16th Century British (Literature)

Poets often use their writing as a way to convey their opinions on politics. William Shakespeare provides an excellent medieval perspective on the tragedies of war. Similarly, Thomas Hardy delivers a look into the modern personal consequences of war. William Wordsworth offers arguments against industrialism and England’s loss of morality in the early 19th century. Throughout half a millennium, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Hardy offer their views on politics, nationalism, war, and industrialism, giving readers a look into the personal consequences and perspectives on England throughout different eras.

Shakespeare’s stage is endlessly varied and inventive, with room enough for ghosts, devils, and witches, not to mention ordinary humans. It is not just the mere presence of such occult figures that is so interesting, but their verisimilitudinous nature: somehow, the playwright succeeds in convincing us that these beings could actually exist, that the world around us is far more interesting—and dangerous—than our materialistic outlook would admit. This awareness of the reality of evil reflects, in part, the enduring influence of the Middle Ages on Elizabethan society. It reflects a conception of the universe that has not yet been influenced by Newton or Darwin, and which is only beginning to grapple with the consequences of Descartes and Copernicus.

And it reflects, too, the reality of Shakespeare’s personal faith, and the importance of that faith in his art. Whether Protestant or Catholic, he was almost certainly a devout Christian, living at a time and in a place during which religious views were regarded, quite literally, as matters of life and death. There is plenty of evidence in his plays attesting to the sincerity of his beliefs, and that extends to his convincing portrayals of evil, as I argue in this paper. Far from being fanciful whims of the author’s imagination, Shakespeare’s ghosts, devils, and witches are grounded in the rich and venerable traditions of English folklore, medieval superstition, and Christian theology, to which he adds his own, unmistakable genius. He employs them not (or not only) for shock value, but to illustrate the very real power of evil in this world, as represented by these supernatural agents of darkness. But he also assures us that, no matter how weak and defenseless we may feel against them, there is yet a Power greater than they.

In this study, I will analyse Jane Anger’s pamphlet titled Jane Anger Her Protection for Women to Defend Them against the Scandalous Reports of a Late Surfeiting Lover and All Other Like Venerians that Complain so to be Overcloyed with Women’s Kindness. I aim to explore the topic of gender equality, and I will discuss this topic in connection with Jane Anger’s pamphlet by establishing that she presents a paradoxical understanding of gender equality, as she addresses issues of inequality while simultaneously asserting female superiority, thereby challenging misogynist literary traditions. I will elaborate on this thesis by presenting two main arguments: firstly, Jane Anger challenges the validity of misogynist beliefs by highlighting contradictions in patriarchal rhetoric, reinterpreting these beliefs to expose their logical flaws and assert women’s moral and intellectual superiority; in doing so, she presents gender equality as a paradoxical concept, rooted in the recognition of women’s virtues over men’s deficiencies. Secondly, her rhetoric is based on comparing women and men highlighting their respective advantages and disadvantages.

This dissertation argues for the Lord's Supper, or eucharist, as a vital basis of the church's unity as the body of Christ. It focuses especially on the theology of James Wm. McClendon, Jr., who, though a member of a largely non-sacramental ("free church") tradition, nonetheless insists upon Christ's presence in the eucharist and that through the eucharist God "re-members" the church as the body of Christ. While the study lauds McClendon's foresight and direction, it also argues that he ultimately shies away from a sacramental understanding of the Supper and that he skims over the unitive function of the eucharist. Added to the discussion, then, are two voices from outside the free church tradition: Henri de Lubac, a Catholic, and Robert Jenson, a Lutheran. Together with McClendon, these twentieth century figures and their theologies have had an enormous impact on contemporary discussions about ecclesial unity. In a final chapter, therefore, the study illustrates how they have influenced a number of contemporary Baptists dubbed "new Baptist sacramentalists," a younger group of Baptist theologians who offer a fresh approach to the ongoing puzzle of the church's disunity through the eucharist.

