Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons^™

‘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 …

Fun With Palamon And Arcite: Rationale And Strategies For Teaching The Two Noble Kinsmen As The Culmination Of The Shakespearean Canon, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

Hardly noticed in the reception of Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human several years ago was his hint that not The Tempest but The Two Noble Kinsmen makes an appropriate final accomplishment. On one level, the play is merely a stage adaptation of Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, with a rather crude couple of subplots thrown in, perhaps to please the commoners. In an undergraduate forum, I am less inclined to evaluate Fletcher's contribution as distinct from Shakespeare, but I do think the play important for how it is representative of many of the co-authored English Renaissance plays …

What Happens (And Doesn't) In Hamlet (And Who Cares?), Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

This lecture, sponsored by Sigma Tau Delta, uses the classic text by John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, to initiate some important considerations on appreciating and teaching Hamlet. Attached as addenda 3 is a Handout which includes the list of soliloquies, keyed to act, scene, lines, as recorded in both the Riverside 2^nd edition and Norton 3^rd edition texts.

Wilson often gravitates to conundrums of the text. Is Hamlet fearing his own mental instability when he warns Marcellus and Horatio that he may put an "antic disposition" on? Why does Shakespeare give us two versions …

Complete Bosoms, Incomplete Men: Reading Abstinence In Measure For Measure, Joseph Makuc

English Summer Fellows

Measure for Measure has often been called one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, and as recent productions show, Measure’s problems — including sexual coercion and governmental corruption — resonate with readers and audiences today. Recent scholarship has examined sexual abstinence in Measure for Measure in terms of its historical economic and religious context, arguing that protagonist Isabella represents a radical break from merchant economics by opting out of the sexual economy. However, Angelo and the Duke, the play's other central characters, also make claims about the values of abstinence, and those claims are at odds with Isabella's claims. My research will …

The Merry Wives Of Windsor, Daniel Gordon

Winthrop Faculty and Staff Publications

The Merry Wives of Windsor A story of LUST, GREED, and DIRTY LAUNDRY
By William Shakespeare, adapted by Daniel Gordon.

Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor uses more prose than any of his other plays, for indeed, these characters are simple folk. His setting of the countryside of Windsor also offers clues to how I might interpret this play for a South Carolina audience. To reinforce the tight-knit community or provincial common folk that is wary of outsiders, I set this production in a southern trailer park. The script and rhythms fit remarkably well with a southern twang. Knowing the …

Shakespeare In The Nineteenth Century; Shakespeare, Time And The Victorians: A Pictorial Exploration, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner reviews Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century (edited by Gail Marshall) and Shakespeare, Time and the Victorians: A Pictorial Exploration (by Stuart Sillars) for Victorian Studies.

Relation And Responsibility: A Levinasian Reading Of King Lear, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

Emmanuel Levinas’s ideas about intersubjectivity can change our reading of Shakespeare by putting philosophical pressure on Shakespeare’s dramatization of human relatedness in The Tragedy of King Lear (1607–8). Even though Levinas does not discuss Lear at length in any of his published work, this difficult philosopher and this difficult play have much to say to one another. Levinas can be fruitfully brought to bear on Shakespeare’s great tragedy, generating fresh and productive ideas about its most pivotal moments, its most perplexing questions, and its most popular interpretations. In addition, Levinas can provide a useful frame for discussing the nature of …

Summer Of Shrew, Part 4: Which End’S Up?, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In the last of a four-part series on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner explores how expanding the range of the titular Shrew to include male characters is actually a return to its original meaning. Pollack-Pelzner focuses on a long-forgotten Renaissance sequel to Shrew (John Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed) that takes the taming of men even further and turns its gender roles upside down.

Summer Of Shrew, Part 3: A Sly Conceit, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In the third of a four-part series on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner asks, what if Kate’s story isn’t the play’s only reality? Pollack-Pelzner explores how a drunken beggar and an earlier version of the script shift the brawling balances of the play and call into question who the real shrew is.

