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Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory
Recognizing Traps And Frightening Wolves: Foxes And Lions As A Representative Of Machiavellian Political Ideology In Shakespeare’S Comedies, Grace A. Powell
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 …
Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, And Metaphor In Early Modern Literature And Culture, Jeremy Cornelius
Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, And Metaphor In Early Modern Literature And Culture, Jeremy Cornelius
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In my dissertation, Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, and Metaphor in Early Modern Literature and Culture, I close read examples of Renaissance drama alongside their contemporary cultural texts to examine anxieties around social differences as constructed and mediated through what I call “contagious animality” in early modern English culture. Animal metaphors circulated anxieties around social differences on the early modern cultural stage in English drama where animality elicits uncertainties about identitarian constructions of difference. In this vein, I close read formal elements and their interactions with early modern culture to argue that animal metaphors transmit modes of speciating difference in …
Shakespeare As Opera In English: Britten's Dream And Adès' The Tempest, Joanne E. Gates
Shakespeare As Opera In English: Britten's Dream And Adès' The Tempest, Joanne E. Gates
Presentations, Proceedings & Performances
I assert that we learn Shakespeare better when we study him against the adaptation. Some of the adaptation choices made by opera composers and librettists-- and especially by stage designers in recent productions-- provoke us to critique a production concept for its innovative staging, forcing us to learn more about Shakespeare's original. The recent Metropolitan's The Tempest conveys the 2004 Thomas Adès Tempest as if an 18th century impresario Prospero had conjured or appropriated the contents of the Milan opera house to his island. Meredith Oakes's libretto simplifies much of Shakespearean language to efficient rhyming couplets, yet this opera eloquently …
"In Loving Virtue": Staging The Virgin Body In Early Modern Drama, Miranda Viederman
"In Loving Virtue": Staging The Virgin Body In Early Modern Drama, Miranda Viederman
Honors Projects
The aim of this Honors project is to investigate representations of female virginity in Renaissance English dramatic works. I view the period as one in which the womb became the site of a unique renewal of cultural anxieties surrounding the stability of the patriarchy and the inaccessibility of female sexual desire. I am most interested in virginity as a “bodily narrative” dependent on the construction and maintenance of performance. I analyze representations of virginity in female characters from four works of drama originating in the Jacobean period of the English Renaissance, during and after the end of the reign of …
Teaching The Structure Of Hamlet: The "To Be Or Not To Be" Soliloquy Repositioned In Recent Film Adaptations, Joanne E. Gates
Teaching The Structure Of Hamlet: The "To Be Or Not To Be" Soliloquy Repositioned In Recent Film Adaptations, Joanne E. Gates
Presentations, Proceedings & Performances
At a crucial turning point in online access to quality productions of Shakespeare, the (April 2010) Great Performances airing of Hamlet (with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart), the occasion arose to turn the open access to it into teaching strategies. Along with all else quirky about it, the production accepts what seems to be a trend in recent film adaptations, dating from at least Zeffirelli's with Mel Gibson in 1991; that is, to rearrange the sequence of Hamlet's 2.2 and 3.1 soliloquies. The precedent dates to the 1603 First Quarto, perhaps, but everything else about the first quarto …
Wherein To Catch The Conscience Of The Queen: Dystopian Politics In Elizabethan Drama, Helen Fielding
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 …
Convents And Novices In Early Modern English Dramatic Works: In Medias Res, Vanessa L. Rapatz
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 …