The Shoemaker's Holiday
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THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE AS TRIBUTARY: MERCANTILISM, NATIONALISM, and SOCIAL MOBILITY in THREE POPULAR DRAMAS a Thesis Submitted To
THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE AS TRIBUTARY: MERCANTILISM, NATIONALISM, AND SOCIAL MOBILITY IN THREE POPULAR DRAMAS A Thesis Submitted to the College of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts In the Department of English University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon By Adam Benn Keywords: Dekker, Heywood, Renaissance Drama, Mercantilism, Nationalism, Tudor Theatre. Copyright Adam Benn, August, 2011. All rights reserved. Permission to Use In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a Postgraduate degree from the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this University may make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying of this thesis in any manner, in whole or in part, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor or professors who supervised my thesis work or, in their absence, by the Head of the Department or the Dean of the College in which my thesis work was done. It is understood that any copying or publication or use of this thesis or parts thereof for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. It is also understood that due recognition shall be given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any scholarly use which may be made of any material in my thesis. Requests for permission to copy or to make other use of material in this thesis in whole or part should be addressed to: Head of the Department of English 320 Arts Building University of Saskatchewan 9 Campus Drive Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A5 Canada Benn i ABSTRACT This thesis examines the relationship between social mobility, early mercantilism, and nationalism in three Elizabethan Popular Dramas: Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday, and Thomas Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West, Part I, and The Four Prentices of London. -
The Suburbs and the City in Thomas Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday
Sites of transgression: The suburbs and the city in Thomas Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday Paul J. C. M. Franssen Utrecht University ABSTRACT The early modern binary of the virtuous City of London versus the sinful suburbs clashes with an older binary pitting the countryside against the city. At the same time, the forces of urbanization along with early capitalism were undermining both binaries. This article traces how this is reflected in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday . The play not only represents the City of London under Simon Eyre’s rule as, potentially, possessing all the virtues of the pastoral, but also suggests that the surrounding countryside, in particular the village of Old Ford, was being corrupted by city values. Dekker’s play, therefore, deconstructs simple dichotomies between country and city, showing how the two inevitably influence each other. KEYWORDS : Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday , City Comedy, Countryside. Jean Howard’s fascinating study of City Comedy, or as she prefers to call it, London Comedy, is structured around a variety of real places within London, some specific (such as the Royal Exchange and the various Counters or debtors’ prisons), others generic (such as bawdy houses and dancing academies). Howard associates these places within London with various discourses of gender, national identity, class, and the new money values. She regards these discourses as not primarily reflections of what really happened at these sites, but at least as much as constituting ways of thinking about such places, turning them into meaningful social spaces (2007:3, 32). Howard shows how the explosive growth of London into a world city undermined old certainties, often cast in the form of simple binaries, Sederi 22 (2012: 139-154) P. -
Actes Des Congrès De La Société Française Shakespeare, 33 | 2015 Middleton Beyond the Canon 2
Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare 33 | 2015 Shakespeare 450 Middleton beyond the Canon Daniela Guardamagna Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/3394 DOI: 10.4000/shakespeare.3394 ISSN: 2271-6424 Publisher Société Française Shakespeare Electronic reference Daniela Guardamagna, « Middleton beyond the Canon », Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare [Online], 33 | 2015, Online since 10 October 2015, connection on 08 June 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/3394 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/shakespeare.3394 This text was automatically generated on 8 June 2020. © SFS Middleton beyond the Canon 1 Middleton beyond the Canon Daniela Guardamagna 1 The old canon of Thomas Middleton1 has been deeply modified in the last forty years by attribution studies, by the analysis of philologists and the work of MacDonald P. Jackson, David Lake and Roger Holdsworth,2 and especially after the issue of what has been defined as “Middleton’s First Folio”, that is his Collected Works and Textual Companion, edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino.3 2 Critics are now aware that there are many clues hinting at the fact that the ‘new Middleton’ is very different from the author that was proposed till the last decades of the 20th century, that is the cold, misogynist, clinical analyst of the society around him (“a 17th-century Ibsen or Zola”, as he was defined4), and that the new figure presents striking features which greatly modify our perception of his work. 3 In this paper I will concentrate on a specific instance concerning the new canon: the modification of female characters that becomes apparent in Middleton’s writing, considering the new plays, the tragedies in particular, that have been definitely attributed to him in the 2007 Collected Works. -
