DOCSLIB.ORG

BEESTON's BOYS and NEGOTIATIONS of SOVEREIGNTY in LATE CAROLINE DRAMA by SCOTT VENTERS Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drama / Bache

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
BEESTON's BOYS and NEGOTIATIONS of SOVEREIGNTY in LATE CAROLINE DRAMA by SCOTT VENTERS Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drama / Bache BEESTON’S BOYS AND NEGOTIATIONS OF SOVEREIGNTY IN LATE CAROLINE DRAMA By SCOTT VENTERS Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drama / Bachelor of Arts in English University of Oklahoma / CUNY, Hunter College Norman, OK / New York, NY 1999 / 2009 Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS July, 2012 BEESTON’S BOYS AND NEGOTIATIONS OF SOVEREIGNTY IN LATE CAROLINE DRAMA Thesis Approved: Maria Beach Thesis Adviser J. Kevin Doolen Lloyd Caldwell Edward Jones Sheryl A. Tucker Dean of the Graduate College ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION: FLESHING OUT THE BODY OF KNOWLEDGE WITH KNOWLEDGE OF BODIES .......................................................................1 II. ORGANS WITHOUT A BODY: THE TERRITORIALIZATION OF CAROLINE THEATRICS ....................................................................................16 III. THE PLAGUE AND NEW CONSCIOUSNESS: THE BIRTH OF A THEATRE ...........................................................................................................38 IV. COURTING THE COURT: GLAPTHORNE’S AESTHETICS AND THE EARLY YEARS OF APPEASEMENT........................................................68 V. POPULAR REVOLT: THE PRODIGAL SON AND THE LATER YEARS OF POLITICAL SATIRE . ....................................................................109 VI. EPILOGUE: A BODY AT REST? ....................................................................152 WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................154 APPENDIX ................................................................................................................166 iii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: FLESHING OUT THE BODY OF KNOWLEDGE WITH KNOWLEDGE OF BODIES On the morning of January 30, 1649, while Charles I of England was busy consulting with Thomas Herbert, his groom of the stool, in a locked chamber at St. James’s Palace, the leaders of the Parliamentary Commission for his trial and execution were on a desperate search for a proper and willing candidate to wield the fatal axe. Hugh Ross Williamson reports that thirty-eight sergeants who formed the ranks of Hugh’s, Hacker’s, and Fairfax’s armies were gathered “and then offered 100 pounds and the promise of rapid preferment in the army to any two sergeants who would come forward as volunteers for the post of headsman and headsman’s assistant. All the sergeants refused, though not with the same emphasis” (80). Grudgingly accepting this unanimous refusal, the Commissioners then approached and threatened Richard Brandon, the common hangman, to assume the distasteful role. Though fearful for his safety, “Brandon . refused absolutely to do what was asked of him” (81). Some scholars contend inconclusively that Brandon’s refusal was only a public ruse to cloak a deed that was undertaken anonymously. The identities of the two masked men who ultimately agreed to sever the sovereign’s head from his body are still shrouded in conjectural mystery, though many theories that implicate Richard Brandon, William Hulet, and George Joyce, among others, have been promulgated. The actual name of the headsman, however, is not of primary importance. Of more 1 significance are the instances of denial both to enact and publicly claim responsibility for regicide. This reveals that the King’s material body still carried a symbolic potency as a reification of the state despite socio-political counter currents arguing for a Commonwealth rid of monarchical tyranny and two civil wars that resulted in countless deaths of those either enlarging or proscribing the powers invested in that body. Revisionist historians continue to overturn notions of Charles’s overwhelming unpopularity and, as Sean Kelsey argues, that the “trial was [a] simple prelude to regicide.” Instead, Kelsey asserts that “his execution was in fact the unlooked-for outcome of a proceeding undertaken to quite opposite ends” (585). Throughout the trial there hovered the possibility of settlement if only Charles could have recognized the legitimacy of the Long Parliament, and even as the judgment was