My dissertation examines the theatrical depiction of corpses as both stage-objects for theoretical speculation and as performance phenomena of the early modern English stage. Investigating popular drama on the London stage from 1587 -1683, 1 demonstrate that the performance of the dead body by the living actor (what I term the "theatrical corpse") is informed by early modern secular and religious polemics over the materiality of the body, the efficacy of performative behavior, and emerging theories of theatrical presence. Previously, literary scholars have approached the performance of death on the stage using the insights of psychoanalysis or medical science, arguing for a rise of the subject and a growing sense of the individual via the emergence of empirical science and anatomical dissection. By contrast, my dissertation focuses on the material realities of the performance event such as staging, sets, and performance objects. In so doing, my dissertation reveals the theatrical corpse on stage-much like the early modern corpse off stage-to function as an active narrative agent beyond its death. vi CHAPTER 1 BRING OUT YOUR DEAD: REVEALING THE EARLY MODERN CORPSE IN THE GRAVE, FROM THE PULPIT, AND ON THE STAGE At the end of 3.4 Hamlet exits his mother's closet "tugging in Polonius," whom he has just inadvertently killed through the arras. Hamlet admits that he will "lug the guts" (210) and "draw" the dead man "toward an end" (214) and he seems to head toward the tiring house with the body.1 The stage direction detailing Hamlet's exit varies in description: in Quarto 1 Hamlet "exits with the dead body," in the Folio he tugs the body in-the verb "tug" connoting the struggle and effort required of the action. In both of these scenarios we are presented with the challenge-and possible awkwardness-faced by the actor playing Hamlet in getting the body of the actor playing Polonius off stage, and the unceremonious nature of the operation is highlighted in those two texts' directions. But why? Why does Shakespeare call attention to what can easily be left behind? Why does the playwright encourage his audience to direct their attention to the leaden materiality of Polonius' body? Why does Hamlet not just cover it up again with the arras and walk off? Why must he address it, saying "This councilor/ is most still, most secret, and most grave,/ Who was in life a most foolish prating knave" (21 1-13), before dragging it out? What function can Polonius' body possibly have in this scene, as it lies dead for over 180 lines of dialogue and waits patiently through a ghostly apparition?2 1 All quotes referto William Shakespeare, Hamlet, The Arden Shakespeare, ed. Thompson Ann and Neil Taylor, 3rd ed. (London: Thompson, 2006). 2 The original actor who portrayed Polonius (John Heminges) likely had experience with this sort of patience. Polonius admits in 3.2 that he was an actor himself, at one time playing Julius Caesar who was "killed i'th/ Capitol. Brutus killed me" (99-100) to which Hamlet immediately replies, "It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there" (101-2). The puns on Brutus/brute Burial of the Dead, the Homily Against Idolatry, and various anti-theatrical tracts, I will examine how writers of such texts return again and again to the image of the corpse as a central problem of both representation and performance. The body itself was a major focus of theological speculation throughout Christian history, and during the sixteenth century Protestant reformers in England reconfigured the ontological terms of the relationship between the body and the soul by repudiating the Catholic Church's persistent foregrounding of the body and its images in ritual practices-including funerary and burial rites. But Protestant resistance to Catholic anthropomorphism, as I will demonstrate in this chapter, reveals a more fundamental anxiety over the potentially active materiality of the corpse. It is common for scholars such as Zimmerman to look at liturgical texts in order to articulate the anxieties over death as annihilation so prevalent in early modern literature.19 My reading of these same texts differs in that I will illuminate a distinct association of the corpse with theatricality. While early modern liturgical texts and liturgically inspired anti-theatrical texts have their own moralizing agendas they often intersect at pivotal arguments. In reading of these texts I identify the corpse as such a site of intersection, a common denominator that is depicted across liturgical and theatrical polemics. My analysis of these texts results in a re-evaluation of early modern corpses not as dead, material stage objects but as potentially transformative, active, and disruptive agents of influence. Claire Gittings, David Cressy, and Ralph Houlbrooke have demonstrated that the corpse poses distinct problems in a post-Reformation society that seeks to distance itself from Catholic ideologies of the body and worship.20 All early modern Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike, agreed that the sine qua non of their faith was the sacrificial death of Christ and his subsequent Resurrection. The body of Christ was thereby deeply enmeshed in the Christian 19 In many ways, Zimmerman follows in the steps of other literary scholars such as Michael Neill,

During the height of the English Renaissance, the revenge tragedies The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet were introduced to the English literary canon. In this essay, I will focus on the similarities that the protagonists, Hamlet and Hieronimo, share as prototypical avengers. Although Hamlet's contribution to the genre should not be discredited, I will argue that the similar characterisation of Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy, portrays the same depth and entitlement to the acclaim as a prototypical avenger as Hamlet. Even though their portrayal may differ in tone, their shared commonality attributes equal complexity to both characters. I will compare and analyse the two plays in order to demonstrate that both characters should be considered prototypical avengers. The essay concludes that a reluctance to revenge and a tendency to contemplate the morality of the action is prominently shared by both prototypical avengers. Although critics generally infer Hieronimo is a less complex character in comparison with Hamlet, this essay will show how both avengers deserve equal credit. This essay illustrates this statement by juxtaposing their equal need to find justification before taking revenge, use of suicide to emphasise their moral dilemma, and comment on the tragic consequences of revenge.

