Early Modern Tragedy Research Articles

Geschlechterpoetik

Abstract ‚Geschlechterpoetik‘ as a methodological approach examines the mutual interferences between gender and genre in classicist drama around 1700. It outlines in which way the development of literary genres, especially tragedies, can be described in relation to historically variable and culture-specific gender performativity in dramatic texts. Obviously classicist drama of the early Enlightenment gradually transforms the virile ethics of the ‚Staats- and Heldentragödie‘ established by ancient poetics into a ‚zivile Tragödie‘. The ‚zivile Tragödie‘ is constituted by moral values that can be considered as genuinely human and universal. In the context of 18th-century moral philosophy, the rising influence of empiricism and the polarisation of gender roles morality is increasingly associated with ideals of womanhood. The gender-based transformation of early modern tragedy can be exemplified in selected texts of Johann Christoph Gottsched, Luise Gottsched and Johann Elias Schlegel which visualize the described transformation of ancient heroic tragedy into a so-called ‚zivile Tragödie‘ by using and gradually naturalizing female allegories for pitiful female protagonists who ideally incorporate genuine human ethics.

Bombast Circumstance: Linguistic Creativity and Aesthetic Judgment in Early Modern Tragedy

Bombast Circumstance: Linguistic Creativity and Aesthetic Judgment in Early Modern Tragedy

Love Notes and Sonnets in Early Modern Tragedy

ABSTRACT This essay engages a previously underexplored motif in a handful of early modern and Shakespearean tragedies that, other than the Inns of Court play, Tancred and Gismund (1567), are fairly well studied. It explores the conjunction of secretly exchanged verses (often sonnets, or almost) and material love tokens in Shakespeare's love tragedies Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida after first observing the trope in the more familiar Seneca-influenced tragedies, The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet. In each instance the sonnet fails to find completion and the token is lost, misplaced, or re-gifted signalling that the love of the play cannot be perfected or sustained. This exchange, and loss of physical love token conjoined or connected to failed or incomplete text acts in concert with the failed love that is the essence of love tragedy in the period.

Shakespeare’s Art of Entanglement: The Tempest’s Tragicomic Dramaturgy of Knotting and Untying

ABSTRACT This article proposes that via its dense knot imagery and actions of (un)tying knots on stage, The Tempest offers metadramaturgic commentary on the playwright's task of (dis)entanglement, the skill of creating and resolving a complex dramatic action. Early modern tragedy and comedy theory derived from Aristotle's Poetics helps to understand how Prospero's magically devised play, to a degree congruous with The Tempest itself, in its tragicomic mode creates and partly unties an exquisitely tied knot. Rather than pursuing a purely formalist concern, my new formalist reading of The Tempest examines how the knot as an image-cluster itself ties together various early modern concerns, such as the knot knowledge of seafaring, the Tudor and Stuart predilection for knot gardens, bondage in the contexts of colonialism and European courts, mutual binding in the imagery of romance and marriage, and the practice of delivery as an untying of the child and its sublimation in discourses of science and magic.

Connotative Confluence: Imagery and its functions in Shakespeare’s King Lear

Written in the early 1600s, King Lear, an early modern tragedy with the human condition as its main premise, displays Shakespeare’s effective exploitation of complex imagery. Through various images and extended or long drawn out metaphors, Shakespeare not only comments on character, plot, action, man’s position in the universe in relation to Nature, offspring and siblings, but also addresses such questions as political legitimacy, treason, treachery, aristocracy and the relationship between land and the monarch. In a turbulent period marked by strict rules against commenting directly on politics and royalty even in the parliament, imagery also serves as advice for the monarch in the tradition of speculum principis i.e., mirror for princes literature. This paper discusses the effect and manifold functions of various imagistic techniques used in King Lear and how imagery as a stylistic tool helps the playwright to substantially expand the meanings of the play making it a timeless and universal reading not only for the learners of Literature, but also for historians, psychologists, political scientists, philosophers, economists and food theorists, to mention only a few.

The Convention of the Boy Actor in Early Modern Tragedies

The social condemnation of female voices in early modern England is illuminated by the exclusion of women from the public stage, for a female actor would have been a vocal woman who transgressed th...

