Researches in the Literature of Slander in Early Modern England

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Focusing upon the mentality of early modern English people, this research analyses the relationship between ideas of slander in depositions of the church courts and those represented in the literature of slander in early modern England. The results of researches are as follows :1. The elucidation of the process in which the disputes over the theatricality merged into the tradition of defamation literature in early modern England, especially focusing upon the relevance between Hamlet and Thomas Heywood's An Apology for Actors.2. The analysis of slanders that are generated in the process of fashioning ducal pardons in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. This analysis makes use of the methodology of the new historicism as well as the perspective explored in Natalie Zemon Davis's Fiction in the Archives : Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (1987).3. The explication of facets of the defamation, which deprives Desdemona of the agency and urges Othello to play the part of cuckold, in Shakespeare's Othello.