This Prison Where I Live: Authority and Incarceration in Early Modern Drama

The image of the prison looms large in early modern literature. By the sixteenth century, the prison was as much a part of everyday life as the public theatre. Although scholars have recently focused on the prison as a cite of cultural production, the depictions of fictionalized prison have not received much attention. Early modern drama in particular frequently resorts to prison as the setting for political struggle, inviting further discourse on authority and its sources. In this thesis, I argue that the prison's liminality allows early modern playwrights to explore the nature of royal privilege. I analyze Marlowe's Edward II, Shakespeare's Richard II, Shakespeare's The Tempest, and Fletcher's The Island Princess through the cultural and historical lens of imprisonment, determining that the prison is a space where relations and power dynamics between the king and his subjects can be questioned and subsequently condemned, upheld, or transformed.