‘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.

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.

Servants

2019 ◽  
pp. 126-163
Author(s):  
George Oppitz-Trotman
Keyword(s):  
Social Anxiety ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Drama ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Revenge Plays ◽  
Ethical Relations

Servants in early modern drama have increasingly been investigated less as objects of domination than as subjects capable of affective and ethical relations with their masters. Both sorts of interpretation depend upon the assumption that actual early modern servants are straightforwardly represented in drama of the time. Observing that common players were themselves patronised and liveried servants, and that the theatre itself appeared as a form of mercenary service, this chapter shows how procedures of dramatic figuration implicate identification of the servant in a complex dialectic of discernment. With roots in various sorts of contemporary social anxiety, such difficulties are at their most intense in revenge tragedy. In many places reading revenge plays involves confronting their ability to undo the social concepts used to grasp their historical content.

scholarly journals Black skin matters : the significance of color in early modern England

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Timothy Love
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Skin Color ◽  
Black People ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Black Skin ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost ◽  
The Impact

This book explores the impact of stereotypical concepts associated with black skin color in representations of black people during the English Renaissance, namely Shakespeare's Othello (Othello), Aaron (Titus Andronicus), Caliban (The Tempest), Rosaline (Love's Labour's Lost), and the "dark lady" (Sonnets). Ultimately, this book demonstrates how Shakespeare, and texts of select English Renaissance authors, retaliate against traditional stereotypical, mythical, or colonial representations of black people -- representations stemming from distinct resentments for black skin color, hegemonic notions of black inferiority, and opportunistic ambitions deriving from collective concepts of white superiority. These very early postcolonial-minded authors foreshadow modern postcolonial philosophers as they factually assess psychological patterns associated with early modern black people who endure racial discrimination, subjugation, and assimilation. Their literature contrasts previous and contemporary colonial works which fail to reference or utilize fact over racial myth when creating representations of black individuals.

scholarly journals Destabilising Decapitation in 'King Henry VI'

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-60
Author(s):  
Hannah Simpson ◽  
Hannah Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
State Authority ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
The Individual

In early modern England, state beheadings were carefully codified, reserved for the nobility and those convicted of treason. The highest and lowest in society were sentenced to beheading: those who headed the nation and those who threatened the head of the nation. Beheading was both a confirmation and an inscription of power: the publicly-staged state-mandated beheading inscribed the state’s power on the subject’s body, reducing the individual to a legible, mastered sign. The decapitated head was intended to be a stable, monosemantic inscription of state power.Shakespeare, however, often resisted the idea of the decapitated head as a permanent, definitive inscription of state authority. This article will examine decapitations in Shakespeare’s King Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3 (1591), exploring how these plays undermine the state’s attempt to inscribe a stable, single meaning on the decapitated head. The plays do this in two ways: firstly, by challenging the state’s monopoly on according hierarchised punishment, by staging illicit beheadings; secondly, by according an agency and an influence to the decapitated head itself on the stage. The recognition of how these staged beheadings undermine the state’s inscription of power might guide us towards seeing the genre’s recurrently subversive response to the state’s claim to authority.

scholarly journals Shakespeare’s Pauses, Authorship, and Early Chronology

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Bruster
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Computational Approaches ◽  
Jacobean Drama ◽  
Edward Iii ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Arden Of Faversham

This paper explores the implications of Ants Oras’s Pause Patterns in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama: An Experiment in Prosody (Oras 1960) for the chronology and authorship of plays in early modern England. Oras’s brief monograph has been noticed by a relatively few scholars, mainly those interested in changes to Shakespeare’s pentameter line. Recent developments in the field, however, have rendered his data newly attractive. Compiled by hand, Oras’s figures on the punctuated pauses in pentameter verse offer computational approaches a wealth of information by which writers’ stylistic profiles and changes can be measured. Oras’s data for a large number of playwrights and poets, as well as his methodology generally, may prove instrumental in constructing a portrait of the aesthetic environment for writers of pentameter verse during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England. In particular, pause percentages may lend context to our attributions of texts of uncertain authorship. A hypothetical chronology is offered for Shakespeare’s earliest writing, including his contributions to Arden of Faversham, 1 Henry VI, and Edward III.

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.

Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allison K. Deutermann
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Early Modern Drama ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Thomas Kyd ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
City Comedy ◽  
Commercial Theatre ◽  
Revenge Tragedies

Early modern drama was in fundamental ways an aural art form. How plays should sound and how they should be heard were questions vital to the formal development of early modern drama, and particularly to two of its most popular genres: revenge tragedy and city comedy. Simply put, theatregoers were taught to hear these plays differently. Revenge tragedies by William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd imagine sound stabbing, piercing and slicing into listeners' bodies on and off the stage; while comedies by Ben Jonson and John Marston imagine it being sampled selectively and according to taste. Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England traces the interconnected development of these two genres and auditory modes over six decades of commercial theatre history, combining surveys of the theatrical marketplace with focused attention to specific plays and to the non-dramatic literature that gives this interest in audition texture: anatomy texts, sermons, music treatises and manuals on rhetoric and poetics.

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.

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