Matching Items (51)
Description
The original-practices movement as a whole claims its authority from early modern theatrical conditions. Some practitioners claim Shakespeare in many ways as their co-creator; asserting that they perform the plays as Shakespeare intended. Other companies recognize the impossibility of an authorial text, and for them authority shifts to the Renaissance theatre apparatus as a whole. But the reality is that all of these companies necessarily produce modern theatre influenced by the 400 years since Shakespeare. Likewise, audiences do not come to these productions and forget the intervening centuries. This dissertation questions the new tradition created by using early modern performance practices, asking how original-practices theatre is situated and arguing that though the desire to rediscover the past fueled the movement, the productions actually presented are in negotiation with modernity. The dissertation begins by looking at the rhetoric surrounding the original-practices movement, then at the physical aspects of early modern performance recreated for modern stages and the desire for material authenticity. This project also explores the ways in which race and gender play key roles within Shakespearean texts presented on stage, and argues that while gender occasionally has attention called to it, race is nearly always ignored to the point of whitewashing. I argue that because these companies insist on the universality of Shakespeare, they need to examine and deal with the racism and sexism inherent within the plays. Finally, this project explores the influence original-practices productions exerts upon audiences, including aspects such as attendees' expectations, architectural spaces, and performance, and argues that together, these elements lead to a far more cohesive and responsive audience than that which is found at traditional theatre performances. This interactivity and group mentality can lead to thrilling theatre, but can also pose dangers in the form of positive responses to xenophobic, racist, or misogynist elements within the texts, acting as early-modern audiences did and reifying those negative stereotypes and prejudices. While original-practices theatre includes the danger of being something only of historical interest, it also presents opportunities for exciting, progressive theatre that reaches audiences who do not typically go to see Shakespeare or other performances.
ContributorsSteigerwalt, Jennifer L (Author) / Thompson, Ayanna (Thesis advisor) / Ryner, Brad (Committee member) / Fox, Cora (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
"YouTube Shakespeares" is a study of Shakespeare online videos and the people who create, upload, and view them on YouTube. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this work is a remix of theories and methodologies from literary, performance, (social) media, fan, and Internet studies that expands the field of Shakespeare studies. This dissertation explores the role of YouTube users and their activities, the expansion of literary research methods onto digital media venues, YouTube as site of Shakespeare performance, and YouTube Shakespeares' fan communities. It analyzes a broad array of Shakespeare visual performances including professional and user-generated mashups, remixes, film clips, auditions, and high school performances. A rich avenue for the study of people's viewing and reception of Shakespeare, YouTube tests the (un)limitations of Shakespeare adaptation. This work explores the ethical implications of researching performances that include human subjects, arguing that their presence frequently complicates common concepts of public and private identities. Although YouTube is a "published" forum for social interactivity and video repository, this work urges digital humanities scholars to recognize and honor the human users entailed in the videos not as text, but as human subjects. Shifting the study focus to human subjects demands a revision of research methods and publications protocols as the researcher repositions herself into the role of virtual ethnographer. "YouTube Shakespeares" develops its own ethics-based, online research method, which includes seeking Institutional Board Review approval and online interviews. The second half of the dissertation shifts from methodology to theorizing YouTube Shakespeares' performance spaces as analogs to the interactive and imaginary areas of Shakespeare's early modern theatre. Additionally, this work argues that YouTube Shakespeares' creators and commentators are fans. "YouTube Shakespeares" is one of the first Shakespeare-centric studies to employ fan studies as a critical lens to explore the cultural significance and etiquette of people's online Shakespeare performance activities. The work ends with a conversation about the issues of ephemerality, obsolescence, and concerns about the instability of digital and online materials, noting the risk of evidentiary loss of research materials is far outweighed by a scholarly critical registration of YouTube in the genealogy of Shakespeare performance.
ContributorsFazel, Valerie Margaret (Author) / Thompson, Ayanna (Thesis advisor) / Ryner, Bradley (Committee member) / Fox, Cora (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This dissertation makes the case to reclaim the typically negative term, coterie, as a poetic method and offers the epithalamium as a valuable object for the study of coterie conditions and values. This examination of the historical poetics of the epithalamium shows how the form was reappropriated by gay postwar poets and those in related social circumstances. This study applies and builds on theories developed by Arthur Marotti (John Donne: Coterie Poet), and Lytle Shaw (Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie) and subsequent critics to develop a coterie poetics, the markers and terms for which I have arranged here to demonstrate conscious "sociable" poetics. It is thus to our advantage to study coterie conditions and methods to open readers to insights into twentieth-century poets that have deliberately exploited reception among those in private and public spheres, just as their Early-Modern precursors did--often as a matter of survival, but also as formative practice. The key figures in this study wrote significant epithalamia or made major theoretical claims for coterie poetics: John Donne (1572-1631), W. H. Auden (1907-1973), Paul Goodman (1910-1972), and Frank O'Hara (1926-1966). O'Hara's poetry is approached as the apex of coterie poetics; his personal immediacy and obscure personal references should alienate and exclude--yet, they invite.