During the height of the English Renaissance, the revenge tragedies The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet were introduced to the English literary canon. In this essay, I will focus on the similarities that the protagonists, Hamlet and Hieronimo, share as prototypical avengers. Although Hamlet's contribution to the genre should not be discredited, I will argue that the similar characterisation of Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy, portrays the same depth and entitlement to the acclaim as a prototypical avenger as Hamlet. Even though their portrayal may differ in tone, their shared commonality attributes equal complexity to both characters. I will compare and analyse the two plays in order to demonstrate that both characters should be considered prototypical avengers. The essay concludes that a reluctance to revenge and a tendency to contemplate the morality of the action is prominently shared by both prototypical avengers. Although critics generally infer Hieronimo is a less complex character in comparison with Hamlet, this essay will show how both avengers deserve equal credit. This essay illustrates this statement by juxtaposing their equal need to find justification before taking revenge, use of suicide to emphasise their moral dilemma, and comment on the tragic consequences of revenge.

https://brill.com/view/journals/jrat/aop/article-10.30965-23642807-bja10113/article-10.30965-23642807-bja10113.xml
Charismas are a particular case of the commerce between visible and invisible powers. The notion of charisma and grace is not independent of sacrifice, which entangles a divine death. St. Paul first coined the term charisma. Charisma begins by signifying the grace that derives through multiple channels from Christ's redemptive sacrifice. For Paul grace is disseminated in every Christian who associates his or her life with that of Christ. After Christ, other sacred deaths will come to be associated with that grace, particularly the lives of the martyrs, but also those of political heroes. The paper examines the grace associated with the life of martyrs and its theological-political analogy with the life of political heroes as dispensators of some kind of grace and salvation.

In the tragic action of The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare portrays Leontes as a madman whose mind has been wildly inflam ed by jealousy. His madness, wrought by his imagination, confirms him as a jealous tyrant. Shakespeare’s political wisdom charts the path Leontes travels from jealousy and tragic injustice to comic reconciliation and justice. A study of classical and early modern concepts of tyranny reveals the corruption jealousy wreaks on the soul and prepares the way for Shakespeare in his play to show how a tyrannical ruler may be transported beyond tyranny by the grace of love. The Winter’s Tale thus presents the possibility of redemption in terms of the enchanting power of the ethical imagination and its appeals to love in order to reorient the misguided erotic soul of the tyrant back towards justice.

This thesis examines Marlowe's interest in the representation of European religion and politics in three selected plays. The Jew of Malta (c. 1590), The Massacre at Paris (c. 1592) and Edward II (c. 1592) consider various aspects of Protestant/Catholic clashes, anti-Catholic sentiment, and elaborate on Machiavellian policies during the late Elizabethan period. The relationship between England and France is governed by many factors. Responses towards Mary, Queen of Scots and to Elizabeth's proposed marriage to Anjou can be considered part of this relationship, whereas the representation of France and the French can be assessed by exploring Marlowe's texts, Holinshed's Chronicles and Foxe's Books of Martyrs. The reaction of the Elizabethan state to Catholics is governed by mutual interest and shared benefits, and not necessarily hatred.

Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677) drew heavily from an earlier source, Thomas Killigrew's Thomaso (1664), a closet drama supposedly based on Killigrew's life as a royalist exile when he made a brief visit to Madrid. 1 Both Killigrew's and Behn's plays harken back to an earlier period of intense Anglo-Spanish rivalry. In both versions, for example, cunning Spaniards make reference to stealing from "Old Queen Besse" or Queen Elizabeth and, in Behn's version, further reference is made to Spain having had "a quarrel [with Elizabeth] ever since Eighty Eight," a reference to the defeat of the Armada. 2 But, in contrast to Killigrew, Behn's play references a more specific facet of the rivalry with Spain whereby Englishmen were presented as potential liberators of peoples victimized by the Spanish imperium. Behn sets her play in Spanish-occupied Naples, where a group of English royalists arrive and "liberate" the oppressed women, or subjects, that inhabit the city. What is singular about the play is that, since the protagonists, Belvile and Willmore, are exiled royalists, they are liberators according to a monarchical ideology that was anachronistic within Commonwealth England. Of course, Behn's play was first performed in 1677 after the restoration, and thus, one might expect it to show support for the restored monarchical ideology. But as Helen M. Burke has argued, Behn's English "liberators" are also ridiculed throughout the play. 3 In particular, they fail to live up to the sixteenth-and early-seventeenth-century ideal of the English privateer, whom Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Ralegh, and others presented as gallantly rescuing the oppressed from the clutches of Spanish tyranny. 4 In this essay, I suggest that the play both conveys nostalgia for the Elizabethan state and presents an alternative to the Elizabethan adoration of the female sovereign, which formed the basis of late-sixteenth-century English national identity. 5 I consider the play as part of a trajectory of dramatic works

