to understand Wordsworth, and enough knowledge, at least, of Christianity to understand Milton, the philosophical basis of Pope's viewpoint has disappeared todaf' The problem, according to Brady, lies in the relationship between reason, the quality which lends the period one of its names, and philosophical optimism, the basis …


Methods Of Revision In Sixteenth-Century English Cycle Drama, John Case Tompkins Oct 2013

Methods Of Revision In Sixteenth-Century English Cycle Drama, John Case Tompkins

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation contends that guilds-folk in sixteenth-century England made their own changes to the play-texts of civic drama and that these changes remain visible to us in the manuscripts which preserve the plays. Further, it argues that the actors and pageant-makers themselves often made these revisions, rather than the civic or ecclesial authorities traditionally credited for rewriting the pageants. These changes, introduced in production and transferred into the texts, helped keep the plays vibrant and successful throughout most of the sixteenth century and reflect the practical and local concerns of their participants. This work continues the historical investigations into pageant …


The Problems Of Treason And Tyranny: The Effect Of The Gunpowder Plot On Artistic Expression, Jessica K. Spevak Jan 2011

The Problems Of Treason And Tyranny: The Effect Of The Gunpowder Plot On Artistic Expression, Jessica K. Spevak

Summer Research

Most people today probably recognize the term “Gunpowder Plot”. They may know it was some sort of assassination plot against the King of England; they might also have heard that there are bonfires in England every November the 5th; they might also have seen the numerous movies, poems, and plays dealing with the Plot. However, many do not know how the Plot was perceived in the years immediately following the failed 1605 attempt to blow up Parliament building with King James I inside. How was the Plot perceived by the English people compared to how we perceive it …


Review Of A Brave Vessel: The True Tale Of The Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown And Inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest, Michael F. Russo Jun 2009

Review Of A Brave Vessel: The True Tale Of The Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown And Inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest, Michael F. Russo

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Rules Of Misrule, Meghan Forgione May 2009

Rules Of Misrule, Meghan Forgione

Honors Scholar Theses

The project seeks to offer an alternative interpretation of sport culture in Renaissance England with respect to theater and football. I seek to show how sport culture, although seemingly threatening to the state, actually reinforces the monarchy due to its ability to provide the people with a controlled social release. The prose explores the function of carnival in sport culture and the way in which the two are manifested in football and theater in the Renaissance.


Racial Impersonation On The Elizabethan Stage: The Case Of Shakespeare Playing Aaron, Imtiaz Habib Jan 2007

Racial Impersonation On The Elizabethan Stage: The Case Of Shakespeare Playing Aaron, Imtiaz Habib

English Faculty Publications

The article focuses on the implications of playwright William Shakespeare performing racial roles himself, such as Aaron in "Titus Andronicus." Several plays are discussed, including "Titus Andronicus," "The Merchant of Venice," and "Othello." The SHAXICON database, which compiles the text of Shakespeare's plays, is the primary source of evidence to suggest Shakespeare acted in his plays. Information about race relations in Great Britain's society during Shakespeare's time is also given.


Self-Effacement And Autonomy In Shakespeare, Kirby Farrell Prof Dec 1987

Self-Effacement And Autonomy In Shakespeare, Kirby Farrell Prof

kirby farrell

This chapter develops the argument in "Self-Effacement and Autonomy in Sx," extending it to fantasies of apotheosis in the poems and plays.


Self-Effacement And Autonomy In Shakespeare, Kirby Farrell Prof Dec 1987

Self-Effacement And Autonomy In Shakespeare, Kirby Farrell Prof

kirby farrell

This is a chapter from my _Play, Death, and Heroism in Shakespeare_ (1988). It identifies a pattern of behavior in Sx and Early Modern culture, in which children learn to efface themselves in order to achieve (or "earn") autonomy. The paradigm has significant implications for the structure of authority in EarlyModern culture, and in Shakespeare supports the fantasies of heroic apotheosis everywhere in his work.


Play, Death, And Apotheosis, Kirby Farrell Prof Dec 1987

Play, Death, And Apotheosis, Kirby Farrell Prof

kirby farrell

This chapter develops the argument in "Self-Effacement and Autonomy in Sx," extending it to fantasies of apotheosis in the poems and plays.


Phantastes Chapter 14: Winter's Tale, William Shakespeare Dec 1622

Phantastes Chapter 14: Winter's Tale, William Shakespeare

German Romantic and Other Influences

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Winter’s Tale, published in 1623 in the First Folio.


Phantastes Chapter 20: The Faithful Shepherdess, John Fletcher Dec 1608

Phantastes Chapter 20: The Faithful Shepherdess, John Fletcher

German Romantic and Other Influences

John Fletcher (1579-1625) was a contemporary of William Shakespeare and followed him as main playwright for the King’s Men. The Faithful Shepherdess (produced in 1608, probably published in 1609) is also important for Fletcher’s definition of tragicomedy, which highlights the importance of near-death to the genre.


Phantastes Chapter 22: The Revenger's Tragedy, Cyril Tourneur Dec 1606

Phantastes Chapter 22: The Revenger's Tragedy, Cyril Tourneur

German Romantic and Other Influences

Cyril Tourneur (1575-1626) was an English dramatist, a contemporary of Shakespeare; Tourneur was also a soldier and politician. The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), as its name implies, is a revenge tragedy, and comments on the battle to avenge the destruction by the giants that lead to the brothers’ deaths. Literary critics now believe that the play was written by Thomas Middleton (1580-1627).