The Economics of Gender Relations in London City Comedy
THE ECONOMICS OF GENDER RELATIONS IN LONDON CITY COMEDY BY KRISTIN WEISSE A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS English May, 2015 Winston-Salem, North Carolina Approved By: Sarah Hogan, Ph.D., Advisor Olga Valbuena, Ph.D., Chair Susan Harlan, Ph.D. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Hogan— not only for her helpful input and guidance throughout the process of writing this thesis, but also for inspiring my interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature through her remarkable energy and enthusiasm. In addition, a special thanks to Dr. Harlan and Dr. Valbuena, whose Renaissance drama classes further solidified my desire to research London city comedy and whose suggestions were also integral to the completion of this project. I am immensely grateful to have had the opportunity to work with such an intelligent and lively group of women. Moreover, I would like to thank my friends and teammates for their constant love and encouragement throughout my entire time as a graduate student at Wake Forest. Thank you especially to my “soulmates” Lizzie and Kelly for the endless trips to Camino (which made thesis writing so much more enjoyable), the ice cream dates, the epic road-trips, and for always being there for me to lean on and to learn from. Thank you also to Sam, Kaitlyn, Kathleen, Aubrey, and Chandler for the constant motivation both intellectually and physically (whether out on the trails, on the track, or even just lounging around the kitchen of 1022 Polo), and for the much-needed distractions from writing and reading. -
Telling, Showing and Interpreting Mad Discourse in Renaissance Drama », « Theta XI, Théâtre Tudor », 2013, Pp
Marie-Hélène Besnault, « Telling, Showing and Interpreting Mad Discourse in Renaissance Drama », « Theta XI, Théâtre Tudor », 2013, pp. 41-62 mis en ligne en septembre 2014, <https://sceneeuropeenne.univ-tours.fr/theta/theta11>. Theta XI est publié par le Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance, dirigé par Philippe Vendrix, Université François-Rabelais de Tours, CNRS/UMR 7323 Responsable scientifique Richard Hillman Mentions légales Copyright © 2014 – CESR. Tous droits réservés. Les utilisateurs peuvent télécharger et imprimer, pour un usage strictement privé, cette unité documentaire. Reproduction soumise à autorisation. Date de création septembre 2014 Theta XI – Théâtre Tudor Marie-Hélène BESNAULT pp. 41-62 CESR, Tours Telling, Showing and Interpreting Mad Discourse in Renaissance Drama Marie-Hélène Besnault Université François-Rabelais de Tours/CESR-CNRS n both Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Part One, and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the plays which made Itheir authors famous in the late 1580s, mad discourse is pre- sent, to a lesser extent in the first case, and more so in the sec- ond. Such discourse must have proved very popular, since Hieronimo’s mad speeches received five anonymous addi- tions in 1602, after Kyd’s death, and after the appearance of other memorable mad scenes in the plays of Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists. By the closing of the theatres in 1642, many more mad scenes, which were often not present in the sources of the playwrights, came to be written. Mad- ness was given both comic and tragic treatments in plays intended for performance by professional male actors or trained young choristers, and intended for a paying audi- ence in a public theatre. -
Sexual Disguise and Social Mobility in Jacobean City Comedy
2 Sexual Disguise and Social Mobility in Jacobean City Comedy In its representation oflove and sexuality, Elizabethan romantic comedy is not concerned with the problematic enactment of social and sexual roles in the institution of marriage. Rather, it concen trates on the complexities of eras, dramatized as sexual desire seek ing and finding fulfillment in the heroes' successful resolution of the process of courtship. In contrast, Jacobean city comedy brings into the light of representation precisely those dissociations and contradictions in English Renaissance sexual ideology which ro mantic comedy evokes but seeks to reconcile and contain. 1 Jaco bean satire, or city comedy, is a genre designed to dramatize the complex process of conducting economic and social relations in a newly forming urban environment. As is well known, city com edy as such began in the late 1590s with Ben Jonson's humor plays, achieved recognizable generic conventions by about 1605, and thrived during, roughly, the first decade of the seventeenth cen tury, when dramatists perceived the city of London as the setting in which those conflicts caused by the political, religious, and eco nomic upheavals that transformed Renaissance England were being enacted most intensely.2 I. See Louis Adrian Montrose, "'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture, " Representations, 1 (Spring 1983), 61-94; and Jonathan Dollimore, "Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression: The Jacobean Connection," Renaissance Drama, N.S. 17 (1986), 53-81. -
