Browsing by Subject "Shakespeare"

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155: Lost Shakespeare sonnet discovered
(Burnt X Orange, 2019-09-11) Young, Blaine
The 2nd Earl of Essex and the history players : the factional writing of John Hayward, William Shakespeare, Samuel Daniel, and George Chapman
(2012-12) Davies, Matthew Bran; Whigham, Frank; Loehlin, James; Barret, J.K.; Friedman, Alan; Levack, Brian
Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth’s last favorite and the last man she executed for treason, has been harshly treated by posterity. Given his leading role at court in what Patrick Collinson calls the “nasty nineties,” Essex has taken much of the blame for the divisive factional politics of Elizabeth’s final decade. However, leading recent efforts to salvage Essex’s reputation, historian Paul Hammer has uncovered a sophisticated bureaucracy operated by highly educated scholars and led by an intelligent, cultivated statesman. A considerable number of high-profile literary figures, moreover, willingly engaged with this ambitiously expanding Essex faction. This thesis proposes that evidence of interference by the censor and the Privy Council, sensitive to a politicized historiography promoting the Earl’s interests chiefly on London’s stages, discloses the presence of a loose, autonomous federation of authors associated with the Essex and post-Essex factions between 1590 and 1610. This thesis considers the suspected works of an eclectic group of writers bonded by their ideological affiliations with Essex’s “radical moderatism”: civil lawyer John Hayward’s prose history of The Life and Raigne of Henrie IIII (1599); William Shakespeare’s second “tetralogy” (1595-99) dealing with the same historical period; Samuel Daniel’s closet drama of the downfall of the Greek general Philotas (1605); and innovative playwright George Chapman’s double tragedy set in France, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608). I situate these authors within the intellectual and public relations wing of the Essex circle in order to consider how they made contact with the center and with each other, and where they resided within the broader operation of the faction; what they offered and what they expected in return; how they shaped political thinking and how their dramaturgy developed as a consequence; whether they were attracted by the purse or the person; and to what extent they were artistically or ideologically motivated. In considering, finally, whether these writers worked in collaboration or alone, on message or off-the-cuff, as propagandists or political commentators, I illuminate the critically neglected role of the factional writer in early modern England.
Appropriating Elizabeth : absent women in Shakespeare's Henriad
(2010-05) Andrews, Meghan Cordula; Rebhorn, Wayne A., 1943-; Bruster, Douglas S.
When scholars look for a Shakespearean analogue to Queen Elizabeth I, they often look no farther than his Richard II, the deposed and effeminate king with whom Elizabeth was known to compare herself. This report seeks to broaden our reading of Shakespeare's Henriad by arguing that, in fact, there are echoes of Elizabeth in both Henry IV and Henry V, successors to Richard II. These traces of Elizabeth reveal the Henriad's fantasy of a male-dominated political sphere as just that: a fantasy. Moreover, this appropriation of maternal or effeminate characteristics is not limited to the Henriad's rulers, but occurs several times in the Shakespearean canon. This absorption becomes another way for Shakespeare's plays to manage their anxiety over threatening women even as they appropriate the authority of an aging Elizabeth.
Avoiding Edmund : reading acknowledgment as failure in Stanley Cavell’s King Lear
(2017-05) Khoshnood, Alfredo Manuchehr; Mallin, Eric Scott
Critics of King Lear often remark that the play feels like a dramatic failure despite its place at the very top of the Shakespearean canon. Using Stanley Cavell’s famous essay on the play, “The Avoidance of Love,” as a framework for interpreting Lear, I argue that an epistemological and ethical failure lies at the heart of the play: an inability to acknowledge the presence of others. In my reading, Cavell’s essay works emotively rather than argumentatively, by approximating the affective scenario of King Lear. Appropriately, Cavell’s essay falters in the same way that Shakespeare’s play does: it cannot attempt to acknowledge other minds without enacting the failure of that very effort. I consider this failure primarily in relation to Edmund, the play’s chief antagonist. Using Cavell’s understanding of what it means to be present before others and before oneself, I show that Edmund’s final words are a brief and poignant instance in which he realizes his true position relative to other minds and his own. I argue that Cavell’s argument fails to properly consider Edmund by its own terms, and in doing so, it enacts its own subject: the impossibility of acknowledging the presence of the other. Moving to Lear’s Fool, I argue that the Fool functions as a voice of political consciousness, comparing his position to Cavell’s own context. The Fool imagines a world where the failure of acknowledgment leaves everyone “darkling.” Ultimately, the play imagines human relationships in essentially pessimistic terms: the attempt to recognize the other results in the erasure of any sense of commonality
The Battered Wives of Othello: What Does Emilia Reveal About the Sentiments on Gender in the English Renaissance?
