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During the past twenty years or so, four major lines of criticism-psychoanalytic, feminist, new historicism, cultural materialist-have emerged and made us aware that not only the poet but also the reader exists in history. The revision of poet's work is, therefore, to locate the modern reader in his/her own historical moment as well as the text itself. Any critical endeavour of reading Shakespeare takes dual process of activity. Namely, we are reading two different stories at once: the story that Shakespeare's audience enjoyed on the contemporary Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, and the story that we read/create between the lines and behind the scenes in our own historical location. This paper is one step to examine how such a play as The Taming of the Shrew, which advocates the system of patriarchal hegemony prevailed in every particle of Elizabethan society, can be localized in the modern reassessment of Shakespeare through gender-conscious reading. The critical reading of the play consists of three parts: Patruchio's story, Katherina's story, and Sly's story. The first two stories, Petruchio's and Katherina's, tell his/her own version of the taming of the shrew, demonstrating the procedure of which the gender/identity politics is negotiated to establish its ideologically righteous power system. The Sly's story, on the other hand, as an induction to the taming of the shrew plot created for the entertainment of the Lord and Sly, negates the whole process of battle for power as theatrical illusion.

Harold Pinter's Betrayal is a sister play to The Collection (1961) and Old Times (1970). All three plays deal with a husband and wife verifying what actually happened to their partner in the past. However, what makes Betrayal outstanding among them is its anti-clockwise scheme. The play opens with the ex-lovers meeting in one of their old pub haunts in order finally to bury their liaison. Then it moves progressively, through all stages of their affairs, backwards in time to the lovers' first moment of embrace nine years earlier. As the story develops, our conventional interest in what happens next is replaced by questions of how. By switching attention to behavioural motivation, Pinter focuses more precisely than ever before on the mechanics of exploitation, the politics of human relations. Betrayal is a story in which main characters betray one another in separate ways on different levels. Conversations are thus negotiations in which the characters try to achieve and maintain the controlling position among them, and to protect themselves from others' attempts to place them in a subordinate status. Every line expresses their continual struggle for alignment. In their communication what matters most is not whether the statement is true or not, but how the words spoken modify and adjust their present relationship. The events recollected and verified are also filtered through each character's own mode of communication. They remember the past as it should have happened. Their past experience is thus recalled in order to improve the present situation and for the benefit of the potential relationships.

Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion was composed as the Twelfth Night masque for the Court Christmas. Ben Jonson wrote the masque in answer to the request from Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham who had returned from a Spanish mission. Charles and Buckingham had made a secret journey to Spain to negotiate the prince's marriage with the Spanish Infanta and to bring her home to England. The Spanish match had been a favorite and ambitious project of King James. However, after long negotiations the prince and the duke returned home resentfully, and the Jacobean court was divided between James and Prince Charles concerning England's Continental policies. Jonson's masque dealt with the safe return of Prince Charles from his misson to Spain; and yet the subject-matter was to pay homage to King James's political wisdom and the consequent triumph for the victorious return of his son. Neptune and his court was dentified with James I and his court and the argument of the masque was presented as an ideal version of the recent political events. In fact, Charles's mission to Spain brought nothing fruitful to England; and much worse, King James was pushed into a new and hard course in foreign policy. Nevertheless, Jonson's loyalty to the State as the court poet urged him to rewrite English history and to create another myth of Jacobean England as the 'Fortunate Isles'. Jonson was convinced that the poet had obligation to serve the State and to sustain wise government by providing the monarch with good counsel. Yet Jonson was never ignorant of the fact that the masquewriter's function which the poet himself believed to be was not identical with the one that the court audience expected. Jonson's awareness of this gap was demonstrated in the comic dialogue between the 'Poet' and the 'Master-Cooke' of the masque. The main masque celebrated the ideal reign of James I by identifying it with the myth of Ocean God, Neptune. And, by the employment of the poet figure as masque-writer of the masque in progress on the stage, Jonson exposed that the masque world was an illusion, a fiction created by the poet. The meta-masque device introduced in Neptune's Triumph was thus a Jonsonian way of manifestation that the poet's invention alone could achieve the ideal transformation of the Monarchy.

The royal entry developed in the Renaissance Europe was a vehicle for the glorification of monarchical imagery. The coronation entry of James I and the pageants were devised to create a mythology for the new monarchy. The triumphal arches with emblems and allegorical figures erected along the processional route were the symbol of the expected wise government of the virtuous king. The accompanying pageants embodied the moral arguments that the arches signified. The introductory part of this paper will make a brief survey of the development of the royal entry in Europe. The second part will examine the function of the triumphal arches and the accompanying pageants at the time of James I's coronation. The focus of my examination here will be Ben Jonson's contribution to this royal entry. The last part will be concluded with the analysis of the decline of processions and the subsequent flourishing of the court masque in James's Court.

This paper is an attempt to see how the satirist in John Marston's works is characterized. First of all, a brief survey will be made of English satire before Marston. Then I will examine how Marston presents the satirist in his verse satire and on the stage. In verse satire, Pigmalion and The Scourge of Villanie, the satirist, filled with righteous indignation, exposes the depraved world where the fools and villains prosper by pretending to be virtuous. In order to attack vice effectively, the satirist employs the most sharp-edged weapons: irony, sarcasm, caricature, and vituperation. He speaks harsh and unnecessarily obscene language to make human depravity as ugly as possible. As a result of this, he acquires unpleasant characteristics which make suspect his post of a heroic scourger of vice. But our attention is always diverted from the satirist to his satiric objects, because we hear only his voice and stand with him. So his moral flaw remains hidden in verse satire. On the stage, however, we escape the control of his rhetoric, and see the distance between what the satirist claims he is and what he really is. In Antonio and Mellida and What You Will, Marston makes explicit the satirist's ugliness, the features twisting with hate and envy at the sight of the prosperous fools and villains. Thus, the satirist becomes a caricature of the conventional satirist developed in verse satire. In The Malcontent, Marston again elaborates on the moral and sanative purpose of satire. The satirist's sharp-edged weapons serve as effective political instruments to control the depraved world. The satirist contributes to probe to the very source of infection in the state and cut it out of the body politic. The Fawn has quite a different type of the satirist. Disguised as a flatterer, the satirist lures men into foolishness by praising that folly and vice are worldly wisdom. Instead of raillery and diatribe, he employs a technique of exposing absurdity by intensification. As a result, the action of the play moves towards clarification through release.