This thesis is concerned with exploring different forms of Jacobean drama and performances that span across different sites, from the commercial stages of London, to the civic pageants that took place on the Thames and in the City, and the court entertainments held at Whitehall Palace. My research necessarily casts a wide net over its subject matter in order to illustrate how these different modes of performance engage with representations of the marine through the technologies available to them, whether poetic, material, or both. While the sea had long been a receptacle for literary and poetic attention and can repeatedly be found as the stronghold of adventure, wonder, danger, and exile in the English narrative tradition, it is specifically at the beginning of the seventeenth century that the sea takes a hold of the literary imagination with particular force.

The cultural, political, and economic predominance of the marine in early modern England found numerous means of expression in drama, where the different facets of marine identity and occupation create on-stage marine spaces. The thesis elucidates how these modes of performance often invoke and exploit the dramatic potential of the marine and its commercial, political, and iconographical meanings. Commercial drama, written for a pre-proscenial stage, realises the marine through language and metaphor, appealing to a collective imaginary in bodying forth the limitless watery expanses on which the action takes place. This imaginative embodiment finds a very different—and indeed a more material—means of expression in civic drama and the court masque, where the extensive and elaborate pageant devices and stage machinery were largely indebted to and shaped by continental theatrical design. The material means of expressing the marine that are found in the civic performances and the court masques discussed in this study necessitates a consideration of European trends in theatre design and the decorative arts. In looking to visual and material culture this thesis explicates the interdependence between different modes of creating on-stage marine spaces and the ways in which the material presence inflects both language and action in Jacobean drama.

‘A sea-change’: representations of the marine in Jacobean drama and visual culture

Narratives of Eros and desire in Shakespeare's poetry

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Ecologies of Thought in Early Modern English Drama.

Indebted to Shakespeare’s understanding of perspective in the visual arts as much as to the tradition of ut pictura poesis , Sonnet 24 uses poetry’s capacity for ambiguity and references drama’s ability to create slippage between character and actor to demonstrate that manipulated surfaces—to wit, the perspectival paintings in vogue since the early fifteenth century—cannot delve into the interior but only discover, or create, more surfaces By understanding and to some degree exploiting the techniques of perspectival artists, Shakespeare is gradually able to create a play space at once deeply physical and insistently metaphysical The chamber scene in Hamlet , with its mirror and thrust-through arras, and the final scene in King Lear , with its stage-versioned vanishing point at the silent mouth of the dead Cordelia, suggest that Shakespeare uses his knowledge of perspective and its limitations in part to explore the dramatic possibilities for character interiority

Shakespeare's Play with Perspective: Sonnet 24, Hamlet, Lear

This article considers how Shakespeare’s King Lear has become a Brexit play across a range of discourses and media, from theatre productions and journalism to social media. With its themes of division and disbursement, of cliff edges and tragic self-immolation, Lear is the Shakespearean play that has been turned to as metaphor and analogy for the UK’s decision following the 23 June 2016 referendum to leave the European Union. Reading this presentist application of Shakespeare, the article attends to Shakespeare as itself a discourse through which cultural ideas, both real and imaginary, about Brexit and the EU are negotiated. It asks how can we might remap Lear in this present context―what other meanings and histories are to be derived from the play, especially in Lear’s exile and search for refuge, or in Cordelia’s departure for and return from France? Moving from a consideration of a Brexit Lear to an archipelagic and even European Lear, this article argues that Shakespeare is simultaneously a site of supranational connections and of a desire for values of empathy and refuge that reverberate with debates about migration in Europe.

/pdf/finding-refuge-in-king-lear-from-brexit-to-shakespeare-s-3msv4ote3x.pdf

Finding Refuge in King Lear: From Brexit to Shakespeare’s European Value

La rhetorique de l'illusion et les limites de la representation : la perspective dans " K. L. "

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1772378.pdf

Jonathan Goldberg

Papers

Dover Cliff and the Conditions of Representation : King Lear 4 : 6 in Perspective in Medieval and Renaissance Representation : New Reflections.