passed, its endorsement was not unanimous. The King was, to many, still a king. It would be hard to imagine that the King’s person could be rhetorically and univocally maintained as a polarized site of popular antipathy in the midst of such ambivalence about his execution. Charles’s chief nemesis in the civil wars, General Thomas Lord Fairfax, could not endorse the proceedings against the King and excused himself from attending the trial where his wife was heard to expostulate that not “half or a quarter” of the people of England accused Charles of high treason and that “Oliver Cromwell is a traitor” (Williamson 40). And the events of 1641 provide evidence to support Lady Fairfax’s asseveration of the King’s innocence. Just seven years prior on the 25 th of November, Charles ceremonially processed through the streets of London to massive encomium in an entertainment entitled England’s Comfort and London’s Joy : “the people responded with loud and joyful acclamations, crying God Bless and long live King Charles and Queen Mary, and their majesties reciprocally and heartily bless[ed] and thank[ed] the people with as great expressions of joy” (qtd. in Cust 314). On the eve of large-scale sectarian strife, Charles’s corporeal being was still received by most as the natural, immovable head of state and locus of religious authority. However, in the midst of the common counter argument 2 that the King was being misled by “evil, popish counselors,” was an effort by a minority of MPs to distinguish and separate loyalty owed to the body politic from the loyalty owed to the King’s natural person. Acts of justice and protection are not exercised in his [the king’s] own person, nor depend upon his pleasure, but by his courts and ministers who must do their duty therein though the king in his own person should forbid them; and therefore if judgements [sic] should be given by them against the king’s will and personal command, yet they are the king’s judgments. (Rushworth 3: 588) This line of argumentation aimed to abrogate the medieval doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies as characterized by Kantorowicz; a doctrine in which “The King’s Two Bodies thus form one unit indivisible, each being fully contained in the other” (9). Whatever impurities or imperfections that are contained in the body natural are purged by the body politic, and the two form a purified whole. Charles, coming from a line of monarchs who continually stressed the Divine Right of Kings, clung closely to the traditional Two Bodies concept. He responded to rhetoric against the authority invested in his corporality by stating, “allegiance [of] all our good subjects . is due unto the natural person of their prince, and not to his crown or kingdom distinct from his natural capacity” (Larkin 2: 773-4). And the difficulty in finding an executioner as late as 1649 would seem to suggest that this medieval view endorsed by Charles had deep, recalcitrant roots for many English. The same ambiguity surrounding the King’s body cannot be located surrounding representations of either the king or the polity, as both were open to interrogation, ridicule, and violence. Puritanical iconoclasm had swelled in the main current of thought and in 1643 sixty members of Parliament voted to destroy the contents of the Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria’s chapel. John Clotworthy, Henry Marten, and a band of troops broke through the chapel door, “struck the painted image of Christ’s face ‘with terrible words’, then struck the face of the Virgin ‘and then, thrusting the hook of his halberd under the feet of the crucified Christ, [Clotworthy] 3 ripped the painting to pieces.’ The fragments were thrown in the Thames” (Purkiss 244). Of course, this is an extreme example of violence against an identifiably Catholic forum recessed within an Anglican nation just after the start of the Civil War, but the paintings are also the iconic property of the monarchy and should reverberate with some sanctity. The assault is one example among many of sublimated violence against the King’s body, thus being redirected at his wife’s property in lieu of his person. It is not that Caroline culture regarded the body as inviolable. Quite the contrary, it was an ethos steeped in martyrdom. The mortification and immolation of the flesh was a testament to faith on both sides of the Protestant-Catholic divide. Hugh Latimer, in a letter to Henry VIII dated 1530, pithily encapsulates the