The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy, ed. Emma Smith and Garrett A. Sullivan (original) (raw)
Related papers
Dissertation: The Return of Tragedy
This dissertation examines the ways in which tragedy produces, and challenges, human subjectivity in three distinct periods of western theatrical production. It also tells a story of their ahistorical continuity based on tragic repetition. Readings of Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos, and Euripides' Bacchae ground this argument in the Greek original. Specific constructions of fate, agency and justice provide sites for understanding the evolution of a tragic consciousness. Charting a meta-narrative of tragic inheritance through Greek tragedy, Renaissance tragic drama, and the modern drama, I establish an alternative view of western theatre's past—one that embodies its own consciously adopted tragic form. Renaissance artists repressed the knowledge structures contained in the artifacts of a past consciousness in service of Christian morality and bourgeois rationality. By creating a hybrid moral tragedy rooted in contemporary ways of knowing, they valorized the human perspective in contradiction to the world-centered one that Greek tragedy staged. As a result, the dramatic tradition increasingly excluded that which could not self-disclose from its catalogue of the real. It secured the illusion of autonomous human agency, creating the conditions for its own literary and historical tragic reversal. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Hamlet and Winter's Tale model this contradiction. Finally, I retheorize Szondi's “crisis of the drama” reading Strindberg's Miss Julie, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard as a final cycle of tragedy that stages historical transformation as the suicide of dramatic realism.
Shakespearean Tragedies and Inconsistencies of the Renaissance ERA
IJASS JOURNAL, 2022
This research explores the elements of tragedy in selected Shakespearean dramas. The Greek philosopher Aristotle investigated and defined tragedy's nature, while the dramatists of ancient Greece cemented its characteristics and qualities. Shakespeare defied the established conventions by classics to get closer to reality. The theories presented by Irving Ribner and A. C. Bradley support this study. Three key points of view that define Shakespeare as a dramatist show his concept of tragedy: the tragic hero, the tragic action (or plot), and catharsis, which this essay tries to explain. This research shows the characteristics of Shakespearean tragedies by comparing them with Greek tragedies. A Shakespearean tragedy has many qualities, as it shows inconsistencies of the Renaissance era, foreshadows romanticism and realism, and shows the human psyche. Shakespeare's humanism best demonstrates by the fact that he has such a deep appreciation for the suffering of the human spirit.
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
The initial stimulation for this special issue was a recent book by the distinguished Anglican theologian and literary critic Rowan Williams, The Tragic Imagination (2016). This is an immensely ambitious, confident book with many suggestive directions and provocations, but we were particularly struck by two central strands. First: the production of a grand narrative concerning a literary form designated "the tragic imagination," which can be traced from the culture of ancient Greece to the theater of modern Britain. Second: the conviction that "the tragic imagination" is as compatible with Christianity as it is with the religion of Sophocles or with contemporary modes of atheism. The first strand raises some issues that any grand narrative must address. How can a story be told that spans many centuries involving profound social, cultural, and economic transformations, a story involving profound changes in the conception of what it is to be a human person, while attending to the minute particulars that constitute divergent and varying histories? Some of the problems encountered by grand narratives were recently addressed in the special issue produced in JMEMS responding to Brad S. Gregory's The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (2012). 1 Is Williams, in his work, sufficiently attentive to the particularities of tragic form? For example, if one wants to talk about Milton and tragedy one may decide, as Williams does, to give a few pages to Samson Agonistes. 2 But Williams's discussion of Milton's extraordinary work is so lacking in attention to specificities that even the identity of speakers is ignored in the service of assimilating this awkward text into the critic's analytical plot. So it is no surprise that such a version of Samson Agonistes and tragedy is cut off from the text with which Milton chose to publish it, Paradise Regained. If one wants to make claims about Christianity and tragedy, it should seem odd to ignore Milton's juxtaposition of these two
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2019
Efforts to describe Shakespeare’s tragedies and place them within the history of the genre have been long misled by dubious assumptions about Shakespeare’s secularism dating back to the influence of German Romanticism. The use of concepts drawn from Aristotle’s Poetics has been compromised, as well, by patterns of misinterpretation, reflecting the influence of Renaissance Protestants such as Melanchthon, who sought to reconcile classical tragedy with Christianity. As Aristotle uses the terms, hamartia does not mean sin, and anagnorisis does not mean repentance. Using these terms as euphemisms for these Christian concepts has allowed critics to avoid recognizing Shakespeare’s indebtedness to the moral vision of Christianity. Tragedy for Shakespeare, as in medieval biblical drama, is the failure of a sinner to repent. Shakespeare represents repentance as a process that requires engagement with other people: an intersubjective transformation Stanley Cavell describes as “acknowledgment.” .......... The Fortunes of Tragedy: Medieval and Early Modern. Special issue edited by David Aers and Sarah Beckwith. Volume 49, Number 1, January 2019. ......... "Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye." So wrote Chaucer at the end of Troilus and Criseyde. But how compatible are the forms and ideas of tragedy with Christian tradition, its theology and liturgy? What are the relations between medieval and early modern discourses of tragedy? In The Tragic Imagination (2016), the distinguished Anglican theologian Rowan Williams presents a grand narrative maintaining the compatibility of "the tragic imagination" and Christianity. Yet the story neglects, without any comment, the entire Middle Ages. This special issue of JMEMS explores the fortunes of tragedy as a genre by investigating the sources and consequences of this missing middle of Williams's book. It also concerns what led generations of Christians to invent or reinvent tragic forms of drama and literature in the early modern period. .......... Articles are by Jason Crawford (Union University), Patrick Gray (Durham University), Eleanor Johnson (Columbia), Paul A. Kottman (New School for Social Research), Russ Leo (Princeton), and Giles Waller (University of Cambridge), with an article by Grace Hamman (Duke) and "New Books across the Disciplines."
