Dickson, Lisa

Simon’s Song is a self-reflexive creative-critical text composed of journal entries, research notes, and various other records written by fictional undergraduate student Simon Goodsworth, and compiled by an anonymous archivist. Through the organized presentation of Simon’s writings, there appears a fragmented narrative which follows Simon as he joins his university’s musical theatre club and becomes absorbed in planning and research for a Master’s thesis applying poststructuralist theory to the study of musical theatre. Simon’s research and original insights into the work of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari destabilize the hidden structures implicit in his perception of his self and his world. Through his writing Simon stages explorations of the ubiquity of performativity, the relationship between life and writing, and the inescapability of what Derrida calls “différance,” the precondition of language and meaning in general. Implicit in Simon’s Song is a recognition that each act of engagement with this text is an uniterable performance. Were it not for this recognition of provisionality, it would be safe to assert that Simon’s Song is, above anything else, a thesis about itself.

The study of animals in Shakespeare’s collected works has expanded over the last 30 years. While a number of different animals have been discussed, the importance of the worm in the larger scope of the canon has largely been ignored. By focusing on the perception and presentation of worms in relation to cultural ideas of death, corruption, and consumption, ideas surrounding the body and soul are brought to the forefront. Worms are integral to our understanding of the Early Modern cultural constructs of the body and soul as the presence of worms reveals the state of the individual or the broader environment. Overall, the depiction of worms in Shakespeare’s works serves as a way to understand the metaphysical processes surrounding death and corruption.

This thesis analyzes the effects of love and melancholia on male and female characters along with their responses to melancholia which fluctuate among choler, revenge, murder, suicide, homicide, madness, never-ending mourning, and lovesickness in Hamlet, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet. My analysis draws on a composite theoretical framework that combines new historicist or cultural materialist perspectives and psychoanalytic approach, focusing on Sigmund Freud’s conceptualization of mourning and melancholia and Julia Kristeva’s meditations on depression and melancholia. Having examined these three plays in terms of their creative symptomatology revealed in the characters’ melancholic dispositions––thus viewing Shakespeare as creative symptomatologist, I arrived at establishing a range of gendered melancholic states, namely love melancholia, virgin melancholy or greensickness, and choleric melancholia. Furthermore, while in Shakespearean dramatic universe the cure for individual melancholia is administered, stereotypically, through marriage and sex,