The Arc of Character: Medieval Stock Types in Shakespeare's English History Plays

This dissertation focuses on practices of stock characterisation as they are represented in literature and drama of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries in England, with particular emphasis on the transformations of social types from medieval literature to early modern drama, specifically Shakespeare's English history plays. Its wider focus is on the social context in which medieval authors created their characters, and on the conventional construction of medieval characters from what Elizabeth Fowler defines as "social persons.".;I argue that stock characters allow for permeability between past history and present performance. Attendant on their deployment in literature and drama is their recollection of past literary and cultural traditions. This is why Shakespeare employs them to such great effect in his English history plays: stock characters have an overt purchase on the past that makes history more socially immediate to early modern audiences. Shakespeare's stock characters recall medieval privileging of family and community, and thus are particularly suitable to the English histories' narratives of a country subsumed by family tragedy.;The dissertation focuses on four social persons which Shakespeare uses to construct stock characters: the Garcio, the Alewife, the Corrupt Clergyman and the Romance Heroine. He employs these social persons in four characters: the Bastard Faulconbridge in King John, Mistress Quickly in the second "tetralogy," Cardinal Beaufort in the first "tetralogy" and Queen Isabel in Richard II. This dissertation is intended to provoke reconsideration of the stock characters as "flat" stereotypes, and to elaborate upon their complex roles in literary and dramatic history.