English Language and Literature Commons^™

Iago As Moral Other In Jonathan Munby's Production Of Othello (2016), Emma Magbanua

Honors Theses

Jonathan Munby produced a contemporary adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre in Spring of 2016. While continuing to utilize Shakespeare's language, Munby modernized Othello through the use of contemporary military costumes, props, accents, music, and dance. Munby did not limit his adaptation to solely visual and auditory aspects of Othello, but also took the liberty of contemporizing the principle of "otherness" in the play. This research explores the identification of Munby's character as Iago as "Moral Other," whose actions lead to the fall of his wife, Emilia, a fellow officer, Roderigo, Desdemona, and the protagonist, Othello.

How Drag Culture Resolves Tensions In Victorian Shakespearean Cross-Dressing; Or, Slay, Feste, Slay, Isaac Robertson

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In 2017, Madame Le Gateau Chocolat, a black drag queen, sashayed onto the stage of the Globe theater to portray Feste in Emma Rice’s production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. This bold move not only gave anxiety to its investors (eventually leading to the stepping down of Emma Rice), but also raised questions about the validity of drag performance within Shakespeare plays. Shakespeare has historically been inseparable with traditional cross-dressing (both in performance and in the narrative itself), although the relationship has not always been cordial. In Victorian England, cross-dressing was often set equal to homosexuality or moral deviance, and …

The Readers Constructed By Shakespeare Anthologies And Pedagogical Scholarship, Andrea Berns

Theses and Dissertations

In my graduate thesis, I determine that modern Shakespeare anthologies provide features for an audience with specific learning needs that may not be representative of the students currently enrolled in undergraduate classrooms who are reading these anthologies. On the other hand, scholars of Shakespeare pedagogy also depict readers with certain learning needs their research, the results of which may have been influenced by bias and, therefore, also may not be representative of the “real” reader of Shakespeare. To determine where the two “constructed” readers depicted in modern Shakespeare anthologies and in pedagogical research overlap and where they diverge, I will …

Of Levinas And Shakespeare: "To See Another Thus", Sandor Goodhart, Moshe Gold, Kent Lehnhof

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Scholars have used Levinas as a lens through which to view many authors and texts, fields of endeavor, and works of art. Yet no book-length work or dedicated volume has brought this thoughtful lens to bear in a sustained discussion of the works of Shakespeare. It should not surprise anyone that Levinas identified his own thinking as Shakespearean. "The play’s the thing" for both, or put differently, the observation of intersubjectivity is. What may surprise and indeed delight all learned readers is to consider what we might yet gain from considering each in light of the other.

Comprising leading scholars …

Shakespeare, Antony And Cleopatra, And The Nature Of Fame, Robert A. Logan

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, and the Nature of Fame is a characterological study, presenting new perspectives on Antony and Cleopatra, the most ambiguous of Shakespeare's plays. It offers fresh insights into Shakespeare's understanding of the attributes of fame, the process by which it occurs, and the significance of being famous—and into the origins and nature of the playwright's own imperishable fame. Inclusive and enlarging, the study considers a fresh method of dealing with the longstanding difficulties theater-goers and readers have had in responding to the characters of Shakespeare's plays, the seventeenth-century contexts of the play that the playwright …

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

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Dadless: Dead Dads In Hamlet And The Effects On Their Children, Erin Diiorio

Student and Faculty Research Days

This research is a close look at the methods of grief as depicted by the children who lose their fathers in William Shakespeare’s classic, Hamlet. The goal is to track each child’s reaction to the sudden bereavement in a variety of physical and emotional manifestations. This has been done by first examining current literature on the text, followed by a review of historical context of the period in which the play was written, and finally analyzing each character’s behavior. In doing so, this research seeks to highlight the importance of the presence of fathers within Hamlet and provide insight …

Players In A Storm: Climate And Political Migrants In The Tempest And Othello, Darcie Rees