ContributorsEisenberg, Jeremy (Author) / Horan, Elizabeth (Thesis advisor) / Hogue, Cynthia (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This thesis examines Christopher Marlowe's poem Hero and Leander and George Chapman's Continuation thereof through a theoretical lens that includes theories of intimacy, sexuality and touch taken from Lee Edelman, Daniel Gil, James Bromley, Katherine Rowe and others. Hands are seen as the privileged organ of touch as well as synecdoche for human agency. Because it is all too often an unexamined sense, the theory of touch is dealt with in detail. The analysis of hands and touch leads to a discussion of how Marlowe's writing creates a picture of sexual intimacy that goes against traditional institutions and resists the traditional role of the couple in society. Marlowe's poem favors an equal, companionate intimacy that does not engage in traditional structures, while Chapman's Continuation to Marlowe's work serves to reaffirm the transgressive nature of Marlowe's poem by reasserting traditional social institutions surrounding the couple. Viewing the two pieces of literature together further supports the conclusion that Marlowe's work is transgressive because of how conservative Chapman's reaction to Hero and Leander is.
ContributorsHardman, Katherine (Author) / Fox, Cora (Thesis advisor) / Ryner, Bradley (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This study looks at Geoffrey Chaucer's use of the color green as it appears in regards to the settings and antagonists of three of the Canterbury Tales: the Wife of Bath's Tale, the Friar's Tale, and the Merchant's Tale. Following the allegorical approach, it argues that the color green in these tales is symbolic of Fortune, modeled upon Boethian philosophy and the allegory of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's thirteenth century French poem, The Romance of the Rose. It suggests, furthermore, that Fortune is a potential overarching theme of the Canterbury Tales, and that the tales, in turn, should be read as a cohesive unit.
ContributorsLemman, Krista (Author) / Sturges, Robert (Thesis advisor) / Maring, Heather (Committee member) / Corse, Douglas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This dissertation focuses on the connections between childbirth and spirituality in fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England. It argues that scholastic interest in conception and procreation led to a proliferation of texts mentioning obstetrics and gynecology, and that this attention to women's medicine and birth spread from the universities to the laity. This dissertation contends that there is interdependence between spiritual and physical health in late medieval English religious culture, correlated with and perhaps caused by an increasing fascination with materialism and women's bodies in religious practices and rhetoric. The first chapter provides an analysis of birth in medical and pastoral texts. Pastoral works were heavily influenced by the ecclesiastical emphasis on baptism, as well as by scholastic medicine's simultaneous disdain for and reluctant integration of folk medicine. The second chapter examines birth descriptions in narratives of saints' miracles and collections of exempla; these representations of childbirth were used in religious rhetoric to teach, motivate, and dissuade audiences. The third chapter turns to the cycle play representations of the nativity as depicting the mysteries of human generation and divine incarnation for public consumption. The fourth chapter analyzes the abstract uses of childbirth in visionary and other religious texts, especially in descriptions of spiritual rebirth and the development of vice and virtue in individuals or institutions. By identifying their roles as analogous with the roles of midwives, visionaries authorized themselves as spiritual caretakers, vital for communal health and necessary for collective spiritual growth. These chapters outline a trajectory of increasing male access to the birthing chamber through textual descriptions and prescriptions about birth and midwifery. At the same time, religious texts acknowledged, sought to regulate, and sometimes even utilized the potential authority of mothers and midwives as physical and spiritual caretakers.
ContributorsSwann, Alaya (Author) / Voaden, Rosalynn (Thesis advisor) / Newhauser, Richard (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This paper utilizes insights from emerging monster theory, particularly the idea that monsters are cultural representations, to examine the representation of the Gyant and the figure Talus in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. The thesis posits that contrary to most critical readings, the episode concerning the Gyant focuses on a portion of the 16th century English Cultural Body-the peasants, rather than the Irish or another cultural subgroup. The thesis also argues that through the application of monster theory, the complicated political sympathies of the author towards the English lower class emerge, and the English third estate gains a voice.
