The Tragic, the Comic and the Tragicomic in Cretan Renaissance Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Holton
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Renaissance Literature ◽  
Biblical Drama ◽  
Hybrid Genre ◽  
Late Renaissance ◽  
Plot Structure ◽  
Folk Tradition ◽  
Renaissance Poetics

Greek tragedy and comedy re-emerge in late sixteenth-century Crete, now based on Renaissance neo-classical prescriptions. Besides ‘pure’ examples of the genres we also find a tragedia di lieto fine (the biblical drama Abraham’s Sacrifice) and a pastoral idyll with a tragic outcome (The Shepherdess), while Kornaros’ verse romance Erotokritos plays with the possibility of a tragic ending before settling for the outcome proper to romance. This intermingling of the tragic and the comic – of tears and laughter – is common in Cretan Renaissance literature, and most fully realised in the new hybrid genre of tragicommedia pastorale, which seems to have been popular in Crete around 1600. Taking Panoria by Georgios Chortatsis as its main textual focus, this chapter explores the interaction of tears and laughter both at a textual level and in plot structure. While the theoretical bases of tragicomedy, as propounded by Guarini, clearly underpin works like Panoria, in the case of works belonging to other genres other factors are involved: Petrarchising tropes, which are common in Cretan literature, and the antithetical structures characteristic of the folk tradition. Panoria, set on Mount Ida, is thoroughly Cretan and at the same time thoroughly imbued with late-Renaissance poetics.

scholarly journals Proximate Translation: George Buchanan's Baptistes, Sophocles’ Antigone, and Early Modern English Drama

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-100
Author(s):  
Lucy Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Early Modern Drama ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
English Drama ◽  
Early Modern English Drama ◽  
Biblical Drama ◽  
The Impact

This essay takes up the question of what impact Greek tragedy had on original plays written in Latin in the sixteenth century. In exploring George Buchanan's biblical drama Baptistes sive calumnia (printed 1577) and its reworking of scenes and images from Sophocles' Antigone, we see how neo-Latin drama provided a valuable channel for the sharing and shaping of early modern ideas about Greek tragedy. The impact of the Baptistes on English drama is then examined, with particular reference to Thomas Watson's celebrated Latin translation of Antigone (1581). The strange affinities between Watson's and Buchanan's plays reveal the potential for Greek tragedy to shape early modern drama, but also for early modern drama to shape how Greek tragedy itself was read and received in early modern England.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
History Of Collecting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Renaissance

This chapter explores the material culture of everyday life in late-Renaissance Paris by setting L’Estoile’s diaries and after-death inventory against a sample of the inventories of thirty-nine of his colleagues. L’Estoile and his family lived embedded in the society of royal office-holders and negotiated their place in its hierarchy with mixed success. His home was cramped and his wardrobe rather shabby. The paintings he displayed in the reception rooms reveal his iconoclastic attitude to the visual, contrasting with the overwhelming number of Catholic devotional pictures displayed by his colleagues. Yet the collection he stored in his study and cabinet made him stand out in his milieu as a distinguished curieux. It deserves a place in the early modern history of collecting, as his example reveals that the civil wars might be a stimulus as much as a disruption to collecting in sixteenth-century France.

The Rebirth of Poetics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hui
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Past ◽  
Renaissance Poetry ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
Renaissance Poetics

This chapter traces the genealogy of the immortality of poetry topos from antiquity to the sixteenth century. It argues that the Renaissance poetics of ruins’s yearning for timelessness is accomplished through the strategy of a temporal multiplicity, a process that transmutes the past and in turn open its own transformation, from author to author, reader to reader. In other words, Renaissance poetry, implicitly or explicitly, hopes to transcend its temporal and spatial horizons (aspiring to be a monument), yet finds its survival in the immanent world, by being recycled, cited, and transformed by successors (living as a ruin). This tension—to be within or without time—drives much of the discourse surrounding ruins. Architectural destruction always compels poets to create works that rise above the sublunary world, while at the same time it inevitably leads them back into the thickets of exchange and mediation. The chapter ends with close-reading of several sonnets of Shakespeare.

scholarly journals Tragedy at Wittenberg: Sophocles in Reformation Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Micha Lazarus
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Teaching Materials ◽  
Literary Thought ◽  
Lutheran Theology ◽  
The Face

Amid the devastation of the Schmalkaldic War (1546–47), Philip Melanchthon and his colleagues at Wittenberg hastily compiled a Latin edition of Sophocles from fifteen years of teaching materials and sent it to Edward VI of England within weeks of his coronation. Wittenberg tragedy reconciled Aristotelian technology, Reformation politics, and Lutheran theology, offering consolation in the face of events that themselves seemed to be unfolding on a tragic stage. A crucial but neglected source of English and Continental literary thought, the Wittenberg Sophocles shaped the reception of Greek tragedy, tragic poetics, and Neo-Latin and vernacular composition throughout the sixteenth century.

Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Elsky
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Renaissance Literature ◽  
Renaissance Art ◽  
Legal Concept ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Century Literature

Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature argues that, ironically, custom was a supremely generative literary force for a range of Renaissance writers. Custom took on so much power because of its virtual synonymity with English common law, the increasingly dominant legal system that was also foundational to England’s constitutionalist politics. The strange temporality assigned to legal custom, that is, its purported existence since “time immemorial,” furnished it with a unique and paradoxical capacity—to make new and foreign forms familiar. This monograph shows that during a time when novelty was suspect, even insurrectionary, appeals to the widespread understanding of custom as a legal concept justified a startling array of fictive experiments. This is the first monograph to reveal fully the relationship between Renaissance literature and legal custom. It shows how writers were able to reimagine moments of historical and cultural rupture as continuity by appealing to the powerful belief that English legal custom persisted in the face of conquests by foreign powers. Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature thus challenges scholarly narratives in which Renaissance art breaks with a past it looks back upon longingly and instead argues that the period viewed its literature as imbued with the aura of the past. In this way, through experiments in rhetoric and form, literature unfolds the processes whereby custom gains its formidable and flexible political power. Custom, a key concept of legal and constitutionalist thought, shaped sixteenth-century literature, while this literature, in turn, transformed custom into an evocative mythopoetic.

