Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons^™

Staging Violence With Intentionality, Toby O'Brien

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the role of the fight choreographer in the theatre while addressing the potential issues staged violence has in distracting an audience from the intended narrative of the play. Avoiding the instruction manual approach of stage combat in favor of expounding on the theory of violent entertainment, I have constructed a thesis that informs the reader of certain types of violence found in both classical and modern productions and have researched the psychological ramifications of violent spectatorship and the necessity for content acknowledgements as well as consideration for the performer’s well-being. By exploring the history of violent entertainment …

Reflection: The Twenty-Line Trap? Shakespeare Enacted By Young Women, Shannon Reed

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Professional actors assemble a toolkit of monologues with an obligatory “Shakespearean monologue” of around 20 lines. But female actors are at a disadvantage, with less than 150 women in a repertoire of over 1,100 characters in Shakespeare’s 37 or more plays. Young female actors (18-22 years old) are even more at a loss, if the powerful and complex older female roles are removed, leaving only a few dozen appropriate speeches. What effect does this limited canon have on such actors? Here, I reflect upon my own participant observer experience as a young woman actor, who received the bulk of my …

Hamlet In Narnia: The Prince And The Poem In Lewis’S Chronicles Of Narnia, Sarah R. A. Waters

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

C.S. Lewis is little-known for his Shakespeare scholarship except perhaps for his lecture “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem” for the British Academy (1942). This essay begins by discussing Lewis’s approach to the play and his desire to reenchant his audience with the play he had loved as a child, before character-criticism got in the way. It then explores how Lewis takes the Prince and the aspects he found most affective in Hamlet out of the play and explores them, imaginatively, in another world: recasting them “for children” in Narnia. The essay considers Hamlet in The Silver Chair in …

‘Faults To Make Us Men’: Shakespeare In The Prison System, Hannah Boyle

Honors Projects

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the positive impact of Shakespeare in prison programs on incarcerated individuals, utilizing empirical data, anecdotal evidence, and scholarly insights. It underscores the educational benefits of engaging with literature and performance arts within prison settings, as well as the various social-emotional learning opportunities, especially the ability to reduce recidivism rates and enhance incarcerated individuals' quality of life.

Drawing on the experience and narrative of many practitioners of theatre in prison and Shakespeare in prisons programs, this paper works to show Shakespeare's unique capacity to connect incarcerated populations with those who have gone through the …

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 …

Child Soldiers Of Verona: The Antiauthoritarian Antiwar Subtext Of Romeo And Juliet, Carl L. Sage

SACAD: Scholarly Activities

Common practice has Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet identified as a tragic love story, which has antecedents tracing back as far as Pyramus and Thisbe by Ovid. Though valid, this interpretation plumbs only a limited portion of the text. It is the position of this paper that, like Shakespeare’s later work Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet was written with a political subtext in mind. Both texts play on the social memory of the War of the Roses, as well as continuing sectarian strife between Protestant and Roman Catholic adherents contemporaneous to the era. However, while Macbeth served to prop up the …

Ask The Duke, Why: How Fabrications Can Undermine Impact In Shakespeare’S Measure For Measure, Spencer D. Hansen

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The following document recounts the observations and consequences that result from my attempts at justifying the actions of Duke Vincentio in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. By following my experience through the duration of West Virginia University’s 2023 production of Measure for Measure, I examine the ramifications of justifying the Duke’s actions and the potentially harmful consequences such justifications could create with regard to the play’s reception. Additionally, this text outlines performance techniques, audience responses, rehearsal strategies, and progressive interpretations for one of Shakespeare’s most challenging characters in one of his most divisive plays.

Laughter In The Shadows: Navigating Comedy And Tragedy In Much Ado About Nothing, Mary Kelly

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

The Virtue Of Humour In King Lear, Kent R. Lehnhof

English Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"As the essays in this volume by Carolyn Sale and Katie Adkison clearly demonstrate, King Lear is centrally concerned with virtue. France makes it a priority when choosing Cordelia for his wife, telling her ‘Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon’ (1.1.250).1 Similarly, Cornwall cites Edmund’s ‘virtue and obedience’ when deciding to ‘seize on’ Edmund as his own (2.1.115, 118). The fact that characters as opposite as Cordelia and Edmund are alike ‘seized’ upon on account of their virtue underscores how difficult it can be to determine who and what is truly virtuous. Lear highlights this very problem when …

“There’S A Double Meaning In That”: Heroism And Blessedness In Much Ado About Nothing, Laura Elizabeth Gregory