ContributorsTurney, Brittany (Author) / Fox, Cora (Thesis advisor) / Holbo, Christine (Committee member) / Corse, Taylor (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
In 1999, Geneviève Hasenohr announced the discovery of a fragment of Marguerite Porete's Mirouer des Simples Ames, a work condemned by the Church at the University of Paris in 1310, hidden in a manuscript at the Bibliothèque municipale in Valenciennes. The fragment corresponds with roughly two chapters in the only extant French version of the manuscript (Chantilly, Musée Condé MS F XIV 26), and when compared with other editions of the Mirouer, it appears to be composed in what might have been Marguerite Porete's native dialect. The discovery changed scholars' perceptions of the weight of the various versions and translations - the Chantilly manuscript had been used previously to settle any questions of discrepancy, but now it appears that the Continental Latin and Middle English translations should be the arbiters. This discovery has elevated the Middle English editions, and has made the question of the translator's identity - he is known only by his initials M.N. - and background more imperative to an understanding of why a work with such a dubious history would be translated and harbored by English Carthusians in the century that followed its condemnation. The only candidate suggested for translator of the Mirouer has been Michael Northburgh (d. 1361), the Bishop of London and co-founder of the London Charterhouse, where two of the three remaining copies of the translation were once owned, but the language of the text and Northburgh's own position and interests do not fit this suggestion. My argument is that the content of the book, the method of its translation, its selection as a work for a Latin-illiterate audience, all fit within the interests of a circle of writers based in Yorkshire at the end of the fourteenth century. By beginning among the Yorkshire circle, and widening the search to include writers with a non-traditional contemplative audience, one that exists outside of the cloister - writers like Walter Hilton, the anonymous authors of the Cloud of Unknowing and the Chastising of God's Children, and Nicholas Love - we may have a better chance of locating and understanding the motives of the Middle English translator of the Mirouer.
ContributorsStauffer, Robert F (Author) / Voaden, Rosalynn (Thesis advisor) / Cruse, Markus (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Christina of Markyate, a twelfth-century visionary and prioress, has been frequently seen in scholarship as an outsider at her home institution of St Albans, enduring solely under the protection of its abbot, Geoffrey, her spiritual friend and confidant. This characterization appears incorrect when The Life of Christina of Markyate, St Albans' record of Christina's personal history and religious career, is viewed in its original literary environment. The high volume of extant material from twelfth-century St Albans makes it possible to view Christina's depiction in several original ways: as a textual construction (at least in part) influenced by Bede's narratives of holy women in his widely read Ecclesiastical History; as a portrayal of contemporary devotional prayer in the style of Anselm of Canterbury, a major authority on devotional practices of the time; and as a prominent addition to St Albans' own liturgy, the record of its celebrated saints and local patrons, as an object of devotion herself. The strategy of Christina's endorsement in her Life is also notably different from strategies on display in St Albans materials related to Katherine of Alexandria, an important saint for Abbot Geoffrey, which further suggests he was not her sole promoter at the abbey, if he was involved in the process of her textual production at all. Finally, the historical fact that she was employed as a patron of St Albans before none other than Pope Adrian IV, to whom St Albans was appealing for numerous institutional benefits at the time, shows that the prevailing opinion of Christina at the abbey can not have been entirely negative. Placing the Life within the literary and cultural circumstances of its production thus provides a fresh reading of Christina's institutional and devotional roles at St Albans, medieval views of women's spirituality and its place within the western European Christian tradition, and the compositional process of a major work of medieval hagiographical literature.
ContributorsVanGinhoven, Bryan (Author) / Voaden, Rosalynn (Thesis advisor) / Newhauser, Richard (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
While tournaments, duels, and challenges were analyzed within literary texts prior to the 1980's, the most recent trend in scholarship has been to focus on how these proceedings fit into a historical context. Many authors have noted how medieval rulers used tournaments, duels, and challenges as a way to keep their militaristic knights under control; however, there has been relatively little study on the way that these three events function as a means of social control in medieval romances. This paper examines how the public nature of these events and the chivalric nature of their participants combine to subvert the agency of not only the nobles, but also King Arthur himself in four of the Sir Gawain romances, "Ywain and Gawain", "The Knightly Tale of Gologras and Gawain", "The Awntyrs off Arthur at the Terne Wathelyne" and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
ContributorsWilhite, Amanda (Author) / Bjork, Robert (Thesis advisor) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Maring, Heather (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012