This dissertation explores the use of amazement as a transformative experience capable of reframing traumatic memory in the romances of Cervantes and Shakespeare. Romance offers a structure to moblilize emotion and fantasy to deal with traumatic events. Focusing on the experienc…
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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…
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…
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 …
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 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…
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…
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 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…
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 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…
'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…
Historically, women and their role in life have been defined by the prevailing culture in which they lived. This dissertation questions the validity of those definitions by looking at a woman who did not accept cultural limitations but instead lived by her own law: Shakespeare's…
Scholars have long noted the prevalence of references to the apocalypse in Shakespeare’s plays from the early Jacobean period, but there are few sustained studies centered on the topic. In this work I will offer an extended treatment of Shakespeare’s use of the apocalypse in Mea…
This dissertation, Signs That Save: Sacramental Matter and Agency in English Literature 1590–1660, explores the imaginative interplay between literature and material cultures of religion in Reformation-era England. Viewing that topic through a critical lens informed by new mater…
This project explores why the combination of cartography and drama is so explosive on the English Renaissance stage in the age of the “new geography.” Using poststructuralist theories that conceptualize maps as performances rather than inert representations, I argue for a more d…
The presence of disabled characters like blind Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice and epileptic Othello are handy physical metaphors for the failures of epistemology that occur in both plays. Disability is often construed as a sort of saboteur of knowledge—disability of all kinds i…
This thesis analyzes, for the first time, how audiences have engaged with Shakespeare in both colonial and post-colonial Punjab, a state in India. It demonstrates how Shakespeare’s cultural mobility is dependent upon how target cultures re-semniotize his plays to accommodate ele…
From its beginning the modern Native American Literary Dramatic Project has been rooted in the desire to define and preserve a voice driven to the brink of extinction by the forces of Euroamerican colonization. Over time, as the threat of outright extinction has waned, Native Am…