(2013-11) Tonu, Alina
Chaucer's Jailer's Daughter
(2015-05) Snell, Megan Angela; Scala, Elizabeth, 1966-; Bruster, Douglas
We know that Shakespeare read Chaucer, but we do not know exactly how he read Chaucer. Established models of source studies require solid "proof," but this paper proposes a more liquid conception of influence that permeates a work in unexpected ways. The Jailer's Daughter, the seemingly un-Chaucerian alteration to The Knight's Tale frame of the Shakespeare and Fletcher play, The Two Noble Kinsmen, acts as the case study of such permeation. Only a single line in the lengthy Knight's Tale offers a parallel figure for this character: the Knight narrates that Palamon escapes prison "By helpyng of a freend," and in the play the Jailer's Daughter frees Palamon from her father's prison. Because it does not supply dialogue, a name, or even a gender to the "freend," The Knight's Tale has long been presumed to offer Shakespeare and Fletcher little beyond this event to inspire the play's more substantive subplot. I argue that the Jailer's Daughter offers a surprising means of connection not only to The Knight's Tale, the obvious source text, but also to the other tales of the First Fragment of The Canterbury Tales, which "quite" the tale of courtly love that precedes them. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, she embodies what the Knight disallows in his narration of the tale, leaking madness and feminine desire into the play's foundation. This structure ultimately suggests how Shakespeare works characterologically, channeling the complexity of a source such as Chaucer fluidly through a unit of character.
Document clustering with nonparametric hierarchical topic modeling
(2015-05) Schaefer, Kayla Hope; Williamson, Sinead; Zhou, Mingyuan
Since its introduction, topic modeling has been a fundamental tool in analyzing corpus structures. While the Relational Topic Model provides a way to link, and subsequently cluster, documents together as an extension of the original Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model, this paper seeks to form a document clustering model for the nonparametric alternative to LDA, the Dirichlet Process. As the structure of Shakespeare's tragedies is the focus of this work, we specifically cluster documents while modeling the text using a Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP), which allows for a mixture model with shared mixture components, in order to capture the natural topic clustering within a play. Using collapsed Gibbs sampling, the effectiveness of the clustered HDP is compared against that of LDA and an HDP without document clustering. This is done using both log perplexity and a qualitative assessment of the returned topics. Furthermore, clustering is performed and analyzed individually on speeches from each of ten tragedies, as well as with a combined corpus of acts.
Embodied mind & sixteenth-century poetry : Wyatt, Vaughan Lock, & Shakespeare
(2013-05) Radley, Noël Clare; Wojciehowski, Hannah Chapelle, 1957-
Abstract: Instead of assuming that sixteenth-century poetry is a form of transcendence, and instead of defining poetry as an expression of inner life or character, this dissertation argues that there are ways to interpret poetry as a tool that helped sixteenth-century subjects understand and process embodied experience. How do we know that sixteenth-century poetry was a function of the material world and the body? The evidence is in the word selections, themes, and tropes created by poets themselves. By closely examining their writings, we can trace the negotiations between sixteenth-century poetic traditions, senses, and the material world. I explore these negotiations through three sixteenth-century poets whose works may be considered paradigmatic of the larger cultural movements that shaped their world: Sir Thomas Wyatt, the diplomat and courtier-poet in the reign of Henry VIII; Anne Vaughan Lock, a Marian exile who translated Calvin and published devotional poetry at the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I; and William Shakespeare, whose sonnet sequence published in 1609 responded to Elizabethan cultural arts at a time of energy and change. The three poets engaged in this project are distinct in class, gender, and history, and thus, each chapter is a case study that surveys embodiment in a unique context. But the reason the three poets are viewed together (and the tie that binds them) is that they all wrote serial poems, or verse sequences. When compared across the project, important connections emerge about the cognitive power of serial poems. I argue that verse sequences are dexterous as well as able to perform cognitive "heavy lifting." Whether it was Vaughan Lock and Wyatt who dilated scriptural exemplars and carved space for emerging evangelical ideas, or Shakespeare, who much more clearly wrote inventive verse, sixteenth-century writers used the sequence to test