The reality/appearance dichotomy can be considered one of Shakespeare’s most celebrated topoi. This paper aims at exploring this conceptual opposition by analyzing the statue of Hermione presented in The Winter’s Tale. Through the ékphrastic lines uttered by Leontes, Perdita and Paulina the statue is described in detail. Yet, as a matter of fact, the sculpture “carved” by Giulio Romano is an extraordinary falsehood: a representation within the representation. In truth, the statue of Hermione is nothing but Hermione in the flesh; her body is not a lifeless objet d'art but is a motionless shape performing as a statue. In so doing, the Queen, the original mould, pretends to represent her own image. She transforms her body into an imitation, into a false likeness. Thus, once again in the Shakespearian canon, seeming and being, deceit and truth, appearance and reality are thoroughly entwined.

In From Hell, Alan Moore establishes systemic patriarchal sexual violence against the backdrop of Victorian London. While rape and other acts of physical repression are easily linked to the notion of sexual violence, Moore's treatment is concentrated on the society as a whole. His anti-hero, physician Sir William Gull, justifies the serial murders and dissection rituals as a necessary continuation of Victorian inequality and as a symbolic manifestation of patriarchy's counterattack. Linking ancient religion and mythology to a thousand years of British history, the sexual violence in From Hell is cast in the frame of a successful victory of patriarchy over matriarchy. Alan Moore's particular emphasis on the erotic as a biological and cultural force creates some ambiguity in the work's promatriarchal ideological values by naturalising much of the tale within a libidinal machine. This is expounded by the anti-hero, Sir William Gull, in a 'psycho-geography' of London that privileges the masculine side in this conflict, and Moore and Campbell employ visual cues that implicate the structures of organised religion. The insights of feminist theologian Mary Daly will be presented to complement Moore's approach to women's societal battle. The matriarchal focus is presented anecdotally in the short presentation of the victims of sexual violence.

Annie Howard, 'the "Freak" of art' Oscar Wilde) shared his understandings of the neurology of pain with the scientist, Francis Galton. In a broader scheme, understandings of pain held by theologians and by physiologists and medical practitioners strongly affected the tenability of their counterparts' positions. In the middle of the century, there is no doubt that Christian theology had a firm, though loosening, grip on the courses open to doctors. Vaccination and anaesthesia both had to fight for survival against the Christian belief that intervention in God's world was blasphemous. The pendulum then swung in the other direction as pain lost its place as a natural part in the universe and became, instead, something to be removed or alleviated at all costs. As I shall argue, medicine took on the role of dominant discourse, and added its strength to the changes that were Introduction already under way in the Christian church: if quotidian pain was no longer either necessary or natural, then other sorts of pain, formerly ordained by Godthose of atonement and damnationalso began to lose their analogical rationale. It is no surprise that the Church of England heresy trials in the 1860s, largely brought because of the defendants' refusal to accept eternal damnation, were concurrent with the increasing strength of physiological and neurological knowledge. Whilst these trends, however, were clearly interrelated, it was also the case that there was no general consensus, and that unpopular beliefs were as firmly held as popular ones, as belief refused to bend, in some cases at least, to prevalent scientific formulations. Pain, and the ways in which it was understood and schematised, far from being abstruse, got to the heart of many important Victorian debates and cultural currents. I have already hinted at the changing status of pain and its importance within the English church as a determining factor, but perceptions of pain had other far-reaching implications. The newly acquired ability to control pain, at least to some extent, contributed to the professionalisation of the medical establishment, and, eventually, the displacement of pain as an integral part of life was seen to play a part in the imperialist anxiety that British soldiers were no longer manly enough for the task they were to undertake. The Victorian craze for classification took up the supposed inability of particular groups to feel pain, and used this to specify sufferers' positions on scales of sensitivity, such that degree of civilisation, class, and psychological well-being, were all seen to be predetermined. As I shall make clear in the course of this dissertation, such arguments were intrinsically circular, and rested not on observation or empirical evidence, but rather on supposed similarities to groups already assumed to be insensate. This assumed insensitivity was then used to police the boundaries between different groups, as the ability to feel pain was used as a marker of difference between, for example, the law-abiding and the criminal. My aim throughout has been to bring together understandings of pain (as well as rhetorical strategies for describing pain) drawn from different spheres, and to do this I have brought to the fore practices and collections of ideas that became potent sources