The Poetological Principles of the Early-Modern Bible Epic in Historical Contrast (Poetologische Prinzipien des frühneuzeitlichen Bibelepos im historischen Kontrast)

The investigation of the biblical epic is usually focused on the literary reception of the ancient epic. This is expedient. Nevertheless, in this paper additional perspectives on the biblical epic are discussed. It takes into account the early-modern, literary-theoretical reception of the Bible and it compares the reception of the Bible in epic with that in early modern tragedy. In conclusion, it critically discusses the considerations on the biblical epic in Ernst Robert Curtius’ Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (first 1948).

La Tragédie et ses marges: penser le théâtre sérieux en Europe (XVIe—XVIIe siècles) by Florence d'Artois and Anne Teulade

Reviewed by: La Tragédie et ses marges: penser le théâtre sérieux en Europe (XVIe—XVIIe siècles) by Florence d'Artois and Anne Teulade Esther Van Dyke Florence d'Artois et Anne Teulade, directeurs. La Tragédie et ses marges: penser le théâtre sérieux en Europe (XVIe—XVIIe siècles) droz, 2017. 464 pp to explore the edges of a thing allows us to establish our understanding of its existence. This is the motivation for the contributing authors of La Tragédie et ses marges as they probe, question, and expand the edges of tragedy. The main intention of this book is to destabilize the definition of tragedy as it has historically been perceived in early modern Europe. As indicated in the introduction, the variety of approaches creates a cartography of the genre, exploring its uncharted margins and borders, thus questioning the traditional hierarchy between tragedy and comedy and placing tragedy into lively conversation with other historically "lesser" genres such as tragicomedy and the pastoral. Much in the vein of work by Paul Bénichou, Alain Viala, and John Lyons, this volume creates a scholarly perspective that shakes the rigidity that so often exemplifies the neoclassical tragedy of early modern Europe, with its rootedness in Aristotle's Poetics. As editors of and contributors to this volume, Florence d'Artois and Anne Teulade use their backgrounds in Spanish and comparative literatures, respectively, to create a unique angle in the approach of the book, which includes a variety of scholars from a range of European universities. Almost all the contributing authors have this in common: they originate from or teach a different literature than their country of residence. Because of this cross-cultural lens, their interpretations of primary sources are rich and varied, covering a wide linguistic, academic, and literary perspective. The works explored in this book include selections from Spanish, Italian, German, British, and French literatures. However, it would have been useful to have representatives of non- European universities; there are many specialists from the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, or other regions who could have contributed another angle to the complexities of rigidly defined tragedy. Nonetheless, the variety of [End Page 195] perspectives serves to create a cartography, mapping out how genre was defined through national literatures of similar eras. The biographical information on each author is limited (most likely due to the large number of contributors), but sufficient enough to enable further research for scholars looking to begin a preliminary study in the definition of genre in early modern European theater. The volume is separated into four main sections, dealing respectively with the subjects of theoretical and non-theoretical approaches, translations and imitations of ancient tragedy, hybridizations of genre, and confrontations between tragedy and its wider cultural context. These are subdivided into chapters, which in turn are each comprised of two to five articles. The first main section (chapters 1–2) provides an overview of theoretical, or academic, treatises versus a non-theoretical, or popular, definition of tragedy in early modern Europe. The articles in chapter 1, written by Florence d'Artois and Enrica Zanin, set the stage for how early modern tragedy was defined, examining its ethical, moral, or aesthetic purpose through the lens of various interpretations of Aristotle's Poetics in Italy and France. Zanin's article in particular examines the contested definition of tragedy in these different milieux. It is during this rebirth of the Poetics' critical authority that we begin to see the rigid crystallization of tragedy, resulting in the more ambiguous forms of theater (such as tragedies with a non-tragic end) being excised or suppressed from the category of tragedy. However, as Zanin's article reveals, there was often pushback (sometimes violent) that responded to this suppression. Chapter 2, with articles by François Lecercle and Lise Michel, juxtaposes the academic and popular perspective of tragedy. Both articles in this chapter look at definitions of genre: Lecercle's focuses on the ambiguity of the word comédie in seventeenth-century France, and Michel's examines the emergence of the spectator-as-critic to various kinds of tragedy. Lecercle's article in particular introduces two of the main...