Great Plains Graduate Review

I have chosen to include this line “There’s a double meaning in that” (spoken by Benedick in Act 2 scene 3) in the title of this analysis as a way of introducing the play’s two heroines: Hero and Beatrice, and my argument that these women’s names at once symbolically exemplify and ironically contrast with their characters’ natures. While referring to scholarship on Shakesperean names, allegory, and societal and gender roles, I will consider the meaning of these names—Hero meaning “hero” and Beatrice meaning “blessed” or “blessing”—and examine the ways that these characters define and are defined by heroism, blessing, and …

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 …

"My Two Ears Can Witness": Feminist Pedagogy From Rehearsal Hall To Classroom, Ben Long, Noah Long, Laura Grace Godwin

Feminist Pedagogy

Given that university rehearsal halls are a natural home for feminist pedagogy, this paper addresses professors across campus under the contention that the signature pedagogy of theatre offers a model for faculty in other disciplines. The essay adapts a series of rehearsal hall techniques for traditional classrooms as efficient ways of fostering subjectivity, empowerment, community, and reflection in service of socio-cultural ends. The original teaching activities outlined herein do not require theatrical performance, but they nevertheless draw upon the power of live witnessing and interactive response that make theatre a powerful pedagogical tool. The authors conclude with an illustration of …

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 …

“What We Ought To Say”: Debating The Morality Of Dishonesty And Equivocation In King Lear, Markelle Jensen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

King Lear does not reveal the nature of honesty but provides a stage on which the morality of honesty can be debated. The play questions whether honesty is inherently moral at all, or if there are ways in which honesty can be considered harmful and even immoral. Other scholars have noted this as well in characters such as Edgar and Kent, but missing from the critical conversation are the ways in which Cordelia is the pillar of moral goodness in the play, and how her own paradoxical honesty and dishonesty were what enabled Lear to “see better” and ultimately, to …

The Tempest 2021, Otterbein Theatre And Dance Department

2020-2021 Season

Abducted and set adrift to die by her power-hungry sister and a jealous king, Prospera and her daughter, Miranda have survived 12 long years shipwrecked on a lonely island. When Prospera learns though her magical arts that those whose sought her child’s death are within her reach, she is consumed by rage. Conjuring the greatest of storms to break their ship upon her shores, Prospera brings her enemies to her feet. But when the opportunity to wreak her final vengeance is upon her, Prospera can no longer recognize the thing she has become, and she is forced to choose between …

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 …

Practising Diversity At The Stratford Festival Of Canada: Shakespeare, Performance And Ethics In The Twenty-First Century, Kim Solga, Erin Julian

Department of English Publications

What does it mean to ‘practise’ diversity in Shakespeare production in the twenty-first century, specifically in an Anglo-American context? How is ‘practising’ diversity, from devising and directing to work in the rehearsal hall and on audience engagement, materially different from the now-familiar (but still important) goal of ‘representing’ diverse bodies on stage? In the last twenty years, debates about what the diversification of Shakespeare performance – along racial lines, gender lines, the lines of age and ability – means or could mean, and the simultaneous interrogation of what ‘Shakespeare’ signifies, for whom, and to whose benefit, have become increasingly urgent …

Practising Diversity At The Stratford Festival Of Canada: Shakespeare, Performance And Ethics In The Twenty-First Century, Erin Julian, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

What does it mean to ‘practise’ diversity in Shakespeare production in the twenty-first century, specifically in an Anglo-American context? How is ‘practising’ diversity, from devising and directing to work in the rehearsal hall and on audience engagement, materially different from the now-familiar (but still important) goal of ‘representing’ diverse bodies on stage? In the last twenty years, debates about what the diversification of Shakespeare performance – along racial lines, gender lines, the lines of age and ability – means or could mean, and the simultaneous interrogation of what ‘Shakespeare’ signifies, for whom, and to whose benefit, have become increasingly urgent …

Bloody Thoughts: Violence And Wit In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Aubrey Keller

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

In this Honors thesis, I examine the roles of wit and violence in Shakespeare's The Tempest, exploring my original suspicion that the play is a pacifist work. Noticing references to "bloody thoughts" in both Hamlet and The Tempest, I hypothesized that while Shakespeare resolves his tragedies using violence, he resolves his comedies using wit, making the two foil plot devices. I discovered that the plot is not propelled by either violence or wit on their own, but by Prospero's cunning. Rejecting the conventional reading of Prospero as a sorcerer, I read Prospero as a Machiavellian figure. I examine …

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 …

Toxic Masculinity In Henry V, Abigail King

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

Toxic masculinity motivates the characters and plot of Henry V by William Shakespeare. The play revolves around King Henry V and how he is a model leader of England during the Hundred Years War. Henry uses what a “true” man should be to inspire his soldiers when morale is low. Further, manlihood is seen in the characters or lack thereof. Characters that fail to follow the high expectations of masculinity are killed. Audience members recognize the importance of masculinity throughout the play, although the outcomes of those stereotypes are dangerous seen in the superficial friendships and suppression of authentic self.

