The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy


Book Description

Introducing the reader to important topics in English Renaissance tragedy, this Companion presents fresh readings of key texts.




English Renaissance Tragedy


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.




The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama


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.




Tragedies of the English Renaissance


Book Description

This book covers the development of tragedy as a dramatic genre from its earliest examples in the 1560's until the closure of the theatres in 1642. It traces the astonishingly diverse range of tragedies as they were influenced by the growth of public and private theatre venues in London. Tragedy was the most popular and the most diverse of theatrical genres during the English Renaissance; it was also the most disruptive and subversive. For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, tragedy reaches kings and queens and everyday person alike. Tragedy has rules, but these were rules that playwrights were ready to trouble and transform to meet changes in society and politics, in theatre venue, and in audience demand.




Tragedies of Tyrants


Book Description

No detailed description available for "Tragedies of Tyrants".




Tragedies of the English Renaissance


Book Description

A survey of modern cinematic and televisual responses to the concept of the golden age.




Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama


Book Description

This book explores representations of the individualistic character in drama, Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean, and some of the Renaissance ideas allowing for and informing them. Setting aside Shakespearean exceptionalism, the study reads a wide variety of plays to explain how intellectual context could allow for such characterization.




Female Mourning in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama


Book Description

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. The author explores how the motif of the mourning woman on the early modern stage embodies the cultural trauma of the Reformation in England; brings to light the extent to which the figures of early modern drama recall those of the recent medieval past; and addresses how these representations embody actual mourning practices that were, after the Reformation, increasingly viewed as disturbing.




English Renaissance Drama


Book Description




The Expense of Spirit


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.