This essay won the 2006 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Seventeenth Century Section. Within the dramatic conventions of the Jacobean period one of the stock female character types that would have been familiar to the audience was the shrew: a woman, usually a wife, who is outspoken and argumentative. This article examines two plays written early in the seventeenth century, John Webster's The White Devil and William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, and considers their presentation of female characters who manifest behaviour that might be considered shrewish. It argues that the plays contain passages that frame a sophisticated attack on such misogynist classifications of the female. The characters in question do more than fail to be confined by the traditionally limited female types, they seem to deliberately call into question the existence of such types, and highlight their nature as artificially constructed and imposed, and inadequate to define the possibilities of womanhood. Both plays challenge the convention that silence in a woman should be equated with virtue by presenting situations where a woman's virtue demands that she speak. More particularly, they both mock the conventional Jacobean typing of shrewishness, the former by presenting good-wife-as-shrew, the latter by presenting shrew-as-oracle.

This edition and discussion of the Findern Manuscript (CUL MS Ff.I.6) presents the first time that its unique lyrics are edited as a whole. The edition pursues the balance between accessibility and authenticity, representing both the manuscript and the texts themselves. The discussion synthesises the current critical milieu which surrounds the manuscript, and draws out new aspects worthy of attention, such as inter-textual connections, thematic elements and musical context. Together, these parts create an impression of the unique lyrics as a body of work contributed by numerous aspirant female and male writers using the manuscript page as a meetingplace for the exchange of ideas. I would also like to acknowledge the continued support of my parents throughout my education. Lastly, I offer heartfelt thanks to John for his love and patience.

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex did not have a significant reputation as a poet among his contemporaries; nevertheless, both his passionate missives and his verses were much sought after by members of later generations who saw in him one of the last heroes of a glorious era. A hitherto unprinted version of one of his sonnets, "The Ways on Earth, have paths and turnings known" is contained in a recently rediscovered 17 th century English miscellany. This article prints the text of this manuscript, a key document which attributes this lyric to Essex and a testimony to the long-lasting fame, which has made him the protagonist of novels, melodramas, and films from the 18 th to the 21 st century.

Through a case study of the holograph letters of Margaret Tudor, Queen ofScots (1489–1541), this article examines the centuries-old editorial debate of whether to modernise or preserve the old-spelling of early modern texts. I examine how historical biographers and editors have approached and presented the language of Margaret Tudor’s letters and consider the implications their editorial approaches have on how readers perceive the figure and epistolary voice of Margaret Tudor. I then draw upon two recent studies in the field of linguistics to show how the detailed analysis of diplomatic transcriptions of Margaret Tudor’s holograph letters can provide important  new  insights  and  a  fuller  understanding  of  Margaret’s sociolinguistic history, her dual identity as English princess and Queen ofScots, and the processes and agents involved in the production of her holograph correspondence. This article argues for the necessity of diplomatic editions and for an editorial approach that carefully attends to and contextualises the language of early modern women’s letters. The article contends that such an approach is central to developing more advanced and nuanced understandings of early modern women and their letters.

This essay examines sixteenth-century women's marginalia in devotional books as a mode of transmission, particularly in circumstances of where early modern women themselves were in circumstance of limited circulation, under house arrest or imprisoned. Recent work on prison literature has highlighted the importance of the prison as a crucible for writing in early modern England. However, it has focused less on the material cultures through which such texts were circulated, which for women writers in particular included marginal annotations to texts then circulated through domestic and coterie circles to a broader world. Anne Boleyn, Jane Dudley, Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart all circulated writing as marginalia while under forms of imprisonment, providing a means of political engagement through lamentation, critique and protest. This essay uncovers the ways in which such texts constructed and disguised their political objectives, as well as the material means through which these prison poems were transmitted, showing the ways in which material and rhetorical cultures operated together to make meaning in this neglected group of texts. Early modern women routinely annotated their books of hours and private prayer books with signatures, marks of ownership, notes on significant passages, short lyrics, letters, drawings and, more rarely, extended poetic and prose works. Largely overlooked in histories of early modern women's writing, the marginal material in these volumes comprises a diverse new corpus of early modern women's textual activity and, viewed collectively, indicates the importance of marginalia as a mode of transmission for women. Particularly in the case of queens and princesses held in a variety of carceral environments, including house arrest and confinement in the Tower of London, marginal annotation of devotional books becomes an orthodox means of textual circulation, a way of attaching the imprimatur of the devotional text to their own writing, and a way of continuing to assert their faith and their leadership of spiritual communities outside the narrow confines of their imprisonment. These forms of authorship foreground the material text to make their meanings: annotations are carefully positioned under images

