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Author: T McAlindon Publisher: Springer ISBN: 134910180X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 279
Book Description
This book provides an introductory perspective on its subject together with detailed studies of the major non-Shakespearean tragedies. It assumes that the central and most disturbing insights of the plays were expressed in terms of the thought patterns of the time.
Author: Michael Neill Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192517902 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
Death, like most experiences that we think of as natural, is a product of the human imagination: all animals die, but only human beings suffer Death; and what they suffer is shaped by their own time and culture. Tragedy was one of the principal instruments through which the culture of early modern England imagined the encounter with mortality. The essays in this book approach the theatrical reinvention of Death from three perspectives. Those in Part I explore Death as a trope of apocalypse — a moment of un-veiling or dis-covery that is figured both in the fearful nakedness of the Danse Macabre and in the shameful openings enacted in the new theatres of anatomy. Separate chapters explore the apocalyptic design of two of the periods most powerful tragedies — Shakespeare's Othello, and Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling. In Part 2, Neill explores the psychological and affective consequences of tragedy's fiercely end-driven narrative in a number of plays where a longing for narrative closure is pitched against a particularly intense dread of ending. The imposition of an end is often figured as an act of writerly violence, committed by the author or his dramatic surrogate. Extensive attention is paid to Hamlet as an extreme example of the structural consequences of such anxiety. The function of revenge tragedy as a response to the radical displacement of the dead by the Protestant abolition of purgatory — one of the most painful aspects of the early modern re-imagining of death — is also illustrated with particular clarity. Finally, Part 3 focuses on the way tragedy articulates its challenge to the undifferentiating power of death through conventions and motifs borrowed from the funereal arts. It offers detailed analyses of three plays — Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and Ford's The Broken Heart. Here, funeral is rewritten as triumph, and death becomes the chosen instrument of an heroic self-fashioning designed to dress the arbitrary abruption of mortal ending in a powerful aesthetic of closure.
Author: N. Liebler Publisher: Springer ISBN: 113704957X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 242
Book Description
This book constitutes a new direction for feminist studies in English Renaissance drama. While feminist scholars have long celebrated heroic females in comedies, many have overlooked female tragic heroism, reading it instead as evidence of pervasive misogyny on the part of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Displacing prevailing arguments of "victim feminism," the contributors to this volume engage a wide range of feminist theories, and argue that female protagonists in tragedies - Jocasta, Juliet, Cleopatra, Mariam, Webster's Duchess and White Devil, among others - are heroic in precisely the same ways as their more notorious masculine counterparts.
Author: Helen Hackett Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 0857723367 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
Shakespeare is a towering presence in English and indeed global culture. Yet considered alongside his contemporaries he was not an isolated phenomenon, but the product of a period of astonishing creative fertility. This was an age when new media - popular drama and print - were seized upon avidly and inventively by a generation of exceptionally talented writers. In her sparkling new book, Helen Hackett explores the historical contexts of English Renaissance drama by situating it in the wider history of ideas. She traces the origins of Renaissance theatre in communal religious drama, civic pageantry and court entertainment and vividly describes the playing conditions of Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses. Examining Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson in turn, the author assesses the distinctive contribution made by each playwright to the creation of English drama. She then turns to revenge tragedy, with its gothic poetry of sex and death; city comedy, domestic tragedy and tragicomedy; and gender and drama, with female roles played by boy actors in commercial playhouses while women participated in drama at court and elsewhere. The book places Renaissance drama in the exciting and vibrant cosmopolitanism of sixteenth-century London.
Author: Peter Holbrook Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1472572823 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
This book's underlying claim is that English Renaissance tragedy addresses live issues in the experience of readers and spectators today: it is not a genre to be studied only for aesthetic or “heritage” reasons. The book considers the way in which tragedy in general, and English Renaissance tragedy in particular, addresses ideas of freedom, understood both from an individual and a sociopolitical perspective. Tragedy since the Greeks has addressed the constraints and necessities to which human life is subject (Fate, the gods, chance, the conflict between state and individual) as well as the human desire for autonomy and self-direction. In short, English Renaissance Tragedy: Ideas of Freedom shows how the tragic drama of Shakespeare's age addresses problems of freedom, slavery, and tyranny in ways that speak to us now.
Author: Mary Beth Rose Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501723251 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 271
Book Description
A public and highly popular literary form, English Renaissance drama affords a uniquely valuable index of the process of cultural transformation. The Expense of Spirit integrates feminist and historicist critical approaches to explore the dynamics of cultural conflict and change during a crucial period in the formation of modern sexual values. Comparing Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic representations of love and sexuality with those in contemporary moral tracts and religious writings on women, love, and marriage, Mary Beth Rose argues that such literature not only interpreted sexual sensibilities but also contributed to creating and transforming them.
Author: Katharine Goodland Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351936646 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
Grieving women in early modern English drama, this study argues, recall not only those of Classical tragedy, but also, and more significantly, the lamenting women of medieval English drama, especially the Virgin Mary. Looking at the plays of Shakespeare, Kyd, and Webster, this book presents a new perspective on early modern drama grounded upon three original interrelated points. First, it explores how the motif of the mourning woman on the early modern stage embodies the cultural trauma of the Reformation in England. Second, the author here brings to light the extent to which the figures of early modern drama recall those of the recent medieval past. Finally, Goodland addresses how these representations embody actual mourning practices that were viewed as increasingly disturbing after the Reformation. Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama synthesizes and is relevant to several areas of recent scholarly interest, including the performance of gender, the history of emotion, studies of death and mourning, and the cultural trauma of the Reformation.
Author: Emma Josephine Smith
Author: Emma Josephine Smith
Author: T McAlindon
Author: Michael Neill
Author: David M Bevington
Author: N. Liebler
Author: Helen Hackett
Author: Peter Holbrook
Author: Mary Beth Rose
Author: William E. Engel
Author: Katharine Goodland