What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon by Blair Hoxby

Reviewed by: What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon by Blair Hoxby Marta Albalá Pelegrín Blair Hoxby. What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon. Oxford UP, 2015. 366 Pp. IN TIMES OF CHAOS, tragedy has been the spirit or the ghost that hovers over history. Tragedy has also been particularly long-lived as a theatrical genre, one whose aesthetic has changed over the course of the centuries, and with it, so too, its appraisal by critics. What Was Tragedy? reflects recent interest in reception studies, as some of its chapters diligently consider the performance history and success of a variety of theatrical texts, some now forgotten (as is the case of Stefonio’s Crispus), some relegated to a secondary position within the corpus of extremely canonical authors (as is the case of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra). With a conceptual-history bent, What Was Tragedy? is an in-depth reflection on the construction of literary theories across time; its ultimate goal is demonstrating “that the philosophy of the tragic is an obstacle to our interpretation of most of the tragedy that was produced in early modern Europe” (293). As the title reminds us, there is not a single definition able to encompass tragedy through time, and delving into the history of tragedy means delving into its past meanings, what it was as opposed to what it is for us. Hoxby’s book is divided into two parts, The Philosophy of the Tragic and the Poetics of Tragedy and The World We Have Lost. Part 1, consisting of chapters 1–2, sets out the theoretical basis of the book, while part 2, consisting of chapters 3–6, incorporates case studies of particular tragedies, each with varying aims and often accompanied by an overview of the performance history of the works in question. Chapter 1, “Our Tragic Culture,” reviews theories of tragedy developed by the German idealist tradition and assesses their influence in twentieth-century conception of tragedy. Special attention is given to a range of 1960s-era scholars, including Jean-Pierre Vernant, who stressed that an alien subjectivity such as that of the Greek tragedy “could not be properly understood apart from its social and cultural context” (37). Following this idea, Hoxby situates himself among more recent critics such as Terence Cave, Terry Eagleton, and Simon Goldhill, while at the same time distinguishing himself from them by “putting emphasis on pathos” and by confining his book “to a historical period with a coherent poetics of tragedy” [End Page 163] (40). Hoxby’s aim, therefore, as he states, is to “redefine tragedy in trans-historical terms,” setting early modern literary theory “in dialogue with rival ideas that have existed in other historical moments” (41). To conceptualize early modern tragedies, Hoxby relies on five propositions: (1) “Great drama need not be the drama of a nation” (41); (2) “Organic form is not superior to beautiful design” (44); (3) “Tragedy is a theatrical rather than a poetic art” (47); (4) “The passions are dramatic units of crucial significance in early modern tragedy” (48); and (5) “Not only the naive but also the sophisticated and seemingly modern aspects of ancient theater have value” (51). As the subsequent chapters unfold, these five propositions serve as the skeleton of the book’s overall argument. Chapter 2, “An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy,” delves into early modern theories of tragedy while analyzing relevant period vocabulary for today’s reader. The chapter relies both on Aristotle’s Poetics and on the myriad interpretations of his text that emerged out of humanist milieux of early modern Italy. As Hoxby explains, “early modern critics often used Aristotle’s terms as a scaffold on which to hang a vast collection of ancient testimonies that elucidated, complicated, or contradicted Aristotle” (57). While the chapter provides terminology and definitions key to understanding the early modern poetics of tragedy, it fails to provide a full portrait of the vast debates and the varied theoretical currents surrounding the issue in early modern Europe. A project as ambitious as that of recovering “what early modern tragedy was” in a single volume must necessarily have its blind spots. One example concerns the chapter...

The Tragicomic Moment: Republicanism in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster

Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher inaugurated their collaboration on a series of popular tragicomedies their play, Philaster, Or Love Lies a-Bleeding, a success soon followed by A King and No King. (1) While their tragicomedies were remarkably popular audiences and influential on other playwrights throughout seventeenth century, burgeoning genre of tragicomedy was also maligned as an aesthetically impure form of drama for its mingling of comedy and tragedy, seemingly against decorum of neoclassical poetics. This prejudice against Fletcherian tragicomedy is visible in modern critical history as well, though for different reasons: notion that genre supports politics has been a commonplace at least since Coleridge's lectures and notes on Shakespeare, in which he indicts Beaumont and Fletcher for their presumed ultra-royalism, describing them as the most servile jure divino royalist in their political opinions, and as high-flying, passive-obedience, Tories whose ideology contrasts badly Shakespeare's serene adherence to permanent politics of nature. (2) Coleridge's judgment on Beaumont and Fletcher is characteristic of critical discourse on tragicomedy, and Fletcherian drama in particular, that takes conciliatory endings of genre as support for its claims, since these endings seem to affirm, rather than to trouble, monarchical and absolutist authority. (3) Such critics as Franco Moretti have argued that early modern tragedy tends to subvert absolutist monarchy by staging deaths of kings. (4) But can we find a similarly subversive undercurrent in tragicomedy and in Beaumont and Fletcher? Specifically, can we identify a republican politics in a genre and among authors typically considered antithetical to republican concerns? If we look at theoretical formulations of Giovanni Battista Guarini in his 1601 Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry, which Fletcher almost certainly had read and taken as a model for his 1609 preface to The Faithful Shepherdess (itself indebted to Guarini's II Pastor Fido), we can locate surprising political possibilities for tragicomedy. In defending his own dramatic practice against critics who upheld generic purity of tragedy and comedy as defined by Aristotle, Guarini argues for superior modernity of tragicomedy. The norms of classical tragedy could no longer be binding, Guarini claims, for the precepts of our most holy religion, which teaches us word of gospel had rendered horrible and savage spectacles of tragedy superfluous for contemporary Christian audiences; meanwhile, comedy had been rendered tedious by mediocrity of mercenary and sordid persons, requiring tragicomic playwrights, following steps of Menander and Terence, to restore seriousness to comedy by combining with pleasing parts of comedy those parts of tragedy that can suitably accompany comic scenes to such an extent that they strive for purgation of sadness. (5) To show that such a mingling of tragic and comic elements could produce a new form superior to either tragedy or comedy in their pure forms, Guarini cites examples of biological and chemical mixtures in nature and, more importantly, political example of republic in human relations: (6) Does not Aristotle say that tragedy is made up of persons of high rank and comedy of men of people? Let us give an example of men of rank and men of people. The republic is such a thing. I do not say this in respect to its material, for every city is of necessity composed of nobles and those who are not noble, of rich and poor, ... but I speak of forms that spring from diversity of these two, that is, power of few and power of masses. Are not these two Species of government very different among themselves? If we believe Aristotle, or even pure reason, there is no doubt of it; yet Philosopher puts them together and makes of them mixture of republic. …

Le Sublime et le Grotesque

Jan Miernowski (ed.). Le Sublime et Grotesque. Geneva: Droz, 2014. Pp. 344. This book gathers contributions from a conference that took place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012 about the sublime and the grotesque or rather, to be more precise, about certain problematic moments at which these two notions collide or collapse. The volume builds indirectly on Hugo's in the Preface de Cromwell, quoted by Baldine Saint Girons as an epigraph to her chapter, that in modern poetry le sublime representee l'ame, while [le grotesque] jouera role de la bete humaine (42). It is this oscillation (to take up Christian Biet's term [122-24]) that the book's eleven extremely rich chapters explore, animated across the centuries by authors as different as Longinus, Montaigne, Flaubert, Nothomb, and (briefly) Zizek. Although summarizing such a book is always a risk and destined to be unfairly uneven in its selections, the best way to signal this volume's value is to highlight some of its key twists and turns. In the first chapter, Au-dela du beau: sublime et the volume's editor defines--without limiting--the scope of the question being asked by studying, in some depth, what the two notions mean for Kant and Baudelaire. He is careful to point out that if le voyage au-dela du beau, vers les regions ou sublime et grotesque se frolent et s'unissent, est une entreprise tentante, mais risquee, the two notions ne partagent point les memes racines (22), which is a good indication of the value of a conference and a book that bring together specialists of different periods. The second chapter, by Baldine Saint Girons, studies different modes (combat, alliance, fusion intime) by which the grotesque might be thought of as a risque du sublime. Her analysis emphasizes how both notions imply a becoming or a morphing, such that the focus is shifted to two processes captured by neologisms that deserve to stick around: la sublimisation (specifically not la sublimation) and la grotesquisation (and accompanying verb grotesquiser). From this point on, the chapters are organized more or less chronologically from the sixteenth century to the present day. In his chapter on Montaigne's Essais, Michel Magnien helpfully begins by reviewing contemporary uses of the term crotesque, first used in French by Rabelais's blason des couillons in the Tiers Livre (couillon de stuc, couillon de crotesque, etc.), and which took on, as in Etienne Pasquier, an increasingly metaphorical sense. Magnien then develops a close and highly productive reading of Montaigne's Socrates as a figure at once sublime and grotesque, before turning to the key mention of crotesques at the start of De l'amitie, to show comment la grotesque [...] devient comme l'embleme anti-classique de Montaigne (83). Building on his previous--and indeed canon-redefining--work about the bloodiest and bloodiness of early modern texts, Christian Biet next argues that we should read early modern tragedy as both sublime (after Jacques Peletier du Mans) and grotesque, suggesting (after Wolfgang Kayser) that the stage be seen as a site for the return of the repressed. To explore these notions, he offers brief readings of the More cruel, wherein the grotesque Maure's character is also (as he dies) momentarily sublime, and of Titus Andronicus. Biet's reading of the latter can be complemented by, and compared with, many recent studies in the Anglophone world (Rowe, Cunningham, Anderson, Tempera, Casey, etc.). The chapter will be of particular interest to students and scholars of either tradition who are unfamiliar with, and interested in, seeing just how similar--and bodily--the two traditions are. …

