Su-kyung Hwang

This essay examines Catholic vestments on the English stage from the early Reformation through Shakespeare. The changing meaning, status, and usage of Catholic vestments, which crossed the boundary from sacred religious property to secular theatrical costume, enabled the diverse theatrical manipulation of the garments to build on and relieve contemporary social anxiety about Catholicism. This, in turn, demonstrates the self-contradictory attitudes of many early modern English subjects toward Cat

본 논문은 서사 창작에 도움을 제공하기 위해서 영문학 작품 기반으로 스토리 DB를 구축해야 하는 필요성과 개발방안의 특성을 탐색하고자 한다. 보다 구체적으로는 영문학 고전으로 알려져 있는 윌리엄 셰익스피어의 작품 <햄릿(Hamlet)>을 예시로 두고 모티프 기반으로 서사의 구성요소간의 관계를 논리적으로 구조화시키기 위한 방안을 제안하였다. 영문학 작품의 특정 텍스트에서 서사의 최소 단위 모티프 데이터를 추출한 후에 내부적으로 데이터를 연결하면서 서사 창작자에게 도움을 제공할 수 있는 스토리 DB의 절차적 개발 틀을 제시하고자 한다. 이와 같은 연구가 축적되면 앞으로 양질의 스토리텔링 콘텐츠가 해외 문학작품 기반으로 (재)생산될 수 있는 기반이 조성될 뿐 아니라 영미문학 작품 역시 보다 대중적인 콘텐츠로 학제간 연구자들에게 노출될 수 있을 것이다. The purpose of this study is to suggest a development model of English litera

This essay looks at how the images of female martyrs were appropriated in post-Reformation England while relieving public anxiety for absent objects to worship. I suggest Mary Magdalene as an apt substitute provided by reformers for the lost female sacredness and their self-contradictory desire to remove carnal idols but to preserve the palpable worship simultaneously. Through examining medieval virgin martyr legends and John Foxe’s female martyrs in Acts and Monuments, this essay traces the con

Isabella’s silence in the final scene of Measure for Measure opens up various readings and performance possibilities, and has framed interpretations of her overall character. Her character embodies a Protestant dilemma: how to engage traditional conceptions of female sacredness, sacred corporeality, and visual representations of the sacred when these conceptions had become oxymoronic in a reformed religio-cultural context. This essay discusses the ways in which Isabella is tamed into a mute pict

This essay examines the sacred bodies symbolically and materially explored in The Croxton Play of the Sacrament. The play touches the late medieval polemic of transubstantiation through a conventional miracle play structure, in which a wicked Jew, Jonathas attempts to desecrate the host, only to have it miraculously transform into the body of Christ. Jonathas, however, deviates from the stereotype of the evil Jew, and happens to converge with the host when his hand is severed from the body. Alth

This essay explores the “reformed” representations of nuns on the early modern English stages, that is, at a time when no convents or nuns left in England since the Monastic Dissolution of 1539. By closely analyzing Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, the essay discusses what stage nuns represented, why they were still utilized, and what theatrical effects they created on post-Reformation English stages, along with the inevitable limitations and self-contradictions of female characters

In this essay, we examine how dramatic factors overlap with gaming elements and what we can do to incorporate games or gaming culture for college level drama classes. After discussing theoretical comparison of what constitutes games and dramatic literature, we introduce a case study on teaching A Streetcar Named Desire written by Tennessee Williams in 1947. The play has been steadily included in American modern drama classics for the last decades in academia and often chosen for textual analysis

This essay argues poisoning frequently staged in early modern England resonates anxiety as well as curiosity of the contemporaries toward still mysterious and ungraspable human body. Along with the Reformation, human body posits a battleground for discourses of sacredness and secularity, whereas the poisoning as a technologically skilled and highly intelligent crime boldly challenges human body, a sacred work created by God. Furthermore, the process to solve criminal cases of poisoning intrinsic

The exceptional success of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great series proves the public interest and fascination on the heathen sovereignty, along with his spectacular body image that impressed even the enemies within the play. Conflating the both, the play provides a symbolic example of an emperor, overwhelmingly competitive in appearance as well as in belligerence at war. Tamburlaine’s body, depicted as monstrously distinguishable from others, fluctuates between the extremes; an idealized body and

This essay investigates the use of bodies represented through the twin servants, the two Dromios in The Comedy of Errors. The play has primarily been discussed with the identity crisis of the Antipholus twins, whereas the struggles of the Dromios have often been considered as a mere amplification of their masters’. Instead of the twin masters, I focus on each pair of Antipholus and Dromio, in order to trace the division of mind and body, conceptually transferable to the Aristotelian frame of mas

This essay examines Hamlet as an individual who underwent the spiritual and social process of the English Reformation and argues the motivation and the timeliness of his revenge to be most persuasive. In light of the contemporary post-Reformation anxiety about the changed notion of afterlife, Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost of his late father expresses a confused response to a supernatural no longer explicable theologically under the Protestant regime. The 1547 abolition of Purgatory renders t

This study examines the visual rhetoric delivered through Catholic clergy on the English stage from the early Reformation through Shakespeare. The changing meaning, status, and usage of Catholic vestments, which crossed the boundary from sacred religious property to secular theatrical costume, enabled the diverse theatrical manipulation of the garments to build and relieve contemporary social anxiety about Catholicism. In order to explain Protestant political pressure to relocate Catholic vestme

This essay primarily discusses the character of the Abbess in The Comedy of Errors as an embodiment of the Protestant ideal for sacred women. She seems free from the conventional anti-Catholic accusation of hypocritical and deceptive Catholic clergy, and the transition of her religious and feminine identity to one of a faithful and productive housewife is an option ideally suggested by Protestant reformers for single women in post-Dissolution England. However, her “wifely conversion” is hardly s