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.

VARIA: Dramatization of Politics in the Age of Shakespeare

The article is concerned with the relationship between politics and aesthetics within the context of English Renaissance drama. It is argued that during the Renaissance politics was very much at the centre of all aesthetic reconstructions of reality. Renaissance writers were keenly interested in the problematization of traditional Christian morality by the advent of political realism, and this interest can be found at every structural level of their works. The article examines the reflection of the issue in a recurrent binary pattern of contrasted characters in select plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare.

Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theatre

Ovid was a multifaceted icon of lovesickness, endless change, libertinism, emotional torment and violence in early modern England. This collection uses adaptation studies in connection with other contemporary theoretical approaches to analyze early modern transformations of Ovid, providing innovative perspectives on the “Ovids” that haunted the early modern stage, while exploring intersections between adaptation theory and gender/queer/trans studies, ecofeminism, hauntology, transmediality, rhizomatics and more. The chapters explore Ovidian adaptations in the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Mary Sidney Herbert, Lyly, Hewood, among others. The volume is divided into four sections: I. Gender/Queer/Trans Studies and Ovidian Rhizomes; II. Ovidian Specters and Remnants; III. Affect, Rhetoric, and Ovidian Appropriation; and IV. Ovid Remixed: Transmedial, Rhizomatic, and Hyperreal Adaptations.” Focusing on these larger topics, this book examines the multidimensional, ubiquitous role that Ovid and Ovidian adaptations played in English Renaissance drama and theatrical performance. The book contains chapters by Simone Chess, Shannon Kelley, Daniel G. Lauby, Deborah Uman, Lisa S. Starks, John S. Garrison, Catherine Winiarski, Jennifer Feather, John D. Staines, Goran Stanivukovic, Louise Geddes, Liz Oakley-Brown, Ed Gieskes, and Jim Casey.

English Renaissance Drama: Status of Women in “The Duchess of Malfi”

Renaissance dramas mostly illustrate gender relations and women’s complex roles of empowerment. Writers of that time examined the social issues of this day through dramas that usually featured a strong female character at the centre of the play, societal issues such as the stereotypical role of the female, elements of class-consciousness, and the role of faith in a patriarchal society. Analysis of literature in this type gives the researchers much pressure to reveal real situations of that period. The main topic of this article is to analyze John Webster’s “ The Duchess of Malfi”.