Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons^™

Piracy, Slavery, And Assimilation: Women In Early Modern Captivity Literature, David C. Moberly

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines a hitherto neglected body of works featuring female characters enslaved in Islamicate lands. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many Englishmen and women were taken captive by pirates and enslaved in what is now the Middle East and North Africa. Several writers of the time created narratives and dramas about the experiences of such captives. Recent scholarship has brought to light many of these works and pointed out their importance in establishing what was still a young, unsure, and developing English identity in this early period. Most of this scholarship, however, has dealt with narratives of the …

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.

"We Endure Around Truths Immemorially Posited”: A Dramaturgical Research Analysis On Brian Friel’S Linguistic-Historical Drama “Translations”, Meredith Levy

Undergraduate Research Awards

A dramaturgical analysis of Friel's Translations intended to provide an overview of the play to a director staging it. The paper focuses on topics such as Friel's life, the history of Northern Ireland relevant to the play, and thematic analysis. The PDF includes the author's entry submission essay for the 2011 Undergraduate Research Awards.

Senior Athletic Training Students' Perceptions And Self-Reported Behaviors Of Evidence-Based Practice, Gregory P. Schneider

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Title: Senior Athletic Training Student‟s Perceptions and Self-Reported Behaviors of Evidence-Based Practice Context: Entry-level athletic training education is currently transitioning to include evidence-based practice (EBP) into their curriculums to continue to establish athletic training as a prestigious allied health profession. Objective: To determine senior athletic training student (SATS) perceptions of EBP and examine the self-reported behaviors of EBP to gain insight into the instructional methods currently used to educate athletic training students in EBP as the method of delivering care to patients. Design: Grounded theory study Setting: Commission on Accreditation of Athletic Training Education accredited undergraduate athletic training programs. Participants: …

Recasting Genre In Tennessee Williams's Apprentice Plays, Christina Ilona Hunter

Dissertations

This dissertation investigates Tennessee Williams’s earliest full-length plays, also known as the apprentice plays—Candles to the Sun, Fugitive Kind, Not About Nightingales, Spring Storm, and Stairs to the Roof—by comparing, contrasting and contextualizing them in relation to Daniel Chandler’s generic criteria of drama; namely, narrative, characterization, setting, topics, iconography, and staging techniques. The present study also draws upon an extensive body of scholarship pertaining to genre theory, Williams’s cultural contemporaries, and the historical and psychological backdrop of Depression-era America. In these early plays, Williams diverged sharply from the dramatic generic conventions of his day, manipulating them in new …

Monstrous!: Actors, Audiences, Inmates, And The Politics Of Reading Shakespeare, Matt Kozusko

English and Creative Writing Faculty Publications

This essay considers the use of Shakespeare as marker of authenticity and as a therapeutic space for performers and audiences across a number of genres, from professional actors in training literature to prison inmates in radio and film documentaries. It argues that in the wake of recent academic trends—the critique of "Shakespeare" as an author figure; the privileging of the text as a source of multiple, potentially conflicting readings—Shakespeare's function as cultural capital has shifted sites, from "Shakespeare" to the playtexts themselves.

Hole In The Head: A Play, Accompanied By A Conspectus Of Knowledge, Both Repressed And Researched, That Directly Influenced The Playwright In Her Development Of A New Work, Margaret Hunter Cook

Honors Scholar Theses

"Hole in the Head" is a play about a woman who wakes up. Maude wakes up in the first act, and in every subsequent scene she undergoes some form of physical or emotional awakening as characters walk in and out of her front door."Hole in the Head" is accompanied by an introduction that attempts to understand the interplay between creativity and academia through an analysis of theatre, feminist and queer theory, and science.

