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This study contributes to practical discussions on the composition of dynamic music for video games from the composer’s perspective. Creating greater levels of immersion in players is used as a justification for the proposals of the thesis. It lays down foundational aesthetic elements in order to proceed with a logical methodology. The aim of this paper is to build upon, and further hybridise, two techniques used by composers and by video game designers to increase further the reactive agility and memorability of the music for the player. Each chapter of this paper explores a different technique for joining two (possibly disparate) types of gameplay, or gamestates, with appropriate continuous music. In each, I discuss a particular musical engine capable of implementing continuous music. Chapter One will discuss a branching-music engine, which uses a precomposed musical mosaic (or musical pixels) to create a linear score with the potential to diverge at appropriate moments accompanying onscreen action. I use the case study of the Final Fantasy battle system to show how the implementation of a branching-music engine could assist in maintaining the continuity of gameplay experience that current disjointed scores, which appear in many games, create. To aid this argument I have implemented a branching-music engine, using the graphical object oriented programming environment MaxMSP, in the style of the battle music composed by Nobuo Uematsu, the composer of the early Final Fantasy series. The reader can find this in the accompanying demonstrations patch. In Chapter Two I consider how a generative-music engine can also implement a continuous music and also address some of the limitations of the branching-music engine. Further I describe a technique for an effective generative music for video games that creates musical ‘personalities’ that can mimic a particular style of music for a limited period of time. Crucially, this engine is able to transition between any two personalities to create musical coincidence with the game. GMGEn (Game Music Generation Engine) is a program I have created in MaxMSP to act as an example of this concept. GMGEn is available in the Demonstrations_Application. Chapter Three will discuss potential limitations of the branching music engine described in Chapter One and the generative music engine described in Chapter Two, and highlights how these issues can be solved by way of a third engine, which hybridises both. As this engine has an indeterminate musical state it is termed the intermittent-music engine. I go on to discuss the implementation of this engine in two different game scenarios and how emergent structures of this music will appear. The final outcome is to formulate a new compositional approach delivering dynamic music, which accompanies the onscreen action with greater agility than currently present in the field, increasing the memorability and therefore the immersive effect of the video-game music.

This study explores the interrelationship between spatiality and subjecthood in the work of Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Alfred Jarry. Concerned with various modes of poetry and drama, it also examines the cross-pollination that can occur between these modes, focusing on a relatively narrow corpus of core texts: Mallarmé’s Igitur (c. 1867-70) and Un Coup de dés (1897); Apollinaire’s “Zone” (1912) and various of his calligrammes; Maeterlinck’s early one-act plays—L’Intruse (1890), Les Aveugles (1890), and Intérieur (1894); and Jarry’s Ubu roi (1896) and César-Antechrist (1895). The poetic and dramatic practices of these four authors are assessed against the broader cultural and philosophical contexts of the fin de siècle. The fin de siècle witnessed a profound epistemological shift: the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm, increasingly challenged throughout the nineteenth century, was largely dismantled, with ramifications beyond physics, philosophy and psychology. Chapter 1 introduces three foundational notions—Newtonian absolute space, the unitary Cartesian subject, and subject-object dualism—that were challenged and ultimately overthrown in turn-of-the-century science and art. Developments in theatre architecture and typographic design are examined against this philosophical backdrop with a view to establishing a diachronic and interdisciplinary framework of the authors in question. Chapter 2 focuses on the spatial dimension of Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés and Apollinaire’s calligrammes—works which defamiliarise page-space by undermining various (naturalised) conventions of paginal configuration. In Chapter 3, the notion of liminality (the experience or condition of the betwixt and between) is implemented in an analysis of character and diegetic space as constructed in Jarry’s Ubu roi and Maeterlinck’s one-acts. Chapters 4 and Chapter 5 undertake a more abstract investigation of parallel inverse processes—the subjectivisation of space and the spatialisation of the subject —manifest not only in the works of Mallarmé, Maeterlinck, Apollinaire and Jarry, but in the period’s poetry and drama more generally.

This thesis considers crucial questions relating to the theatrical works of Aimé Césaire and Derek Walcott and argues that the authors' quest for identity is framed by a dialectic which Édouard Glissant has termed "philosophy of Relation". I show that it is this "philosophy of Relation" which helps the authors formulate a theatrical vision that transcends the chaotic aspects of Antillean history. By examining the dialectical thrust of Walcott's and Césaire's theatre, the study seeks to develop an overarching theory of modern West Indian drama that accounts for its specific Antillean nature.

