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.

‘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.

The Origins of English Revenge Tragedy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Oppitz-Trotman
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Dramatic Character ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Duchess Of Malfi ◽  
Tragic Drama

Charting a new course between performance studies and literary criticism, this book discovers a poetics of figuration in English tragic drama. It demonstrates that our recognition of the dramatic person in printed drama of the early modern period is involved in the terms on which those plays were first realized in the theatre. Since many such tragedies challenge and confuse the straightforward discernment of dramatic character, a strong distinction between performance studies and literary criticism breaks down in the course of an attentive reading. In the past this problem of recognition was artificially resolved or ignored so as to launch various sorts of moral interpretation. In fact, the ethical and political 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. Moreover, the epistemological issues created by these games of personation have been inadequately addressed by historicist criticism purporting to unearth the social, religious, and political impulsions of Shakespearean drama. Intervening in a wide range of current debates within early modern studies, The Origins of English Revenge Tragedyholds that the origins of English tragic drama cannot be understood without considering how the common player appears in the play.

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.

scholarly journals Demetaphorization, Anatomy, and the Semiotics of the Reformation in Early Modern Revenge Tragedy

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-201
Author(s):  
Attila Kiss
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Figures Of Speech ◽  
Modern Subject ◽  
The Face ◽  
Revenge Tragedies ◽  
Rhetorical Tropes

Abstract Reformation theology induced a profound thanatological crisis in the semiotics of the human being and the body. The Protestant Reformation discontinued numerous practices of intercession and communal ritual, and the early modern subject was left vulnerable in the face of death. The English Renaissance stage played out these anxieties within the larger context of the epistemological uncertainties of the age, employing violence and the anatomization of the body as representational techniques. While theories of language and tragic poetry oscillated between different ideas of imitatio (granting priority to the model) and mimesis (with preference for the creative and individual nature of the copy), the new anatomical interest and dissective perspectives also had their effects on the rhetorical practices of revenge tragedies. In the most shocking moments of these plays, rhetorical tropes suddenly turn into grisly reality, and figures of speech become demetaphorized, literalized. In a double anatomy of body and mind, English Renaissance revenge tragedy simultaneously employs and questions the emblematic and poetic traditions of representation, and the ensuing indeterminacy and ambiguity open paths for a new mimesis.

(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.

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.

‘Caviare to the General’?: Taste, Hearing and Genre in Hamlet

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allison K. Deutermann
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Revenge Tragedies ◽  
Absolute Control ◽  
City Comedies

This chapter turns to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, an early modern play deeply interested in, and highly self-consciously about, hearing. Possibly a revision of an earlier revenge tragedy, Hamlet is vitally shaped by the formal contests emerging at the turn of the century. Hamlet himself articulates a Jonsonian model of selective and tasteful theatrical reception, but his own hearing trouble frequently, tragically, undermines his ability to perform such audition. The Prince’s longing for complete and absolute control over his body’s sonic circulation is juxtaposed against Horatio’s more measured, partial reception; it is only in the play’s final moments that the dying Hamlet is released from this doomed, tortured struggle. Hamlet recuperates revenge from charges of embarrassing obsolescence by suggesting that all sounds can be processed thoughtfully, consciously, and carefully -- that no one dramatic sound or form forces its audiences to hear it so unthinkingly, or so violently. The chapter closes by examining Hamlet’s influence on the sound and structure of a handful of Jacobean revenge tragedies and city comedies, with particular attention to the highly sophisticated, generically self-aware The Revenger’s Tragedy.

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