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This paper presents a reading of migrants and their relationships with political and environmental slow violence in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Othello. Using Steve Mentz’s work with water and shipwreck, Lowell Duckert’s work on water in Shakespeare, Rob Nixon’s concept “slow violence,” Patricia Fumerton’s book on vagrancy in sixteenth and seventeenth century England, and Ken Hiltner’s work with environmental advocacy of the same time, I read the social history of vagrancy of the time (presented by Hiltner and Fumerton) alongside the Poor Laws. This social history is combined with water-focused ecocriticism, shipwreck and a postcolonial reading of migrancy. Ultimately, …

“Your Unthought Of Harry”: Political Legitimacy And The Economy Of Honor In Shakespeare's Henriad, Bandana Singh

Scripps Senior Theses

Shakespeare’s Henriad delves into questions of divine authority, political process, and the role of class in society. Most importantly, however, the text tracks the shifts in leadership and kingly identity. Richard II paints the portrait of a king infatuated with his own divinity. Richard’s journey from anointed king to deposed mortal captures the dissolution of his fantasy of invincibility. Inciting Richard’s demise, Henry IV effectively disturbs the passive obedience which the king’s subjects maintain; in doing so, the kingship begins to shift away from divine authority, moving into a vacuum of rebellion and civil conflict. Meanwhile, the previously profligate Prince …

Sounding And Dressing The Part: Understanding Macbeth Through Language And Costume, Jacqueline Peveto

Conversations: A Graduate Student Journal of the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Theology

Macbeth, written by William Shakespeare, is a complex tragedy driven by the relationships of its characters. While it can appear that Macbeth decides his own actions, staging of this production greatly influences the audience’s perception of Macbeth as a character. Is Macbeth inherently disposed towards evil, or do the witches possess him to do these wicked deeds? In stage productions, the relationship of Macbeth to the three witches influences readings of Macbeth and his status as a sympathetic character. This paper will analyze the link between the witches and Macbeth through the relationship identifiers of verbal similarity and costume in …

16th Century Shakespeare And 21st Century Students, Sheridan Lynn Steelman

Dissertations

Drawing on examples from the author’s and colleagues classrooms, this dissertation shows how an historical approach to teaching Shakespeare, drawing on primary documents from the period, opens meaningful interpretations, issues and questions for secondary students. Chapter One reviews current pedagogical approaches to teaching Shakespeare, close reading, reader response, and performance to set forth the rationale for teaching Shakespeare using primary documents. Chapter Two highlights ninth grade students studying Romeo and Juliet and includes classroom stories about engagement with documents about gender, sexuality, violence, and potions. Chapter Three describes two general English 11 classes and their successes and challenges with Hamlet …

Virtus Vs. Virtue: The Role Of Honor In Shakespeare’S Coriolanus, John D. Rimann

The Catalyst

An analysis of Shakespeare's Coriolanus with an emphasis on the juxtaposition of the concepts of English Christian and Roman honor.

Sonifying Hamlet, Ashleigh Cassemere-Stanfield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sonifying Hamlet uses data-mining techniques and algorithmic composition to read Shakespeare's Hamlet through sound. In so doing, it attends to pre-semantic, textual data that is only visible when one steps back from reading for narrative and instead focuses on formal details that, being individually small, but collectively numerous, are more visible to computational sorting than they are to human eyes that have been trained to look for broad semantic content. This use of algorithmically generated sound to reconstruct textual data continues the western trend towards ubiquitous quantification, while also challenging that trend's underlying assumption that reality is reducible to fully …

Body As Text: Physiognomy On The Early English Stage, Curtis Le Van

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation explores the presence of physiognomy, which is the reading of faces and bodily affects to determine a person’s character. I investigate plays originally produced for the early English stage, ranging from the late Middle Ages to the Restoration. In this work I argue that the bodies within the selected plays exist as texts that are to be interpreted by readers and audience members alike. While embodiment theory has done excellent work in explaining the corporeality of the pre-modern body, it does not consider the body as a textual construction. My work aims to fill such a gap. My …

Shaking Up Shakespeare: Teaching For The Contemporary High School English Classroom, Megan Sampson