It is now broadly accepted that Vaughan Williams's music betrays a more complex relation to national influences than has traditionally been assumed. It is argued in this thesis that despite the trends towards revisionism that have characterized recent work, Vaughan Williams's interest in and engagement with English folk materials and cultures remains only partially understood. Offering contextual interpretation of materials newly available in the field, my work takes as its point of departure the critical neglect surrounding Vaughan Williams's contradictory compositional debut, in which he denounced the value of folk song in English art music in an article published alongside his song 'Linden Lea', subtitled 'A Dorset Folk Song'. Reconstructing the under-documented years of the composer's early career, it is demonstrated that Vaughan Williams's subsequent 'conversion' and lifelong attachment to folk song emerged as part of a broader concern with the intelligible and participatory quality of song and its performance by the human voice. As such, it is argued that the ways in which this composer theorized an idea of 'song' illuminate a powerful perspective from which to re-consider the propositions of his project for a national music. Locating Vaughan Williams's writings within contemporaneous cultural ideas and practices surrounding 'song', 'voice', and 'Englishness', this work brings such contexts into dialogue with readings of various of the composer's works, composed both before and after the First World War. It is demonstrated in this way that the rehabilitation of Vaughan Williams's music and reputation profitably proceeds by reconstructing a complex dialogue between his writings; between various cultural ideas and practices of English music; between the reception of his works by contemporaneous critics; and crucially, by considering the propositions of his music as explored through analysis. Ultimately, this thesis contends that Vaughan Williams's music often betrays a complex and self-conscious performance of cultural ideas of national identity, negotiating an optimistic or otherwise ambivalent relationship to an English musical tradition that is constructed and referenced through a particular idea of song.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the comic art of Molière through the lens of empathy and narcissism, and reciprocally, to show that Molière nourishes Western thought about these phenomena, which can be viewed as opposite ends of a continuum. Every personality has some of each, but the unbalanced egoist has excessive self-love and cannot put himself in another's place. The narcissist is omnipresent in Molière's theatre, but has been heretofore unidentified as such in criticism. This work attempts to fill this gap, and accordingly, my corpus encompasses his 33 extant plays. Furthermore, these psychological concepts are inherently theatrical, especially with respect to whether or not spectators recognize themselves in characters on stage. There is a dialectic relation between reconnaissance and empathy or antipathy, and, therefore, laughter. Hence, empathy and narcissism provide a way of looking at characters on stage and at the interaction between the dramatic action and the audience. To explore the former, I investigate endogenous words Molière uses to convey empathy and narcissism; how he portrays empathizers and narcissists visually through their adherence to and breaking of social codes; and how cognition influences their ability to change. For the latter, I demonstrate how early modern querelles surrounding Molière's plays involve these notions; and how his metatheatrical discourses reveal that Molière transports his spectators 'hors de soi': a state that mirrors romantic love and provides pleasure. Taken in this framework, I argue that Molière's work can be seen as anti-narcissistic; if his spectators knew themselves in the mirror he held up, laughing was a means of precluding blind empathy. Thus, employing tools from modern psychology and neuroscience and notions from the seventeenth century, this thesis evaluates how Molière's characters provide us, today, with a means for better understanding the place of narcissism in our occidental world.

This thesis looks into the relationship between dance and politics. It argues that dance is both a method of intervening in other symbolic languages and a system of inscription that is intertwined in that moment of intervention. Dance as a political language has a subversive potential; it can challenge verbal political statements. In the thesis I work with and against Jacques Rancière’s interpretation of politics as re-distribution of the sensible and with Aletta Norval’s reading of Rancière’s conception of democracy as egalitarian inscription which I expand and read as egalitarian embodied inscription. I show that Rancière’s focus on politics as rupture disables the recognition inscription as continuity. I show that dance enables a reading of politics as both rupture and continuity, an intervention that leaves traces that endure after it ends. Through a genealogy of the concept of the Dionysian I show that philosophers and dance practitioners alike have read dance as both subversive and affirmative, an intervention and a system of inscription that acts independently of spoken discourse. I show that Isadora Duncan created the first political moment in modern dance as a re-distribution of the sensible; at the same time although she created egalitarian embodied inscription she did not leave a codified system of movement, and did not contradict her politics in spoken language. I show that Martha Graham created the second moment of re-distribution of the sensible in which she created a codified movement language that subverted politics in spoken words. Finally, I revisit Rancière’s work and bind his discussion of human rights with the problematic of the tension between rupture and continuity. I re-read both these arguments with my interpretation of dance as political and argue that it yields a reading of dance as enabling the creation of human rights claims. Dance is both subversive and affirmative.