Journeys from Crimes to Crowns: Literary Representation of Shakespearian Tragedies
Global Regional Review, 2019
Thinking is ideas' banking and everyone wants the encashment of his/her thinking. Man desires to get godly powers through the encashment of his ideas. Some people get power through inheritance while others earn through hard work. The scholars are of the view that religion and fortune favor some men in committing crimes to reach the crowns, while others lose their lives. Human history is full of such incidents where sinners become saints through power. Religious and cultural accounts start preaching and teaching of their nobility. Shakespearean tragedies, in this regard, are highly important where different dramatic characters and historical figures reached to crowns through committing crimes and these characters can be seen in the present age. This research paper is an investigation that how has the act of crime in Shakespeare's Hamlet (2006), Macbeth (1990) and King Lear (1897) connected to the accession of crowns?
The Revenger’s Tragedy: The State of Play, 2018
In 2008, two British productions of The Revenger’s Tragedy, one in London, the other in Manchester, reintroduced twenty-first-century theatre audiences to the savage satire of Middleton’s play. Critical responses to both versions were mixed. For some, these productions proved too self-consciously modern in their overt representation of sexual and social depravity. Heavy-handed moralizing effectively subsumed the play’s subtle undercurrents of infectious humor. In consequence, both the National Theatre and the Manchester Royal Exchange stood accused of sensationalized and salacious “overkill”. Such “overkill” was blamed on directors unwilling to trust the narrative, or overly eager to highlight the corrupt decadence of male authority at the play’s core. These readings were not surprising in the context of an economic crisis that, since late 2007, was already triggering public mistrust in institutions of social and financial control. Revenge and corrupting revenue represented the contemporary keys to interpretation. In contrast, a London fringe theatre production of 2015 consciously avoided the extremes of moral discourse, despite its equally modern-dress design choices. Lazarus Theatre’s Revenger’s Tragedy focused more on the stylized attractiveness and reality of removed violence, and its effect on characters that suffer from, or glory in, its execution. The play’s director, Gavin Harrington-Odedra, justified this relaxed attitude to violent extreme by referencing the early modern acceptance of public execution as family entertainment. Blood and horror sold plays far better than cathartic moralizing. An immediate effect of this directorial “underkill” was a surprising elevation of the female characters in the play. No longer shallow archetypes that pandered to traditional readings of sexual desire, virginity, and femininity, the Duchess, Gratiana, and Castiza instead represented complex feminist commentators on the worlds they inhabit. Castiza might be commoditized by the lust of Lussurioso and the apparent insensitive greed of her mother, but in the Lazarus production, this complicated commercial exchange became less a cipher for moral decay, and more an opportunity for individual self-justification. The Duchess and Gratiana, in particular, both offer surprisingly honest, non-moralizing analyses of their actions. This detailed self-analysis seemed lost because of recent mainstream “overkill” performance choices. Including interviews with Harrington-Odedra, and the Artistic Director of Lazarus, Ricky Dukes, this chapter explores the representation of commodified women in The Revenger’s Tragedy, and considers how twenty-first century interpretations can offer radical new feminist readings when directors offer more nuanced views of the play's female characters.
New Companion to Renaissance Drama, 2017
Renaissance English revenge tragedy enacts a cycle of violence that often culminates in an ambivalent purgation of lawlessness. This circular movement is evident not only in the plots of many revenge tragedies but also in the gestures that characterize this genre. The staging of return in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the circular choreography and masque in John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, and the language of poison, contagion, and cure in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi reflect the range of circular movements that bring together the form and performance of Renaissance English revenge tragedy. At the same time, this cyclical narrative structure and recursive embodied effects extend beyond the revenge tragedy form, for example, informing William Shakespeare’s tragicomic The Tempest, and beyond its performance, as when Sir Philip Sidney in An Apology for Poetry theorizes tragedy’s restorative effects on the audience.