Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Playing Devil's Advocate: The Attractive Shakespearean Villain, Jonathan Montgomery Green

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The characters of William Shakespeare have spawned countless words of critical interpretation inspired by the playwright's aptitude for fashioning intricate and conflicted figures. As a master character craftsman, Shakespeare is consistent in creating fascinatingly deep characters, and many of them have even gone so far as to generate entire literary archetypes. From the contemplative Prince Hamlet to the despicable yet charming John Falstaff, Shakespeare's characters remain eternal representatives of what any good character should be: interesting, provocative, and complicated.

However, among the playwright's most hypnotic figures are his villains, those characters whom audiences should by all counts detest but cannot …

Dickens And Shakespeare’S Household Words, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

Though Dickens' Shakespearean qualities have often been noted, less attention has been paid to the way that Dickens constructed the terms of his comparison to Shakespeare, scripting the response he received from critics from the nineteenth century to the present and shaping Shakespeare's reception as well. Focusing on The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield in the context of their Victorian reception, this essay shows how Dickens used Shakespearean quotation to market his characters' quotability, turning them into household words and popularizing Shakespeare's sayings in turn, even as he challenged the universality of quotable phrases.

The Monster In The Moor, Andrew Stesienko

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Ophelia's Mistreatment And Ignored Monastic Opportunities, Danielle Tovsen

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Thesis: I will argue that Ophelia could have saved her own life if she had left home and fled to a nunnery; the treatment she received from Laertes and Polonius was worse than Hamlet's treatment of her throughout the play and especially in Act 3 .1. Through thorough research, the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, is explored. This thesis specifically focuses on the character of Ophelia and Ophelia's relationships with Hamlet, Laertes, and Polonius. Through the examination of Ophelia, with a literature review of Ophelia's reputation amongst scholars, the argument is made that Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia is one of …

The Return Of Logos: Language And Meaning In Hamlet, James Funk

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Anachronistic Shrews, James J. Marino

English Faculty Publications

A single line in the Folio text of The Taming of the Shrew seems to point to dates decades apart. A performer identified by his speech heading as 'Sinklo,' the actor John Sincklo or Sincler, recalls a stage character named 'Soto,' presumably the character from John Fletcher's Women Pleased. Sinklo's name is used to argue for an early date for the play, sometimes as early as 1592, while the allusion to Soto suggests a date around 1620. Scholars intent on setting an early date for the 1623 text and on preserving its priority to the 1594 Taming of a Shrew …

“The Liquor Is Not Earthly”: The Tempest And The Downfall Of Native Americans, Sally Shader

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

A Language Of Grief: Spectacular, Textual, And Violent Expression In Titus Andronicus, Connor Guy

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

“Suit Me All Points Like A Man”: Gender And Performance In As You Like It And Richard Iii, Taylor Burns

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Dickens's Hamlet Burlesque, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner considers what an interlude in Great Expectations involving a spectacularly bad production of Hamlet can do for Hamlet. Specifically, Pollack-Pelzner looks at what Dickens's rendering of Mr. Wopsle's travesty reveals about Hamlet's openness to an audience's derisive laughter. Wopsle’s production may be a travesty, but Dickens’s narrative of that production is a burlesque, with Hamlet as much its target as Wopsle.

The Missing Child In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Thomas R. Frosch

Publications and Research

The Indian boy over whom the king and queen of fairies quarrel is the most important of several characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream who do not appear on stage: his parents, who form with him a missing nuclear family; a child god, Cupid; and a female authority figure, the dowager to whose property the lovers Lysander and Hermia flee. In its narrative structure the play presents a healing regression to the early mother and the primary process. However, the regressive movement has disturbing, as well as adaptive, elements; in addition, while the characters are still in the forest, the …

