Examination of the motif of the prodigal son as treated in early modern drama, from Shakespeare to Beaumont and Fletcher.

The domestic play flourished on the English popular stage during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Its roots were predominantly native, rather than classical, and its mainspring was the staging of domestic conflict amongst English characters from the middle ranks of society. 'Household Business' traces the genre's origins in the cycle plays of medieval England and examines its aesthetic configurations in relation to extra-literary discourses and practices that underwrote Renaissance ideologies of private life. At a time when the orthodox view of the family defined it as the foundation of the social order, a number of domestic dramas took a more critical perspective, stressing the contradictions and struggles that attend marriage and the patriarchal family. In addition to well-known domestic dramas as A Woman Killed with Kindness, Arden of Feversham, The Witch of Edmonton, and A Yorkshire Tragedy, Viviana Comensoli analyzes less well-studied plays as A Warning for Fair Women, Two Lamentable Tragedies, and The Late Lancashire Witches. The book also provides an extensive and timely assessment of domestic comedy, demonstrating how plays such as The London Prodigal, The Fair Maid of Bristow, and The Honest Whore (Parts I and II) resist homiletic paradigms in favour of a more dialectical dramaturgy.

In this thesis, I analyse a series of plays from the early modern professional stage to argue that temporality is socially constructed in the early modern period and that time, like gender, class and race, is a category through which early modern subjectivity is negotiated. I suggest that the 'early modern temporal consciousness' was dominated by a binary of action and delay and I explore the ways in which the axis of time, as it is defined by that binary, intersects the axis of gender on the early modern stage. Through my analysis of delay, and of action as its implicit opposite, in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean drama, I argue that a variety of gendered social identities are constructed temporally. -- I begin with the best known drama of delay, Hamlet. This play sets the terms for my exploration of the gendered experience of time through its engagement with three concepts which are, I suggest, structured by the opposition of action and delay which shapes temporality in early modern society: patience, prodigality and revenge. I proceed with chapters focused on these three thematic foci in turn, analysing a range of domestic comedies and revenge tragedies performed between 1585 and 1622. I argue that these dramatic genres mark fundamental differences in the experience of temporality by men and women and that those differences drive the plots and thematic concerns of the theatre at that time. I conclude by looking at how theatrical repertories informed the autobiographical writings of Lady Anne Clifford, a 'postponed heiress' who structured her gender and her works through the dramatic models of patience, prodigality and revenge. Thus this thesis offers a double argument: it marks gender as a shaping factor in the experience of time and it helps define early modern gender categories by way of temporality.

Offers a new, interdisciplinary account of early modern drama through the lens of playing and playgoing.

Early modern England's system of patrilineal inheritance, in which the eldest son inherited his father's estate and title, was one of the most significant forces affecting social order in the period. Demonstrating that early modern theatre played a unique and vital role in shaping how inheritance was understood, Michelle M. Dowd explores some of the common contingencies that troubled this system: marriage and remarriage, misbehaving male heirs, and families with only daughters. Shakespearean drama helped question and reimagine inheritance practices, making room for new formulations of gendered authority, family structure, and wealth transfer. Through close readings of canonical and non-canonical plays by Shakespeare, Webster, Jonson, and others, Dowd pays particular attention to the significance of space in early modern inheritance and the historical relationship between dramatic form and the patrilineal economy. Her book will interest researchers and students of early modern drama, Shakespeare, gender studies, and socio-economic history.

This book visits the wondrous, magical, sacred, sainted, numinous, uncanny, auratic, and sacral in the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, studying the instabilities of 'enchanted' and 'disenchanted' practices of thinking and knowledge-making in the early modern period. If what marvelously stands apart from conceptions of the world's ordinary functioning might be said to be 'enchanted', is the enchantedness weakened, empowered, or modally altered by its translation to theatre? The book asks what happens in theatre, as a medium that can give power to or curtail experiences of wonder, addressing plays that reflect contemporary reorientations of vision, awareness, and cognitive practice.