Revenge Tragedy And The Drama Of Commemoration In Reforming England

Considering major works by Kyd, Shakespeare, Middleton and Webster among others, this book transforms current understanding of early modern revenge tragedy. Examing the genre in light of historical revisions to England's Reformations, and with appropriate regard to the social history of the dead, it shows revenge tragedy is not an anti-Catholic and Reformist genre, but one rooted in, and in dialogue with, traditional Catholic culture. Arguing its tragedies are bound to the age's funerary performances, it provides a new view of the contemporary theatre and especially its role in the religious upheavals of the period.

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.

The Spanish Tragedy was the first 'revenge tragedy' on the English Renaissance stage: but for its influence, major dramas including The Revenger's Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi and even Hamlet would not exist as they do. It is thus a key text for the study of Renaissance drama and normally appears in introductory undergraduate courses on Renaissance drama and Shakespeare. Despite its initial smash-hit status, after the closing of the theatres in 1642 the play was only once performed in Britain before its gradual revival in the 20th century. Following its first professional performance in 1973, the play has come to be recognised as a Renaissance classic, receiving frequent performance. This volume will bring together its most insightful and influential modern scholars to produce an edition read both by experts in the field and lovers of Thomas Kyd's drama.

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an annual volume committed to the publication of essays and reviews related to drama and theatre history to 1642. Volume 30, an anniversary issue, contains eight essays, three review essays, and 12 briefer reviews of important books in the field.

Francis Bacon described revenge as a 'kind of wild justice'. Then as now, early modern playwrights and their theatre-going public were fascinated by the anarchic energies that a desire for retribution unleashes. Rather than rehearsing familiar conventions, each of these plays presents a unique social and cultural milieu where dark fantasies of revenge are variously played out. In Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy a grieving father seeks public justice for the murder of his son by envious princelings. When his attempts are thwarted he turns a court spectacle of murder into the 'real' thing. Blackly comic in its tone and style, The Revenger's Tragedy (anon.) presents vengeance as mimetic art, witty and cruel. Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore represents an innovative re-working of the genre as a brother's love for his sister leads to his spectacular revenge on his rival, her husband, in a society in which brutal retaliation for perceived wrong is the norm. In Webster's The White Devil crimes of passion ignite revenge in the courts of the Italian city states. This student edition contains fully annotated, modernized texts of each play together with an introduction discussing the dramatic and poetic style of each play, focusing on its action and play of ideas.

The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage is the first full-length study to examine representations of sexual violence on the Restoration stage. By reading theatrical depictions of sexual violence alongside political tracts, propaganda pamphlets, and circulating broadsides, this study argues that authors used dramatic representations of rape to respond to and engage with late-century upheavals in British political culture. Beginning with an examination of rape scenes in English Civil War propaganda, The Politics of Rape argues that Roundhead authors described acts of rape and atrocity to demonize their enemies, the Irish, the Catholics, and the Cavaliers. After the Restoration, propagandists and playwrights on each side of every political conflict would follow suit, altering the rhetoric of sexual violence in response to each new moment of political upheaval: The Restoration of Charles II, the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars, the Popish Plot, the Exclusion Crisis, the Glorious Revolution, and the accession of William and Mary. The study offers an intensive look at British propaganda culture, gathering together a wealth of understudied pamphlet texts, and identifying a series of stock figures that recur throughout the century: The demonic Irishman, sexually violent villain of the 1641 Irish Rebellion tracts; the debauched Cavalier, the secretly Catholic royalist rapist; the poisonous Catholic bride, the malignant consort who encourages the rapes of Protestant women; the cannibal father, the evil patriarch who rapes his daughters-in-laws before ingesting his own sons as a symbol of monarchical overreach; and the ravished monarch, the male rape victim whose sexual violation protests his political disenfranchisement. The study also traces the appearance of these figures on the British stage, examining well-known works by Dryden, Rochester, Behn, Lee, and Shadwell, alongside lesser-known plays by Orrery, Howard, Settle, Crowne, Ravenscroft, Pix, Cibber, and Brady. The Politics of Rape thus offers a new method for understanding of the geo-political implications of theatrical sexual violence. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Recasts the Reformation as a battleground over memory, in which new identities were formed through acts of commemoration, invention and repression.

As the Elizabethan era gave way to the reign of James I, England grappled with corruption within the royal court and widespread religious anxiety. Dramatists responded with morally complex plays of dark wit and violent spectacle, exploring the nature of death, the abuse of power and vigilante justice. In Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy a father failed by the Spanish court seeks his own bloody retribution for his son's murder. Shakespeare's 1603 version of Hamlet creates an avenging Prince of unique psychological depth, while Chettle's The Tragedy of Hoffman is a fascinating reworking of Hamlet's themes, probably for a rival theatre company. In Marston's Antonio's Revenge, thwarted love leads inexorably to gory reprisals and in Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, malcontent Vindice unleashes an escalating orgy of mayhem on a debauched Duke for his bride's murder, in a ferocious satire reflecting the mounting disillusionment of the age. Emma Smith's introduction considers the political and religious climate behind the plays and the dramatic conventions within them. This edition includes a chronology, playwrights' biographies and suggestions for further reading.