valorization of martyrdom, “where the word of God is truly preached, there is persecution, aswell of hearers, as of the teachers” (qtd. in Monta 37). By 1684 there were nine complete editions of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments , more commonly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs , and more than 50 works covering the persecution of Catholics (Monta 1). Persecution was, in essence, a requirement for the validation of personal belief and proclaimed identity. In an early modern culture that prided itself on “self-fashioning,” the negation of the self, whether through dismemberment, other forms of death, or suffering persecution, seemed equally important in claiming authority (Marshall 4). If the sovereign is the embodiment of ideology that subtends the socio-political unit, “a guarantor of the social order” as Susanne Scholz surmises (10), then he should be a reflection of this core value of “martyrdom,” or at least an example
Load more

Recommended publications
  • M a K in G a N D U N M a K in Gin Early Modern English Drama
    Porter MAKING AND Chloe Porter UNMAKING IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH DRAMA Why are early modern English dramatists preoccupied with unfinished processes of ‘making’ and ‘unmaking’? And what did ‘finished’ or ‘incomplete’ mean for spectators of plays and visual works in this period? Making and unmaking in early IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH DRAMA IN EARLY UNMAKING AND MAKING modern English drama is about the prevalence and significance of visual things that are ‘under construction’ in early modern plays. Contributing to challenges to the well-worn narrative of ‘iconophobic’ early modern English culture, it explores the drama as a part of a lively post-Reformation visual world. Interrogating the centrality of concepts of ‘fragmentation’ and ‘wholeness’ in critical approaches to this period, it opens up new interpretations of the place of aesthetic form in early modern culture. An interdisciplinary study, this book argues that the idea of ‘finish’ had transgressive associations in the early modern imagination. It centres on the depiction of incomplete visual practices in works by playwrights including Shakespeare, John Lyly, and Robert Greene. The first book of its kind to connect dramatists’ attitudes to the visual with questions of materiality, Making and Unmaking in Early Modern English Drama draws on a rich range of illustrated examples. Plays are discussed alongside contexts and themes, including iconoclasm, painting, sculpture, clothing and jewellery, automata, and invisibility. Asking what it meant for Shakespeare and his contemporaries to ‘begin’ or ‘end’ a literary or visual work, this book is invaluable for scholars and students of early modern English literature, drama, visual culture, material culture, theatre history, history and aesthetics.
    [Show full text]
  • English Renaissance
    1 ENGLISH RENAISSANCE Unit Structure: 1.0 Objectives 1.1 The Historical Overview 1.2 The Elizabethan and Jacobean Ages 1.2.1 Political Peace and Stability 1.2.2 Social Development 1.2.3 Religious Tolerance 1.2.4 Sense and Feeling of Patriotism 1.2.5 Discovery, Exploration and Expansion 1.2.6 Influence of Foreign Fashions 1.2.7 Contradictions and Set of Oppositions 1.3 The Literary Tendencies of the Age 1.3.1 Foreign Influences 1.3.2 Influence of Reformation 1.3.3 Ardent Spirit of Adventure 1.3.4 Abundance of Output 1.4 Elizabethan Poetry 1.4.1 Love Poetry 1.4.2 Patriotic Poetry 1.4.3 Philosophical Poetry 1.4.4 Satirical Poetry 1.4.5 Poets of the Age 1.4.6 Songs and Lyrics in Elizabethan Poetry 1.4.7 Elizabethan Sonnets and Sonneteers 1.5 Elizabethan Prose 1.5.1 Prose in Early Renaissance 1.5.2 The Essay 1.5.3 Character Writers 1.5.4 Religious Prose 1.5.5 Prose Romances 2 1.6 Elizabethan Drama 1.6.1 The University Wits 1.6.2 Dramatic Activity of Shakespeare 1.6.3 Other Playwrights 1.7. Let‘s Sum up 1.8 Important Questions 1.0. OBJECTIVES This unit will make the students aware with: The historical and socio-political knowledge of Elizabethan and Jacobean Ages. Features of the ages. Literary tendencies, literary contributions to the different of genres like poetry, prose and drama. The important writers are introduced with their major works. With this knowledge the students will be able to locate the particular works in the tradition of literature, and again they will study the prescribed texts in the historical background.
