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"A field of Golgotha" and the "Loosing out of Satan" : Protestantism and the intertextuality in Shakespeare's 1-3 Henry VI and John Foxe's Acts & Monuments
No full textChallenging the currently orthodox "New Historicist" conception of Shakespeare's English history plays as a kind of "radically secular" historiography, this thesis attempts to show how Shakespeare's first chronicle play, 1--3HenryVI, was informed by and expressive of Protestant providential historiography. By comparing the texts of the plays with Foxe's Acts and Monuments, the central text of Elizabethan Protestant historiography, the author attempts to show how Foxe's influential history functioned both as an important source for Shakespeare's view of the past in 1--3HenryVI and as a vital intertext in terms of which the play would have been construed as history by Shakespeare's audience. At the heart of this source/intertext dynamic is the figure of Antichrist, a powerful historiographical symbol in Foxe which is adumbrated in Shakespeare's dramaturgy, giving the plays' representation of the violence of the Wars of the Roses era an ineluctably providential character. Having traced the Foxeian intertext in Shakespeare's play, the author concludes by suggesting that, again contrary to the secularizing bent of much recent "New Historicist" criticism, it is precisely because 1--3HenryVI spoke the language of Protestant providential history that Shakespeare's play was significantly "political" in its original late-Elizabethan historical moment
The argument against tragedy in feminist dramatic re-vision of the plays of Euripides and Shakespeare /
No full textThis dissertation examines the arguments against tragedy offered by feminist playwrights in their "re-visions" of the plays of Euripides and Shakespeare.In the first part, I maintain that feminist dramatic re-vision is one manifestation of an unrecognized tradition of women's writing in which criticism is expressed through fiction. I also argue that the project of feminist dramatic re-vision embodies a feminist "new poetics."In the second part, I examine the aesthetics and politics of tragedy from a feminist perspective. Feminist arguments against tragedy are, in effect arguments against patriarchy. But it is the theorists and critics of tragedy---not the playwrights---who are unequivocally aligned with patriarchy. Playwrights like Euripides and Shakespeare can be seen to destabilize tragedy in their plays.In the third part, I show how recent feminist playwrights (Jackie Crossland, Dario Fo and Franca Rame, Deborah Porter, Caryl Churchill and David Lan, Maureen Duffy, Alison Lyssa, The Women's Theatre Group and Elaine Feinstein, Joan Ure, Margaret Clarke, and Ann-Marie MacDonald) counter tragedy by extrapolating from the arguments presented by Euripides and Shakespeare in The Medea, The Bacchae, King Lear, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Othello , and by allocating voice and agency to their female protagonists
The rhetoric of silence /
No full textThis study explores how we may read silence in dramatic works as a rhetorical strategy. Silence is usually equated with absence, oppression, or passivity. Speech is usually equated with presence, expression, and action. While silence can be imposed to prevent articulation, my study suggests that we re-read women's discourse, including their use of silence, as an empowering tool. By examining silence as strategic we allow for individual agency. Part One of the thesis demonstrates how the rhetoric of silence functions as a tool to communicate, persuade, and generate knowledge for women protagonists. The study of silence on the stage explores how choosing to employ a non-verbal form of communication challenges the logocentric tendency that privileges assertation and speech over silence. For this reason, Shakespeare's Cordelia serves as the paradigmatic silent rhetor. Cordelia demonstrates how silence, employed by choice, affirms authenticity. In Part Two, twentieth-century interpretations of female protagonists---Salome, Antigone and Philomele---are examined to show how we may read them as strategic rhetors who employ silence in order to recreate themselves as agents
The inconstant "I" and the poetics of seventeenth-century libertine lyrics /
No full textThe dissertation argues that libertine first-person lyrics of seventeenth-century England reveal a coherent literary strategy in formal, thematic, and ideological terms. My focus is the libertine poems of Donne, Suckling, Carew, Lovelace, and Rochester. I situate the lyrics in a period of historical change, an age of epistemological and ontological questioning. Libertine lyrics concern inconstancy on various levels, from the sexual to the ontological, and they explore the problems of freedom, human nature, identity, and individualism. I argue that the libertine's inconstant selfhood is a creative "solution" to a historical dilemma. This conception of inconstant selfhood is also a response to courtly prescriptions of the behavior of poets and courtiers, a way of claiming an authoritative voice and individualistic freedom. My examination of seventeenth-century libertine lyrics shows that, as part of a transitional age, the poems manifest a contradictory character and they reveal an ideological inconsistency. However, in the final analysis, the imaginative answer to the period's problem of mutability and displacement that libertine lyrics offer turns out to be unsatisfactory. In tracing the development of seventeenth-century libertine lyrics, I suggest that the poems constitute an experimental and transitional development in the lyric tradition of male confessional desire
LARRUE, Jean-Marc, Le Théâtre yiddish à Montréal. Préface et postface de Dora Wasserman, Montréal, Éditions Jeu, 1996, 168 p., ill.
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Corporeal Ecology and European Otherness on the Shakespearean Stage
Full text linkAu début de la période moderne, la corporalité devint un élément important de ce qui était alors compris comme étant la « nature humaine ». Des médecins philosophes tels Levinus Lemnius dans The Touchstone of Complexions (traduction anglaise 1576) ou Thomas Wright dans The Passions of the Mind in General (1601, 1604) ont affirmé la nature commune des êtres humains tout en théorisant le corps comme étant un lieu de différences entre les « nations ». Ils voyaient l’organisme humain comme un système écologique complexe, à la fois intérieurement cohérent et en relation subtile avec son environnement. Différents environnements produisaient différentes caractéristiques nationales, mais des physiologies similaires rendaient possibles le changement. William Shakespeare emploie le langage du corps modulé physiologiquement et environnementalement pour explorer le phénomène du pareil et du différent européen. Dans cet article, je me penche sur Henry v, qui redéfinit le corps anglais pour y incorporer son Autre national français, ainsi que sur The Merchant of Venice qui, dans sa représentation de la relation troublée du corps vénitien à ses Autres inclus / exclus, refuse l’écologie de l’altérité.The early modern period was one in which corporeality became an important element of what was understood as “human nature.” Physician philosophers like Levinus Lemnius in The Touchstone of Complexions (English translation 1576) or Thomas Wright in The Passions of the Mind in General (1601, 1604) affirmed the commonality of human beings while they theorized the body as a site of difference between “nations.” They saw the human organism as a complex ecological system, both internally coherent and in a subtle relationship with its environment. Different environments produced different national characteristics, but similar physiologies made adjustment and change possible. William Shakespeare employs the language of the physiologically and environmentally mediated body to explore the phenomenon of European sameness and difference. In this paper I focus on Henry v, which redefines the English body to incorporate its French national other, and The Merchant of Venice, which in its representation of the troubled relationship of the Venetian body to its included / excluded others, refuses the ecology of otherness
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