‘Chastity on the Early Modern English Stage’ seeks to explain the relationship between tragicomedy’s brief and short-lived English popularity and the royal cult of chastity which spanned exactly the same historical time-frame. This study attempts to define a cultural movement which influenced the political, religious, social, intellectual, aesthetic, and medical fields in the first half of the seventeenth-century and argues that the narrative tropes which structured, and assisted the spread of, the post-Elizabethan cult of chastity were the same tropes governing the tragicomedies so popular in the period. The arguments made for tragicomedy are speculatively extended to all generic forms, with the intention of expanding an area of scholarship still dominated by formalist analysis. By focussing on narrative tropes and locating them within both fictional and non-fictional texts and in the presentation and discussion of significant events (from medical discoveries to liturgical arrangements and royal birthing rituals) this thesis aims to illustrate that the human and cosmic visions articulated by different dramatic genres were as relevant to early modern lives outside the theatre as they were to those within it. Genre is thus less a description of a text’s formal characteristics and more a set of truths governing certain human experiences both in texts and in life. Focussing on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, two plays by John Ford, Caroline court masques and birthing rituals, Milton’s A Maske and a number of non-professional performances (from the Earl of Castlehaven’s trial to William Harvey’s demonstration of the circulation of the blood), ‘Chastity on the Early Modern English Stage’ describes the four tropes of chastity and their place in tragicomic experience from the death of Elizabeth I to the beheading of Charles I. While Charles’s death and the closure of the theatres are crucial reasons for the abrupt end of the cult of chastity and tragicomedy, this thesis argues that cause must also be attributed to the efforts of pro-Parliamentary and Puritan writers who, throughout the 1630s and 1640s, sought to claim the tropes of chastity for their own rhetoric and cause. Their success resulted in a redefinition of chastity as masculine, individuated, Parliamentarian, Protestant, intellectual, civic and prosaic instead of Catholic, royal, spectacular, feminised, Marian, pietised, and theatrical.

This thesis examines the performance of Indian classical dance in the contemporary 'diaspora space' (Brah 1996) represented by the city of London. My aim is to analyse whether and how performances of "national" art, assumed to represent an equally "national" culture, change when performed in transnational contexts. Drawing upon theories of postcolonialism, multiculturalism and diaspora, I begin my study with an historical analysis of the reconstructed origins of the dance in the intertwined discourses of British colonialism and Indian nationalism. Using this analysis to ground my ethnography of the present-day practice of the dance, I unearth its relation to discourses of contemporary multiculturalism and South Asian diasporic identity. I then demonstrate specific ways in which the relationship between colonial and postcolonial artistic production on the one hand and contemporary performances of national and multicultural identity on the other are visible in the current practices and approaches of diasporic and multicultural Indian classical dancers. My thesis advances the scholarship that has demonstrated the link between the construction of Indian classical dance and the Indian nationalist movement by highlighting particular ways in which historical narrative, national and religious identities, gendered ideals and racialised categories are constituted through, and help produce in turn, contemporary Indian classical dance practices in the diaspora. Locating my study in the UK while still accounting for the Indian nationalist aspects of the dance, my contribution to the scholarly literature is to analyse its performance in relation to both Indian and British national identity. My research demonstrates that Indian classical dance is co-produced by both British and Indian national discourses and their respective cultural and political imperatives, even as the dance contributes to the formation of British, Indian and South Asian diasporic politico-cultural identities.

A definitive text of the libretto of Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes is here presented. The process by which it was created is revealed in detail. All the extant versions are collated and significant differences between them displayed. For the first time the scenarios written by Britten and his partner Peter Pears and the first surviving draft versions of scenes by the librettist Montagu Slater are published in full. Additions to the draft and final libretto texts and revisions throughout this process by Slater, Britten, producer Eric Crozier and, in the final scene, poet Ronald Duncan, are clarified and a critique provided. Marked differences in stage directions between the libretto texts and music scores are shown and versions selected or created which offer the best indicative detail for performance practice. The edited text is similarly enriched by the inclusion of performance indicators from various sources added by Britten, Pears and the work's first conductor, Reginald Goodall. The edition is introduced by three 'Perspectives' sections which consider (1) Britten's relationship with Slater and working practice with librettists; (2) the relationship of the work to its original source, George Crabbe's poem The Borough, the difference in the portrait and treatment of the character Peter Grimes and the reasons for the difference; and (3) the particular contribution and features of Slater's writing. Thereafter follow an account of the rationale, principles and practice of the edition and introductions to every scene in which the use of source material, the evolution of the text, the plot development and performance issues of the scene, the presentation of characters and the set are delineated, the latter with reference to photographs of the original set hitherto unpublished.