Epicoene. for the Moment, I Want to Particularly Consider
DANGEROUS BOYS DANGEROUS BOYS AND CITY PLEASURES: SUBVERSIONS OF GENDER AND DESIRE IN THE BOY ACTOR'S THEATRE By ERIN JULIAN, B.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts McMaster University © Copyright by Erin Julian, September 2010 MASTER OF ARTS (2010) McMaster University (English and Cultural Studies) Hamilton, Ontario TITLE: Dangerous Boys and City Pleasure: Subversions of Gender and Desire in the Boy Actor's Theatre AUTHOR: Erin Julian, B.A. (Brock University) SUPERVISOR: Dr H.M. Ostovich NUMBER OF PAGES: vi, 143 ii ABSTRACT: This thesis draws on the works of Will Fisher, Lucy Munro, Michael Shapiro, and other critics who have written on the boy actor on the early modem English stage. Focussing on city comedies performed by children's companies, it argues that the boy actor functions as a kind of "third gender" that exceeds gender binaries, and interrogates power hierarchies built on those gender binaries (including marriage). The boy actor is neither man nor woman, and does not have the confining social responsibilities ofeither. This thesis argues that the boy's voice, his behaviours, and his epicene body are signifiers of his joyous and unconfined social position. Reading the boy actor as a metaphor for the city itself, it originally argues that the boy's innocence enables him to participate in the games, merriment, and general celebration of carnival, while his ability to slip fluidly between genders, ages, and other social roles enables him to participate in and embody the productively disruptive carnival, parodic, and "epicene" spaces of the city itself. -
Disordered Appetites: Female Flesh in the Works of Thomas Middleton
DISORDERED APPETITES: FEMALE FLESH IN THE WORKS OF THOMAS MIDDLETON A dissertation submitted by Gregory M. Schnitzspahn in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English TUFTS UNIVERSITY May 2015 Copyright © 2015 by Gregory M. Schnitzspahn Advisor: Judith Haber ii Abstract This dissertation contends that Thomas Middleton’s plays and poetry exploit an early modern psychocultural anxiety focused on the insubstantiality of symbolic or linguistic constructs. More specifically, Middleton’s works consistently examine the manipulability and immateriality of patriarchally prescribed female social identities––such as maid, wife, and widow––that are based entirely upon a woman’s sexual or marital relations with men. Employing principles drawn from psychoanalysis and ecofeminism, I argue that this Middletonian preoccupation bespeaks a more widespread uncertainty in the period about symbolic structures intended to control or contain female bodies and the natural world. My analysis of Thomas Middleton’s work therefore points to conceptual technologies that were emergent in the early modern period and which continue to exert influence in the present day. In the introduction, I describe my guiding principles and theoretical apparatus by reading the typically Middletonian complications of marital and sexual identity in two plays, The Witch and The Phoenix. Chapter One moves to a discussion of female virginity in The Changeling, Middleton’s famous collaboration with William Rowley, and argues that the play taps into cultural anxieties about the potential unreliability of symbolic technologies for controlling female bodies and appetites. Chapter Two examines Middleton’s early work, The Ghost of Lucrece, and contends that this poem’s plaintive ghost uses images of iii female corporeality as a rhetorical weapon, unleashing great floods of blood, milk, and tears that strain the written language of the poem itself. -
Bedlam, Charity, and Renaissance Drama: Reconfiguring the Relationship Between Institutions in History
Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1997 Bedlam, Charity, and Renaissance Drama: Reconfiguring the Relationship between Institutions in History Kenneth S. Jackson Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Jackson, Kenneth S., "Bedlam, Charity, and Renaissance Drama: Reconfiguring the Relationship between Institutions in History" (1997). Dissertations. 3668. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/3668 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1997 Kenneth S. Jackson LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO BEDLAM, CHARITY, AND RENAISSANCE DRAMA: RECONFIGURING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INSTITUTIONS IN HISTORY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY OF ARTS DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY KENNETH S. JACKSON CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JANUARY 1997 Copywright by Kenneth S. Jackson, 1997 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am tremendously grateful to the Knocs of St. Larry's -- Carolyn, Lynn, Mick, Krug, Stinger, and Dupe -- for teaching me Protestant charity in a Catholic place, and to Rita and Athena for teaching me Catholic charity in a Protestant place. Above all else, this is for Pauline for knowing and understanding the pain involved in any charitable work. CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . iv Chapter 1. BEDLAM, PROTESTANT CITIZEN CHARITY, AND THE DRAMA . -