    [Show full text]
  • Bringing Richard Brome Online
    This is a repository copy of Bringing Richard Brome Online. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/105805/ Version: Published Version Article: Hirsch, BD orcid.org/0000-0002-6231-2080 (2010) Bringing Richard Brome Online. Early Theatre, 13 (1). pp. 137-153. ISSN 1206-9078 10.12745/et.13.1.837 This article is protected by copyright. Reproduced in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Early Theatre Volume 13, Issue 1 2010 Article 7 Bringing Richard Brome Online Brett D. Hirsch∗ ∗University of Western Australia, [email protected] Copyright c 2010 by Early Theatre. Early Theatre is produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress). http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/earlytheatre Bringing Richard Brome Online Brett D. Hirsch Abstract This review essay assesses Richard Brome Online, an online edition of the collected works of Richard Brome, in terms of the design, functionality, and usability of its features.
    [Show full text]
  • Repertory and Riot: the Relocation of Plays from the Red Bull to the Cockpit Stage
    132 Issues in Review 28 Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce, 62. 29 Leggatt, Jacobean Public Theatre, 4. Repertory and Riot: The Relocation of Plays from the Red Bull to the Cockpit Stage On 4 March 1617 the newly built Cockpit playhouse in Drury Lane was assailed by a band of ‘lewde and loose persons, apprentices and others’.1 Writ- ing four days after the event, Edward Sherbourne claimed that between three and four thousand apprentices had mobilized themselves, ‘wounded divers of the players, broke open their trunckes, & whatt apparreil, bookes, or other things they found, they burnt & cutt in peeces; & not content herewith, gott on the top of the house, & untiled it’.2 Consequences were not limited to loss of property. Sherbourne elaborates that ‘one prentise was slaine, being shott throughe the head with a pistoll, & many other of their fellowes were sore hurt’.3 On the same day, John Chamberlain wrote to Dudley Carleton of the disorder in town, adding that the players of Queen Anne’s Men, the current occupants of the Cockpit, ‘defended themselves as well as they could and slew three of them [the rioters] with shot, and hurt divers’.4 The gravity of the situation, at least as far as city authorities were concerned, is clear. In a letter to the lord mayor and aldermen of London, it was reported that ‘there were diverse people slayne, and others hurt and wounded’. Later that month, the privy council ordered security and vigilance against the behaviour of citizens and apprentices to be tightened.5 A number of historical narratives have prioritized the riot, which took place on Shrove Tuesday that year.
    [Show full text]
  • Volume 4 2014
    2101 EAST COLISEUM BOULEVARD FORT WAYNE, IN 46805-1499 Volume 4 2014 Volume Volume 4 2014 Volume 4 2014 EDITORS at Indiana University– at Mount St. Mary’s University Purdue University Fort Wayne Emmitsburg, Maryland M. L. Stapleton, Editor Sarah K. Scott, Associate Editor Cathleen M. Carosella, Managing Editor Jessica Neuenschwander, Pub. Assistant BOARD OF ADVISORS Hardin Aasand, Indiana University–Purdue University, Fort Wayne; David Bevington, University of Chicago; Douglas Bruster, University of Texas, Austin; Dympna Callaghan, Syracuse University; Patrick Cheney, Pennsylvania State University; Sara Deats, University of South Florida; J. A. Downie, Goldsmiths College, University of London; Lisa M. Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University; Heather James, University of Southern California; Roslyn L. Knutson, University of Arkansas, Little Rock; Robert A. Logan, University of Hartford; Ruth Lunney, University of Newcastle (Australia); Laurie Maguire, Magdalen College, Oxford University; Lawrence Manley, Yale University; Kirk Melnikoff, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Paul Menzer, Mary Baldwin College; John Parker, University of Virginia; Eric Rasmussen, University of Nevada, Reno; David Riggs, Stanford University; John P. Rumrich, University of Texas, Austin; Carol Chillington Rutter, University of Warwick; Paul Werstine, King's College, University of Western Ontario; Charles Whitney, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Marlowe Studies: An Annual is a journal devoted to studying Christopher Marlowe and his role in the literary culture of his time, including but not limited to studies of his plays and poetry; their sources; relations to genre; lines of influence; classical, medieval, and continental contexts; performance and theater history; textual studies; the author’s professional milieu and place in early modern English poetry, drama, and culture.
