English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
Browse
6 results
Search Results
Item Daggers of the Mind: Performing Madness and Mental Disorder on the Early English Stage(2023) Rio, Melanie; Passannante, Gerard; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Madness is such a popular device in early modern English drama that extant playscripts are littered with stage directions indicating that a character should enter “like a madman” or simply, “mad.” Because the public playhouse required the psychosomatic participation of actors and observers from every social class and category, it served as a unique cultural laboratory in which to explore questions of cognition, embodiment, identity, and interiority. Madness as a theatrical device also offers unique insight into the challenge of “performing” an invisible disability. This dissertation examines representations of madness in the early English playhouse—primarily in the works of works Shakespeare, but also considering works by Fletcher, Webster, Middleton, Armin, and others—as well as extradramatic primary sources such as court cases and physicians’ notebooks in order to demonstrate how intersecting indices of identity influence the construction and interpretation of early modern cognitive disorder.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 The Development of Theater in Post-Revolutionary Iran from 1979 to 1997(2022) Ahmadian , Nahid; Keshavarz-Karamustafa, Fatemeh; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research studies the development of Iranian dramatic literature and theater in post-revolutionary Iran. In a historical survey from the 1979 revolution to the beginning of the Reform Era, it explores the connection of the dramatic literature and their productions to their cultural contexts and studies the ways these contexts impact the function and formation of Iranian theater. In a chronological survey, this research examines the ways Iranian theater developed new theatrical forms to meet and reflect on the political, social, and cultural demands of an important phase in Iranian history. This research benefits from the methods of postpositivist theater historiography to advance a revisionist historical narrative based on the dynamic dialectics between Iranian theater and its cultural setting. This is summative, analytical, and archival research. Based on archival research grounded in nearly 2000 documents, and 200 plays it also provides resources on Iranian theater history and historiography. By bringing together the list of scholarship, theatrical productions, and historical documents of the 1980s and 1990s, it provides a resource on Iranian post-revolutionary history in one of the most transformative periods in Iranian contemporary history.Item ‘THE LIFE YET OF HIS LINES SHALL NEVER OUT’: LINEATION AND POETIC AUTHORITY IN THE SHAKESPEAREAN CORPUS(2019) Lind, Sarah; Trudell, Scott A.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The “line” in early modern poetics was a confusing concept due to competing definitions of line length. “Length” could refer to classical, vernacular, or visual measurement. “Length” could figuratively refer to a poet’s “line of life” where a lasting reputation was a measure of a poet’s authority, conflated with the length and measure of his or her lines. Despite the cultural importance of the line, studies of lineation are rare, and few account for the line’s assembly of definitions and vital relationship to poetic authority. This thesis therefore offers an account of lineation and the poetic authority surrounding lineation in editorial and performance traditions. It examines changes to lines in playtexts, songs, and actors’ parts through the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Shakespearean tradition. It argues that changes in ideas about lineation are both signs and consequences of the continual struggle to adapt Shakespeare’s plays to different performative and textual purposes.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.Item Play Studies: Integrating Drama, Games, and Ludi from the Medieval to the Digital Age(2017) Kelber, Nathan; Kirschenbaum, Matthew; Leinwand, Theodore; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)At first glance, the fact that the English word for drama is “play” must strike the modern reader as odd. Playing is usually an activity we associate with games (or musical instruments), yet this odd linguistic trace is a forgotten marker of how far the modern sense of drama has strayed from its antecedents. This dissertation recovers the historical relationship of drama, play, and games, developing a shared discourse under the rubric of “play studies.” Play is defined in two complementary phenomenological frameworks, methexis and mimesis, to enable scholarship that transcends historical, cultural, and material boundaries. The first chapter engages the linguistic confusion surrounding late medieval drama (with examples from Mankind, cycle plays, and Fulgens and Lucres) and medieval games (The Game and Playe of the Chesse, The Book of Games), arguing that the medieval English view of play can help correct and complicate modern game scholarship. The second chapter takes up this medieval perspective of play-as-methexis and demonstrates its applicability to digital media of the late 20th century with examples from video games like Tetris and Dragon’s Lair. Along the way, this chapter also makes ontological arguments in relation to early computer history, software studies, and media archaeology, advocating that a fuller understanding of games depends on the willingness of humanities scholars to build, hack, and play with media using methods normally reserved for artists and scientists. The final chapter considers the lasting legacy of the medieval play-as-game, particularly how the development of English drama is indebted to the theater buildings that created a space for the sustained collaboration of players with a variety of skills. The final section considers the current state of Shakespeare-as-play, including 21st-century productions, digital video games, and board games.