Necessary Form: Allegory and Actor in Shakespeare and His Predecessors

FAIN: FR-10230-78

Robert S. Knapp
Reed College (Portland, OR 97202-8138)

To complete a book, presently about one-half finished, tentatively entitled "Necessary Form: Allegory and Actor in Shakespeare and His Predecessors." Main topics will cover: the provisions in medieval drama of an allegorical, exemplaristic, and non-consequential base for future dramaturgy; the experiments with prophetic secular history in the Tudor interlude; the elaborate fictionalizing of queenly presence in Peele and Lyly; Kyd's blending of intrigue and deceit with a metatheatrical sequence of mirrors; and the invention in Greene and Marlowe of an actor who is somewhat (but ambiguously) more self than sign.