Download or read book Revenge Tragedies of the Renaissance written by Janet Clare and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study of revenge tragedies - notably by Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, John Marston and John Webster - Janet Clare suggests that genres are not passively inherited, but made and re-made every time a new play is performed. The implication that there is an identifiable genre of revenge tragedy rehearsing common conventions is challenged as Clare examines Renaissance plays of revenge on their own terms. While disclosing evident inter-textual links and a similar appeal to classical material, revenge plays of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean period strive for a range of effects including satire, parody and farce. Some plays embody a providential outlook while others seem defiantly secular. Francis Bacon's famous maxim 'a kind of wild justice' captures the moral ambivalence of revenge: a rough justice on the point of anarchy. Janet Clare demonstrates the problematic nature of revenge as it defines dramatic action As the exploration of plays in this study reveals, revenge is not only bound up with justice, honour and duty, but impelled by perverted impulses, envy and resentment.
Download or read book Renaissance Revivals written by Wendy Griswold and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1986-10 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renaissance Revivals examines patterns in the London revivals of two English Renaissance theatre genres over the past four centuries. Griswold's focus on revenge tragedies and city comedies illuminates the ongoing interaction between society and its cultural products. No cultural object is ever created anew, she argues, but is instead constructed from existing cultural genres and conventions, the visions and professional needs of the artist, and the interests of an audience. Thus, every "new play" is in part a renaissance and every "revival" is in part an entirely new cultural object.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy written by Emma Josephine Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-12 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introducing the reader to important topics in English Renaissance tragedy, this Companion presents fresh readings of key texts.
Download or read book When the Bad Bleeds written by Imke Pannen and published by V&R unipress GmbH. This book was released on 2010 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mantic elements are manifold in the English drama of the Renaissance period: they are supernatural manifestations and have a prophetic, future-determining function within the dramatic plot, which can be difficult to discern. Addressing contemporaries of Shakespeare, this study interprets a representative number of revenge tragedies, among them The Spanish Tragedy, The White Devil, and The Revenger's Tragedy, to draw general conclusions about the use of mantic elements in this genre. The analysis of the cultural context and the functionalisation of mantic elements in revenge tragedy of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline era show their essential function in the construction of the plot. Mantic elements create and stimulate audience expectations. They are not only rhetoric decorum, but structural elements, and convey knowledge about the genre, the fate of which is determined by retaliation. An interpretation of revenge tragedy is only possible if mantic providentialism is taken into account.
Download or read book Origins of English Revenge Tragedy written by Oppitz-Trotman George Oppitz-Trotman and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates the figures and materials of English tragedyKey FeaturesEstablishes a new approach to the relationship between historical performance and printed literatureComplicates the popular concept of metatheatreOffers boldly original readings of important English tragedies like Hamlet and The Spanish TragedyShows how our encounter with difficulty in the reading of revenge plays can be equivalent to an imaginative confrontation with the contradictions of early modern theatrical actionCharting a new course between performance studies and literary criticism, this book explores how recognition of the dramatic person is involved in theatrical materiality. It shows how the moral difficulty of revenge in plays like The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet and The Duchess of Malfi is inseparable from the difficulty of discerning human shapes in the theatre and on the page. Intervening in a wide range of current debates within early modern studies, Oppitz-Trotman argues that the origins of English tragic drama cannot be understood without considering how the common player appears in it.
Download or read book The motif of romantic love in Renaissance Revenge Tragedies written by Natalia Gubergritz and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2018-02-19 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald, language: English, abstract: The concerns of civilized human society from the beginning on until our days have not changed much. The basic problems of mankind and therefore the basic topics literature was written about are religion, love, family and war. English Renaissance drama is no exception to that. One of the most fascinating genres of Shakespeare’s contemporaries is the Revenge Tragedy. It combines revenge plots with love matters and confronts all this with the structure and beliefs of society. One of the motifs the Revenge Tragedy depends on in order to remain absorbing for the audience is the motif of romantic love. Hence this will be the topic of the paper at hand. Further on I will discuss the different aspects of romantic love and analyse their status in Renaissance society and also the representations of this aspects in three of the most important Revenge Tragedies of that time. At first I will look on how love was seen in Renaissance society, and in which way matters of marriage were settled. This topic will be regarded deeper in the second chapter, where the approach to love and marriage will be exemplified on the tragedies. The problem of marriage, particularly unequal and secret marriage will be analysed in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Afterwards I am going to compare the play to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and see how Kyd handled the Problem of unequal relationships. In chapter 3.3 one of the most important plays in literary history will be analysed on the love relationships of its main characters. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet the romance between the Prince of Denmark and the fair Ophelia is of highest interest to the literary critic. Well, naturally the motif of romantic love does not only include marriage and interpersonal relationships, but also the question of sexuality is quite important. In this paper, I will discuss the dealing with all these topics in the Renaissance tragedies by working closely with the plays in question. As will be found out in the course of the discussion, romantic love, with its different aspects is a crucial motif to every successful Revenge Tragedy.