Two Kings: An Account Of The Preparation And Performance Of The Role Of Edgar In William Shakespeare's King Lear, Ryan Kathman

Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film: Theses, Student Research, and Creative Work

This work is my graduate thesis documenting the creative process behind my performance of the role of Edgar in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s 2009 production of King Lear by William Shakespeare. It is comprised of five sections including an introduction, pre-rehearsal research, rehearsal and performance journal, post-production responses and conclusion. The introduction outlines my impressions of Edgar and King Lear prior to researching or rehearsing the role. In my research section, I attempt to better understand Shakespeare, his play and the role of Edgar by studying the playwright’s life and the history of the character and play, while also making …

The Triumphant Tragedy Of King Lear, Erin Lamontage

English Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Bloudy Tygrisses: Murderous Women In Early Modern English Drama And Popular Literature, Alexandra Hill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines artistic and literary images of murderous women in popular print published in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. The construction of murderous women in criminal narratives, published between 1558 and 1625 in pamphlet, ballad, and play form, is examined in the context of contemporary historical records and cultural discourse. Chapter One features a literature review of the topic in recent scholarship. Chapter Two, comprised of two subsections, discusses representations of early modern women in contemporary literature and criminal archives. The subsections in Chapter Two examine early modern treatises, sermons, and essays concerning the nature of women, the roles and …

The Comedy Of Scholarship: Review Of Hugh Kenner’S Flaubert, Joyce And Beckett: The Stoic Comedians, Katherine Weiss

ETSU Faculty Works

Review of Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians. by Hugh Kenner

Perpetuality In Print: Musing Nature In Sylvia Plath’S The Bell Jar, Kacey Silvia

Senior Honors Projects

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another …

Exploding Bombs: Masculinity And War Trauma In Sam Shepard’S Drama, Katherine Weiss

ETSU Faculty Works

This paper examines violence and masculinity in Sam Shepard's work as a symptom of war trauma, apparent in his characterization of several of his male characters as war veterans and the violent language accompanying his other characters. War becomes a cultural disease infesting and destroying the family on Shepard's stage.

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.

A Tragic Farce: Revolutionary Women In Elizabeth Inchbald’S The Massacre And European Drama, Wendy Nielsen

Department of English Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This essay examines Elizabeth Inchbald’s treatment of French Revolutionary women and relationship to European drama in order to appreciate the implications of tragic writing for British women playwrights. Focusing on Inchbald’s connections to French culture and English theater in late 1792 and early 1793 elucidates the self‐censoring and generic conventions of her only tragedy, The Massacre. Events in France like the September Massacres unsettled Burkean notions of femininity and raised the possibility of female violence. This mixing of traditional gender characteristics resembles discourse about Inchbald’s dramas as neither tragic, comic, nor tragicomic. The genre of tragic farce describes Inchbald’s revisions …

Incest And Empire In The Faerie Queene, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

"When considered in the context of Elizabeth's effort to silence all discussion of incest, Edmund Spenser's courtly epic aiming to cultivate favor with the monarch looks like a disastrous miscalculation, for incest appears throughout The Faerie Queene. Indeed, incest sits at the center (both literally and figuratively) of the Book of Chastity, the very book wherein Spenser encourages Elizabeth 'in mirrours more then one her selfe to see.' In the present essay, I investigate the apparently illogical and impolitic prominence afforded to incest in book three of The Faerie Queene, ultimately arguing that the imperialist logic underpinning the epic is …

Stages Of Evil: Occultism In Western Theater And Drama, Robert Lima

Studies in Romance Languages Series

“The evil that men do” has been chronicled for thousands of years on the European stage, and perhaps nowhere else is human fear of our own evil more detailed than in its personifications in theater. In Stages of Evil, Robert Lima explores the sociohistorical implications of Christian and pagan representations of evil and the theatrical creativity that occultism has engendered. By examining examples of alchemy, astronomy, demonology, exorcism, fairies, vampires, witchcraft, hauntings, and voodoo in prominent plays, Stages of Evil explores American and European perceptions of occultism from medieval times to the modern age.