new possibilities and integrate prior knowledge. In this diachronic reading of poetic embodiments, we can begin to see verse sequences as a technology that merges compelling perceptual observation with high abstraction, and that allows for opposing ideas to take place across the text, resolving rigid binaries and synthesizing opposites. Although my project attempts to view the poets together, each chapter provides evidence of significant differences across sixteenth-century poets. Although Wyatt and Vaughan Lock both utilized serial poems to test evangelical beliefs regarding conscience and penitence, they signal opposing impulses when it comes to gendered power. Moreover, Shakespeare's sonnets are more ostensibly amatory than religious in their overall intent. Shakespeare's metaliterary discourses, moreover, mobilized the serial format as an even more reflexive form. The project may be a skeletal map of the space between the evangelical procedures of conscience (which were themselves very reflexive) and Shakespearean procedures of mind. By comparing these differences, we may cast light on the ways in which psalm paraphrase (as a mode and a sequential format) influenced English amatory verse sequences. The dissertation works to address unstudied connections between diverse poets from the period of Henry VIII through the early reign of James I. But the dissertation also forges new routes in Renaissance studies, by proposing directions and methods for studying literary embodiment. I believe that sixteenth-century embodiment is best viewed through the lens of religious history and print technology. Moreover, I argue that the study of sixteenth-century embodiment should also incorporate contemporary historical ideas about the mind. By engaging both New Historicism and the discourse of embodied cognition from neuroscience, finally, the project creates a comparative view of cognition, translating between empirical methods and historicist techniques in English studies.
Exploring teaching Shakespeare with fan fiction
(2013-05) Evans, Mathew, M.A.; Resta, Paul E.; Hughes, Joan
Although students are exposed to the works of Shakespeare extensively from 9th -12th grade and sometimes at the postsecondary level, teachers are pressed to make the literature relevant and interesting for their classes. Fan fiction, which are stories written by amateurs out of a strong feeling of admiration and appreciation for an existing work, present numerous avenues to engage students with classic literature. I developed a fan fiction website called the Stratford Tattler which reimagines Shakespeare’s characters and world as if they were modern day celebrities which the website covers like an online tabloid. While I wrote fan fiction articles and developed the website, I received feedback, which in turn formed an iterative design. Three university Shakespeare scholars, two high school English teachers, and one legal expert on copyright provided the bulk of the feedback and advice. Over six months, I incorporated their suggestions as the project evolved from trying to build a participatory community to developing a stand-alone learning environment which teachers could readily incorporate in their classroom. The final result includes a website with teacher resources, namely a teacher’s guide with recommendations and lesson plans directed at high school English teachers, along with a model article of fan fiction that stays true to Shakespeare’s original text, a quality that most of the aforementioned experts who participated in the project found necessary for fan fiction to be educational. The teacher’s guide also includes guidelines for avoiding copyright infringement when repurposing existing digital images. Along with these teacher resources, the insights of my participants and my experience writing fan fiction as related in this report hopefully provide a first step toward high school English teachers being create their own fan fiction website and engage students with classic literature.
“Female Power in Titus Andronicus”
(2021-11-03) Howells, Allison
Forming the Grand Strategist According to Shakespeare (Winter 2019/2020)
(Texas National Security Review, 2020) Campbell, Peter; Jordan, Richard
Shakespeare, like Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, locates the crux of strategic genius in the analysis of character, both of individuals and of societies. A key ingredient in strategic education, therefore, should be the close study of human character — not least through classic fiction. In Coriolanus, Shakespeare explores the relationship between tactics and strategy, the place of realism in strategic discourse, and the relationship between a strategist and his polis. His ideas anticipate modern debates in international relations theory, especially ones about the “first image” and realpolitik. He insists that strategic calculation cannot omit the analysis of leaders and the regimes that form them.