Download or read book A Companion to Renaissance Drama written by Arthur F. Kinney and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2002-06-10 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This expansive, inter-disciplinary guide to Renaissance plays and the world they played to gives readers a colorful overview of England's great dramatic age. Provides an expansive and inter-disciplinary approach to Renaissance plays and the world they played to. Offers a colourful and comprehensive overview of the material conditions of England's most important dramatic period. Gives readers facts and data along with up-to-date interpretation of the plays. Looks at the drama in terms of its cultural agency, its collaborative nature, and its ideological complexity.
Download or read book Revenge Tragedies written by Bente A. Videbaek and published by College Publishers. This book was released on 2003 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Tragedies of the English Renaissance written by Goran Stanivukovic and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A survey of modern cinematic and televisual responses to the concept of the golden age.
Download or read book English Revenge Drama written by Linda Woodbridge and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-16 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vengeance permeates English Renaissance drama - for example, it crops up in all but two of Shakespeare's plays. This book explores why a supposedly forgiving Christian culture should have relished such bloodthirsty, vengeful plays. A clue lies in the plays' passion for fairness, a preoccupation suggesting widespread resentment of systemic unfairness - legal, economic, political and social. Revengers' precise equivalents - the father of two beheaded sons obliges his enemy to eat her two sons' heads - are vigilante versions of Elizabethan law, where penalties suit the crimes: thieves' hands were cut off, scolds' tongues bridled. The revengers' language of 'paying' hints at the operation of revenge in the service of economic redress. Revenge makes contact with resistance theory, justifying overthrow of tyrants, and some revengers challenge the fundamental inequity of social class. Woodbridge demonstrates how, for all their sensationalism, their macabre comedy and outlandish gore, Renaissance revenge plays do some serious cultural work.
Download or read book The genres of Renaissance tragedy written by Daniel Cadman and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-25 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These twelve new essays show the variety and versatility of Renaissance tragedy and highlight the issues it explores. Each chapter defines a particular kind of Renaissance tragedy and offers new research on a particularly striking example. Collectively the essays offer a critical overview of Renaissance tragedy as a genre.
Download or read book Family and the State in Early Modern Revenge Drama written by Chris McMahon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-27 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, McMahon considers Early Modern revenge plays from a political science perspective, paying particular attention to the construction of family and state institutions. Plays set for close study are The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Malcontent and The Duchess of Malfi. The plays are read as unique events occupying positions in historical process concerning the privatisation of the family (by means of symbolism and concrete household strategies such as budgeting and surveillance) and the subsequent appropriation of the family and its methods by the state. The effect is that family becomes an unofficial organ of the state. This process, however, also involves the reform of the state along lines demanded by the private family. McMahon’s critical method, derived from the theory of Bourdieu, Bataille, and Girard, maps capital transactions to reveal emotionally charged, often idiosyncratic responses to issues of shared concern. Such issues include state corruption, the management of women, the performance of roles according to gender, the uses of surveillance, and the ethics of sacrifice.
Download or read book Hamlet s Choice written by Peter Lake and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illuminating account of how Shakespeare worked through the tensions of Queen Elizabeth's England in two canon-defining plays Conspiracies and revolts simmered beneath the surface of Queen Elizabeth's reign. England was riven with tensions created by religious conflict and the prospect of dynastic crisis and regime change. In this rich, incisive account, Peter Lake reveals how in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet Shakespeare worked through a range of Tudor anxieties, including concerns about the nature of justice, resistance, and salvation. In both Hamlet and Titus the princes are faced with successions forged under questionable circumstances and they each have a choice: whether or not to resort to political violence. The unfolding action, Lake argues, is best understood in terms of contemporary debates about the legitimacy of resistance and the relation between religion and politics. Relating the plays to their broader political and polemical contexts, Lake sheds light on the nature of revenge, resistance, and religion in post-Reformation England.
