The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama

The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama PDF Author: N. Liebler
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113704957X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This book constitutes a new direction for feminist studies in English Renaissance drama. While feminist scholars have long celebrated heroic females in comedies, many have overlooked female tragic heroism, reading it instead as evidence of pervasive misogyny on the part of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Displacing prevailing arguments of "victim feminism," the contributors to this volume engage a wide range of feminist theories, and argue that female protagonists in tragedies - Jocasta, Juliet, Cleopatra, Mariam, Webster's Duchess and White Devil, among others - are heroic in precisely the same ways as their more notorious masculine counterparts.

The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama

The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama PDF Author: N. Liebler
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113704957X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book constitutes a new direction for feminist studies in English Renaissance drama. While feminist scholars have long celebrated heroic females in comedies, many have overlooked female tragic heroism, reading it instead as evidence of pervasive misogyny on the part of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Displacing prevailing arguments of "victim feminism," the contributors to this volume engage a wide range of feminist theories, and argue that female protagonists in tragedies - Jocasta, Juliet, Cleopatra, Mariam, Webster's Duchess and White Devil, among others - are heroic in precisely the same ways as their more notorious masculine counterparts.

John Banks’s Female Tragic Heroes

John Banks’s Female Tragic Heroes PDF Author: Paula de Pando
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004379347
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
In John Banks’s Female Tragic Heroes, Paula de Pando offers the first monograph on Restoration playwright John Banks. De Pando analyses Banks’s civic model of she-tragedy in terms of its successful adaptation of early modern literary traditions and its engagement with contemporary political and cultural debates. Using Tudor queens as tragic heroes and specifically addressing female audiences, patrons and critics, Banks made women rather than men the subject of tragedy, revolutionising drama and influencing depictions of gender, politics, and history in the long eighteenth century.

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England PDF Author: S. P. Cerasano
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 0838640745
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Contains essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from both hemispheres as well as substantial reviews of books and essays dealing with medieval and early modern English drama before 1642. This volume addresses the conditions of theatrical ownership and dramatic competitionto those exploring stage movement and theatrical space.

The Female Hero in English Renaissance Tragedy

The Female Hero in English Renaissance Tragedy PDF Author: L. Hopkins
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230503055
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
This book focuses on female tragic heroes in England from c.1610 to c.1645. Their sudden appearance can be linked to changing ideas about the relationships between bodies and souls; men's bodies and women's; marriage and mothering; the law; and religion. Though the vast majority of these characters are closer to villainesses than heroines, these plays, by showing how misogyny affected the lives of their central characters, did not merely reflect their culture, but also changed it.

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages PDF Author: Tanya Pollard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192511610
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages argues that ancient Greek plays exerted a powerful and uncharted influence on early modern England's dramatic landscape. Drawing on original research to challenge longstanding assumptions about Greek texts' invisibility, the book shows not only that the plays were more prominent than we have believed, but that early modern readers and audiences responded powerfully to specific plays and themes. The Greek plays most popular in the period were not male-centered dramas such as Sophocles' Oedipus, but tragedies by Euripides that focused on raging bereaved mothers and sacrificial virgin daughters, especially Hecuba and Iphigenia. Because tragedy was firmly linked with its Greek origin in the period's writings, these iconic female figures acquired a privileged status as synecdoches for the tragic theater and its ability to conjure sympathetic emotions in audiences. When Hamlet reflects on the moving power of tragic performance, he turns to the most prominent of these figures: 'What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba/ That he should weep for her?' Through readings of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists, this book argues that newly visible Greek plays, identified with the origins of theatrical performance and represented by passionate female figures, challenged early modern writers to reimagine the affective possibilities of tragedy, comedy, and the emerging genre of tragicomedy.

Holy Estates

Holy Estates PDF Author: Sid Ray
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
ISBN: 9781575910819
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
This volume examines analogies between marital and political ideology in early modern culture, analyzing sixteenth- and seventeenth-century marriage tracts and the appropriation of their rhetoric by Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, and John Webster. Just as the marriage tracts draw explicitly on political metaphors to prescribe marital decorum, early modern political treatises adopt the language of the marriage tracts, using their construction of the family unit as a model for exercising power. on important, often subversive, meanings when they are redeployed in prose fiction and drama. The woman's place within these marital and political discourses and how she fares within early modern domestic and political hierarchies are the book's primary concerns. Included here are detailed discussions of Wroth's Urania, Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, Othello, and The Tempest, Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, and Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. Sid Ray is Associate Professor of English at Pace University in New York.

Women and Shakespeare's Cuckoldry Plays

Women and Shakespeare's Cuckoldry Plays PDF Author: Cristina León Alfar
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1134773382
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
How does a woman become a whore? What are the discursive dynamics making a woman a whore? And, more importantly, what are the discursive mechanics of unmaking? In Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal, Cristina León Alfar pursues these questions to tease out familiar cultural stories about female sexuality that recur in the form of a slander narrative throughout William Shakespeare’s work. She argues that the plays stage a structure of accusation and defense that unravels the authority of husbands to make and unmake wives. While men’s accusations are built on a foundation of political, religious, legal, and domestic discourses about men’s superiority to, and rule over, women, whose weaker natures render them perpetually suspect, women’s bonds with other women animate defenses of virtue and obedience, fidelity and love, work loose the fabric of patrilineal power that undergirds masculine privileges in marriage, and signify a discursive shift that constitutes the site of agency within a system of oppression that ought to prohibit such agency. That women’s agency in the early modern period must be tied to the formations of power that officially demand their subjection need not undermine their acts. In what Alfar calls Shakespeare’s cuckoldry plays, women’s rhetoric of defense is both subject to the discourse of sexual honor and finds a ground on which to “shift it” as women take control of and replace sexual slander with their own narratives of marital betrayal.

Service and Dependency in Shakespeare's Plays

Service and Dependency in Shakespeare's Plays PDF Author: Judith Weil
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139444573
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
This is an unusual study of the nature of service and other types of dependency and patronage in Shakespeare's drama. By considering the close associations of service with childhood or youth, marriage and friendship, Judith Weil sheds light on social practice and dramatic action. Approached as dynamic explorations of a familiar custom, the plays are shown to demonstrate a surprising consciousness of obligations, and a fascination with how dependants actively change each other. They help us understand why early modern people may have found service both frightening and enabling. Attentive to a range of historical sources, and social and cultural issues, Weil also emphasises the linguistic ambiguities created by service relationships, and their rich potential for interpretation on the stage. The book includes close readings of dramatic sequences in twelve plays, including Hamlet, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew and King Lear.

Shakespeare's Originality

Shakespeare's Originality PDF Author: John Kerrigan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019251251X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
How original was Shakespeare and how was Shakespeare original? This lucid, innovative book sets about answering these questions by putting them in historical context and investigating how the dramatist worked with his sources: plays, poems, chronicles and prose romances. Shakespeare's Originality unlocks its topic with rewarding precision and flair, showing through a series of case studies that range across the output—from the mature comedies to the great tragedies, from Richard III to The Tempest—what can be learned about the artistry of the plays by thinking about these sources (including newly identified ones) after several decades of neglect. Discussion is enriched by such matters as Elizabethan ruffs and feathers, actors' footwork, chronicle history, modern theatre productions, debts to classical tragedy, scepticism, magic and science, the agricultural revolution, and ecological catastrophe. This is authoritative, lively work by one of the world's leading Shakespearians, accessible to the general reader as well as indispensable for students.

The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage

The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage PDF Author: Michelle M. Dowd
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107099773
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The first full-length study of the ways in which Shakespearean drama influenced and expanded notions of inheritance in early modern England.