This thesis examines the traces of theological and broader religious discourses in selected works of three major twentieth-century poets. Each of the texts examined in this thesis encodes within its poetics a distinct, theologically derived conception of the ontological status of the self in relation to the Absolute. Yeats primarily envisions the relation as one of essential identity, Jones regards it as defined by alterity, and Eliot depicts it as dialectical and paradoxical. Critics have underestimated the impact on Yeats’s late work of his final and most sustained engagement with Indic traditions, which issued from his friendship and collaboration with Shri Purohit Swami. Though Yeats projected Theosophical notions on the Indic texts and traditions he studied with Purohit, he successfully incorporated principles of Classical Yoga and Tantra into his later poetry. Much of Yeats’s late poetics reflects his struggle to situate the individuated self ontologically in light of traditions that devalue that self in favor of an impersonal, cosmic subjectivity. David Jones’s The Anathemata encodes a religious position opposed to that of Yeats. For Jones, a devout Roman Catholic committed to the bodily, God is Wholly Other. The self is fallen and circumscribed, and must connect with the divine chiefly through the mediation of the sacraments. In The Anathemata, the poet functions as a kind of lay priest attempting sacramentally to recuperate sacred signs. Because, according to Jones’s exoteric theology, the self must love God through fellow creatures, The Anathemata is not only circular, forming a verbal templum around the Cross; it is also built of massive, rich elaborations of creaturely detail, including highly embroidered and historicized voices and discourses. Critics have long noted the influence of Christian mystical texts on Eliot’s Four Quartets, but some have also detected a countercurrent within the later three Quartets, one that resists the timeless even as the poem valorizes transcending time. This tension, central to Four Quartets, reflects Eliot’s engagement with the dialectical theology of Karl Barth. Eliot’s deployment of paradox and negation does not merely echo the apophatic theology of the mystical texts that figure in the poem; it also reflects the discursive strategies of Barth’s theology. The self in Four Quartets is dialectical and paradoxical: suspended between time and eternity, it can transcend its own finitude only by embracing it.

Seneca’s contribution to the development of Western European theatre and conceptions of theatricality has been underestimated in comparison to that of Greek tragedy. This thesis argues for the continuous importance of Senecan drama in theatrical theory and practice from the sixteenth century until the present day. It examines significant instances of Seneca in performance, and shows how these draw on particular aspects of Seneca’s style and dramaturgical technique to coalesce into a sub-genre of tragedy termed here ‘hypertragedy’ or the ‘senecan aesthetic’. The underlying premise of this representational mode is that verbal (vocal) performance is a physical act and induces physical responses. This entails the consequential inference that Senecan theatre is not mimetic – that is, based on an isomorphic identification of character with performer – but rather affective; like oratory, it functions through direct, quasi-musical manipulation of the auditor’s senses. The goal of this theatrical form is to articulate extreme states of mind or experiences which cannot be conveyed via conventional mimetic means: pain, frenzy, dissolution of the self. In tracing the theories of tragedy which comprise a narrative contrapuntal to the reception of Seneca onstage, it is possible to identify the factors which have successively constructed, promoted, suppressed, reviled and finally reinstated the senecan aesthetic as philhellenism’s other.

Existing accounts of the music profession argue that between 1750 and 1850 musicians acquired a new identity as professional ‘artists’ and experienced a concomitant rise in their social and cultural status. In the absence of sustained investigation, it has often been implied that these changes affected male and female musicians in similar ways. As this thesis contends, this was by no means the case. Arguments in support of female musical professionalism, artistry, and their function in public life were made in this period. Based on the gender-specific nature of the female voice, they were an important defence of women’s public engagement that has been overlooked by gender historians, something which this thesis sets out to correct. However, the public role and professionalism of female musicians were in opposition to the prevailing valorisation of female domesticity and privacy. Furthermore, the notion of women as creative artists was highly unstable in an era which tended to label artistry, ‘genius’ and creativity as male attributes. For these reasons, the idea of female musicians as professional artists was always in tension with contemporary conceptions of gender, making women’s experience of the ‘rise of the artist’ much more contested and uncertain compared to that of men. Those advocating the female singer as professional artist were a minority in the British musical world. Their views co-existed alongside very different and much more prevalent approaches to the female singer which had little to do with the idea of the professional artist. Through examining debates about female singers in printed sources, particularly newspapers and periodicals, alongside case studies based on the surviving documents of specific singers, this thesis builds a picture of increasing diversity in the experiences and representations of female musicians in this period and underlines the controlling influence of gender in shaping responses to them.

This thesis provides the first study of the representation, performance, and reception of Shakespeare’s ageing women in early modern and present-day England. It contributes an exposition of the physiology and theory of early modern ageing, drawing on this original material to make an argument for the ageing woman as a source of anxiety within the plays as they were originally staged, and as they are performed and received today. It finds the old and ageing woman in Shakespeare’s drama to be represented as physically and verbally excessive; the thesis also identifies a corresponding urge in the plays and in their reception towards the ageing woman’s containment and control. This containment is exercised in the text, the rehearsal room, the theatre, and the public space of performance reviews. My introduction determines my methodology and establishes the terms of reference for the project. The first chapter defines early modern old age and delivers a study of the early modern literature and theory of the ageing body. Each of the four subsequent chapters explores an ageing female character or characters through the lens of a theme: magic, motherhood, sexuality, and memory. The characters studied are drawn from The Merry Wives of Windsor, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, Coriolanus, King John, All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and Richard III. Some brief concluding remarks complete the thesis. The larger project of the thesis is a cultural study. Throughout, I am keen to learn how characters are talked about as well as written and performed. My effort to understand the work which Shakespeare’s older women are asked to carry out in the present day defines my methodology: I draw on prompt books, production recordings, reviews, costume, photographs, programmes, and interviews with actors and directors to aid my investigation, juxtaposing these with close study of the written plays and the early modern culture and knowledge which underpins them. The word count, exclusive of bibliography but inclusive of all footnotes and an appendix, is approximately 92,000.