Renaissance Drama And Magic: Humanism And Hermeticism In Early Modern England, Caitlin A. Larracey

Honors Program Theses and Projects

With deals made with the devil, the promise of base metals turned into gold, and charms cast over beasts, humans, and spirits, magic has a profound role in the drama of Early Modern England. Even more than magic, be it black or white, the magus repeatedly takes center stage in front of Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences. There exists a fascination in the period with unnatural or supernatural powers, especially in light of the reputations of figures such as the physician-magicians John Dee and Simon Forman, and even King James I. Yet the magic and magician that emerge in principal plays …

Love Kills: Exploring Young Women In Shakespeare, Malcolm X. Evans

Senior Theses and Projects

Taking a look at how William Shakespeare writes young women (particularly in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet), Evans puts forth the idea that "love kills." There are no young and strong characters that are powerful, entirely as women, in the works of Shakespeare. To further put forth the idea Evans comments on a production of his own design, by the same name, which brings together the Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet.

Acting, Integrity, And Gender In Coriolanus, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

Shakespeare's Coriolanus... anticipates and corroborates modern-day analyses emphasizing the sociopolitical dimensions and determinants of antitheatrical discourse. In the present essay, I would like to shift my focus from questions of class/status to questions of sex/gender, endeavoring to trace the links between Coriolanus’s antiperformative zeal and his ultra-masculine identity. For though it is true that Coriolanus opposes the dissimulation of others on political grounds (i.e., it creates social confusion), what causes him to reject play-acting in his own person is the sexualized fear that it will unman him (i.e., turn him into a squeaking virgin or crying boy). In this manner, …

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 …

Costuming The Shakespearean Stage: Visual Codes Of Representation In Early Modern Theatre And Culture, Robert Lublin

Robert Lublin

Although scholars have long considered the material conditions surrounding the production of early modern drama, until now, no book-length examination has sought to explain what was worn on the period's stages and, more importantly, how articles of apparel were understood when seen by contemporary audiences. Robert Lublin's new study considers royal proclamations, religious writings, paintings, woodcuts, plays, historical accounts, sermons, and legal documents to investigate what Shakespearean actors actually wore in production and what cultural information those costumes conveyed.

Four of the chapters of Costuming the Shakespearean Stage address 'categories of seeing': visually based semiotic systems according to which costumes …

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.

Aristotle, Performativity, And Perfect Friendship In Shakespeare, Ryan Engley

Undergraduate Review

From childhood, most of us have been taught that our “identity,” both how we see ourselves and how others see us, is shaped at least in part by our friends: “you are the company you keep,” as the cliché goes. Experience will teach us that not all friendships are the same, much less equal, even if we never hear of Aristotle and his tripartite scale of friend-types. His categories were of course born of the classical world but, true to fashion, remain valuable barometers for measuring individual identity and desire in friendships. They’re useful, too, in understanding Shakespeare’s characters and …

Is Prospero Just? Platonic Virtue In William Shakespeare’S The Tempest, Anthony Jannotta

Undergraduate Review

The Tempest is often regarded, and rightly so, as Shakespeare’s last great play. Many scholars argue that Prospero is an analogue for Shakespeare himself, noting the similarities between Prospero’s illusory magic and Shakespeare’s poetic genius. The themes of imagination, illusion, and, indeed, theatre itself play an integral role. The line that is perhaps most often cited as evidence for this argument is Prospero’s speech directly after he breaks up the wedding masque in which he refers to “the great globe itself” (IV.i.153). There is a danger, however, in appealing to the author’s biography or treating the biography as paramount, namely …

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.

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 …

"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 …

Shakespeare's Tragic Vision, James Koldenhoven

Pro Rege

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 Historical Survey And Evaluation Of The Most Prominent Theories That Shakespeare Did Not Write The Works Attributed To Him, Lola Vida Johnson

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

The question of the authorship of the plays, poems, and sonnets traditionally attributed to the pen if William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon has now been before the public for over one hundred years. Many of the most noted poets, playwrights, and nobles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been assigned the authorship of these works. The controversy can be compared to the controversy over Homer’s authorship. In 1975, Friederick Augustus Wolf proposed that Homer did not write The Iliad and The Odyssey. By 1900, Wolf had been disproven, but the question was one of great importance when it was first …

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 …

Jealousy In Shakespeare's Tragedies, Harold M. Kimball

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

In undertaking a study of the theme of jealousy, one must make some limitation of material. The field of literature as a whole, or the more limited ones of drama or even tragedy - each of these is too large for so short a study as this must be. Only certain aspects of such a restricted subject as the tragedies of Shakespeare can be given any thorough treatment, while others, both interesting and profitable, must be put aside; for instance, space will prohibit a careful comparison of Shakespeare's use of jealousy with that of other dramatists; nor can a study …