    [Show full text]
  • Jane Milling
    ORE Open Research Exeter TITLE ‘“For Without Vanity I’m Better Known”: Restoration Actors and Metatheatre on the London Stage.’ AUTHORS Milling, Jane JOURNAL Theatre Survey DEPOSITED IN ORE 18 March 2013 This version available at http://hdl.handle.net/10036/4491 COPYRIGHT AND REUSE Open Research Exeter makes this work available in accordance with publisher policies. A NOTE ON VERSIONS The version presented here may differ from the published version. If citing, you are advised to consult the published version for pagination, volume/issue and date of publication Theatre Survey 52:1 (May 2011) # American Society for Theatre Research 2011 doi:10.1017/S0040557411000068 Jane Milling “FOR WITHOUT VANITY,I’M BETTER KNOWN”: RESTORATION ACTORS AND METATHEATRE ON THE LONDON STAGE Prologue, To the Duke of Lerma, Spoken by Mrs. Ellen[Nell], and Mrs. Nepp. NEPP: How, Mrs. Ellen, not dress’d yet, and all the Play ready to begin? EL[LEN]: Not so near ready to begin as you think for. NEPP: Why, what’s the matter? ELLEN: The Poet, and the Company are wrangling within. NEPP: About what? ELLEN: A prologue. NEPP: Why, Is’t an ill one? NELL[ELLEN]: Two to one, but it had been so if he had writ any; but the Conscious Poet with much modesty, and very Civilly and Sillily—has writ none.... NEPP: What shall we do then? ’Slife let’s be bold, And speak a Prologue— NELL[ELLEN]: —No, no let us Scold.1 When Samuel Pepys heard Nell Gwyn2 and Elizabeth Knipp3 deliver the prologue to Robert Howard’s The Duke of Lerma, he recorded the experience in his diary: “Knepp and Nell spoke the prologue most excellently, especially Knepp, who spoke beyond any creature I ever heard.”4 By 20 February 1668, when Pepys noted his thoughts, he had known Knipp personally for two years, much to the chagrin of his wife.
    [Show full text]
  • Christopher Beeston and the Caroline Office of Theatrical ‘Governor’
    Early Theatre 11.2 (2008) Christopher Matusiak Christopher Beeston and the Caroline Office of Theatrical ‘Governor’ The decision in February 1637 to appoint Christopher Beeston (alias Hut- chinson) ‘Gouuernor of the new Company of the Kings & Queenes boyes’ crowned one of the busiest and most innovative careers in seventeenth-cen- tury commercial theatre.1 Beeston had emerged in the 1590s as a young per- former in the Chamberlain’s Men, notably acting with Richard Burbage, Wil- liam Kempe, and William Shakespeare in the first production of Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour. For the better part of the next two decades, he managed the financial affairs of Queen Anne’s Men at the Red Bull and with that company’s assets at his disposal, particularly its valuable wardrobe, he oversaw the building of west London’s first playhouse in 1616 — the Cock- pit (or Phoenix) in Drury Lane. By 1636, Beeston had established himself as London’s pre-eminent theatrical entrepreneur, having led Queen Henri- etta Maria’s fashionable company for ten years and amassed an unpreced- ented personal treasury of playbooks, acting apparel, and other tiring house materials. However, in May of that year the worst outbreak of plague in three decades closed the theatres and suppressed business until the following October 1637. Under the stress of eighteenth months of enforced idleness, acting companies buckled, setting patents and personnel adrift. Among the casualties was Beeston’s relationship with the Queen’s Men. From his van- tage point at the competing Salisbury
    [Show full text]
  • The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, 1623-1673
    ill "iil! !!;i;i;i; K tftkrmiti THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/dramaticrecordsoOOgreaiala CORNELL STUDIES IN ENGLISH EDITED BY JOSEPH QUINCY ADAMS LANE COOPER CLARK SUTHERLAND NORTHUP THE DRAMATIC RECORDS OF SIR HENRY HERBERT MASTER OF THE REVELS, 1623-1673 EDITED BY JOSEPH QUINCY ADAMS CORNELL UNIVERSITY NEW HAVEN: VALE UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON: HUMPHREY MILKORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS MDCCCCXVII 7 7 Copyright, 191 By Yale University Press First published, October, 191 PRESS OF THE NEW ERA PRINTING COMPANY LANCASTER, PA. College Library TO CLARK SUTHERLAND NORTHUP AS A TOKEN OF ESTEEM 1092850 PREFACE The dramatic records of the Office of the Revels during the reigns of Edward VI, Mar>', and Elizabeth have been admirably edited with full indexes and notes by Professor Albert Feuillerat; but the records of the Office