Cosmos Tragedy

This study focuses on Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, the four main tragedies and Antony and Cleopatra. Tom McAlindon argues that there were two models of nature in Renaissance culture, one hierarchical, in which everything has an appointed place, and the other contrarious, showing nature as a tense system of interacting opposites, liable to sudden collapse and transformation. This latter model informs Shakespeare's tragedy.

Otis clarifies the moral and theological issues raised in the Ortesia and relates them to certain stylistic and structural qualities of the three plays. He tackles the central questions of guilt, retribution, and the relation between human and divine justice, and he sees a carefully prepared evolution in the trilogy from a primitive to a more civilized form of justice. Otis treats the trilogy as a poem, a play, and a work of theological and philosophical reflection. Originally published in 1981. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

This book's underlying claim is that English Renaissance tragedy addresses live issues in the experience of readers and spectators today: it is not a genre to be studied only for aesthetic or “heritage” reasons. The book considers the way in which tragedy in general, and English Renaissance tragedy in particular, addresses ideas of freedom, understood both from an individual and a sociopolitical perspective. Tragedy since the Greeks has addressed the constraints and necessities to which human life is subject (Fate, the gods, chance, the conflict between state and individual) as well as the human desire for autonomy and self-direction. In short, English Renaissance Tragedy: Ideas of Freedom shows how the tragic drama of Shakespeare's age addresses problems of freedom, slavery, and tyranny in ways that speak to us now.

William Storm reinterprets the concept of the tragic as both a fundamental human condition and an aesthetic process in dramatic art. He proposes an original theoretical relation between a generative and consistent tragic ground and complex characterization patterns. For Storm, it is the dismemberment of character, not the death, that is the signature mark of tragic drama. Basing his theory in the sparagmos, the dismembering rite associated with Dionysus, Storm identifies a rending tendency that transcends the ancient Greek setting and can be recognized transhistorically. The dramatic character in any era who suffers the tragic fate must do so in the manner of the ancient god of theater: the depicted self is torn apart, figuratively if not literally, psychologically if not physically. Storm argues that a newly objectified concept of the tragic can prove more useful critically and diagnostically than the traditional and more subjective tragic "vision." Further, he develops a theory of the tragic field, a model for the connective and cumulative activity that brings about the distinctive Dionysian effect upon character. His theory is supported with case studies from Agamemnon and Iphigenia in Aulis, King Lear, and The Seagull. Storm's examination of the dramatic form of tragedy and the existential questions it raises is sensitive to both their universal relevance and their historical particularity.

In this volume, tragedy in antiquity is examined synoptically, from its misty origins in archaic Greece, through its central position in the civic life of ancient Athens and its performances across the Greek-speaking world, to its new and very different instantiations in Republican and Imperial Roman contexts. Lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace the shifting dramatic forms, performance environments, and social meanings of tragedy as it was repeatedly reinvented. Tragedy was consistently seen as the most serious of all dramatic genres; these essays trace a sequence of different visions of what the most serious kind of dramatic story might be, and the most appropriate ways of telling those stories on stage. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual, and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.

The central contention of Christian faith is that in the incarnation the eternal Word or Logos of God himself has taken flesh, so becoming for us the image of the invisible God. Our humanity itself is lived out in a constant to-ing and fro-ing between materiality and immateriality. Approaching different aspects of two distinct movements between the image and the word, in the incarnation and in the dynamics of human existence itself, Trevor Hart presents a clearer understanding of each and explores the juxtapositions with the other.

This ethical context is a productive frame of reference for interpreting the strange artificiality of Senecan tragedy, the consciousness that its own dramatic worlds, events, and people are literary constructs. In Troades for example Achilles' ghost and its vengeance is represented both as an inexorable dramatic reality and the creature of a fabula to be dismissed as a malignant fiction."--BOOK JACKET.