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 Future In The Instant: Time As The Essence Of Dramatic Tension In Shakespeare's Plays And Their Contemporary Stage Appropriations, Amalia Oswald

Theses and Dissertations

This project looks at the similarities and differences between three Shakespeare plays and their companion contemporary stage appropriations: Othello and Toni Morrisons’s Desdemona, The Winter’s Tale and Mary Elizabeth Hamilton’s 16 Winters or the Bear’s Tale, and Macbeth and Daivd Grieg’s Dunsinane. The specific lens used to examine these texts is the dramatic concept of time, taking the form of different variations throughout the work such as chronology, remembrance, fate, and futurity. This project argues that the multifaceted dramatic concept of time is the foundation for dramatic tension and the principal connecting motif between the three sets of early modern/contemporary …

The Power Of Modern Othello, Akasha Khalsa

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

On The Variations Of 'Occupatio' In "Richard Ii", William Kelly Reeder

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent scholarship of Shakespeare’s Richard II has been interested in or preoccupied with its historical relations. Particularly the plays association with the Essex Rising of 1601, and the censorship of the deposition scene, both of which seem to resonate for history with Elizabeth’s enigmatic comment expressing her identification with Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard II.

This paper proposes to resolve the question of the play’s censorship by interpreting the deposition scene as a dramatization of transubstantiation, perhaps triggering Elizabethan censors.

Transubstantiation is the doctrine by which the Catholic Church interprets the Eucharist using the distinction between substance and accidens (eternal and …

Queer Pregnancy In Shakespeare's Plays, Alicia Page Andrzejewski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bringing together queer and feminist theory, this dissertation examines Shakespeare’s representations of pregnancy divorced from their promised duration and promised end, revealing that the pregnant body is not wholly symbolic of futurity, chastity, or even heterosexual desire. In queer readings of Shakespeare’s plays and in the methodological debates that inform them, the pregnant body has been conspicuously absent, despite being often subsumed into definitions of heteronormativity and procreative reproduction. In feminist work on Shakespeare’s pregnant characters, scholars largely conflate pregnancy with maternity instead of considering the ways in which these women might engage in non-heterosexual forms of intimacy and eroticism. …

Strict Restraints: Abstinence's Gender Problems In Measure For Measure, Joseph Makuc

History Honors Papers

Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure poses questions about sexual coercion and governmental corruption that resonate today. Recent scholarship has examined sexual abstinence in Measure for Measure in terms of its historical economic and religious context regarding Isabella. However, Angelo and the Duke, the play's other central characters, also make claims about the value of abstinence. I put these characters’ claims into dialogue with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and extensive scholarship on Shakespearean England. I argue that abstinence is the axis around which Measure’s main characters revolve, and that Measure locates these characters’ abstinences as competing performances of manhood and …

The Unruly Womb In Early Modern English Drama: Plotting Women's Biology On The Stage, Ursula Potter

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

This study provides an accessible, informative and entertaining introduction to women’s sexual health as presented on the early modern stage, and how dramatists coded for it. Beginning with the rise of green sickness (the disease of virgins) from its earliest reference in drama in the 1560s, Ursula Potter traces a continuing fascination with the womb by dramatists through to the oxymoron of the chaste sex debate in the 1640s. She illuminates how playwrights both satirized and perpetuated the notion of the womb’s insatiable appetite.

Monstrosity As A Problem Of Moral Proximity In Shakespeare’S Othello, Kyle Ward

Student Works

Abstract

In Othello, Shakespeare explores the idea of monstrosity through his titular character. This paper argues that Othello exemplifies the idea that monstrosity is not an inherent evil, but rather that it is a problem of Moral Proximity. The Problem of Moral Proximity, as it is explained in the paper, is the idea that good and evil are the moderation of or corruption of neutral traits. This paper not only argues that monstrosity is one of these neutral qualities, but also explores how Iago corrupts this monstrosity to bring about Othello's downfall.

Anna Larpent And Shakespeare, Fiona Ritchie

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Anna Larpent (1758-1832) is a crucial figure in theater history and the reception of Shakespeare since drama was a central part of her life. Larpent was a meticulous diarist: the Huntington Library holds seventeen volumes of her journal covering the period 1773-1830. These diaries shed significant light on the part Shakespeare played in her life and contain her detailed opinions of his works as she experienced them both on the page and on the stage in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London. Larpent experienced Shakespeare’s works in a variety of forms: she sees Shakespeare’s plays performed, both professionally and by …