This study enquires into the construction of a cultural fantasy, the favorite (or royal mistress), in the reign of Louis XIV (1661-1715), and aims to explore the kinds of narrative, the 'scénario pour l’imaginaire', articulated around this figure. A process of crystallization in respect of the favorite, both as word and as literary figure, develops across the late seventeenth century. This process is on the one hand fuelled by the increasing prominence of female favouritism as a political practice during the period, and on the other facilitated by the emergence of new privileged media such as the novel and the 'nouvelle historique'. The favorite, as a new incarnation of the ‘femme forte’, becomes a trope by which anxieties can be expressed: about female power, but also about the monarchy in general. This thesis advances by way of close readings and studies of vast corpora of texts; it alternates – both within and between chapters – between analysis and synthesis. Following the introduction, the first chapter introduces a set of mental landmarks, both semantic and axiological, and explores the dictionaries, treatises and courtly manuals of the time in search of the favorite. The second chapter focuses on the fiction of the 1660s and 1670s, and questions the way in which these texts established elements of definition and recurrent issues related to the staging of the favorite in this period. The third chapter considers the representation of Louis XIV's mistresses, principally through a study of the ballets, poems, letters, memoirs, satires and pamphlets concerned with the Sun King's loves. Its object is to show how the favorite is inserted into the royal mythology. The fourth chapter is dedicated to the first text explicitly and exclusively devoted to the favorite: the Histoire des Favorites (1697) by Anne de La Roche-Guilhen. This chapter attempts to bring to light the tensions underlying the text, while interrogating the determining role of this collection in the process of crystallization explored throughout the thesis. The fifth chapter sketches out the afterlife of the favorite under Louis XV and Louis XVI, and describes the principal evolutions which ensured her survival in the collective imagination.

This is the first full-scale study of Robert Greene’s drama, offering a new interpretation of the dramatic oeuvre of one Shakespeare’s most neglected literary predecessors. Recent criticism has emphasised Greene’s pioneering role as an author of Elizabethan romance. Yet, in contrast to the numerous prose works which were printed during his life time, his drama, which was printed posthumously, has received little attention. Greene’s plays are visually magnificent: madmen wander on stage waving the severed limbs of their victims (Orlando Furioso, c. 1591), the dead are resurrected (James IV, c. 1590), tyrants gruesomely mutilate their subjects (Selimus, c. 1591-4), extravagant stage properties such as the mysterious brazen head prophesy to the audience (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, c. 1589), and sinners are swallowed into hell accompanied by fireworks (A Looking Glass for London and England, c. 1588). This thesis will examine the way in which these stage images evoke astonishment, which in turn encourages the audience to contemplate their symbolic significance. The triumph of Greene’s drama is not one of effects over affect; it lies in the interaction between effect and affect. My principal objective in this thesis is to develop a methodological strategy which will allow critics of non-Shakespearean plays, which frequently lack a substantial performance tradition, to study drama through the lens of performance. Engaging purposively with anachronism as an enabling mode of linking old and new, this thesis will draw analogies between the early modern stage and modern cinema in order to emphasise the relevance of early modern drama to today’s ocularcentric world, a relevance that more historical theoretical approaches would seek to deny. My opening chapter will try to establish Greene’s dramatic canon and assess the critical reception of Greene’s plays. Drawing on material from Greene’s entire oeuvre, Chapter Two will outline my methodological and conceptual approach. This chapter will include an extended analysis of Friar Bacon’s discussion of the ‘strategy with cunning shows’ in John of Bordeaux (JB. 735). Launching into detailed studies of specific spectacles, Chapter Three focuses on Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene’s collaborative effort, the biblical drama A Looking Glass for London and England. During the play, Prophet Jonah is ‘cast out of the whale’s belly upon the stage’ (LG. IV.i.1460-1). Focusing on this stage spectacle, this chapter seeks to emphasise the commercial appeal of this biblical drama. Examining another stage property, Chapter Four will explore the melodramatic and sensational potential of the tomb stage property in Greene’s James IV. Examining the apparent tension between the play’s two presenters, I will demonstrate that Bohan, a cynical Scot, and Oberon, the King of the Fairies, proffer two distinct, but not mutually exclusive, ways of conceiving of and interpreting theatrical spectacle. Completing my study of spectacular stage properties, Chapter Five examines the symbolic significance of the brazen head, which appears in two of Greene’s plays: Alphonsus, King of Aragon and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. In both plays, the brazen head becomes an object of excessive or supreme devotion as either a religious idol or a secular deity. The brazen head is perceived as monstrous not simply because it is a source of horror or astonishment but because it represents the misplaced veneration or worship of something other than God. Turning away from stage properties, my final two chapters look at how Greene exploited specific stage conventions. Directing my attention towards Greene’s Orlando Furioso (c. 1591), I will argue that the figure of Orlando Furioso bequeathed an enduring legacy to early modern theatrical discourse, contributing to the convention of the mad poet, which would be replicated and parodied by a new generation of dramatists. Orlando’s behaviour, which rapidly alternates between that of a madman and that of a poet, forces the audience to contemplate the link between the mania of the mentally ill and the melancholia of the creative genius. Ridiculing the concept of furor poeticus, Greene’s play interrogates the belief that great writers are divinely inspired by God through ecstatic revelation. My final chapter will explore the aesthetics of violence in Selimus. A relatively recent addition to the Greene canon, Selimus depicts the rise of an anti-hero amidst a cycle of brutal violence. My reading of this play posits Selimus as a surrogate playwright, arguing that the semiotics of dismemberment allows Greene to interrogate the concept of artistic autonomy. Widespread indifference to Greene’s work has facilitated critical blindness to the powerful aesthetic appeal of spectacle in early modern drama. This reassessment of Robert Greene’s dramatic oeuvre offers a new perspective on the aesthetics of spectacle in early modern drama.