English Calvinism And The Crowd: Coriolanus And The History Of Religious Reform, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Late Tudor London comes alive when Stephen Greenblatt's acclaimed biography of William Shakespeare, shadowing its subject, takes to the streets. “The unprecedented concentration of bodies jostling … crossing and recrossing the great bridge, pressing into taverns and theaters and churches,” Greenblatt suggests, is a “key to the whole spectacle” of crowds in the playwright's histories and tragedies. To be sure, his little excursions in London left their mark on his scripts, yet he scrupulously sifted his literary sources from which he drew characters and crises onto the stage. He prowled around Plutarch and read Stow and Hollinshed on the wars …

What Hath Wittenberg To Do With Stratford-Upon-Avon?: The Protestant Reformation In Hamlet, Jason Adkins

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Greater Of Two Evils: Distinguishing Between Machiavellians And Tyrants In Shakespeare's "The Rape Of Lucrece" And Milton's Paradise Lost, Mark Crisp

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Shakespeare's Twist: The Tragic Within Some Comedies, Susan Dettweiler Wilhide

Theses & Honors Papers

Shakespeare creatively intermingled comic and tragic motifs throughout each comedy. In doing so, the audience remembers the joyous reunions and unions rather than the potential tragedies of these plays. However, the comic portions are dependent upon the tragic portions and vice versa. The audience understands the tragic situations the characters face, yet laughs at the comic motifs causing these occurrences. The audience also shares in the joy of the characters as everything works out positively in the end.

'Rather Say I Play The Man I Am': Shakespeare's Coriolanus And Elizabethan Anti-Theatricality, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Books and Book Chapters

In the second act of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, the hero is informed that his acceptance as a Roman consul is dependent upon donning the robe of humility and petitioning the common people in the market-place for their ratifying vote. Coriolanus recoils from the custom, outraged at the idea of acting a part—complete with costume, dialogue, and stage directions— that does not correspond with his inner truth. At this moment and others, Coriolanus echoes the anti-theatricalist rhetoric of Elizabethan pamphleteers like the popular and prolific Stephen Gosson. In many ways, Coriolanus serves as a stand-in for the anti-theatrical ideology of Gosson and …

Manipulating Images Of Women's Power In Elizabethen England: Elizabeth I, Spenser, And Shakespeare, Amanda Kaye Martin

Theses & Dissertations

This work celebrates the influence of Elizabeth I on Elizabethan society and literature. In the opening of his Shakespearean Negotiations. Stephen Greenblatt describes writing as an outlet for the dead to speak to the living through "textual traces of themselves" that "make themselves heard in the voices of the living". These textual traces form the foundation for the critical theory of New Historicism, which perceives such traces as a conduit for literary critics to learn about an author's view of the nation, and era, in which he or she lived. In "The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text," Louis …

Shakespeare And Astrology, William Bruce Smith

Master's Theses

The popular ity of astrology in Elizabethan England is ref lected by the large number of references to it in the works of William Shakespeare. The majority of astrological references in the Shakespearean canon are "commonplaces" and do not add signif icantly to our understanding of his work, although they are of interest in studying exactly how much astrological knowledge he possessed. There are astrological references in the plays, however, that are of significance in the study of character in Shakespeare. In certain plays (Romeo and Juliet, The Winter' s Tale) a judgement concerning various individuals ' inner nobility may …

"Wretched, Bloody, And Usurping Boar"? An Evaluation Of The Historicity Of Shakespeare's Richard Iii, Kathryn Kiff

Institute for the Humanities Theses

Shakespeare's portrait of Richard III as a diabolical monster was based on the hostile accounts fashioned about him during the Tudor regime. Sir Thomas More's Richard III established the definitive image of Richard as the deformed tyrant who usurped the throne and murdered his nephews. This was the portrait that Shakespeare inherited from the sixteenth-century writers who incorporated More's account into their chronicles. This thesis examines Shakespeare's portrayal of Richard and the chronicle sources upon which he drew in order to show how Shakespeare's portrait of Richard developed. Although Richard was not the evil character presented in Shakespeare's play, it …

