School of English and Theatre Studies

"This work investigates Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet', one of the exemplary heteronormative love stories in Western culture. By engaging in new queer or pomosexual readings of Shakespeare's text, in relation to various adaptations, including 'Shakespeare in Love, Tromeo and Juliet ', and 'Get Real', this thesis challenges the traditional heteronormative reading of the play and argues that the play itself is queer. I argue that queering involves the non-normative and disruptive process(es) of reading texts. Adaptation, as a process of re-writing/disrupting a normative, 'originary,' historically situated text, is by definition a queer process. 'Romeo and Juliet' is a historical text that has been adapted, and thus queered, numerous times; Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet' is itself an adaptation and therefore is always already a queer text. Thus, adaptations of Shakespeare's text are necessarily involved in queering the queer(ed): a pomosexual process that ultimately leads to the breakdown of the normative signification system."

We ask authors to answer for the unity of the works published in their names; we ask that they reveal, or at least display the hidden sense pervading their work; we ask them to reveal their personal lives, to account for their experiences and the real story that gave birth to their writings.

John Heywood’s interlude The Play of the Wether: A New and Very Mery Enterlude of All Maner Wethers (1533) focuses specifically on the relationship between humans and the weather as negotiated through the divine. Curiously, most studies have not considered the importance of the weather in this play. Reading this interlude as primarily about weather not only demonstrates that early Tudor plays can be considered from an ecocritial perspective but also that so-called "green studies" need to take into account pre-Shakespearean drama.

Faustus's magic circle, then, represents a self-containment, undertaken for defence, and as a means of concentrating power in order to escape from the limits he sees pressing on his wilful soul in all the academic disciplines, and especially in theology. But his self-containment quickly leads to to a futile self-imposition of much more alarming limitations. In fleeing outward from his inner self, Faustus is abandoning the central position from which the Renaissance magus hoped, once he had been reborn into his true divine nature, to exercise marvellous powers. He is abandoning all hope of begetting a deity (B: 89), and risks instead becoming something less than human.

Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is a play about boundless aspirations and the enclosing spiritual and theological structure that renders them tragically absurd. As Edward A. Snow has remarked, Faustus's desires are endless in the dual sense of being without limit and of lacking purpose.1 And there is a heavy irony to the final inversion of these desires.

Readers of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus find themselves, at present, in a very curious position. The play survived the Elizabethan age in two versions, which were first printed in 1604 (the “A-text”) and 1616 (the “B-text”). These two quartos, from which all subsequent editions are derived, offer variant readings in many parallel passages, and also differ very substantially from one another in the last three acts. While accepting many of the A-text's readings, recent editors have been unanimous in making the B-version of the play the basis of their editions. (The last major edition to use the A-version as its copy-text was that of Tucker Brooke, in 1910). There is now, however, a near-consensus among critics and editors alike that although the A-text shows clear signs of textual corruption, it presents the play in a form that is both aesthetically preferable to the B-version and more authentic, in the sense of being closer to what Marlowe actually wrote. What is anomalous about the present situation is that Fredson Bowers, the scholar whose arguments in 1973 established this opinion (thus overthrowing the view, dominant since the 1940's, that the B-text corresponded closely to Marlowe's intentions), at the same time based his edition of the play upon the 1616 quarto, and relegated the third and fourth acts of the A-text to an appendix. Readers are thus informed that the A-version is more authentic—and are given the B-version to read.

An essay first published in 'The Faustian Century: German Literature and Culture in the Age of Luther and Faustus', edited by Jim Van der Laan and Andrew Weeks (New York: Camden House, 2013), pp. 67-91. In that version the footnotes are abbreviated; here they are given in full.

[This essay, which applied a formalist-structural analysis to Marlowe's play, dates from 1980. It has not previously been published. Except in note 16, where I have added in square brackets a reference to my 2008 edition of Doctor Faustus, and note 21, which is entirely new, the text and notes have not been updated.] I More, perhaps, than any other part of Doctor Faustus, the third scene of Act I (which begins with Faustus's invocation of Mephastophilis) 1 illustrates the difference between the experience of reading a play and of seeing it performed. The extraordinary image of grotesque macrocosmic appetite with which the scene opens is striking to the ear, and repays a reader's meditative pause: Now that the gloomy shadow of the earth, Longing to view Orions drisling looke, Leapes from th'antartike world unto the skie, And dimmes the welkin with her pitchy breath: 1 1 I have used this spelling of the spirit's name throughout this essay (except in quotations where other spellings occur). " Mephastophilis " is the most common spelling in the 1604 quarto (the most frequently occurring spelling in the 1616 quarto is " Mephostophilis ").