The thesis presents a qualitative study which examines teachers’ and pupils’ experiences of drama tasks in secondary school subject lessons other than Drama, where the tasks are incorporated in pursuit of curriculum-defined teaching and learning goals. I take a cultural-historical perspective in my analysis, interrogating the possibilities for meaningful appropriations of drama as a pedagogical toolkit by examining social interaction and communication within the cultural context of the classroom and how these practices may have developed over time. Set in four secondary school classrooms in the UK, the study focused on the experiences of teachers, (who are not trained drama specialists), and their pupils as they undertook drama tasks as part of curriculum lessons. I carried out a series of lesson observations, supplemented by interviews with participants. Using Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Cole 1996, Engeström 1987, Engeström 1999) as a heuristic tool, I created an analytical framework that explored the tensions between communicative tools, rules of the classroom space, and teacher-pupil and peer relations. This theoretical stance appreciates both the dynamic nature of classrooms and the possibilities for pedagogies of choice. The emphasis on tool-mediated action offers a fresh perspective in that it creates a structured and detailed framework for exploring the subtle and complex process of empathetic thought. This study reveals some of the ways in which tensions occur and existing and historically-embedded cultural practices are brought to the surface, and reinforced or challenged. I provide extracts from the data to illustrate a concern for an assessment-driven acquisition of curriculum content is a particular constraint, along with varying opportunities for both teacher and pupils to construct a framework for spontaneous in-role action within the dramatic form. The appropriation of communicative tools, although influential in achieving goals, does not always preclude emotional investment in the tasks. Although there are shifts from teacher authority to increased pupil decision-making, the way in which the teacher and pupils operate in these drama tasks reveals as much about the established and reinforced learning and social practices of the classroom, as the way these practices are changed. The research considers how drama as a pedagogical toolkit has developed historically, and it reveals implications for future study and practice relating to the understanding of drama-as-toolkit within formal educational settings.

There is consensus in academic circles that the directors Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine have similar approaches to theatre practice and occupy the same position in the landscape of theatre production in France. Yet there have not been any in-depth studies that unpack the similarities and differences between the two practitioners. Considering their stature on the national French and international stages, such a gap of scholarship needed to be filled. By examining the specificities of their practices via the analysis of their two most emblematic productions, the Mahabharata and Les Atrides, this thesis hopes to provide an appraisal of their practices at a time when they are moving away from theatre. More specifically, this thesis looks at how the two directors transferred ancient archetypal and mythological narratives to the contemporary French stage. It considers how they used successful, parallel methodologies to adapt and render present an Ancient Sanskrit epic on the one hand (Brook), and Ancient Greek drama on the other (Mnouchkine). I uncover in their work the matrix for adaptation, located in the discourse of storytelling and in the post-Brechtian concept of estrangement, that I label ‘décalage’. Moreover, the thesis hopes to provide an appraisal of the supremacy of directors on the French stage in the nineteen eighties and advocates for the cultural necessity of theatre as an art form, at a time of crisis in France.

