Graduation Year

2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

English

Major Professor

Emily Griffith Jones, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Nicole Guenther Discenza, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Phillip Sipiora, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Kristin Bezio, Ph.D.

Keywords

class, clown, fate, gender, knight, monster, determinism, hierarchy, heir, colonialism

Abstract

When Shakespeare’s First Folio was published in 1623, it was entitled Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, the title designating the three genres under which his plays would be categorized for the next 250 years. Later, Irish critic Edward Dowden took it upon himself to restructure the Shakespearean canon by adding plays that were not previously published in the First Folio, reclassifying the genres of several of the plays, and establishing a new genre to accompany the previous three: romance. Within this fourth generic category of romance, Dowden situated four of the Shakespearean plays: Pericles, Prince of Tyre; Cymbeline; The Winter’s Tale; and The Tempest. This dissertation argues that, in the final years of his life, Shakespeare began to experiment with the genre of romance by appropriating medieval romance characters and conventions and transforming them, bestowing them with more dark and tragic potential to create plays that would conform to the popular, emerging hybrid genre of tragicomedy and that would also reveal hidden monstrosities in the characters, attitudes, and behaviors to reconfigure heroes as deviants, clowns as villains, submissiveness as aggressiveness, and innocence as monstrous. Shakespeare manipulated medieval romance generic characters and conventions to highlight a greater potential for tragedy and to provide contemporary commentary on early modern anxieties and debates surrounding the turn of the seventeenth century and a changed world: religious discussions on free will versus predestination, desires for social mobility that broke down the hierarchical “chain of being,” political insecurities arising from Elizabeth I’s death without an heir, gender debates regarding women and their expected behaviors and roles, and colonization concerns focused on the colonizer versus the colonized. The tragic potentiality and the comedic resolutions of romance—which were often bound up with religion, class, and gender—offer William Shakespeare a unique space to explore these issues.

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