The Villain As Hero In Elizabethan Tragedy

Excerpt from The Villain as Hero in Elizabethan Tragedy This essay, which was presented as a dissertation for the doctorate at Princeton University, is the result of an endeavour to discover whether or not the heroic criminals of Elizabethan tragedy adhered to any particular type. Investigation showed that the greatest villains were Machiavellians. But it did more; it indicated that there were still other types of villains, and that many of them were not only heroic criminals, but were actually the protagonists of the plays in which their crimes were represented. This discovery changed the scope of my work, for it centred my attention upon the problem concerning the nature of tragic emotion, and interested me primarily in Aristotle's theory that tragic pleasure could not be aroused unless the character of the hero were good. As the essay now stands, it is an attempt to trace back to Seneca the origin of plays in which the villain is hero; to differentiate among the various types of villain-heroes presented by the Elizabethan dramatists; to demonstrate the specific influence of Machiavelli upon the type, and to show the gradual breaking away from this influence; and finally to analyse the nature of the emotion aroused by these villain-heroes, and to point out what is necessary to stimulate tragic pleasure when the hero is a villain. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Excerpt from The Villain as Hero in Elizabethan Tragedy Elizabethan drama is a term rather loosely used to cover the plays produced between the accession of Elizabeth, in 1558, and the restoration of Charles II in 1660. The plays of this period are, as every student knows, of very mixed type and unequal value, including as they do the sacred drama of national origin, the Latin imitations of Plautus and Seneca, the masterpieces of Shakespeare, and the decadent drama immediately preceding the closing of the theatres. It was towards the end of the sixteenth century that the Moral plays, performed chiefly for the edification and amusement of the common people, and the stiff imitations of Classical plays, performed chiefly at court began to give way before a new movement drawmg nourishment from both, but distinctly different from either the Romantic Drama, the drama of passion, which was the crown and flower of Elizabethan dramatic art, and of which Shakespeare is the great exemplar. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The first edition of this book formed the basis of the modern approach to Elizabethan poetic drama as a performing art, an approach pursued in subsequent volumes by Professor Bradbrook. Its influence has also extended to other fields; it has been studied by Grigori Kozintsev and Sergei Eisenstein for instance. Conventions of open stage, stylized plot and characters, and actors' traditions of presentation are realted to the special expectations which a rhetorical training produced in the listeners. The general discussion of tragic conventions is followed by individual studies of how these were used by Marlowe, Tourneur, Webster and Middleton. For this second edition, Professor Bradbrook has revised her material and written a new introduction. A new final chapter on performance and characterization describes the conventions of role-playing. Dramatists before and after Shakespeare are compared with him in their methods of showing a complex identity on stage. This chapter also considers the work of Marston, Chapman and Ford in relation to the themes and conventions studied in earlier chapters.