Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons^™

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 …

The Faustian Deal: What Is Good And Evil?, Jaclyn Elmquist

English Honors Theses

How is the “deal with the devil” is portrayed in contemporary films? This essay compares how the original Faustian deal informs modern-day portrayals. Thus, I examine how devils were first represented in early works such as The Faustbuch, Mary of Nijmegen, and Goethe’s Faustus. These depictions and their historical context provide the basis for my research. I compare these works to the films, Rosemary’s Baby, Wall Street, and Sweet Smell of Sucess. In the mentioned films, the main characters make deals with a devil or demon for wealth, success, or fame. I explore how the Faustian character of each film …

Literature, Pandemic, And The Insufficiency Of Survival: Boccaccio’S Decameron And Emily St. John Mandel’S Station Eleven, Anthony P. Russell

Interdisciplinary Journal of Leadership Studies

The question of literature’s utility in relation to the “real world” has been asked since at least the time of Plato. This essay examines an extreme instance of this problem by investigating two works, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349-1353) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2016), that argue for the value of art in the midst of catastrophe. Boccaccio’s collection of 100 tales, written in the context of the Black Plague, and Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel about a world devastated by a killer flu, overlap and diverge in instructive ways in making their cases for the important role of literature in …

Accommodation And Coping In Medieval Catholic England: A Historical Dramaturgy Casebook For The Chester Mystery Cycle’S Play 14: Christ At The House Of Simon The Leper, Christ And The Moneylenders, And Judas’ Plot, Andrew J. Roberge

Senior Projects Spring 2022

In this historically focused dramaturgy casebook for the medieval Catholic Chester Mystery Cycle's Play 14, Christ at the House of Simon the Leper, Christ and the Moneylenders, and Judas’ Plot, I offer suggestions for Play 14's production as it might have appeared in the cycle's final year of performance, 1575. I contextualize and grapple with the play's antisemitisms, and also offer a brief history of antisemitism in medieval Europe. I also analyze Play 14 and the Chester Mystery Cycle for their rhetorical appeals to the medieval vernacular language, contexts, and events, as well as their anachronistic temporal and geographic …

Desmitificando Un Nombre. Juana, “La Loca”, A Través De Su Representación Biográfica Y Dramática. Siglos Xviii-Xxi, Maria Carmen Vera Lopez

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The mythification of the character of Queen Juana I of Castile is the subject of this thesis. The biographical and literary representation are discussed from the biographical and literary perspectives which implies the study of two fundamental aspects in the formation of this myth: woman-power and madness. The main objective of this research is to break down the myth known today as Juana, “the mad” through historical and literary analyses.

This work is part of new Hispanic medievalism because it explains a phenomenon that began in the Middle Ages. The five chapters affirm that, in the case of Juana I …

Convents And Novices In Early Modern English Dramatic Works: In Medias Res, Vanessa L. Rapatz

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Texts: In Medias Res attends to the religious, social, and material changes in England during the century following the Reformation, specifically examining how the English came to terms with the meanings of convents and novices even after they disappeared from the physical and social landscape. In five chapters, it traces convents and novices across a range of dramatic texts that refuse easy generic classification: problem plays such as Shakespeare's Measure for Measure; Marlowe's comic tragedy The Jew of Malta; Margaret Cavendish's closet dramas The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious …

The Performance Tradition Of The Medieval English University: The Works Of Thomas Chaundler, Thomas Meacham

Early Drama, Art, and Music

Contrary to previous scholarship, which has claimed that university drama did not occur at the English universities before the Tudor period, Meacham argues that there was a vibrant tradition of performance throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He suggests an earlier tradition has not been recognized because, in addition to the false assumption that medieval pedagogy cannot support such activity, the full range of medieval performance practices or "texts," beyond the traditional play text, have not been considered. This book takes as its focus one of the last medieval university plays, Thomas Chaundler’s Liber apologeticus de omni statu humanae naturae …

Drama And Sermon In Late Medieval England: Performance, Authority, Devotion, Charlotte Steenbrugge

Early Drama, Art, and Music

This is the first full-length study of the interrelation between sermons and vernacular religious drama in late medieval England. It investigates how these genres worked as media for public learning, how they combined this didactic aim with literary exigencies, and how the plays in particular acquired and reflected a position of authority. The interrelation between sermons and vernacular drama, formerly assumed relatively uncritically to be a close one, is addressed from a variety of angles, including historical connections, performative aspects, and the portrayal of the sacrament of penance. The analysis challenges the common assumption that Middle English religious drama is …

The Jeu D'Adam: Ms Tours 927 And The Provenance Of The Play, Christophe Chaguinian

Early Drama, Art, and Music

The Jeu d'Adam is an Anglo-Norman mid-twelfth-century representation of several biblical stories, including the temptation of Adam and Eve and the subsequent fall, Cain and Abel, and the prophets Isaiah and Daniel. Its framework builds on the Latin responses of the mass during the liturgical season of Septuagesima, from before Lent to Easter. This collection of essays explores whether this early play was monastic or secular, its Anglo-Norman character, and the text's musical provenance.