Shakespeare and the Apocalypse: Visions of Doom from Early Modern Tragedy to Popular Culture by R. M. Christofides

Journal Article R. M. Christofides. Shakespeare and the Apocalypse: Visions of Doom from Early Modern Tragedy to Popular Culture. Get access Shakespeare and the Apocalypse: Visions of Doom from Early Modern Tragedy to Popular Culture. By R. M. Christofides. Continuum Shakespeare Studies. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. Illus. Pp. xviii + 216. $120.00 cloth. Richard Hillman Richard Hillman Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 66, Issue 4, Winter 2015, Pages 498–501, https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2015.0074 Published: 01 December 2015

‘The cunning of their ground’: The Relevance of <i>Sejanus</i> to Renaissance Tragedy

Modelled on contemporary metatheatrical tragedies such as Tamburlaine and Richard III, Sejanus is Jonson’s riposte to these rebellious innovations to tragedy illustrating that his peers have failed to resolve substantially the problem of generic decay. Sejanus, modelled on the anarchic heroes of Marlowe and Shakespeare, satirizes these figures, while the play’s rigid decorum demonstrates the structural discipline necessary to produce tragedy’s moral function. Sejanus enacts Jonson’s criticism of the ‘corrupt’ context of early modern tragedy, its characters and argument the result of a decayed ethos in which the use of performance has corroded both gesture and interpretation into cynicism, and in which true heroism, and true tragedy, are impossible.

A return to form? Postmasculinist television drama and tragic heroes in the wake of The Sopranos

The paper considers The Wire in the light of the critical discourse around The Sopranos and with reference to Deadwood, Mad Men, and Sons of Anarchy. The aim is to argue that, collectively, these works might be categorised as ‘postmasculinist television drama’, analogous to the grouping of shows such as Ally McBeal and Sex and the City under the rubric of postfeminism. Like this latter category, postmasculinist dramas can be interpreted as displaying an ambiguous/ambivalent relation not just towards feminism but to other twentieth-century movements that were concerned with the de-centring of the normative, white masculine subject. Focusing primarily on issues of gender and medium, genre and form, the contention is that all these dramas create fictional worlds dominated by misogyny, homophobia, and racism whilst (apparently) establishing ‘ironic distance’ from these attitudes. Following up claims to the status of ‘tragedy’ made by, or for, all these works, this argument is developed by reading them in relation to early modern Revenge Tragedy. This suggests that, ultimately, they re-inscribe and reclaim for contemporary (white) masculinity the position of the (anti)-hero/subject as constructed by canonical tragedy, and defined in terms of the experience of existential ‘crisis’.

What Was Tragedy? The World We Have Lost, 1550–1795

We owe our idea of tragedy and our tragic repertoire to a generation of romantic critics who, writing in the shadow of Kant, demanded that tragedies display organic form, express the spirit of a nation, and stage a collision between freedom and necessity. Their formula obscures aspects of Attic tragedy and hinders our ability to interpret most tragedies written from 1550 to 1795. These works were supported by a poetics of tragedy that identifies pathos as the essence of tragedy. In order to read this repertoire anew, we must entertain five propositions: (1) that great drama need not be the drama of a nation; (2) that organic form is not superior to mechanic beauty; (3) that tragedy is a theatrical rather than a poetic art; (4) that not only the naïve but the sophisticated aspects of ancient theater have value; and (5) that the passions are dramatic units of crucial significance to early modern tragedy, a theatrical form that cannot be read only for plot, character, and imagery.

