UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item Staging the Middle Ages: History and Form in Early Modern English Drama(2022) Daley, Liam Thomas; Robertson, Kellie; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Early modern conceptions of what it meant to be “medieval” continue to shape our own conception of what it means to be “modern.” Writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries claimed to separate historical fact from literary fiction more effectively than their medieval forebears. And yet, many widespread ideas about the Middle Ages that persist to this day—including the idea of a “Middle Ages” at all—are the fictional inventions of early modern writers, from chroniclers and antiquarians, to poets and playwrights. Focusing on the affordances and limitations of dramatic form, this dissertation examines how enduringly popular visions of the Middle Ages crafted by Shakespeare and other early modern playwrights (including John Bale, Thomas Hughes, and Elizabeth Cary) still inform our historical understanding. These writers shaped their revisionist historiographical narratives for the Renaissance stage in a host of generic guises, not only in Elizabethan chronicle history plays, but also in secularized morality plays, Senecan tragedies, and closet drama. These early modern depictions of the medieval past gave new life to older dramatic forms characteristic of both classical and medieval theatre, such as the chorus and various forms of theatrical spectacle, while also employing new formal strategies such as the soliloquy, the dumbshow, and the play-within-a-play. All the plays examined here—including John Bale’s Kynge Johan, Shakespeare’s King John and Richard II, Thomas Hughes’s The Misfortunes of Arthur, and Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam—engage in self-conscious medievalism. Remediating earlier chronicle accounts as well as contemporary historiographical controversies (or “battles-of-the-books”), these plays fashion new fictions of when the Middle Ages ended and when modernity began. The dissertation concludes with an analysis of modern dramatic medievalism in Tony Kushner’s twentieth-century stage epic, Angels in America, a play that witnesses the continuing power of premodern dramatic and historical models as tools for re imagining ideas of national and cultural identity. Examining the formal strategies employed by all these playwrights provides insight into the ways that readers and writers have understood the medieval past, the modern present, and the shape of history itself.Item Representation of Books and Readers in English Renaissance Drama(2018) Adams, Brandi Kristine; Cartwright, Kent; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study presents a novel approach to the history of books and reading by encouraging scholars to look beyond the archives to include the study of English Renaissance Drama to understand how early modern readers interacted with and used their books. In this dissertation, I suggest that by employing an archeology of feeling—which involves deliberate consideration of how English Renaissance dramatists represented books and reading in the theater and in print—it is possible to cultivate a deeper understanding of readers living in London during the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth centuries. My project focuses on dramatists (and other writers) with significant connections to either the universities or Inns of Court; I suggest that their theatrical representations of books and reading onstage indicate their growing anxiety over the diminishing roles and opportunities for scholars and public intellectuals. I also argue that they use the theater to advocate for themselves and their colleagues using their books and erudition through nostalgia, satiric complaint, or counsel. This anxiety about the significance of books and reading may also be the result of changing discourses in education which were moving from a humanist-centered to a more empiricist-centered framework, perhaps encouraging dramatists to question the limits and worth of their studies. Through an examination of plays that features bookish and erudite characters including those from Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594), Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (1604), The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus (1606), and John Fletcher’s The Elder Brother (1633), I articulate ways in which scholarly readers use books to confront their concerns over government, social and political changes that do not necessarily prioritize the learned. In the first chapter, I propose that characters engage in specific acts of reading to anticipate the changing course of humanism and future paths of reading; in the second chapter, I consider physical sites of reading, including the Renaissance study, in which scholars use their reading and books to define the space and themselves alongside the tumult, noise, and capitalism inherent in city life that begins to encroach upon their space of reading and writing. Finally, in the third chapter, I examine the consequences of reading in which bright, learned individuals are left without provision or preferment after a university education. Their shared reading experiences and history of attending university and then living in London create a powerful group of readers who, through books, satire, and complaint signify their potential danger to the city, the country and the monarch due to their shifting political, social, and economic views. Throughout these plays, readers vacillate between questioning and affirming the worth of their reading and books even as they continually champion the value of their literacy.