This thesis traces Hardy's involvement in the theatre from the 1880s to the 1920s. The narrative of Hardy's relationship with the theatre is set against an analysis of the changing nature of the stage during this period, though I acknowledge throughout the thesis the fact that Hardy's awareness of the theatre did not perfectly keep pace with its evolution. The aim of the thesis is to examine the motivations determining Hardy's work in the theatre in light of the fact that he seemed so dismissive of its efficacy. I trace the history of Hardy's adaptations of his work for the stage, before setting the scripts against the novels in order to weigh the extent to which the novels resist translation into a different medium – whether there is something integral to Hardy's plots that cannot be conveyed on stage. I have chosen to focus predominantly on material that made it beyond a rough sketch on a scrap of paper, on projects that reached the stage of rewritings and commercial negotiations - often years before they were produced. My selection has been determined by the belief that the material is indicative of the development of Hardy's understanding of the relationship between his work and the possibilities adaptation offered. My first chapter, on the history of an adaptation of 'Far From the Madding Crowd' in 1882, argues that Hardy's collaboration with J. Comyns Carr on the script was driven by his desire to assert his copyright over the novel's afterlife. The adaptation may never have been performed, but simply have been registered with the Lord Chamberlain as a deterrent against unauthorised adapters. It was the plagiarism row over Arthur Wing Pinero's possible theft of Hardy's plot in his popular pastoral play, 'The Squire', that pushed Hardy and Carr to stage their version. My second chapter looks at the history of Hardy's adaptations of 'Tess'. I am interested primarily in his writing of two scripts in the mid-1890s, and his negotiations with leading actresses in response to their interest in creating the part of Tess. The chapter then looks at the circumstances leading to the eventual staging of the play in the 1920s, focusing on the difficulties posed by producing a script which was by then thirty years old, and showing its age. In the third chapter I concentrate on plans to stage two novels, 'The Woodlanders' and 'Jude'. Neither was produced, but both are evidence of Hardy's increasing interest in the possibility of selecting from his material, rather than compressing it into the time available. The two adaptations allied Hardy much more closely with the avant garde than his earlier work had done – 'The Woodlanders' was begun in 1889 at the suggestion of J. T. Grein and C. W. Jarvis, two men who would later found the Independent Theatre, a private subscription society which pioneered the staging of Ibsen in England. Hardy's own sketches for adapting 'Jude' (1895, 1897, 1910, 1926) concentrated on Sue's position. I set Hardy’s realignment of 'Jude' against a focus on the place of women in unhappy marriages, drawing principally on Hardy's contribution to a debate about the role of wives in the 'New Review' for June 1894 and a 'Westminster Review' article by the feminist Mona Caird (August 1888), which provoked three months of debate (and 27,000 letters) in 'The Daily Telegraph' on the question 'Is Marriage a Failure?' Caird’s ideal dovetails with Sue's views on marriage as 'legalized prostitution' and her revulsion from 'the dreadful contract to feel in a particular way in a matter whose essence is its voluntariness!' The final chapter of the thesis looks at two adaptations of 'The Dynasts'. The first is a wartime entertainment staged by Harley Granville Barker in 1914, the second is Hardy's own adaptation for Dorset amateur actors (the Hardy Players) to perform in 1916, which concentrated on the impact of the war on the local populace. I then turn to the premiere of Hardy's only full-length drama written specifically for the stage – the one-act Arthurian play 'The Queen of Cornwall' (1923). I argue in this final chapter that Hardy was beginning to move from the role of reluctant adapter to that of director, conscious of the boundaries imposed by the stage and experimenting with how to craft his work to fit within them, rather than abridging his material indiscriminately.

Between 1808 and 1814 England was committed to an expensive and bloody campaign against the French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. The Peninsular War, as it came to be known, was initially celebrated as a war of national independence that attracted widespread support. Soon after, it was characterised by political scandal and public controversy. Literary scholars have devoted much attention to the political, social and cultural effects of the French Revolution, but have written surprisingly little about the later years of the campaign against Napoleonic France. The principle objective of this thesis is to offer the first in-depth study of English theatre during the Peninsular War. It considers the most popular plays in performance, and asks what their staging, publication, and reception history reveal about a nation’s literary tastes and its political self-awareness. Sheridan’s Pizarro, a play about the Spanish conquest of Peru, was one of the most successful plays on the Romantic stage. A close analysis of this play considers its popularity between 1799 and 1815, and what it suggests about the flexibility of the contemporary repertoire system. Audiences’ ability to ascribe topical inflections to old plays helps explain the demand for Shakespeare and the bard’s political import to wartime audiences. This thesis explores the London patent stages and popular minor theatres, where programmes were restricted to song, dance, and spectacle. It also offers a case study of provincial theatre in Bristol, underscoring the significant limitations in assumptions that the metropolitan stage was representative of national trends. Archival research on the London and Bristol stages has been crucial to this study, which is based on an examination of playbills, memoranda, letters, playtexts, and prints. The newsprint and cartoons discussed offer an important political and historical framework, suggestive of the cultural expectations likely to have influenced contemporary playgoers.