THE DOMESTIC DRAMA of THOMAS DEKKER, 1599-1621 By
CHALLENGING THE HOMILETIC TRADITION: THE DOMESTIC DRAMA OF THOMAS DEKKER, 1599-1621 By VIVIANA COMENSOLI B.A.(Hons.), Simon Fraser University, 1975 M.A., Simon Fraser University, 1979 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of English) We accept, this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA December 1984 (js) Viviana Comensoli, 1984 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of The University of British Columbia 1956 Main Mall Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Y3 DE-6 (3/81) ABSTRACT The dissertation reappraises Thomas Dekker's dramatic achievement through an examination of his contribution to the development of Elizabethan-Jacobean domestic drama. Dekker's alterations and modifications of two essential features of early English domestic drama—the homiletic pattern of sin, punishment, and repentance, which the genre inherited from the morality tradition, and the glorification of the cult of domesticity—attest to a complex moral and dramatic vision which critics have generally ignored. In Patient Grissil, his earliest extant domestic play, which portrays ambivalently the vicissitudes of marital and family life, Dekker combines an allegorical superstructure with a realistic setting. -
Marston, the Dutch Courtesan, and Theatrical Profit
3532 Early Theatre 23.1 (2020), 109–26 https://doi.org/10.12745/et.23.1.4165 Lucy Munro Living by Others’ Pleasure: Marston, The Dutch Courtesan, and Theatrical Profit We have known for over a century that John Marston held a share in Children of the Queen’s Revels, the all-boy playing company that first performed The Dutch Cour- tesan in 1604, but how this knowledge affects our understanding of his plays requires further exploration. Drawing on neglected documentary sources, this essay reappraises the company’s links with the Chapel Royal choir to argue that Dutch Courtesan capitalizes on the skills that most clearly connected its performers with the royal choir, even while scrutinizing the ways in which the company turned pleasurable recreation into profit. Early in the second scene of The Dutch Courtesan, the ‘witty city jester’, Coclede- moy, offers a mock ‘oration’ in praise of the ‘most pleasurable function’ of the bawd, Mary Faugh. Opening by describing her ‘profession or vocation’ as ‘most worshipful of all the twelve companies’, he eventually concludes that ‘only my smooth-gummed bawd lives by others’ pleasure and only grows rich by others’ rising’ (‘Fabulae argumentum’ 2–3; 1.2.27, 28, 31–2, 32–3, 50–2).1 Cocledemoy’s ‘only’ serves to distinguish the bawd from the merchant, lawyer, and physician, whose trades he has just described, but the sex-trade was not, of course, the only means through which pleasure was sold in early Jacobean London. Cocledemoy’s paean to the bawd carries with it hints of another form of ‘trade’, much closer to home: the theatre was itself a means of ‘liv[ing] through others’ pleasure’, that is, the enjoyment of the paying audience. -
A Short History of English Literature, Second Edition
A Short History of English Literature A Short History of English Literature Second Edition HARRY BLAMIRES London and New York First published in 1974 by Methuen & Co. Ltd This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Second edition 1984 © 1974 and 1984 Harry Blamires All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Blamires, Harry A short history of English literature –2nd ed. 1. English literature—History and criticism I. Title 820.9 PR83 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Blamires, Harry A short history of English literature Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. English literature—History and criticism I. Title PR83.B5 1984 820'.9 84–8922 ISBN 0-203-13727-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-17749-5 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-05078-2 (Print Edition) Contents Preface vii Preface to the edition of 1984 viii 1 The fourteenth century 1 2 Fifteenth-century poetry and prose 19 3 The early sixteenth century 31 4 Elizabethan drama 40 5 Jacobean drama 64 6 Elizabethan poetry 81 7 Metaphysical and Cavalier poetry 95 8 Elizabethan and seventeenth-century prose 111 9 Milton to Dryden 125 10 Restoration drama 137 11 Origins of the novel 151 12 The age of Swift and Pope 160 13 The age of Johnson 181 14 The eighteenth-century novel 201 15 The close of the eighteenth century 217 16 Wordsworth and the Romantics 231 17 Scott and contemporary novelists 255 18 Victorian poetry 270 19 The Victorian novel 301 20 Twentieth-century drama 331 v vi Contents 21 Twentieth-century poetry 353 22 The twentieth-century novel 383 Chronological table of writers 424 Bibliography 431 Index 447 Preface This work of introduction is designed to escort the reader through some six centuries of English literature.