What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?*

AbstractWhen Hamlet reflects on the charged power of the tragic theater, the figure who haunts his imagination is Hecuba, Queen of Troy, whose tragedy came to define the genre in sixteenth-century Europe. As a bereaved mourner who seeks revenge, Hecuba offers a female version of Hamlet. Yet even while underscoring her tragic power, Shakespeare simultaneously establishes a new model of tragic protagonist, challenging the period’s longstanding identification of tragedy with women. In exploring why both Hamlet and Shakespeare are preoccupied with Hecuba, this article argues that ignoring the impact of Greek plays in sixteenth-century England has left a gap in our understanding of early modern tragedy. Attending to Hecuba highlights Shakespeare’s innovations to a genre conventionally centered on female grief. In invoking Hecuba as an icon of tragedy, Shakespeare both reflects on and transforms women’s place in the genre.

Early Modern Drama on Screen: A Jarman Anniversary Issue

Early Modern Drama on Screen:A Jarman Anniversary Issue Pascale Aebischer Two thousand eleven, if Alex Cox's apocalyptic Revengers Tragedy (2002) is to be believed, marks the annihilation of what survives of Great Britain by the impact of a comet. What remains of the reign of Elizabeth II—Beefeaters, judges on life support and all—is engulfed in a cloud of dust while the disembodied voice of Gloriana is heard, shrieking "Revenge! Revenge! Revenge!" from across the historical gulf separating the early modern from the postmodern Elizabeth. Cox's apocalyptic vision for the ending of Revengers sees the past impacting on the present, creating an explosive blend of early modern tragedy and political critique of present-day cultural and military imperialism at a time when Western powers "had just embarked on an open-ended war of revenge" (Cox 269; see Wray in this issue). From the vantage point of a film that went into post-production in September 2001, then, 2011 was the date set for the collision of the past and the present. The date Cox pinpointed for the triumph of his Jacobean revenger coincides with the twentieth anniversary of Derek Jarman's final Renaissance film, Edward II, which was released in 1991. Twenty years later, Jarman's film has not lost any of its beauty, energy, and intelligence. Its significance has, if anything, grown. Its use of Marlowe's play as a means of expressing disenchantment with the repressive politics of the present has left its mark on subsequent filmmakers. Edward II has come to stand for Jarman's battle against homophobic legislation, his fight against AIDS, his final word on how "the Elizabethan past," instead of being "used to castrate our vibrant present," ought to be used to "out the present" (Queer Edward 112, Dedication). [End Page 495] The twentieth anniversary of Edward II invites a reflection upon the extent to which this first major British feature film adaptation of a play by a contemporary of Shakespeare marks a point of departure from earlier ventures such as the infelicitous Doctor Faustus directed by Nevill Coghill and Richard Burton in 1967. Is Edward II responsible for the evolution of a coherent corpus of films defined by their engagement with an early modern theatre that is not over-determined by the presence of Shakespeare? Can Jarman's blend of present-day sexual and class politics, camp, counter-culture, trademark anachronisms, and deep investment in early modern thought and literature be credited with creating a distinctive style of adaptation for early modern tragedy in the same way that Kenneth Branagh—whom Jarman described as "not [having] had an original theatrical thought" (Modern Nature 147)—has been credited with initiating the "Kenneth Branagh era" (Crowl)? Edward II was the culmination of Jarman's longstanding fascination with the Renaissance as a period which enabled an engagement with the past that was both radical, in its ability to challenge the received wisdoms and absurdities of the present, and conservative ("with a small 'c,'" as Jarman insisted in his conversation with Simon Field), in its preservation of aspects of cultural heritage marginalized by mainstream culture. It is telling that, having dedicated a large part of his film career to the historical figures of Caravaggio, Elizabeth I and Doctor John Dee and having produced seminal counter-cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare's works (The Tempest [1978] and The Angelic Conversation [1985]), Jarman, for his most direct attack on Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government and its homophobic legislation, moved from Shakespeare to Marlowe, from The Sonnets to Edward II. When discussing his films with Simon Field in 1989, Jarman still thought of Shakespeare as "radical." By the time he was working on Edward II, however, Jarman had moved from that position towards an implicit, if not explicit, agreement with A. L. Rowse's assessment of Shakespeare as "a conservative" and of Marlowe as "much more radical" (quoted in Queer Edward 112). Rebelling against the Shakespeare-on-screen industry, which he identified in his Queer Edward II screenplay with the "vulgarity" of costume drama adaptations initiated by Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944), Jarman rejected such "a delusion based on a collective amnesia, ignorance and furnishing fabrics...

