The Price That Women in Renaissance Drama Pay for Taking Initiative

The article is a close reading of Isabella’s soliloquy in act IV of The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. Pointing at the difference between the role of women in Early Modern re­ality and their function in contemporary plays, it demonstrates the perversity of a society where women were regularly marginalized and where, even in theatre, their transgressions of the boundaries imposed on them by the patriarchal social apparatus led to extremely unfavourable repercussions. Isabella, emotionally crushed by the foul murder of her son, decides in her helplessness to take her own life. In a world dominated by men, she does not quietly accept her passive role, but works within its limitations to become a character that takes action, albeit action that ends her life. Before making the symbolic gesture of stabbing herself, she exclaims against the circumstances which drove her to it. Her speech can be seen as one of the climactic points of the play.

TEACHING DRAMA: CHALLENGES AND BENEFITS

It has frequently been stated that the dramatic method of teaching is rather efficient in students’ personal development. The basic practical aspect of this teaching method involves the acquisition of various social and language skills which point to its immense interdisciplinary potential. Apart from the benefits, teaching drama represents a highly challenging task for educators since they are supposed to mediate between the world of artists and the recipients of their art. In order to highlight the challenges and benefits of teaching drama, the theoretical framework of the paper relies on the pioneering lecturing work of Heathcote (1976, 1998), as well as the critical insights of Freire (2005) and Nussbaum (1997). Their methodical perspectives on drama as a learning medium have been combined with the results of the internal survey the authors of the paper conducted in the period 2016-2018 by teaching Renaissance drama courses at the university level.

Renaissance Drama: Excluding Shakespeare

This chapter has three sections: 1. Editions and Textual Matters; 2. Theatre History; 3. Criticism. Section 1 is by Steve Bull; section 2 is by Lakshmi Balakrishnan; section 3(a) is by Elizabeth Moroney; section 3(b) is by Cristiano Ragni; section 3(c) is by Alice Equestri.

The Play in the Mind’s Eye

Anglophone criticism of English Renaissance drama largely assumes the irrelevance of sixteenth-century continental critical debates on how to achieve verisimilitude. This chapter argues that English dramatists’ rejection of the Aristotelian unities was not in itself a solution to the problems of making theatre imaginatively compelling: all the challenges discussed by Italian critics were also challenges for English dramatists. Their plays manipulate what we might call the ‘unscene’, whereby the audience infers and imagines characters’ past histories, motives, offstage locations, and inner lives. Shakespeare and other dramatists invite us to supplement and make sense of what we actually see onstage by their use of the topics of ‘circumstance’: topics of time, place, cause, and manner which, in the period’s rhetorical and dialectical traditions, were used to give narratives and descriptions an imaginative liveliness known as enargeia or evidentia. This account is supported by the contemporary critical witness of William Scott.

King Lear and the late Renaissance dramatic convention of self-addressed speech: An empirical approach to theatrical history

In King Lear, Shakespeare inventively and daringly employed the astonishingly precise features of the convention that governed soliloquies in late Renaissance drama. Plentiful, unambiguous, conspicuous, varied, and one-sided evidence demonstrates that soliloquies represented self-addressed speeches by characters as a matter of convention rather than either interior monologues or audience addresses. The most distinctive employment of the convention in Lear occurs when a character speaks to himself in the presence of others without guarding his soliloquy from their hearing either because the speaker loses consciousness of their presence or because he does not care that others overhear his speech.

THE VIEW FROM HERE – THE CHALLENGES OF TEACHING GENDER ISSUES IN DRAMA AT AN-NAJAH NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Drawing on the challenges I have faced in my feminist analysis of Renaissance drama, this article sheds light on traditional approaches to teaching Othello in Palestine and the responses generated by my counter discussions of this domestic tragedy. My approach aims to reveal the destructive discourse of gossip, the objectification of women, and male refusal to listen to the female voice. While education is a means of emancipation and liberation within the Israeli-Palestinian context, I explore how the traditional way of teaching the play can advertently and inadvertently align with colonial strategies that stifle students’ critical thinking and their potential to emancipate themselves from the network of oppressive traditions and in extension perpetuate the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

The Status of Women in Renaissance Drama: An Analytical and Critical Study of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1612)

This paper attempts to analyze two plays, Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1612). It focuses on main characters in these works which compares and contrasts between them. These plays were selected to highlight issues related to Renaissance women such as marriage, feminism, misogynist, silence, and obedience. This analysis shows the tyranny of the husband against women, and their revolution against their social status. The outcome of this analysis endeavors to present new kind of heroines who want to change the traditional stereotype about women. Special attempt is given to propose feminist explanations for these characters.