Shakespeare and the idea of the book

Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book is about the book in Shakespeare's plays; the book as an object, wherein the article may disclose narratives, corroborate stories, expose versions of reality and perspectives of presence; and the semiotic of the book, wherein the language of the book, of holding, touching, turning leaves, opening pages, reading, revealing and closing may simulate an idea of the body or mind in motion. This thesis is about how the metaphorical and material book appears on Shakespeare's stage, and how the physical and figurative presence of the book challenges the imaginative and representational conditions of theatre. Having chosen seven plays for their particularly significant relationship to the book, I explore each play and its books for the demands they make of each other and what such demands reveal. The Introduction outlines the argument of the project and, drawing on a broad range of Shakespeare's plays, sets out the prevalence of the 'book' and an awareness of the potential discourses through which the object is beginning to move in the Elizabethan period. The thesis is then split into five chapters, the first two dealing with two plays each, Titus Andronicus and Cymbeline, and The Taming of The Shrew and Love's Labour's Lost. The following three chapters deal with individual plays, Richard II, Hamlet, and The Tempest. Although the thesis follows, with the exception of Cymbeline, a chronology of the drama, I make no attempt to suggest that Shakespeare forged a linear narrative in his evolving relationship with the book. Rather, my conclusion demonstrates how the book's extraordinary semantics cope resists a continuum or progressive evolution. The ever-changing capacity of the book, its materiality and language, supports the stage in a quest to define and expand the representational relationship between seeing and thinking, moving and being. Shakespeare's books are, I will argue, like Hamlet's players, 'the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time', and, to that end, 'let them be well used)

From Cyrus to Abbas: staging Persia in Early Modern England

This thesis considers the different ways Persia was perceived in early modern England. Persia, understudied in recent scholarship, played an important role in the early modern English imagination, both as a classical civilization and as a counterweight to the Ottoman threat to Christendom. This classical heritage and anti-Ottomanism, when intersected with a Persian Muslim identity, resulted in a complex phenomenon. This thesis is an attempt to understand the various cross currents that constructed this complex image. Chapter One discusses English interest in classical Persian themes in the wake of Renaissance humanism. It focuses on three classical ‘Persian’ plays featuring Achaemenid Kings; Cambyses, Darius and Cyrus, and investigates how classical Persia became a focus of interest for Elizabethan playwrights. Chapter Two moves to the wars between the Ottomans and Safavids and how they fascinated many English writers of the time. Paying specific attention to Usumcasane in Marlowe’s Tambulaine plays, the chapter suggests the significance of Persian references in the play and offers a new interpretation of the notorious Qur’an burning scene. Chapter Three analyses John Thomas Minadoi’s Historie of Warres betweene the Turkes and the Persians and shows the significance of Christian knowledge of schism in Islam for Catholic-Protestant debates. Chapter Four concentrates on the representation of Persia in Romance texts from late Elizabethan England and shows that despite being hailed as an anti-Ottoman power, Persia’s anti-Christian Islamic identity, which was also suggested by Minadoi, becomes manifest in the alliance of ‘Sultan’ and ‘Sophy’ against the Crusaders. Chapter Five combines two crucial moments in Anglo-Persian encounters: Jenkinson’s trading mission and the ‘travailes” of the Sherley brothers. Through an analysis of the play The Travailes of the Three English Brothers, the argument of the chapter is that it represents the cumulative experience of Englishmen in Persia in the early modern period

An architecture of intimate encounter plotting the Raffles Hotel through flora and fauna (1887-1925, 1987-2005).

This thesis reconstitutes the 'architectural subject' by placing the intimate encounter between the experiencing subject and the architectural object as central to the architecture of the Raffles Hotel, a well-known colonial monument in Singapore. By expanding Julia Kristeva's notion of 'the semiotic' through the context of feminist architectural theory, this thesis theorizes the original concept of an architecture based on intimate encounter - a method, which emphasizes the agency of the experiencing subject and relational modes of architectural interpretation. The intimate encounter may be broadly surmised by three key aspects - the relational role of the experiencing subject, the construction of architectural histories and theories through a chronologically complex spatial armature, and interpretations of the intimate detail, an object central to the experiencing subject's architectural experience. Working through academic methodologies, historical-theoretical speculations and performative textual strategies, the investigation combines modes of historical, theoretical and inventive architectural interpretation and production. The hotel's two key spaces - the Palm Court and the Billiard Room - are interpreted through their floral and animal 'plots', that is, architectural concepts based on metonymica and metaphorical relationships. Although the investigation through flora and fauna relates to a 'tropical' situation, this methodology ultimately critiques prevalent regionalist architectural discourses common to the hotel's geographical context. This research has five main objectives. It develops a theoretical framework that critically accounts for subject positions outside those of the architect's. It expands the repertoire of evidence relevant to architectural research. It employs modes of interpretation and writing, which draw on knowledge and techniques from architectural theory, history and criticism, feminist and literary theories, and philosophical ideas. It suggests that architectural history and theory is an imaginative spatial enterprise involving diverse times, spaces and subjects. Finally, it innovates a creative architectural typology for the hotel, based on its floral and animal plots

History of Central America. Vol. II. 1530-1800

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Richard Hakluyt's Principal navigations (1598-1600) and the textuality of Tudor English nationalism

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

On the River Road. In viaggio sui fiumi dell'Ovest, 1803-1861.

From the Louisiana Purchase (1803) to the beginning of the Civil War (1861), travel writing about journeys on the Mississippi and its tributaries contributed to spread themes, motives, symbols and characters of paramount importance for American imagination. Traveling was already a key part in American identity and the Western Rivers represented a landscape element endowed with great mythopoetic power. The present thesis analyses actual and fictional accounts of journeys on the Western Rivers in order to establish fruitful links between major works of American literature and less known texts, drawing especially from the memoirs of travelers and the sketches of Southwestern humorists