Download or read book Four Revenge Tragedies written by Katharine Eisaman Maus and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1998 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Revenge Tragedy flourished in Britain in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean period for both literary and cultural reasons. Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1587) helped to establish the popularity of the genre, and it was followed by The Revenger's Tragedy (1606), published anonymously and ascribed first to Cyril Tourneur and then to Thomas Middleton. George Chapman's The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois and Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedy were written between 1609 and 1610. Each of the four plays printed here defines the problems of the revenge genre, often by exploiting its conventions in unexpected directions. All deal with fundamental moral questions about the meaning of justice and the lengths to which victimized individuals may go to obtain it, while registering the social strains of life in a rigid but increasingly fragile social hierarchy.
Download or read book Revenge Tragedy and Classical Philosophy on the Early Modern Stage written by Crosbie Christopher Crosbie and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-14 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the influence of classical philosophy on revenge narratives by Shakespeare and his contemporariesThis book discovers within early modern revenge tragedy the surprising shaping presence of a wide array of classical philosophies not commonly affiliated with the genre. By recovering the pervasive influence of Aristotelian faculty psychology on The Spanish Tragedy, Aristotelian ethics on Titus Andronicus, Lucretian atomism on Hamlet, Galenic pneumatics on Antonio's Revenge and Epictetian Stoicism on The Duchess of Malfi, Crosbie reveals how the very atmospheres and ontological assumptions of revenge tragedy exert their own kind of conditioning dramaturgical force. The book also revitalises our understanding of how the Renaissance stage, even at its most lurid, functions as a unique space for the era's practical, vernacular engagement with received philosophy.Key FeaturesAnalyzes the twentieth-century development of revenge tragedy as a genre, and diagnoses the roots of modern criticism's tendency to treat most philosophy as estranged from the violent work of revengeProvides fresh readings of five plays central to the revenge tragedy genre, paying close attention to the conditioning influence of classical philosophy on their narratives of retributionReveals how revenge tragedy's distinctive 'moods' or 'atmospheres' emerge from fully-realized sets of ontological assumptions which help shape reception of retribution on the early modern stageDevelops new reception histories for five classical philosophical doctrines, revealing their currency and, what's more, radical adaptability within early modern England
Download or read book Three Revenge Tragedies written by Cyril Tourneur and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2004-08-26 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign in the early seventeenth century, the new court of King James was beset by political instability and moral corruption. This atmosphere provided fertile ground for the dramatists of the age, whose plays explore the ways in which social decadence and the abuse of power breed resentment and lead inexorably to violence and bloody retribution. In Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy, the debauched son of an Italian Duke attempts to rape the virtuous Gloriana - a veiled reference to Elizabeth I. Webster's The White Devil depicts a sinister world of intrigue and murderous infidelity, while The Changeling, perhaps Middleton's supreme achievement, powerfully portrays a woman bringing about her own unwitting destruction. All three are masterpieces of brooding intensity, dominated by images of decay, disillusionment and death.
Download or read book Five Revenge Tragedies written by Thomas Kyd and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2012-05-31 with total page 826 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the Elizabethan era gave way to the reign of James I, England grappled with corruption within the royal court and widespread religious anxiety. Dramatists responded with morally complex plays of dark wit and violent spectacle, exploring the nature of death, the abuse of power and vigilante justice. In Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy a father failed by the Spanish court seeks his own bloody retribution for his son's murder. Shakespeare's 1603 version of Hamlet creates an avenging Prince of unique psychological depth, while Chettle's The Tragedy of Hoffman is a fascinating reworking of Hamlet's themes, probably for a rival theatre company. In Marston's Antonio's Revenge, thwarted love leads inexorably to gory reprisals and in Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, malcontent Vindice unleashes an escalating orgy of mayhem on a debauched Duke for his bride's murder, in a ferocious satire reflecting the mounting disillusionment of the age. Emma Smith's introduction considers the political and religious climate behind the plays and the dramatic conventions within them. This edition includes a chronology, playwrights' biographies and suggestions for further reading.
