Seneca and Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy. Aspects of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

1985 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-152
Author(s):  
MARTIN HELZLE
Keyword(s):  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Revenge Tragedy

(Re)Contextualizing gender representation in Hamlet

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Andrew Darr
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Female Gender ◽  
Gender Representation ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
Conduct Books ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
English Translations

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] My dissertation "(Re)Contextualizing Gender Representation in Hamlet" argues that all Hamlets reflect their historically specific gender crisis, which helps explain why Hamlet remains the most adapted Shakespearian drama. Each Hamlet recontextualizes its representation of gender to reflect the gender norms of that historical period, beginning with Shakespeare's. My first chapter traces the ongoing conversation regarding male and female gender norms from Italian conduct books to their English translations, which in turn instigated an English counter-response. My second chapter interrogates gender representation in the English dramatic genre of revenge tragedy from its Senecan roots through Thomas Kyd's foundational play The Spanish Tragedy to Shakespeare's first revenge tragedy, Titus Andronicus. My third chapter explores twentieth century film adaptations of Hamlet as each film recontextualizes Hamlet and Ophelia within that period's dominant scholarly perception of the characters. My last chapter centers on the emergence of video game adaptations of Hamlet, which was made possible by the arrival of independently funded independent games. These innovative and interactive reimaginings of Hamlet participate within the larger, ongoing conversation concerning the representation of gender within the video game medium. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that the transitional moment that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet during accounts for the play's incredible afterlife, especially in regards to the representation of gender.

‘She’s Turned Fury’: Women Transmogrified in Revenge Plays

2018 ◽  
pp. 220-236
Author(s):  
Janet Clare
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
Revenge Plays

This chapter explores early modern responses to Hecuba, arguing that whereas Euripides’ Hecuba is a sympathetic tragic heroine and successful avenger, this model was not replicated in early modern plays. Instead the two aspects of Hecuba’s role, that of lamenting mother and ruthless avenger, bifurcate in English revenge tragedy. Pitiful, mourning mothers such as Isabella from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy are unsuccessful, while savage ones, such as Tamora from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Queen Margaret in Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy, are abhorrent and aberrant, inflicting violence from a position of power. In contrast to Germany and France – where artistic treatments of the Biblical Judith decapitating General Holofernes offer a heroic, political image of female vengeance – the chapter argues that in early modern England revenge was definitively not a woman’s business.

scholarly journals Rethinking the ““Spectacle of the Scaffold””: Juridical Epistemologies and English Revenge Tragedy

2005 ◽  
Vol 89 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
LORNA HUTSON
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Jury Trial ◽  
Renaissance Drama ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
English Renaissance Drama ◽  
Lay Participation ◽  
Political Differences

ABSTRACT Michel Foucault's analysis of penal torture as part of a regime of truth production continues to be routinely applied to the interpretation of English Renaissance drama. This paper argues that such an application misleadingly overlooks the lay participation that was characteristic of English criminal justice. It goes on to explore the implications of the epistemological differences between continental inquisitorial models of trial and the jury trial as it developed in sixteenth-century England, arguing that rhetorical and political differences between these two models are dramatized in the unfolding action of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.

Going Roman: Richard III and Titus Andronicus compared

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lake
Keyword(s):  
Richard Iii ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Revenge Tragedy

This chapter provides a comparison of Richard III and Titus Andronicus. Both Titus and Richard III have at their centre an elaborated picture of tyranny. While Titus comes off as a revenge tragedy, it also features a political under-plot, in which, as well as revenge being achieved by the Andronici, legitimacy is restored to a Rome ravaged by the tyranny of Saturninus and the Machiavellian atheism and evil counsel of Tamora and her lover Aaron, the Moor. While the radical purport of what actually happens in Richard III is obscured rather than highlighted by the heavily providential mix of prophecy and prodigy that suffuses the action, none of that is true of Titus Andronicus.