Chorus in Samson Agonistes

PMLA ◽  
1943 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 649-664
Author(s):  
Gretchen Ludke Finney
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Samson Agonistes ◽  
Greek Drama ◽  
Dramatic Criticism ◽  
Dramatic Practice

Milton writes in his preface to Samson Agonistes that “Chorus is here introduc'd after the Greek manner, not antient only but modern, and still in use among the Italians”; that “In the modeling therefore of this Poem … the Antients and Italians are rather follow'd, as of much more authority and fame.” It is not unreasonable, therefore, to expect to find in Italian drama of the seventeenth century these evidences of classical usage to which he refers. Milton is here concerned, it would appear, only with the use of chorus, and he implies that there was common in Italy in his day an imitation of Greek drama which differed from similar efforts in other countries in the handling of the chorus. He is not writing of dramatic criticism, but of dramatic practice. An interest in Minturno and Castelvetro does not explain so direct a statement. Furthermore, the phrase, “still in use,” cannot be accepted as a reference to drama of the sixteenth century, however convenient it would be to fall back upon proved relationships. Trissino's Sophonisba, for example, so close a copy of Sophocles and Euripides, presents many parallels to Samson Agonistes, but it was written more than a hundred and fifty years earlier (in 1515), and presented in 1562. Certain sixteenth-century Italian pastoral plays, such as the Aminta, show interest in the use of chorus which is derived from Greek tragedy, but the Aminta, in spite of its classical ancestry, and Milton's known admiration for its author, was written in 1573, and can scarcely answer for chorus “still in use among the Italians.” Even the seventeenth-century revivals of it would be too infrequent to account for a statement as broad as Milton's. Much the same may be said of the Pastor Fido. Moreover, at the same time, between 1550 and 1590, Jodelle and Garnier in France were writing tragedies at least as much after the Greek manner as were Tasso and Guarini. We must return to the fact that Milton is concerned with a trend in his own century.

The Hazards of Conversion: Nuns, Jews, and Demons in Late Renaissance Italy

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 468-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamar Herzig
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
Demonic Possession ◽  
Italian Peninsula ◽  
Ruling Elites ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Female Monasticism ◽  
Late Renaissance

Female monasticism and the conversion of the Jews were both major concerns for the ecclesiastical establishment, as well as for Italian ruling elites, after the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Hence, the monachization of baptized Jewish girls acquired a unique symbolic significance. Moreover, during this period cases of demonic possession were on the rise, and so were witchcraft accusations. This article explores a case from late sixteenth-century Mantua in which Jewish conversion, female monachization, demonic possession and witch-hunting all came into play in a violent drama. Drawing on unpublished documents as well as on chronicles and hagiographies, the article elucidates the mental toll that conversion and monachization took on the Jewess Luina, who later became known as Sister Margherita. It delineates her life, which culminated with her diagnosis as a demoniac, and analyzes the significance that this etiology held for the energumen—whose affliction was attributed to her ongoing contacts with Jews—and for Mantua's Jews. The article argues that the anxiety provoked by suspicions that a formerly Jewish nun reverted to Judaism was so profound, that it led to the burning at the stake of Judith Franchetta, the only Jew ever to be executed as a witch in the Italian peninsula.

Abortion and the Confessional in Counter-Reformation Italy

2012 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 443-484 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Christopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Social ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Ecclesiastical Administration ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Late Renaissance

What did abortion mean in late Renaissance Italy? In what ways did the reforming Church conceive of it and try to regulate its practice? This study explores attitudes toward abortion in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century through the lens of confessional discourses and practices. In the last three decades of the century, bishops and popes attempted to eradicate the practice of abortion by imposing shaming and increasingly severe punishments for its procurers. However, such initiatives were hindered by the social and practical consequences of bringing procurers of abortion to light. The ecclesiastical establishment had to rely on the secret space of the confessional to reform this aspect of morality. Exploring the negotiations between theological pronouncements and the sociopolitical realities of ecclesiastical administration, this article draws attention to the ambiguities inherent in early modern conceptions of abortion and contends that these led to inconsistent responses among Counter-Reformation ecclesiastical authorities.

The Figure of the Reader in Petrarch's Secretum

PMLA ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 100 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Kahn
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Renaissance Literature ◽  
Limited Applicability ◽  
The Will ◽  
Role Of The Reader

Critics of Renaissance literature have recently claimed that the active role of the reader in the production of meaning is only recognized in the sixteenth century. While numerous counterexamples can be found in classical and medieval literature, this essay focuses on the active role of the fictional reader in Petrarch's Secretum in order to demonstrate the limited applicability of such a claim to the early Renaissance. While critics have interpreted the exchange between Augustinus and Franciscus as the dramatic representation of Petrarch's divided will, they have failed to note that this dividedness is conveyed as well by the intertextuality of the work. In his willful misreading of Augustine's Confessions, in his allusions to his own earlier letter on the ascent of Mont Ventoux, as well as in his use and abuse of citations and moral exempla, Petrarch dramatizes his conception of the will itself as a faculty of interpretation.

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