Generative metaphor: filiation and the disembodied father in Shakespeare and Jonson
(2009-12) Penuel, Suzanne Marie; Bruster, Douglas; Loehlin, James; Moore, Timothy; Rebhorn, Wayne; Chapelle Wojciehowski, Hannah
This project shows how Jonson and Shakespeare represent dissatisfactions with filiation and paternity as discontents with other early modern discourses of cultural reproduction, and vice versa. Chapters on six plays analyze the father-child tie as it articulates sensitivities and hopes in remote arenas, from usury law to mourning rites, humanism to Judaism, witchcraft to visions of heaven. In every play, the father is disembodied. He is dead, invisible, physically separated from his child, or represented in consistently incorporeal terms. In its very formlessness, the vision of paternity as abstraction is what makes it such a flexible metaphor for Renaissance attitudes to so many different forms of cultural cohesion and replication. The Shakespeare plays treat the somatic gulf with ambivalence. For Shakespeare, who ultimately rejects a world beyond the impermanent material one, incorporeality is both the father's prestige and his punishment. But for Jonson, the desomatization more often indicates paternal privilege. Jonson wants filiation and fathering to counteract the progression of history, and since time destroys the concrete, abstraction and disembodiment are necessary for the process to work. His plays initially envision a paternally imagined rule of law achieving permanence for those under it. But Volpone undermines Every man in his humour's fantasy of law, and The staple of news dismantles it still more. Ultimately, in Staple's schematically represented father and son, a pair whose reunion allows them a courtroom triumph, Jonson resorts to an abstractly figured paternity itself to justify other abstractions, legal and literary. As with law in Jonson, so for religion and the supernatural in Shakespeare. Shakespeare's body of work eventually renounces the religious faith whose representation it interweaves with portraits of children and fathers. It does so first in Merchant's intimidating Judaism and hypocritical Christianity, then in Twelfth night's more subtly referenced Catholicism, mournful and aestheticized, and finally in The tempest's various abjurations. Monotheism vanishes altogether in the last play, replaced by a dead witch and multiple spirits and deities who do the bidding of a conjuror who plans to give them up. Both playwrights ultimately reduce their investment in other forms of cultural transmission in favor of more intimate parent-child structures, embodied or not.
Hamlet, the Knight’s Tale, and the economy of fraternal relations
(2016-09-19) Shearer, Kayla Gayle; Scala, Elizabeth, 1966-; Mallin, Eric
Hamlet criticism was forever changed when Freud compared Shakespeare’s play to Oedipus Rex and pronounced the infant sexual desires that drove both stories. Since Freud, considerations of the play have suffered from what I consider both a “father-fixation” and an assumption of female hypersensuality that obscures other, more powerful family relations driving the play. To uncover these forces I use a combination of René Girard’s theory of mimetic triangulated desire and Eve K. Sedgwick’s feminist revision of his work, which emphasizes how triangulation legitimizes an economy of exchange in women in which they signify male worth. Additionally, I posit Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale as an alternate source for Shakespeare’s portrayal of fraternal rivalry that does not implicate the parents in the sons' violence. With these tools I reframe the structure of male political power in Hamlet as based on fraternal, rather than filial, relationships. This reveals the way that mimetic rivalry shapes the relationship between Hamlet and Laertes, and offers a reading of Gertrude and Ophelia that de-emphasizes their sexual culpability.
"He takes false shadows for true substances": Madness and Metadrama in The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus
(2018-05) Williams, David Higbee
Although scholars have written extensively about madness and metadrama, they have rarely discussed the relationship between the two on the early modern stage. In many plays, however, mad characters become acutely metatheatrical, oftentimes putting on spectacles, consciously performing in front of others, and gaining various levels of dramatic awareness. In this thesis, I analyze the ways that two influential plays, The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus, present madness theatrically and suggest an association between lunacy and drama. The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus offer a unique opportunity to study this issue. Not only are they relatively early plays, showing theatricalized madness at early stages in its development, but they were both added to later. These additions present more developed, explicit manifestations of the link between madness and metadrama. By viewing the original plays and the additions as four texts, we can trace the gradual establishment of the link in early modern drama, as lunacy and theater become united by their shared mistaking of “false shadows for true substances.” Through this connection, we can detect a simultaneous anxiety and fascination regarding the illusory nature of drama.
How does Shakespeare portray and use gender in Much Ado about Nothing?
(2014-10) Mabruk, Aminah
How is Shakespeare's Use of Supernatural Elements Important to the Meaning of the Work as a Whole?