during the reigns of James I, Charles I, and Charles TI remain either unedited or scattered in mis- cellaneous volumes, none of which is indexed. Every scholar working in the field of the Tudor-Stuart drama must have felt the desirability of having these later records printed in a more accessible form. In the present volume I have attempted to bring together the dramatic records of Sir Henry Herbert, during whose long administration the Office of the Revels attained the height of its power and importance. These records, most of them preserved through Herbert's own care, consist of his office-book, covering the period of 1 622-1 642, a few documents relating to the same period, and miscellaneous documents relating to the management of the Office after the Restoration.
    [Show full text]
  • Sidney, Shakespeare, and the Elizabethans in Caroline England
    Textual Ghosts: Sidney, Shakespeare, and the Elizabethans in Caroline England Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Rachel Ellen Clark, M.A. English Graduate Program The Ohio State University 2011 Dissertation Committee: Richard Dutton, Advisor Christopher Highley Alan Farmer Copyright by Rachel Ellen Clark 2011 Abstract This dissertation argues that during the reign of Charles I (1625-42), a powerful and long-lasting nationalist discourse emerged that embodied a conflicted nostalgia and located a primary source of English national identity in the Elizabethan era, rooted in the works of William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, John Lyly, and Ben Jonson. This Elizabethanism attempted to reconcile increasingly hostile conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, court and country, and elite and commoners. Remarkably, as I show by examining several Caroline texts in which Elizabethan ghosts appear, Caroline authors often resurrect long-dead Elizabethan figures to articulate not only Puritan views but also Arminian and Catholic ones. This tendency to complicate associations between the Elizabethan era and militant Protestantism also appears in Caroline plays by Thomas Heywood, Philip Massinger, and William Sampson that figure Queen Elizabeth as both ideally Protestant and dangerously ambiguous. Furthermore, Caroline Elizabethanism included reprintings and adaptations of Elizabethan literature that reshape the ideological significance of the Elizabethan era. The 1630s quarto editions of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan comedies The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Taming of the Shrew, and Love’s Labour’s Lost represent the Elizabethan era as the source of a native English wit that bridges social divides and negotiates the ii roles of powerful women (a renewed concern as Queen Henrietta Maria became more conspicuous at court).
    [Show full text]
  • Staging Executions: the Theater of Punishment in Early Modern England Sarah N
    Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2007 Staging Executions: The Theater of Punishment in Early Modern England Sarah N. Redmond Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY THE COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES “STAGING EXECUTIONS: THE THEATER OF PUNISHMENT IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND” By SARAH N. REDMOND This thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2007 The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Sarah N. Redmond, Defended on the 2nd of April, 2007 _______________________ Daniel Vitkus Professor Directing Thesis _______________________ Gary Taylor Committee Member _______________________ Celia Daileader Committee Member Approved: _______________________ Nancy Warren Director of Graduate Studies The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my major professor, Dr. Daniel Vitkus, for his wonderful and invaluable ideas concerning this project, and Dr. Gary Taylor and Dr. Celia Daileader for serving on my thesis committee. I would also like to thank Drs. Daileader and Vitkus for their courses in the Fall 2006, which inspired elements of this thesis. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures . v Abstract . vi INTRODUCTION: Executions in Early Modern England: Practices, Conventions, Experiences, and Interpretations . .1 CHAPTER ONE: “Blood is an Incessant Crier”: Sensationalist Accounts of Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Print Culture . .11 CHAPTER TWO “Violence Prevails”: Death on the Stage in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy .
    [Show full text]
  • Preservation and Innovation in the Intertheatrum Period, 1642-1660: the Survival of the London Theatre Community
    Preservation and Innovation in the Intertheatrum Period, 1642-1660: The Survival of the London Theatre Community By Mary Alex Staude Honors Thesis Department of English and Comparative Literature University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 2018 Approved: (Signature of Advisor) Acknowledgements I would like to thank Reid Barbour for his support, guidance, and advice throughout this process. Without his help, this project would not be what it is today. Thanks also to Laura Pates, Adam Maxfield, Alex LaGrand, Aubrey Snowden, Paul Smith, and Playmakers Repertory Company. Also to Diane Naylor at Chatsworth Settlement Trustees. Much love to friends and family for encouraging my excitement about this project. Particular thanks to Nell Ovitt for her gracious enthusiasm, and to Hannah Dent for her unyielding support. I am grateful for the community around me and for the communities that came before my time. Preface Mary Alex Staude worked on ​Twelfth Night​ 2017 with Alex LaGrand who worked on ​King Lear​ 2016 with Zack Powell who worked on ​Henry IV Part II ​2015 with John Ahlin who worked on ​Macbeth​ 2000 with Jerry Hands who worked on ​Much Ado About Nothing​ 1984 with Derek Jacobi who worked on ​Othello ​1964 with Laurence Olivier who worked on ​Romeo and Juliet​ 1935 with Edith Evans who worked on ​The Merry Wives of Windsor​ 1918 with Ellen Terry who worked on ​The Winter’s Tale ​1856 with Charles Kean who worked on ​Richard III 1776 with David Garrick who worked on ​Hamlet ​1747 with Charles Macklin who worked on Henry IV​ 1738 with Colley Cibber who worked on​ Julius Caesar​ 1707 with Thomas Betterton who worked on ​Hamlet​ 1661 with William Davenant who worked on ​Henry VIII​ 1637 with John Lowin who worked on ​Henry VIII ​1613 with John Heminges who worked on ​Hamlet​ 1603 with William Shakespeare.
    [Show full text]
  • History of English Literature Timeline
    EBOOK BY: KnowledgeMerger.com English literature dates back exceeding five centuries. The literature not only represents authors or writers from almost every part of the world but also it had untapped almost every major genre of writings that one could possibly imagine. In this article on the history of English literature, you'll be getting a glimpse of almost every age of English literature. You will also know about the style of writing of the poets and authors that prevailed back then. History of English Literature Timeline Given below is the History of English Literature timeline. Old Literature (858-1100) Anglo Saxon Norman Conquest (A landmark) Middle Ages (1100-1500) Renassaince (1500-1660) Tudor (1485-1603) Elizabethan (1558-1603) Jacobian (1603-1625) Caroline (1625-1649) Late Renaissance (Puritans) (1625-1660) Neo-Classical Age (1660-1798) Restoration Age (1660-1700) Augustan Literature Age of Sensibility 19th Century Literature Romanticism (1798-1837) Victorian Age (1837-1901) Edwardian Age English Literature Since 1901 Modernism (1901-1939) Post Modernism (1940-21st Century) In this post, all the major ages are focused on. You'll know about the main characteristics of the age of History of English Literature. Old Literature (858-1100) People communicated the poems and literary works orally during the period under consideration. Writing was not given much importance. The Anglo-Saxons were made up of three tribes who came to England through the North Sea route - the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. The Anglo-Saxon age comprises about 600 years. Beowoulf is one of the most important works of that age. It is an epic poem which throws light on a young warrior in Geatland who fought for his people.
    [Show full text]