Detail of Chicken-Feeding Girl behind lotus altar, next to hungry ghost on right and preaching monk on left. to various entities, the most notable being the Ten Kings of Hell, whose images can be seen above that of the Chicken-Feeding Girl at Great Buddha Bend. It was believed that the deceased would pass in front of each of the Ten Kings on those days and without proper "payment" in hand for the King, i.e., good karmic deeds, would spend time in the hells underneath a king's jurisdiction. Within this medieval mindset, the punishment fit the crime. The Chicken-Feeding Girl would be paying a price for every chicken she raised, just as the person who slaughtered it would pay a price along with the person who cooked it and the one who ate it, all of whom are depicted within the hell tableau at Baodingshan. The image of the Chicken-Feeding girl, placed front and center, below the images of souls being tortured for the more obvious sins of lying, stealing, or cheating, highlighted for the Chinese worshipper that even seemingly inconsequential day-today acts had very dire consequences for the Buddhist believer.

Some influence of Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale, also known as the story of the patient Griselda, on Shakespeare, and particularly on The Winter’s Tale, has long been recognized. It seems, however, that the matter deserves further attention because the echoes of The Clerk’s Tale seem scattered among a number of Shakespeare’s plays, especially the later ones. The experimental nature of this phenomenon consists in the fact that Griselda-like characters do not strike the reader, especially perhaps the Renaissance reader, as good protagonists of a tragedy, or even a problem comedy. The Aristotelian conception of the tragic hero does not seem to fit Griselda because there is no “tragic fault” in her: she is completely innocent. It was thus a bold decision on the part of Shakespeare to use this archetype as a corner stone of at least some of his plays.

In later medieval and early modern England, women of the nobility were able to exercise forms of
gendered agency through their participation in political, legal, economic, and social activities. When
elite women exercised such agency, it was imperative that it was done with patriarchal support,
either from their husband, male family members, their sons, or the king. During the reign of Henry
VIII, it became increasingly dangerous for women to employ certain forms of political agency
against the king. This thesis analyses four elite women who were tried and executed under King
Henry VIII because they were perceived to have exercised political agency in ways that
transgressed conventional gendered norms: Anne Boleyn (b.1500-1507? -1536), Katherine Howard
(1519-1525? – 1542), Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford (1505-1542), and Margaret Pole, Countess of
Salisbury (1473 – 1541). These women, two queens, one woman of the nobility, and one peeress
were all found guilty of high treason and their downfalls effectively widened the scope of treason,
with significant consequences for successive noble and elite women. This thesis adds further to the
scholarship on gender and queenship studies, but also adds to English legal history which until
recently, has centred on men as the main perpetrators of treason.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the conception of art and nature expounded by Shakespeare in The Winter's Tale. It begins by discussing the Nature-Art dialectic from classical antiquity throughout the medieval ages, arriving finally to the Renaissance. It discusses then the debate between Perdita and Polixenesa dialogue in which the two characters present a vision of the relationship of art and nature that is highly evocative of the alchemical notions widespread at the time which wmbody in an indirect way Shakespeare"s own conception on the topic.

Did Sophocles or Seneca exercise a greater influence on Renaissance drama? While the twenty-first century public might assume the Greek dramatist, in recent decades literary scholars have come to appreciate that the model of tragedy for the Renaissance was the plays of the Roman Seneca rather than those of the Athenian tragedians. In his important essay on Seneca and Shakespeare written in 1932, T.S. Eliot wrote that Senecan sensibility was ‘the most completely absorbed and transmogrified, because it was already the most diffused’ in Shakespeare's world. Tony Boyle, one of the leading rehabilitators of Seneca in recent years, has rightly said, building on the work of Robert Miola and Gordon Braden in particular, that ‘Seneca encodes Renaissance theatre’ from the time that Albertino Mussato wrote his neo-Latin tragedy Ecerinis in 1315 on into the seventeenth century. The present essay offers a complement and supplement to previous scholarship arguing that Seneca enjoyed a status ...