Succession and confessional politics combined

2020 ◽  
pp. 17-34
Author(s):  
Peter Lake
Keyword(s):  
Roman History ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Central Elements ◽  
Henry Vi

This chapter focuses on the play “Titus Andronicus,” which is considered not merely a revenge tragedy. It explains how Titus is suffused with evocations and references to the Aeneid and central elements in the plot that are taken from Ovid. It also mentions how Titus was described as a “noble Roman history” when it was entered in the stationer's register. The chapter discusses the Titus' central concerns: succession, tyranny, resistance and the nature and origins of monarchical legitimacy. It shows how Titus contains echoes of and parallels with the Henry VI and Richard III plays and how it was set within a meticulously evoked and entirely fictional version of Romanitas.

Revenge Tragedy and Classical Philosophy on the Early Modern Stage

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Crosbie
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Faculty Psychology ◽  
Aristotelian Ethics ◽  
Classical Philosophy ◽  
The Duchess Of Malfi

This 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, this book 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.

Sound in Mind and Body: Hearing Early Modern Revenge Tragedy

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allison K. Deutermann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Henry Vi

This chapter traces how revenge tragedy took shape on the early modern stage, outlining the model of violent, invasive hearing on which the genre would increasingly depend. Many late-sixteenth century plays delight in sonic excess, combining cannon fire, trumpets, and alarums with the rumbling thunder of bombastic speech. In these productions, loud noises are often associated with violence, and particularly vengeance. Revenge is said to ‘thunder’ into bodies, or to ‘shriek’ and ‘cry’ out; noise itself becomes a weapon. Contemporary anatomy texts support such thinking, as do early modern theories of theatrical influence and effects. Increasingly, revengers’ speeches become weapons to be wielded precisely -- that is, directly into the ears of specific, intended victims --rather than released indiscriminately into crowds of hearers. Through Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy andShakespeare’s 3 Henry VI and Titus Andronicus, this chapter argues that revenge tragedy is intimately bound up in thinking about what sound can do to listeners both on and off the stage. The theatrical form proves explicitly invested in the question of what it means to hear plays in performance.

Titus und kein Ende

POETICA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 333-360
Author(s):  
Tobias Döring
Keyword(s):  
Recent Criticism ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Religious Context ◽  
Strong Conclusion ◽  
Fall Of Rome

Abstract As part of the discussion on the poetics of endings, this paper looks at Shakespeare’s early Roman revenge tragedy as a particularly rich case study. Readers, spectators, and critics of Titus Andronicus have long been puzzled and sometimes annoyed by the sense of uncertainty and irresolution which this play seems to leave us with, even though its final speeches take us through the motions of a strong conclusion. Recent criticism has especially focussed on the figure of the new emperor, whose words close the tragedy with traditional burial orders but whose authority remains in doubt. My paper reopens the case by drawing also on two German adaptations, Heiner Müller’s Anatomie Titus Fall of Rome (1984) and Botho Strauß’s Schändung (2005), as heuristic texts to highlight fundamental ruptures that are at stake here. Trying to put the question of endings also into the religious context of the English Reformation and into the culture of the playhouse, the paper argues that Shakespeare’s dramatic non-ending in Titus may indeed be quite productive.

scholarly journals 'Such Violent Hands'

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-199
Author(s):  
William David Green
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Thomas Middleton ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Text Understanding ◽  
George Peele ◽  
New Material ◽  
Selling Point

For many, ‘Titus Andronicus’ exemplifies the extreme visual horror which characterises the subgenre of Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Long recognised as a collaboration between William Shakespeare and George Peele, the play’s notorious denouement – in which a Gothic queen is tricked into eating her slaughtered sons – has often been interpreted as a satire upon the revenge genre itself. Yet the nature of the play has recently been complicated by the claim that an additional banquet scene, only present in the 1623 Folio, may be a later addition written by a third dramatist, probably Thomas Middleton, and incorporated into the play sometime after 1616. This article will consider the implications of this probability further. It will explore how the author was not simply adding new material to ‘Titus Andronicus’ in order to provide a new selling point for a later revival of the work, but was constructing a new sequence designed to mirror and complement the already infamous cannibalistic conclusion of the original text. Understanding this scene as a later addition, we can now better understand how this additional scene serves as an integral turning point in the drama’s narrative, and is far less ‘disposable’ than previous critics have been equipped to realise.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document