Lellock, Jasmine Shay (Author)
Cartwright, Kent
Bauer, Ralph
Coletti, Theresa
Gill, Meredith J
University of Maryland, College Park
Bauer, Ralph
Coletti, Theresa
Passannante, Gerard
Gill, Meredith J
Passannante, Gerard
Edition Details: Advisor: Cartwright, Kent; Committee Members: Bauer, Ralph, Coletti, Theresa, Passannante, Gerard, Gill, Meredith J.
Physical Details: 294 pp.
Language: English
In late medieval and early modern England, magic was everywhere. Although contested, occult beliefs and practices flourished among all classes of people, and they appeared regularly as a subject of early English drama. My dissertation focuses on staged magic in early English drama, demonstrating the ways in which it generates metacritical commentary. It argues that magic in drama serves more than just a symbolic function, but rather, some early English drama saw itself as performing a kind of magic that was also efficacious. To this end, this project theorizes that drama participated in forms of contemporary magic that circulated at the time. This dissertation focuses on representations of magic in early English drama, specifically in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament (ca. 1471), Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1588-92), William Shakespeare's The Tempest (1610-1), and John Milton's A Maske Performed at Ludlow Castle (1634). These early English plays stage their magic as socially and personally beneficial, not just illusory, flawed, or demonic. Whether staging magic as a critique or apology for its own medium, however, the plays suggest that theater draws upon magic to depict itself as efficacious. This project thus reads magic as both a metaphoric, literary convention and its own entity with accompanying political and cultural effects. Examining magic and its representation as part of a continuum--as contemporary audiences would have done--offers a clearer picture of what magic is doing in the plays and how early observers might have apprehended its effects. This dissertation offers a textually based cultural context for the magic found within its central plays, bringing extraliterary magical texts into conversation with literary, dramatic texts. Because the borders between natural philosophy, religion, and magic were not clearly defined in early modern England, this project draws as well upon scholarship and primary materials in the history of science and religion. The motivation of this project is to reanimate early English theater with a sense of wonder and magic that it historically offered and that it continues to bring to readers and audiences to this day.
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 75/02(E), Aug 2014. Proquest Document ID: 1461770623.
Similar Citations
Thesis
Hodes, Nathaniel;
(2014)
The Muses' Method: Logic and the Moral Function of English Renaissance Poetry
(/isis/citation/CBB001567584/)
Book
Turner, Henry S.;
(2006)
The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580--1630
(/isis/citation/CBB000640791/)
Book
Lipking, Lawrence;
(2014)
What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution
(/isis/citation/CBB001510101/)
Book
Cummins, Juliet;
Burchell, David;
(2007)
Science, Literature, and Rhetoric in Early Modern England
(/isis/citation/CBB000774600/)
Book
Pettigrew, Todd H. J.;
(2007)
Shakespeare and the Practice of Physic: Medical Narratives on the Early Modern English Stage
(/isis/citation/CBB000772386/)
Book
Harris, Jonathan Gil;
(2004)
Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare's England
(/isis/citation/CBB000800019/)
Book
Paster, Gail Kern;
(2004)
Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage
(/isis/citation/CBB000640102/)
Thesis
Dye, Amy;
(2005)
Writing Creation in England, 1580--1680
(/isis/citation/CBB001560880/)
Thesis
Liou, Jennifer Hwa Yu;
(2013)
“This Rough Magic”: Experimental Literature in Seventeenth-Century England
(/isis/citation/CBB001567436/)
Book
Kerwin, William;
(2005)
Beyond the Body: The Boundaries of Medicine and English RenaissanceDrama
(/isis/citation/CBB000720434/)
Article
Turner, Anthony;
(2007)
Stagecraft and Mathematical Magic in Early Modern London
(/isis/citation/CBB000850236/)
Thesis
Moshenska, Joseph;
(2011)
“Feeling Pleasures”: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England
(/isis/citation/CBB001567300/)
Book
Jackie Bennett;
Andrew Lawson;
(2016)
Shakespeare's Gardens
(/isis/citation/CBB702535308/)
Chapter
Spates, William;
(2010)
Shakespeare and the Irony of Early Modern Disease Metaphor and Metonymy
(/isis/citation/CBB001253087/)
Chapter
Potkowski, Edward;
(2006)
Gott, Teufel und Schrift. Vorstellungen zu den heiligen und dämonischen Wirkungen der Schrift im Polen des 15.--16. Jahrhunderts
(/isis/citation/CBB001020514/)
Chapter
Rees, Emma L. E.;
(2010)
Cordelia's Can't: Rhetorics of Reticence and (Dis)ease in King Lear
(/isis/citation/CBB001253084/)
Book
Selfridge-Field, Eleanor;
(2007)
Song and Season: Science, Culture, and Theatrical Time in Early Modern Venice
(/isis/citation/CBB001020722/)
Book
Margaret Willes;
(2015)
A Shakespearean Botanical
(/isis/citation/CBB647549819/)
Thesis
Sarkar, Debapriya;
(2014)
Possible Knowledge: Forms of Literary and Scientific Thought in Early Modern England
(/isis/citation/CBB001567568/)
Thesis
Votava, Jennie M.;
(2012)
The “Other” Senses: Mediating Mind and Matter on the Early Modern English Stage
(/isis/citation/CBB001562786/)
Be the first to comment!