OF DOMESTIC MONSTERS AND COMPLEX MARVELS: SERIALIZATION, RICHARD III, AND THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE by KATHRYN LEE SNITZER Bachelor of Arts, 2012 Southeastern Louisiana University Hammond, Louisiana Bachelor of Arts, 2014 Southeastern Louisiana University Hammond, Louisiana Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of AddRan College of Liberal Arts Texas Christian University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts May, 2016 Copyright by Kathryn Lee Snitzer 2016 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge and thank the following people who have supported me, not only during the course of this project, but throughout the pursuit of my Master’s degree. First, and foremost, I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Dr. Ariane Balizet, for supporting me in my decision to explore such a broad and creative topic, and for her unique ability to provide me with direction while still allowing for this work to reflect my own personal interests. I would also like to thank Dr. Jason Helms for his unwavering belief in me and my capabilities, especially in those moments when I no longer believed in myself. For had it not been for his consistently kind words and perpetual wisdom, this work may never have been completed. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends for their constant love and support throughout the whirlwind that has been my graduate career. And, most importantly, I would like to thank my fiancé, David Drake, for being a constant source of inspiration, and for challenging me—every day—to become the very best version of myself. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………….1 HEADING TO THE “MOTHERSHIP:” NARRATIVE COMPLEXITY, TRANSMEDIA, AND THE FUTURE OF SERIAL STORYTELLING…………………………………………………………………14 “DESTINY IS ANATOMY:” RICHARD III’s FEMINIZED BODY, AMBIGUOUS GENDER, AND THE ELIZABETHAN PATRIARCHY……………….….38 APPENDIX A: TRANSMEDIA READING LIST………………………………………….55 APPENDIX B: RENAISSANCE DRAMA READING LIST………………………………57 TRANSMEDIA ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………59 RENAISSANCE DRAMA ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………….……151 iii INTRODUCTION “At any moment, the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship.” — Walter Benjamin Within this short quotation—taken from page thirty-two of his book, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction—I believe that Walter Benjamin both adequately and succinctly describes what I identify as the process of composing a Master’s thesis. For, as I wrote this thesis over the course of the past four and a half months, I, too, have become an expert—of sorts—on the topics of transmedia storytelling and Shakespeare’s play, Richard III, as I worked “willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process,” and, as a reader, gained access to authorship (Benjamin 32). Now, you may be wondering as to how on earth transmedia storytelling and Richard III—two seemingly unrelated topics—are able to come together and be studied within a single body of research, especially when you consider that transmedia storytelling and Richard III are separated by nearly four hundred years. The answer to your question is this: through the study of serialization. In what follows, I will identify the key concepts of the serial form in order to introduce my own work concerning the serial’s future within New Media and its overlooked past within the early modern period. !1 Within her book, Consuming Pleasures, Jennifer Hayward reiterates Roger Hagedorn’s idea that “since the nineteenth century the serial has been [the] dominant mode of narrative presentation in Western culture” (qtd. in Hayward 2). As a genre born out of capitalism, the serial’s historical roots can be traced back to that of the Victorian market economy as it operates under the economic principle of obtaining the “the maximum number of effects from the minimum force” (de Certeau 82). According to Hayward’s articulation of the serial’s appeal, she argues that the advantages of the form is that it practically “advertises itself, providing ever-increasing profits:” Since the inception of mass-market culture in the nineteenth century, producers have relied on the serial form to consolidate and hold a mass audience, thus enabling the profits that make new technologies (cheap mass- produced books, color printing in news papers, film, radio, television) viable in a market economy. (1-2) This is due, in part, to the very nature of serial texts as they are unique in their ability to present audiences with a single, “ongoing narrative” that is “released in successive parts” (Hayward 3). Within his own work, Michael Hammond asserts that today, as was the case “with the serialization of novels in the nineteenth century, the form of the serial [has become] central in gaining and retaining audiences and readers that the advertising industry now terms ‘loyals’” (Hammond and Mazdon 80). And, he is correct for as a result of the serial’s inherent nature, they produce the “desire for more about characters and plots” (Hayward 152). Thus, over the course of the serial’s appropriation over time, its narrative form has come to be understood as !2 a “beneficial addictive good” as audiences utilize a “discourse of addiction” in describing their relationship with serialized texts: they are “hooked,” they have to get their “fix,” and go through withdrawals when they are unable to engage with their favorite texts (Clarke 4; Hayward 155). It comes as no surprise, then, that the serial form has continued to grow and develop over time as Hayward traces its narrative evolution across three different media: written narrative (periodicals/novels), a combination of visual and written narrative (comics), and visual narrative (soap operas/television). According to Frank Rose, while “stories themselves are universal, the way we tell them changes with the technology at hand” (2). And, in regards to the television, Hayward asserts that it “offers unique benefits in its appropriation of the serial genre:” Parts are issued regularly. Audiences are vast and diverse, and because of their longevity, quotidian recurrence and themes, and—not least—audience familiarity with actors as well as characters as a result of media’s obsession with itself, [television serials] intensify the intermingling of fictional characters with audience lives that is so characteristic of the serial form. (Hayward 144) Meanwhile, within his own work, Glen Creeber adds to Hayward’s conceptualization of the relationship that exists between the television serial and its audience in his discussion of the the serial and series’ shared characteristic of episodic form: [T]he episodic nature of the serial form means that it also shares important characteristics with the series. This means that the serial can frequently break !3 free of the narrative limitations of the single drama and exploit some of the most seductive elements of serialization. In particular, the viewer is often able to get to know the characters and the story in a serial almost as well as they might do in a series or soap opera. [which] allows far greater ‘audience involvement, a sense of becoming a part of the lives and actions of the characters they see. (Creeber 9) Due to this shared characteristic, it comes as no surprise that in 1991, with the invention of the Internet, “the first medium that can act like all media,”—“it can be text, or audio, or video, or all of the above”—the serial underwent another evolutionary transformation in which it and series formats converged (Rose 3). The Internet’s appropriation of both the serial and series’ form gave rise to a new mode of serialization that Jason Mittell calls “narrative complexity.” According to Mittell, “the hallmark of narrative complexity [is] an interplay between the demands of episodic and serial storytelling [that] often oscillat[es] between long-term arcs and stand-alone episodes” (Complex TV 19). As a result of its unique form, Sara Gwenllian-Jones notes that the complex television series often consists of “scores of episodes that together constitute a hundred or more screen hours and that are played out across several years of production and distribution” (87). Additionally, complex narratives allow for the exploration of fictional worlds “of infinite suggestion and inexhaustible possibility,” which rewards “close textual scrutiny, extrapolation, and speculation and exert their fascination not through the linear pull of story events but rather through their lateral resonance and connectivity” (Gwenllian-Jones 90-91). !4 According to Henry Jenkins, “[m]ore and more, [serial] storytelling has become the art of world building, as artists create compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or even a single medium (Convergence Culture 116). As a result, many complex narratives are forced to “overflow” into other media—resulting in a heightened form of serialization that is known as transmedia storytelling (Gray and Lotz 76). Within his book, Convergence Culture, Jenkins defines the nature of transmedia storytelling: A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best. Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game and vice