This is an attempt to use binary opposition to explore a play using textual analysis technique. Binaries within Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale are analyzed to reinforce the idea of certain explicit themes. Since the text is built on many contrasts, which enhance the dramatic effect so, tracing antonyms enables to explore the conflicts among characters, within a character, and external, internal conflicts of character(s). The declining frequency of antonyms reveals the resolution of conflicts. Conflicts revealed through antonyms, show rise and fall of conflicts among characters or within a character, and mark exposition and resolution of dramatic tension. A pattern of declining or rising antonyms of a character's speech also gives great insight into the character's ability to change or adapt during action. The greatness of Shakespeare's plays also lies in his ability to transfer the conflict from external to internal realm. From the play, 339 identifiable antonyms were collected. Words uttered by a character found against some other character's words at that time are identified as antonyms, along with the words of a character presenting in contrast with his/her own words in some other point of time.

This dissertation attempts to clarify some aspects of the operation of speech acts as they relate to power, authority, status, and rank in Shakespeare's plays. At its core, it consists of three arguments. The first is that the ultimate index of power is the ability to have one's words felt. That power then may translatein terms that are neither simple nor fixedinto authority, rank, and status. The second is that such assertions or deployments of power (unless authorized by broad cultural consensus) are almost always met with resistance, and that consequently the assertions most likely to succeed are those that are least visible. The third point brings the first two together. If speech acts are often a means of asserting and exercising power, then paradoxically those speech acts that are least overt will be those most likely to succeed in that assertion: speech acts that are indirect, off-record, ambiguous, or perlocutionary. Bearing these arguments in mind, I will consider the operation and either the frustration or fruition of social ambition in Shakespeare's plays, particularly his comedies. The plays bear out the pattern that speakers who make subtle, incremental assertions of status, by means of exploiting expectations of speech acts and genres, can then consolidate those incremental assertions into more enduring changes in status. iii Acknowledgments The process of writing this dissertation has not been brief, and any project as long-lived as this must acquire some debts. Acknowledging those debts, while it will give me some pleasure, will not acquit what I owe. The first and most obvious debt is to my very dedicated thesis committee. Lynne Magnusson's work first persuaded me that there was still something new to be said about Shakespeare, even in the early twenty-first century, and her faith that I could find that something kept me working through many obstacles. Jill Levenson has supported and encouraged my work since my undergraduate days, and her encyclopaedic knowledge and keen eye for detail were an incentive to raise my gameand supported my efforts to do so. Christopher Warley's forthright commentary saved me from one major error, and countless smaller follies. I have benefitted enormously from the institutional support offered by the University of Toronto, especially its English department. At different times, and in different capacities, both Alexander Leggatt and Elizabeth Harvey served as role models and sounding boards. David Galbraith, my first English professor and finally my departmental examiner, never failed to alternate judiciously between enthusiastic encouragement and sly, pointed criticism; there was no middle ground. I owe him a lifetime of Vietnamese lunches. The colleagues in my cohort were an unusually cohesive and collegial team; they form the core of a larger group of early modern scholars (plus a few ringers) whose work has challenged and inspired meand whose solidarity has buoyed me up. Within and beyond the University of Toronto, that group includes Susan

HE curious path followed by Richard Roos's Middle English translation of Alain Chartier's La Belle Dame sans Mercy (henceforth, LBDSM) provides an exemplary instance of the perils of Middle English authorship. The text is a Middle English rendering of perhaps the most influential fifteenthcentury French text: 1 Chartier's poem spawned a vigorous poetic debate and dozens of poetic rejoinders and defenses that focus on the question of the cruelty of La Belle Dame, whose withering rhetorical attacks on a hapless courtly lover have entertained, baffled, enraged, and intrigued readers for centuries. 2 Though Roos's own translation has been both praised and blamed for its style by modern critics, 3 it has for the most part been simply ignored. 4 T 1 See Daniel Poirion, Le Poète et le Prince (Paris, 1965), 255, who claims that Chartier is the most influential French poet of the fifteenth century; and William Calin, The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England (Toronto, 1994), who writes that it is "the most important single poem of its century in terms of literary history, and one of the finest in aesthetic terms as well" (250). 2 The criticism on Chartier's LBDSM is too numerous to cite effectively here, but on the dialogic quality of the response texts, see Emma Cayley, "Collaborative Communities: The Manuscript Context of Alain Chartier's Belle Dame sans mercy," Medium Aevum 71 (2002): 226-40, whose book on the dialogue surrounding Chartier's poem, Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in his Cultural Context is forthcoming from Oxford. For a new edition and translation of the "quarrel" texts, see Alain Chartier: The Quarrel of the Belle dame sans mercy, ed. and trans.

