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Shakespeare's Middle Comedies : = Human Agency and the Early Modern Experience.

Record Type:	Language materials, manuscript : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Shakespeare's Middle Comedies :/
Reminder of title:	Human Agency and the Early Modern Experience.
Author:	Hubbell, Pamela J.
Description:	1 online resource (222 pages)
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 78-10(E), Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International78-10A(E).
Subject:	British & Irish literature. -
Online resource:	click for full text (PQDT)
ISBN:	9781369781250

Shakespeare's Middle Comedies : = Human Agency and the Early Modern Experience.
Hubbell, Pamela J.

Shakespeare's Middle Comedies :Human Agency and the Early Modern Experience. - 1 online resource (222 pages)

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 78-10(E), Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Claremont Graduate University, 2017.

Includes bibliographical references

In this dissertation I address The Merchant of Venice in its commercial context and propose that Shakespeare explores fully the ways in which estimation and deliberation drive event and character. I show how Much Ado About Nothing prioritizes the attempt to know something for certain despite modes of perception, articulation, and apprehension that are vulnerable to being unchaste. Finally, I posit that in As You Like It, Shakespeare privileges human agency against a backdrop of agential chaos to create a series of circular moves that provocatively suggest a near infinite displacement of one's place in the world. My contention for these middle comedies is that the dictates of genre were necessarily side-stepped by the playwright in order to explore human acts that play out within contemporary, early modern contexts concerning commerce, epistemology, and the topic of agency itself. And so, because of this, the playwright was inevitably left with human conditions and consequences that did not fit neatly with comedy's mandate for love and social order to triumph unambiguously. To invite scenarios into his plays in which characters were given the responsibility to determine outcomes meant Shakespeare had to give over control to human capabilities.

Electronic reproduction.
Ann Arbor, Mich. :
ProQuest,
2018

Mode of access: World Wide Web

ISBN: 9781369781250Subjects--Topical Terms:

1148425
British & Irish literature.
Index Terms--Genre/Form:

554714
Electronic books.

Shakespeare's Middle Comedies : = Human Agency and the Early Modern Experience.
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245 1 0 $a Shakespeare's Middle Comedies : $b Human Agency and the Early Modern Experience.
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300 $a 1 online resource (222 pages)
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500 $a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 78-10(E), Section: A.
500 $a Adviser: Lori Anne Ferrell.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Claremont Graduate University, 2017.
504 $a Includes bibliographical references
520 $a In this dissertation I address The Merchant of Venice in its commercial context and propose that Shakespeare explores fully the ways in which estimation and deliberation drive event and character. I show how Much Ado About Nothing prioritizes the attempt to know something for certain despite modes of perception, articulation, and apprehension that are vulnerable to being unchaste. Finally, I posit that in As You Like It, Shakespeare privileges human agency against a backdrop of agential chaos to create a series of circular moves that provocatively suggest a near infinite displacement of one's place in the world. My contention for these middle comedies is that the dictates of genre were necessarily side-stepped by the playwright in order to explore human acts that play out within contemporary, early modern contexts concerning commerce, epistemology, and the topic of agency itself. And so, because of this, the playwright was inevitably left with human conditions and consequences that did not fit neatly with comedy's mandate for love and social order to triumph unambiguously. To invite scenarios into his plays in which characters were given the responsibility to determine outcomes meant Shakespeare had to give over control to human capabilities.
520 $a I contend it is not uncommon for any of these three plays to be picked up by a literary critic and included in a broader study of a topic, theme, or genre due to their serious engagement with human affairs, their involvement in real-world contexts, and their generic shape-shifting. However, I argue this serves to highlight the pressing need for my goals in the present study: to make the middle comedies themselves the central topic, to read each play in its entirety for the way it contributes to Shakespeare's thematic exploration of human agency, and to recuperate the middle comedies as coherent manifestation of meaning and comedy within the body of Shakespeare's dramatic works. In fact, recent Shakespearean studies that have turned the focus of literary criticism back to the human---literary humanism---often include a chapter or two on one of the three plays I focus on here, but due to the absence of any study that localizes distinct explorations of human agency by the playwright in the middle comedies as a group, I suggest the present study works as both a contribution to the modern body of criticism concerned with early modern ideas about humanity as well as a testament to Shakespeare's own ideological contributions to the contemporary topic. While profound questions about both human and cosmic agency are asked in many of his plays, in The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, and As You Like It my position is that the poet ventures to think about human potentiality as their central question. That Shakespearean scholarship has not previously noted the distinct ways in which these three middle comedies work together to flesh out manifestations of effective human activity is an omission that this dissertation endeavors to correct. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).
533 $a Electronic reproduction. $b Ann Arbor, Mich. : $c ProQuest, $d 2018
538 $a Mode of access: World Wide Web
650 4 $a British & Irish literature. $3 1148425
650 4 $a Theater history. $3 1185120
655 7 $a Electronic books. $2 local $3 554714
690 $a 0593
690 $a 0644
710 2 $a ProQuest Information and Learning Co. $3 1178819
710 2 $a The Claremont Graduate University. $b Arts and Humanities. $3 1183716
773 0 $t Dissertation Abstracts International $g 78-10A(E).
856 4 0 $u http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=10265967 $z click for full text (PQDT)