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Contemporary high school English students find Shakespeare distant because they believe Shakespeare is hard to understand. Pairing Shakespeare with thematically-similar contemporary texts can make his works more accessible to students. Using different angles on the same theme shows students that Shakespeare presented some universal issues that still have relevance today. The Literacy Design Collaborative modules included within this thesis use Shakespeare in cooperation with other texts to focus on a specific theme. Using the module structure, teachers can organize the unit’s overarching goals and can include all handouts and necessary materials. This structure of design incorporates literacy-centered practices in order …

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 …

Ophelia's Reflection, Kelley Kennedy

Senior Theses

This project examines Ophelia's role in the thematic exploration of the nature of the individual self in Shakespeare's Hamlet. First, I discuss the different models of subjectivity and virtue that Ophelia embodies and by which characters around her judge her actions. Her father, Polonius, espouses a form of Renaissance humanism that Shakespeare counters throughout the play. He believes the imitation of noble qualities can affect inner goodness, and he demands Ophelia's obedience of his instructions regarding noble conduct. In contrast, Hamlet locates moral authority within the individual, and he dismisses Polonius' notions of elite selfpresentation as vulgar performances. Both men …

Transmutations Of Ophelia's "Melodious Lay", Danielle Byington

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There are multiple ways in which language and image share one another’s aesthetic message, such as traditional ekphrasis, which uses language to describe a work of art, or notional ekphrasis, which involves literature describing something that can be considered a work of art but does not physically exist at the time the description is written. However, these two terms are not inclusive to all artworks depicting literature or literature depicting artworks. Several scenes and characters from literature have been appropriated in art and the numerous paintings of Ophelia’s death as described by Gertrude in Hamlet, specifically Millais’ Ophelia, …

Homosociality In Michael Radford’S "The Merchant Of Venice", Eric A. Pitz

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

The Shadow Puppets Of Elsinore: Edward Gordon Craig And The Cranach Press Hamlet, James P. Taylor

Mime Journal

Taylor considers the role that book arts may play in Craig’s theories of the new theatre, or the Art of the Future. He expands our understanding of Craig’s design work to include print culture, examining his engravings for the monumental editions of Hamlet published by Count Harry Kessler’s Cranach Press in 1929–30. Taylor explores the relationship of Craig’s designs for the 1912 Moscow Art Theatre production of Hamlet to his engravings for the German and English-language Cranach Press editions of the play. He suggests that it was only with this print publication that Craig finally achieved the absolute artistic control …

The Shadowland Of Shakespeare: Christianity And The Carnival, Micah E. Cozzens

Student Works

The moral complexity of Shakespeare’s work is created by balancing carnival elements such as subversion of authority, plays within plays, and ascension of thrones, with Christian elements such as repentance, the supernatural, and forgiveness. Far from being didactic or moralizing, Shakespeare’s plays—specifically King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Hamlet—frequently inhabit an ethical shadowland, in which right becomes wrong and wrong becomes right. This intricacy renders even the simplest of his plots an interesting exploration of human consciousness. But Shakespeare never exalts Christianity at the expense of the carnival nor the carnival at the expense of Christianity—rather, …

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 …

Dangerous Fictions In Shakespeare's Richard Ii, Terence D. Wride

Student Works

In Shakespeare's Richard II, Shakespeare deposes monarchy by exposing the dangerous fictions of The King’s Two Bodies, Carl Schmitt's definition of sovereignty as expounded in Political Theology, and the English tradition of the divine right of kings and royal prerogative. By examining Ernst Kantorowicz's explication of the king's body politic and body natural as found his book The King's Two Bodies, I argue that Shakespeare critiques the popular political theology of his time by exposing the negative political repercussions of an ill-defined body politic. What past scholars have overlooked and failed to do is provide a concrete definition of …

Shakespeare And Classical Cosmology, Jean Feerick

2017 Faculty Bibliography

In this wide-ranging and ambitiously conceived Research Companion, contributors explore Shakespeare’s relationship to the classic in two broad senses. The essays analyze Shakespeare’s specific debts to classical works and weigh his classicism’s likeness and unlikeness to that of others in his time; they also evaluate the effects of that classical influence to assess the extent to which it is connected with whatever qualities still make Shakespeare, himself, a classic (arguably the classic) of modern world literature and drama. The first sense of the classic which the volume addresses is the classical culture of Latin and Greek reading, translation, and imitation. …

“Blame The Due Of Blame”: The Ethics And Efficacy Of Curses In Richard Iii, Alexandra Malouf

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Language, particularly the language of cursing, plays a powerful role in determining the outcome of events in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Gender imperatives reflected in the speech of Richard III’s characters indicate where power lies and how it is exercised across gendered spheres. While male characters in the history plays typically obtain and exert power through violence, both in war and in secret, the primary source of power held by female characters in Richard III is their use of language. Consistently, the women seal the violent ends of their enemies with curses, and Richard is perpetually given cause to …

Ophelia's Desire, James J. Marino

English Faculty Publications

Psychoanalytic criticism renders Ophelia anomalous, no longer Hamlet's erotic object in her own right but a refraction of his cathexis on the Queen. This approach obscures how profoundly Ophelia, the only daughter in William Shakespeare to renounce the lover her father forbids, violates generic norms, and how structurally similar Hamlet's two examples of madness are. Hamlet and Ophelia go mad after sacrificing the independent (and expected) aims of adulthood at the commands of fathers whom the play links to figures of murderous aggression against children: the biblical Jephthah and Seneca's filicidal ghosts. Hamlet is a play haunted by fathers who …

Something Wicked This Way Comes: The Supernatural And Unnatural In Macbeth, Mary Spencer

Undergraduate Research Journal

Fate is an omnipresent force woven through much ancient literature, and in English literature it is named from the earliest recorded writings as wyrd. By tracing this influence from its first appearances in Anglo-Saxon writing to the Early Modern period, we can see how Shakespeare uses his cultural inheritance to create the supernatural world of Macbeth, specifically through representations of wyrd. In the play, he examines the question “Does fate make the characters, or do the characters create their fates?” Juhász Tamás, a Shakespeare scholar, makes the point, “Of all Shakespearean dramas, the concept of fate and destiny seems most …

The Social Network Of Early English Drama: A Digital Humanities Lesson Plan, Adam Rzepka, Pierce Williams, Jennifer Royston

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

The Folger Shakespeare Library's recently launched Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama (EMED) provides searchable, TEI-encoded, digital editions of 403 English plays first staged in London between1576 and 1642. A central task for participants at the Folger's 2016 summer workshop "Beyond Access: Early Modern Digital Texts in the Classroom" was to devise pedagogical uses for the Digital Anthology. Our team focused on the metadata that the editors of the anthology attached to each play—its chronology, author, printer, publisher, and the theater company that initially staged it—in order to foreground an aspect of these dramas that is crucial yet very …

Shakespeare And Black Masculinity In Antebellum America: Slave Revolts And Construction Of Revolutionary Blackness, Elisabeth Mayer

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how Shakespeare was used by Antebellum American writers to frame slave revolts as either criminal or revolutionary. By specifically addressing The Confessions of Nat Turner by Thomas R. Gray and "The Heroic Slave" by Frederick Douglass, this paper looks at the way invocations of Shakespeare framed depictions of black violence. At a moment when what it means to be American was questioned, American writers like Gray and Douglass turned to Shakespeare and the British roots of the English language in order to structure their respective arguments. In doing so, these texts illuminate how transatlantic identity still permeated …

Shakespeare's "Honest And Vertuous" Ensigns: Transgressing The Military/Domestic Divide In The Henriad And Othello, Matthew R. Wentz

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis explores how the military service of the ensign disrupts and ultimately obliterates domestic life in Shakespeare’s Henriad and Othello. The rank of the ensign held expectations of honesty and honor, yet Shakespeare portrays his only two ensign characters, Ancient Pistol and Iago, as ironically failing to adhere to these standards. The received view of Pistol that results from his portrayal in 2 Henry IV as a stock braggadocio is challenged by a sympathetic reading of his character, especially in Henry V. Although Pistol occasionally behaves with honor in Henry V, his military service results in …