In Re "William Shakespeare": Brief Of Appellee William Shakespeare (Or Shakspere) Of Stratford-Upon-Avon, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

In Re "William Shakespeare": Reply Brief Of Appellee William Shakespeare (Or Shakspere) Of Stratford-Upon-Avon, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Shakespeare's Treatment Of Love : The Mature Tragedies, Albert E. Clark

Master's Theses

The machinery of criticism has been extensively applied to those plays in the Shakespeare canon often referred to as the mature tragediess Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Antony and Cleopatra, One seeking enlightenment in veritably any area of interest will find the means in the varied approaches which have proliferated through four hundred years of Shakespeare criticism. New and valid interpretations testify to a continuing need for insight into Shakespeare's arts nevertheless,. the word "supererogatory" must surely have occurred to even the moat resilient seeker after Shakespearean truth. A spate of learned articles and scholarly tomes inundate, and the burden is …

The Uses Of Processions In Shakespeare's Plays, William F. Sodini

English Theses & Dissertations

No abstract.

Shakespeare's Treatment Of Kingship In The Lancastrian Tetralogy, June Stemen Allman

Master's Theses

The English history play reached its highest peak of development between 1595 and 1599, for it was during these years that Shakespeare wrote the set of four plays covering the historical period from Richard II to Henry V. Each of the plays is a single entity, but in their entirety, they constitute a unified tetralogy concerning the rise of the house of Lancaster. Through the illegal seizure of the crown by Bolingbroke from Richard II to the glorious reign of Henry V, Shakespeare, as an intensely political writer, examines the facets of kingship and its inherent power and authority.

Concepts Of Suffering In King Lear, Emma Jean Westcot

English Theses & Dissertations

No abstract.

Character And Theme In Romeo And Juliet And Troilus And Cressida : A Comparative Critical Study, Charlotte H. Oberg

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

A Study Of The Dramatic Criticism Of Charles Lamb, Lyman Francis Smart

English Language and Literature ETDs

In the one hundred fifty years since Charles Lamb published what might be termed his first formal criticism, opinions of his stature as a critic have waxed and waned. His critical writing has been attached as the "blasphemies of a poor manic," and praised as possibly the greatest applied criticism in English. Recent critical estimates of British criticism have tended to ignore Lamb or to damn him with faint praise.

The purpose of this study is to re-examine the earlier attitudes toward Lamb and his writing on the drama, and to look with fresh perspective at the most noteworthy of …

A Comparison Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Century Criticism Of Shakespeare's Heroines, Grace Mcleod Gartman

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

The nineteenth century critics appraised Shakespeare's heroines by standards different from those of the twentieth; consequently the two ages reached different conclusions. The purpose of this paper is to point out just what these differences are.

A paper of this scope had to be narrowed in some ways. Otherwise a formidable array of heroines would have been enumerated, but little depth of research could have been shown. In the general conclusion the result would have been the same, as I have discovered through wide reading. To limit the subject only the most famous heroines could be included. The process of …

A Study Of The Tragic Elements In Shakespeare's Comedies, Dorothy Corson

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

In a study of the tragic elements in Shakespeare's comedies, it is necessary to distinguish between the tragic and the comic and to note their relationship, before considering the subject proper.

Shakespeare's Genius Was Essentially A Dramatic One, Marie Valentine Prudeaux

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis, submitted to Xavier University in 1929, argues that Shakespeare's genius was essentially a dramatic one, examining his life, artistic development, and dramatic works across four periods of composition. A biographical account of Shakespeare's life at Stratford-on-Avon and London opens the study, followed by an analysis of the qualities that distinguish his genius, including originality, insight into character, and the power to portray emotion.

Prudeaux draws on the critical tradition of Dryden, Hazlitt, Johnson, Pope, and Schlegel, among others, to organize Shakespeare's dramatic output into four periods, characterized in the thesis as "In the Workshop," "In the World," "Out …