Browsing by Author "Parker, Courtney Bailey."
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Item "If I were a woman" : gendered artifice on the Shakespearean stage.(2016-08-03) Parker, Courtney Bailey.; Hunt, Maurice, 1942-This is a dissertation about different types of cross-dressed performance in Shakespearean drama. Throughout this project, I argue for a more nuanced reading of the performance of female characters on the English Renaissance stage that not only categorizes cross-dressing along a spectrum of theatrical artifice, but also investigates how this range of artifice enriches our understanding of the plays. To demonstrate my argument, each chapter of this project will consider the degree to which the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries capitalize on a range of gendered artifice in their representation of female characters. I maintain that we cannot treat all women the same with respect to onstage cross-dressing, and that we must account for these differences in characters’ “artificial femaleness” with the play text as our guide.Item Liturgy, ritual, and community in four plays by Brian Friel.(2012-08-08) Parker, Courtney Bailey.; Russell, Richard Rankin.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.This thesis considers the function of ritual and liturgy within four plays by Irish playwright Brian Friel—Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964); Faith Healer (1979); Dancing at Lughnasa (1990); and Molly Sweeney (1994)—while paying special attention to how these more spiritual traits elegize not only the Irish experience, but also the theatre experience. In Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Dancing at Lughnasa, I argue that Friel advocates a household vision of spirituality, wherein the institutionalized forms of Catholicism find deeper significance once transposed to the confines of the home. My second chapter examines Molly Sweeney and Faith Healer in light of documentary theatre and how Friel uses the disparate communities in these two plays to ritualistically illustrate a representation of community that dramatizes the theatre itself.