I examine Wilde’s Hellenism in terms of the specific texts, editions and institutions through which he encountered ancient Greece. The late-nineteenth-century professionalisation of classical scholarship and the rise of the new science of archaeology from the 1870s onwards endangered the status of antiquity as a textual source of ideal fictions rather than a material object of positivist study. The major theme of my thesis is Wilde’s relationship with archaeology and his efforts to preserve Greece as an imaginative resource and a model for right conduct. From his childhood Wilde had accompanied his father Sir William Wilde on digs around Ireland. Sir William’s ethnological interests led him to posit a common racial origin for Celts and Greeks; thus, for Wilde, to read a Greek text was to intuit native affinity. Chapters 1–3 trace his education, his travels in Greece, his involvement with the founding of the Hellenic Society, and his defence of the archaeologically accurate stage spectaculars of the 1880s, arguing that in his close association with supporters of archaeology such as J.P. Mahaffy and George Macmillan Wilde exemplifies the new kind of Hellenist opposed by Benjamin Jowett and R.C. Jebb. Chapter 4 makes a case for Wilde’s final repudiation of archaeology and his return to the textual remains of Greek antiquity, present as an intertexual resource in his mature works. Thus I examine the role of Aristotle’s Ethics in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ and of Platonism in the critical dialogues, The Picture of Dorian Gray and ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ I present The Importance of Being Earnest as a self-conscious exercise in the New Comedy of Menander, concluding that Wilde ultimately returned to the anachronistic eclecticism of the Renaissance attitude to ancient texts.

‘Poetry’ insisted Ezra Pound, ‘is a composition of words set to music’: his Cantos remembered ‘Uncle Willie’ downstairs composing, singing poetry to himself. This study examines the nature and effects of W.B.Yeats’s idiosyncratic but profound sense of music. For his poems were compositions set to music. They were saturated with musical themes; syntactically he professed to write for the ear rather than the eye; and he flung himself repeatedly into the breach between music and words, composing ballads, songs, and plays with music, and performing poetry with musical instruments. My thesis is that nature of poetry, spoken, read or sung, obsessed Yeats, and I hold it self evident that such an acutely self-conscious poetry will articulate this obsession: to use his own imagery, will bear the scars of its own birth. What follows is a study of meaning, obsession, and influence, beginning with what Yeats knew and how he came to poetry: his father’s and his own vocalizations of the musical preoccupations of Scott and Shelley, viewed through the annotations of ‘the first book [he] knew Shelley in’ and the solipsistic singers and instrumentalists of his early verse. The theme of chapter two is Ireland: the musical resonances of Anglo Irish ballads and Irish verse are viewed through Yeats’s aurally-oriented canon-formation, as we examine his instinctual recitations and deliberate approach to Irish folksong through the mediation of Douglas Hyde. The aesthetics of Wagner, Pater, and the French symbolistes frame the third chapter, which describes how poetry might approach the condition of music in the motivic organization of The Wind Among the Reeds. In chapter four the impact of Nietzsche’s profoundly musical philosophy is correlated for the first time with the exact moments of Yeats’s discovery of his texts, as Yeats’s plays and poetry move from ‘Apollonian’ languor to ‘Dionysian’ energy, from dream to song and dance. My final chapter uncovers the long history of the practical experiments Yeats made to perform poetry with a ‘psaltery’, and their resonating afterlife in subsequent poetry and poets. No musician himself, Yeats’s musical sense has until now been entirely dismissed: this study shows how central it is to his art and to an understanding of the dominant aesthetic of the age.

This study seeks to provide historical and literary contexts for elderly characters from English play-texts c.1580 to 1625. Its primary aim, from a literary perspective, is to draw attention to the ways that a better understanding of elderly characterisation can enrich the appreciation of much-studied play-texts, and to indicate some interesting features of more obscure ones. Its secondary aim is to suggest the value, for social historians of old age in early modern England, of play-texts as social evidence. I have examined most of the published extant play-texts of the period, and have found approximately 150 of these to be relevant (the most important of these are listed in the Appendix). Because of the problems of handling all aspects of such a large amount of material, I have chosen to consider the plays chiefly as texts to be read, with little reference to their performative aspects. However, I analyse the dramas as literary as well as social documents. Specific plays provide illustrations for observations and support for various hypotheses about dramatic representations of the elderly. In some instances, I address plays which have received little critical attention. The thesis falls into two parts. In the first three chapters, I discuss the socio-historical, cultural and non-dramatic literary contexts for representations of elderly men and women in play-texts. In chapters four through seven, I examine elderly characters in specific role or relationship categories: as sovereigns and magistrates, in sexual and marital relationships, and as parents. In the final chapter, I offer a detailed analysis of The Old Law by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley.