Performing Ethics in English Revenge Drama

Performing Ethics in English Revenge Drama PDF Author: Noam Reisner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100946244X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
An investigation of how Renaissance English revenge drama carried out important ethical work through audience participation and metatheatre.

Performing Ethics in English Revenge Drama

Performing Ethics in English Revenge Drama PDF Author: Noam Reisner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100946244X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
An investigation of how Renaissance English revenge drama carried out important ethical work through audience participation and metatheatre.

English Revenge Drama

English Revenge Drama PDF Author: Linda Woodbridge
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139493558
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Vengeance permeates English Renaissance drama - for example, it crops up in all but two of Shakespeare's plays. This book explores why a supposedly forgiving Christian culture should have relished such bloodthirsty, vengeful plays. A clue lies in the plays' passion for fairness, a preoccupation suggesting widespread resentment of systemic unfairness - legal, economic, political and social. Revengers' precise equivalents - the father of two beheaded sons obliges his enemy to eat her two sons' heads - are vigilante versions of Elizabethan law, where penalties suit the crimes: thieves' hands were cut off, scolds' tongues bridled. The revengers' language of 'paying' hints at the operation of revenge in the service of economic redress. Revenge makes contact with resistance theory, justifying overthrow of tyrants, and some revengers challenge the fundamental inequity of social class. Woodbridge demonstrates how, for all their sensationalism, their macabre comedy and outlandish gore, Renaissance revenge plays do some serious cultural work.

Women and Revenge in Shakespeare

Women and Revenge in Shakespeare PDF Author: Marguerite A. Tassi
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
ISBN: 1575911310
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Can there be a virtue in vengeance? Can revenge do ethical work? Can revenge be the obligation of women? This wide-ranging literary study looks at Shakespeare's women and finds bold answers to questions such as these. A surprising number of Shakespeare's female characters respond to moral outrages by expressing a strong desire for vengeance. This book's analysis of these characters and their circumstances offers incisive critical perceptions of feminine anger, ethics, and agency and challenges our assumptions about the role of gender in revenge. In this provocative book, Marguerite A. Tassi counters longstanding critical opinions on revenge: that it is the sole province of men in Western literature and culture, that it is a barbaric, morally depraved, irrational instinct, and that it is antithetical to justice. Countless examples have been mined from Shakespeare's dramas to reveal women's profound concerns with revenge and justice, honor and shame, crime and punishment. In placing the critical focus on avenging women, this book significantly redresses a gender imbalance in scholarly treatments of revenge, particularly in early modern literature.

Reformations of the Body

Reformations of the Body PDF Author: J. Waldron
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137313129
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
This project takes the human body and the bodily senses as joints that articulate new kinds of connections between church and theatre and overturns a longstanding notion about theatrical phenomenology in this period.

Origins of English Revenge Tragedy

Origins of English Revenge Tragedy PDF Author: Oppitz-Trotman George Oppitz-Trotman
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474441742
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
Investigates the figures and materials of English tragedyKey FeaturesEstablishes a new approach to the relationship between historical performance and printed literatureComplicates the popular concept of metatheatreOffers boldly original readings of important English tragedies like Hamlet and The Spanish TragedyShows how our encounter with difficulty in the reading of revenge plays can be equivalent to an imaginative confrontation with the contradictions of early modern theatrical actionCharting a new course between performance studies and literary criticism, this book explores how recognition of the dramatic person is involved in theatrical materiality. It shows how the moral 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. Intervening in a wide range of current debates within early modern studies, Oppitz-Trotman argues that the origins of English tragic drama cannot be understood without considering how the common player appears in it.

Civil Vengeance

Civil Vengeance PDF Author: Emily L. King
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501739662
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
What is revenge, and what purpose does it serve? On the early modern English stage, depictions of violence and carnage—the duel between Hamlet and Laertes that leaves nearly everyone dead or the ghastly meal of human remains served at the end of Titus Andronicus—emphasize arresting acts of revenge that upset the social order. Yet the subsequent critical focus on a narrow selection of often bloody "revenge plays" has overshadowed subtler and less spectacular modes of vengeance present in early modern culture. In Civil Vengeance, Emily L. King offers a new way of understanding early modern revenge in relation to civility and community. Rather than relegating vengeance to the social periphery, she uncovers how facets of society—church, law, and education—relied on the dynamic of retribution to augment their power such that revenge emerges as an extension of civility. To revise the lineage of revenge literature in early modern England, King rereads familiar revenge tragedies (including Marston's Antonio's Revenge and Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy) alongside a new archive that includes conduct manuals, legal and political documents, and sermons. Shifting attention from episodic revenge to quotidian forms, Civil Vengeance provides new insights into the manner by which retaliation informs identity formation, interpersonal relationships, and the construction of the social body.

Critical Analyses in English Renaissance Drama

Critical Analyses in English Renaissance Drama PDF Author: Brownell Salomon
Publisher: Popular Press
ISBN: 9780879721251
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
This bibliographic guide directs the reader to a prize selection of the best modern, analytical studies of every play, anonymous play, masque, pageant, and "entertainment" written by more than two dozen contemporaries of Shakespeare in the years between 1580 and 1642. Together with Shakespeare's plays, these works comprise the most illustrious body of drama in the English language.

Civil Vengeance

Civil Vengeance PDF Author: Emily L. King
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501739670
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
What is revenge, and what purpose does it serve? On the early modern English stage, depictions of violence and carnage—the duel between Hamlet and Laertes that leaves nearly everyone dead or the ghastly meal of human remains served at the end of Titus Andronicus—emphasize arresting acts of revenge that upset the social order. Yet the subsequent critical focus on a narrow selection of often bloody "revenge plays" has overshadowed subtler and less spectacular modes of vengeance present in early modern culture. In Civil Vengeance, Emily L. King offers a new way of understanding early modern revenge in relation to civility and community. Rather than relegating vengeance to the social periphery, she uncovers how facets of society—church, law, and education—relied on the dynamic of retribution to augment their power such that revenge emerges as an extension of civility. To revise the lineage of revenge literature in early modern England, King rereads familiar revenge tragedies (including Marston's Antonio's Revenge and Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy) alongside a new archive that includes conduct manuals, legal and political documents, and sermons. Shifting attention from episodic revenge to quotidian forms, Civil Vengeance provides new insights into the manner by which retaliation informs identity formation, interpersonal relationships, and the construction of the social body.

The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy

The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy PDF Author: Emma Josephine Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521519373
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Introducing the reader to important topics in English Renaissance tragedy, this Companion presents fresh readings of key texts.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy PDF Author: Claire McEachern
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107470137
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
This revised and updated Companion acquaints the student reader with the forms, contexts, critical and theatrical lives of the ten plays considered to be Shakespeare's tragedies. Thirteen essays, written by leading scholars in Britain and North America, address the ways in which Shakespearean tragedy originated, developed and diversified, as well as how it has fared on stage, as text and in criticism. Topics covered include the literary precursors of Shakespeare's tragedies, cultural backgrounds, sub-genres and receptions of the plays. The book examines the four major tragedies and, in addition, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. Essays from the first edition have been fully revised to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship; the bibliography has been extensively updated; and four new chapters have been added, discussing Shakespearean form, Shakespeare and philosophy, Shakespeare's tragedies in performance, and Shakespeare and religion.