Shakespeare

This dissertation explores ways in which diverse subtopics in literary studies converge to answer questions about the composition history, reception, and thematic content of several plays by Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd. I first endorse the theory that Shakespeare’s career began i…

Erdrich has departed from christening her characters with Native American names. Specifically, this work explores the relationships between The Plague of Doves (2008) and Antony and Cleopatra (1606); The Round House (2012) and Titus Andronicus (1588-93); and LaRose (2016) and Th…

This thesis describes and analyzes the humor used in William Shakespeare’s plays from a philosophical and psychological perspective. In doing so, this thesis demonstrates how humor constitutes meaning in Shakespeare’s plays and at the same time traces the use of humor in the dev…

This dissertation analyzes depictions of effeminacy and anxiety surrounding masculinity in early modern drama. Effeminacy is a frequently used term in the literature of the period, occurring seven times in Shakespeare alone. For my research, I combine literary analysis and perfo…

The significance of heraldic references in literature has been the subject of both antiquarian interest and recent scholarship. In the field of seventeenth-century poetry, there exists a small body of published work concerned with the use of heraldry by William Shakespeare, Ben …

Concentrating on six plays in the 1610s, this thesis explores the ways theatrical visual effects described as “strange” channel the period’s moral anxieties about rhetoric, technology, and scepticism. It contributes to debates in repertory studies, textual and material culture, …

This thesis looks at occurrences of "living death" – a liminal state that exists between life and death, and which may be approached from either side – in early modern English drama. Today, reference to the living dead brings to mind zombies and their ilk, creatures which entere…

This dissertation explores the resurgence of motifs related to Celtic cultures in Shakespeare’s plays, that is to say the way the pre-Christian and pre-Roman cultures of the British Isles permeate the dramatic works of William Shakespeare. Such motifs do not always evidently app…

This thesis aims to establish a model for understanding the intricate motivations and significances of Shakespearean adaptations in the twenty-first-century China and Taiwan. While the term Chinese Shakespeare usually includes the Taiwanese adaptations of the Bard's work, it fai…

This thesis explores the role of metaphor in the construction of early modern English national identity in the dramatic writing of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The metaphorical associations of character names and their imagined native or foreign stage settings helped mode…

This thesis investigates the cultural uses and implied signifying practices of the work of actors who are popularly and frequently described as 'Shakespearean.' Though ubiquitous figures within culture, there is a dearth of criticism which questions what qualities are invoked in…

The twenty-first century has seen a marked change in approaches to understandingShakespeare's texts through literary and theatrical criticism and also performance.This thesis argues that performances of Shakespeare in Britain between 1997 and2008 staged by Shakespeare's Globe, t…

'Legitimacy, Illegitimacy and Sovereignty in Shakespeare's British Plays' demonstrates how Shakespeare participates in an early modern 'discourse of legitimacy' as described by Robert Zaller. This thesis, however, proposes an interrelated discourse of illegitimacy that is of equ…

In recent years, Gothic literary studies have increasingly acknowledged the role played by Shakespeare in authorial acts of appropriation. Such acknowledgement is most prominently stated in Gothic Shakespeares (eds. Drakakis and Townshend, 2008) and Shakespearean Gothic (eds. De…

This thesis is a study of appropriations of the early modern banquet course in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries during the period 1590-1640. My interdisciplinary approach is evident in the range of sources used, including primary material such as accounts of entertain…

My dissertation, “The Rhetoric of Rank in Early Modern Drama from 1590 to 1642,”argues that early modern dramatic works pull from rhetorical theory to shape social status in a period that underwent significant social transformations. Arguing that dramatists use early modern rhet…