Liturgical Drama And The Reimagining Of Medieval Theater, Michael Norton

Early Drama, Art, and Music

The expression "liturgical drama" was formulated in 1834 as a metaphor and hardened into formal category only later in the nineteenth century. Prior to this invention, the medieval rites and representations that would forge the category were understood as distinct and unrelated classes: as liturgical rites no longer celebrated or as theatrical works of dubious quality. If this distinction between liturgical rites and non-liturgical representations holds, should we not examine the works called "liturgical drama" according to the contexts of their presentations within the manuscripts and books that preserve them? Given the ways that the words "liturgy" and "drama" have …

Mary Of Nemmegen: The Ca. 1518 Translation And The Middle Dutch Analogue, Mariken Van Nieumeghen, Clifford Davidson, Ton J. Broos, Martin Walsh

Early Drama, Art, and Music

Mary of Nemmegen, a prose condensation in English of the Middle Dutch play Mariken van Nieumeghen, is an important example of the literature that was imported from Holland in the early part of the sixteenth century - literature that helped to establish an English taste for narrative prose fiction. It also may be compared to Everyman, described as a treatise "in the manner of a moral play." Mary of Nemmegen is an analogue of the Faustus story, in which a person makes an agreement with the devil; hence the work deserves to be made available as background …

Shakespeare's Blush, Or "The Animal" In Othello, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

This essay examines how the rhetoric of animalization in Shakespeare’s Othello compels us to think early modern categories of race in connection with early modern discourses of “human” versus “animal.” Beginning with Shakespeare’s representation of Iago, I suggest that it is the potential for sameness conditioned by Iago’s counterfactual statement (“Were I the Moor, I would not by Iago”) that is most significant about his relation to Othello. From there I consider the overlap between the play’s representations of animality and black skin. Read in the context of Jacques Derrida’s reflections on animals, I consider the deconstructive value of linking …

"Nayles Large And Lang": Masculine Identity And The Anachronic Object In The York Crucifixion Play, Daisy Black

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Robot Saints, Christopher B. Swift

Publications and Research

In the Middle Ages, articulating religious figures like wooden Deposition crucifixes and ambulatory saints were tools for devotion, techno-mythological objects that distilled the wonders of engineering and holiness. Robots are gestures toward immortality, created in the face of the undeniable fact and experience of the ongoing decay of our fleshy bodies. Both like and unlike human beings, robots and androids occupy a nebulous perceptual realm between life and death, animation and inanimation. Masahiro Mori called this in-between space the “uncanny valley.” In this essay I argue that unlike a modern person apprehending an android (the uncanny human-like object that resides …

Memory And Remembering: Sacred History And The York Plays, Clifford Davidson

Clifford Davidson

A Penitent Prepares: Affect, Contrition, And Tears, Christopher B. Swift

Publications and Research

This essay draws upon a poetic and devotional texts from late medieval Spain to show how public displays of emotion (weeping, in particular) during penitential processions could be learned and prepared for in advance.

Bullying In York’S Corpus Christi Plays, Clifford Davidson, Sheila White

Clifford Davidson

The York Mysteries: Carnivalesque?, Clifford Davidson

Clifford Davidson

York Mysteries: Seeing And Listening, Clifford Davidson

Clifford Davidson

Beowulf, Anthony Alvarado

Masters Theses

My composition is a tone poem based on the Old English epic poem Beowulf Specifically, this piece depicts Beowulf s three battles with three diverse monsters. The first Grendel, second Grendel's mother, and last a dragon. In this composition, the music does not follow any specific or traditional forms. Instead, each episode is presented as a picture of each event.

The choice to depict the story of Beowulf was an interesting choice. While historically the story is significant, it is not a very popular one. The poem is the oldest surviving manuscript written in Old English. However, more recent (relatively) …

Rev. Of Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relations And Symbolic Act In The York Corpus Christi Plays, Clifford Davidson

Clifford Davidson

The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, Clifford Davidson, Pamela King

Clifford Davidson

Some Observations On Violence In Medieval English Drama, Clifford Davidson

Clifford Davidson

The Medieval Actor And The Antitheatrical Prejudice, Clifford Davidson

Clifford Davidson

Positional Symbolism And Medieval English Drama, Clifford Davidson

Clifford Davidson

Visualizing The Moral Life: A Study Of The Iconography Of The Macro Morality Plays, Clifford Davidson

Clifford Davidson

No abstract provided.

The Middle English Saint Play, Clifford Davidson

Clifford Davidson

Word, Picture, And Spectacle, Edam Monograph Series 5, Clifford Davidson

Clifford Davidson

The topics covered include the symbolism of scatological illustration in Gothic manuscripts, connections between word and picture in religious art, and the relationship perceived between divine and human creativity.

From Creation To Doom: The York Cycle Of Mystery Plays, Clifford Davidson

Clifford Davidson

Includes previously published papers in revised or modified form: “After the Fall,” “Civic Patronage and the York Realist,” “Northern Spirituality and the Late Medieval Drama of York,” “From Tristia to Gaudium.”

Drama In The Twentieth Century: Critical And Comparative Essays, Clifford Davidson, C. Gianakaris, John Stroupe

Clifford Davidson