Unshap'd Monsters: Political Farce On The London Stage, 1717-1737, Melissa Ann Bloom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation reexamines the role of John Gay's and Henry Fielding's anti-government satirical farces during the politically contentious 1720s and 1730s in London. Although their plays were and still are considered, variously, burlesques, entertainments, farces, and satires, I call them satirical farce for two reasons. First, contemporaries used the term farce as much to signify political and social stances as dramatic type or function. Those political and social stances are the central focus of this dissertation. Second, I see in this collection of plays—Gay's Three Hours After Marriage (1717) and The Beggar's Opera (1728), Fielding's The Author's Farce (1730), The …

“A Midsummer Night's Dream”: A Director's Notebook, Natasha Bunnell

Institute for the Humanities Theses

This manuscript is an analysis of artistic growth as well as an attempt to document the creative process during this stage of growth. The production herein discussed was an excerpted version of A Midsummer Night's Dream ; however, the process of conceiving and staging the piece was identical to the process of producing an interpretation of the complete text. It is difficult to document all aspects of the theatre artist's creative process in writing and still photographs, thus, I have only included what I consider to be the most straightforward and significant elements for illustrating and analyzing the conclusions drawn: …

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.

The Carnival King, Ian Kilroy

Books/Book Chapters

A play in two acts. A macabre farce about murder and the search for justice during carnival time.

On Alan Moore And Eddie Campbell's From Hell (1996) And The Hughes Brothers' From Hell, Rodney Sharkey

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Allen and Albert Hughes' film version of From Hell is visually striking and strong on memorable images. For those who enjoy attending films based on graphic novels they have read, the first framed shot of a London skyline beneath a scarlet sky is superbly reminiscent of the menacing and yet enticing comic world of the novel. Moreover, the film develops its theme visually as well as narratively; the impulse behind the ripper murders is chillingly realized in some ensemble scenes at the Royal College of Physicians and police barracks where single female victims are counter-pointed against a metaphorical …

Katharina's Volte-Face : Self-Discovery In Shakespeare's The Taming Of The Shrew, Vinodini Murugesan

Student Works (2000-2009)

At first glance, Shakespeare's controversial battle-of-the-sexes play The Taming of the Shrew appears to be the story of a vile-tempered woman who is taken on as a challenge by a man who then 'tames' her into becoming a docile wife by subjecting her to a number of harsh experiences. In actual fact, however, the play is more than a simple far-fetched farce or comedy despite the undeniable fact that it is both funny as well as farcical. Although exceedingly entertaining in terms of both slapstick humour and witty repartee, the play has depths of meaning not at once apparent to …

'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 …

Style Guide For Books In Comparative Cultural Studies, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Purdue Books In Comparative Cultural Studies, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Eugene O'Neill International Conference 1995: O'Neill's People, Schedule Of Events, Eugene O'Neill Society

Frederick Wilkins Papers (MS 110)

This item is related to a series of Eugene O'Neill Conferences convened at Suffolk University by Suffolk Professor Fred Wilkins and the Eugene O'Neill Society in the 1980s and 1990s.

Eugene O'Neill International Conference 1995: O'Neill's People, Program, Eugene O'Neill Society

Frederick Wilkins Papers (MS 110)

This item is related to a series of Eugene O'Neill Conferences convened at Suffolk University by Suffolk Professor Fred Wilkins and the Eugene O'Neill Society in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Feminine Other: A Study Of The Women In Shakespeare's Major Tragedies, Kurt E. Wilamowski

Masters Theses

The central examination of this thesis concentrates on the essential contributions of the female characters in Shakespeare's major tragedies--Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. Without the women's conflict with the patriarchal order, the males would be unable to recognize and combat the corrupt elements in their society. The awareness of the female characters allows them to perceive the tainted patriarchal atmosphere they dwell in and operate within it as best as they can.

In short, each woman's individual field of awareness allows her to act as the executor of the dénoucement in the tragedy. Even …

Marsha Norman's Ghosts: The Embodiment Of The Past On The Stage, Jennifer Anne Workman

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study focuses on the role of the ghost figure in Marsha Norman's drama. In order to understand how this ghost figure is unique to her drama, but at the same time has roots in the American theater, I first examine her relationship to her American predecessors and their portrayal of the past in order to later show how the ghost figure is Norman's "device" that she uses to explore the past on the stage. I then attempt to determine her relationship to the current movements with which she is most often associated: new realism and feminism. Because new realism …