(2013-11) Bradley, Lauren Victoria
How Shakespeare became our contemporary dramatist : historicizing elements of the "original practices" movement
(2021-08-13) Jones, Robert William, Ph D.; Loehlin, James N.; Kornhaber, David; Bruster, Douglas; Carlson, Andrew
This dissertation historicizes the “original practices” (OP) movement in contemporary Shakespearean performance. However, my examination dates to earlier theatrical innovations and conventions that took hold in the late- 1960s through the 1980s that I argue affected to a great degree the conception of OP and its performance(s). I investigate the ways in which modern theatrical practices have influenced what is often considered historical performance, often in ways that have gone unacknowledged or under appreciated. In this work, I follow scholars such as W.B. Worthen, Cary Mazer, and Abigail Rokison in seeking to determine how contemporary theatrical perception has inflected both a sense of historical performance and how that perception gets translated to the modern stage. The major foci of my study are versification and delivery, as connected to Peter Hall’s work with Harold Pinter; thematic doubling and the impact of late twentieth-century doubling practices from contemporary playwrights and companies; and the influence of improv strategies on the more recent “unrehearsed” Shakespeare movement. The portion of my study that evaluates doubling relies heavily on the work done by Brett Gamboa, but also contemporary dramatists such as Caryl Churchill and Tony Kushner, while also considering the impact of companies that regularly employ extreme doubling practices, such as the Actors From The London Stage. The pervasiveness of the unrehearsed Shakespeare approach, practiced now by both professional and amateur companies, draws heavily on Folio adherents such as Patrick Tucker, Neil Freeman, and Don Weingust. In teasing out how these advocates read action into text, I explore how improv techniques developed especially by Keith Johnstone have conditioned the ways in which these texts become instructional for sets of action, seemingly authorized by Shakespeare as a “director.” Overall, I argue that, in practice, in the rehearsal room, and on-stage, OP performance and its offshoots are less of a reconstruction, rediscovery or excavation of Shakespeare’s staging conditions and practices and more of a continuation of innovations in contemporary performance that are often regarded as distinctive and separate from OP.
Is Beatrice viewed as a submissive, powerless, male-dominated woman who contradicts feminist views, or is she a woman in her own right, making her own decisions and accepting men on her own terms?
(2014-10) Clement, Katherine
The LAH102H Library Research Assignment includes an annotated bibliography, a précis of a scholarly article, and a brief reflection on the research experience.
"King hereafter" : Macbeth and apocalypse in the Stuart discourse of sovereignty
(2010-05) Foran, Gregory Augustine; Rumrich, John Peter, 1954-; Whigham, Frank F.; Mallin, Eric S.; Ng, Su Fang; Levack, Brian P.
“‘King Hereafter’” posits Shakespearean theater as a gateway between Reformation England’s suppressed desire to rid itself of monarchy and that desire’s expression in the 1649 execution of King Charles I. Specifically, I argue that Macbeth darkly manifests a latent Protestant fantasy in which the kings of the earth are toppled in a millenarian coup. Revolution- and Restoration-era writers John Milton and William Davenant attempt to liberate or further repress Macbeth’s apocalyptic republicanism when they invoke the play for their respective causes. Shakespeare’s text resists appropriation, however, pointing up the blind spots in whatever form of sovereignty it is enlisted to support. I first analyze Macbeth (1606) in its original historical context to show how it offers an immanent critique of James I’s prophetic persona. Macbeth’s tragic foreknowledge of his own supersession by Banquo’s heirs mirrors James’s paradoxical effort to ground his kingship on apocalyptic promises of the demise of earthly sovereignty. Shakespeare’s regicidal fantasy would be largely repressed into the English political unconscious during the pre-war years, until John Milton drew out the play’s antimonarchical subtext in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649). Yet the specter of an undead King Charles, I argue in chapter two, haunts Milton just as Banquo’s ghost vexes Macbeth because Milton’s populist theory of legitimate rule continues to define sovereignty as the right to arbitrary violence. In chapter three, I show how Sir William Davenant’s Restoration revision of Macbeth (c.1664) reclaims the play for the Stuart regime by dramatizing Hobbes’s critique of prophetic enthusiasm. In enlarging upon Macduff’s insurgency against the tyrant Macbeth, however, Davenant merely displaces the rebellious potential of the rogue prophet onto the deciding sovereign citizen. Finally, my fourth chapter argues for Milton’s late-career embrace of Shakespearean equivocation as a tool of liberty in Samson Agonistes (1671). Samson’s death “self-killed” and “immixed” among his foes in a scene of apocalyptic destruction challenges the Hobbesian emphasis on self-preservation and the hierarchical structures on which sovereignty itself depends for coherence. Milton’s mature eschatological vision of the end of sovereignty coincides with his artistic acceptance of the semantic and generic ambiguities of Shakespearean drama.
The LIBERATOR Magazine, November 2015
(University of Texas at Austin, 2015-11) The University of Texas at Austin