This project explores examples of metamorphoses in early modern English literature, and argues that metamorphosis becomes a means of affective expression for characters who are otherwise constrained. The Ovidian assault on the firm distinction between subject and object tells us something about affective life in the early modern world-and perhaps especially, if not exclusively, the affective life of early modern women. My primary texts include Thomas Lodge's Scillae's Metamorphosis and William Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece; Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, Book III Cantos 10-12, and Book IV through Canto 10; Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and John Lyly's Woman in the Moon; Anne Cecil's Pandora sonnets, and selections of Katherine Phillips' and Mary Sidney's poems. In considering these texts, I explore how radical changes respond to or incorporate violence as a core facet of the expression of subjectivity, and how such change may provide opportunities for affective communication. Because of the way the subject may be construed in early modern England, much of the literature grapples with the fine line separating subject from object, and the idea that it is not difficult to cross that line oneself through a deterioration of boundaries. This progression is always disruptive, though not necessarily negative. This dissertation is indebted to Julia Kristeva's model of subjectivity as being consistently mutable and reflective of external reality. Kristeva's essays hinge on "the turning points" that situate the

Introduction Senecan tragedy, body of nine closet dramas (i.e., plays intended to be read rather than performed), written in blank verse by the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca in the 1st century AD. Rediscovered by Italian humanists in the mid-16th century, they became the models for the revival of tragedy on the Renaissance stage. The two great, but very different, dramatic traditions of the age-French Neoclassical tragedy and Elizabethan tragedy-both drew inspiration from Seneca. The Elizabethan dramatists found Seneca's themes of bloodthirsty revenge more congenial to English taste than they did his form. The first English tragedy, Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, is a chain of slaughter and revenge written in direct imitation of Seneca. Senecan tragedy is also evident in Shakespeare's Hamlet; the revenge theme, the corpse-strewn climax, and such points of stage machinery as the ghost can all be traced back to the Senecan model.

Beauty that I find in contemporary art-works that interest me, whose source is the trauma and to which it also returns and appeals, is not the beauty as 'private' or as that upon which a consensus of taste can be reached, but is a kind of encounter that perhaps we are trying to avoid much more than aspiring to arrive at … .

An important impulse behind this collection has been to read a variety of early modern discourses in a way that asks, as rigorously as possible, what it means to be subject at once to language and the body. 1 Whether focusing on the figure of the anatomist, the healer, or the poet, the preceding essays range across religious, literary, rhetorical, legal, and medical texts in order to chart the stubborn refusal of the flesh to be cast aside by discourses that try to transcend it. Taking touch "as a category of investigation," the editor remarks, enables an approach to early modern cultural studies that "reactivate[s] the body's material, and often gendered, relation to the world." It therefore seems appropriate to bring this volume to a close, and to think about the import of its claims, by returning to a classical scene of touching that deeply influenced early modern representations of speaking, embodied subjectivity. The scene I have in mind is Ovid's prolonged description of Pygmalion's passion as expressed in, and augmented by, the loving caresses he gives to the statue of his own making. 2 When Jodi Cranston discusses Vasari's figure of the painter's "magic touch" that turns pale images into "living, talking figures" ("il tocco magico di pennello che tramuta le smorte immagini in figuri vive e parlanti"), she reminds us that the idea of animation behind the story of Pygmalion's moving statue did more than spawn a lively literary progeny in the early modern period. It also informed an entire theoretical discourse about the excellence of painting-a discourse that took its inspiration from such classical treatises on rhetoric as Cicero's De Oratore and De Partitione Oratoriae and Aristotle's Rhetoric. 3 When Vasari describes the vividness of painting in Le vite de piii eccellenti pittori, Pygmalion's touch is implicit. When Petrarch writes about the vividness of painting in the Rime sparse, it becomes explicit. Pygmalion appears in a pair of sonnets designed to take up the conventional dispute of the paragone-, by the end of the pair, Petrarch's allusion casts Pygmalion in the role of a rhetorician who, by contrast to the poem's speaker, was so persuasive that he convinced his statue to reply. 4 "When Simon received the high

When poisoned or fatally wounded, characters in Marlowe's plays often develop an uncanny knowledge of what is happening inside their bodies, including the precise anatomy of their injuries and the physiology of the onset of death. In effect, they conduct their own autopsies. These moments of peculiarly physical self-knowledge pose a useful challenge to our conventions for the representation of pain, embodiment, and interiority. Marlowe's wounded speakers deploy these anatomical selfdescriptions in a metatheatrical competition: in a struggle for the attention of the audience, describing one's wounds can be a powerful strategy.