Compulsion: A View from the Director's Chair

This article illuminates the perspective of Sarah Harding, the director of Compulsion , an adaptation by Joshua St Johnston of Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling for Ray Winstone's production company, Size Nine, screened on ITV in May 2009. It considers the position, originated by Gary Taylor, of Thomas Middleton as 'our contemporary' to validate Harding's lifelong fascination with the complexity and ambiguity of morality and desire in The Changeling and explores the ways in which this might be mapped onto a contemporary prime-time television drama. The film's re-telling of the plot through the eyes of Anjika ( Compulsion's British-Asian rending of Beatrice-Joanna) and the navigation of her sexual relationship with De Flores (recast in the film as Anjika's family's English chauffeur, Don Flowers) are presented in relation to contemporary concerns surrounding the complexity of women's newfound autonomy and their sexual relations with men: concerns which resonate with the early modern source text. The article addresses the difficulties faced in adapting an early modern tragedy for a television audience which was likely to be largely unfamiliar with it, and highlights the creative care taken over the presentation of the play's troubling sexual politics in particular. Also under consideration is the film's complex interweaving of references to Shakespeare and the counter-cultural tradition of 'Jacobean' screen performance personified by Derek Jarman, which hope to continue a thread of conversation with dead Jacobean authors while addressing a twenty-first-century audience.

Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts

1. Theatre and government under the early Stuarts J. R. Mulryne 2. Early Stuart politics Simon Adams 3. Ben Jonson and the Master of the Revels Richard Dutton 4. The politics of the Jacobean masque Graham Parry 5. Reform or reverence? The politics of the Caroline masque Martin Butler 6. The spectacle of the realm: civic consciousness, rhetoric and ritual in early modern London James Knowles 7. The Reformation plays on the public stage Julia Gasper 8. Politics and dramatic form in early modern tragedy Kathleen McLuskie 9. Drama and opinion in the 1620s: Middleton and Massinger Margot Heinemann Index.

Tragedy and the Crisis of Authority in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Tragedy and the Crisis of Authority in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet Peter C. Herman S A N D I E G O S T A T E U N I V E R S I T Y On the one hand, the early modern period did not lack for aclear definition of tragedy.!InthededicatoryepistletoSeneca’sTenneTragedies(1581),Thomas Newton,thetranslator,defendstragedyagainstitsdetractorsonthegroundsof moral instruction:^ ForitmaynotatanyhandbethoughtanddeemedthedirectmeaningofSENECA himself,whosewholewrytynges(pennedwithapeerlesssublimityandloftinesse ofStyle)aresofarrefromcountenauncingVice,thatIdoubtwhethertherebee anyamongealltheCatalogueofHeathenwryters,thatwithmoregravityofPhUosophicallsentences ,morewaightynessofsappywords,orgreaterauthorityof soundmatterbeatethdownsinne,looselyfe,dissolutedealinge,andunbrydled sensuality: or that more sensibly, pithily and bytlngly layeth downe the guerdon of filthy lust, cloaked dissimulation, &odious treachery: which is the dryft, whereuntoheleveleththewholeyssueofechoneofhisTragedies ,(sig.A2v-r) An earlier translation of Seneca’s Oedipus by Alexander Nevyle (1563) is even morepreciseabouttheexpectationsoftragedy:“Mineonlyentent[intransating Seneca’stragedies]wastoexhortementoembraceVertueandshunVyce[...J (sig. a.n.). But whereas Nevyle focuses on all “men,” Sir PhUip Sidney, foUowing theMirrorforMagistrates,definestragedymorecloselyandmorepolitically: So that the right use of comedy wiU, Ithink, by nobody be blamed, and much less the high and excellent tragedy that openeth great wounds and showeth forth the ulcersthatarecoveredwithtissue,thatmakethkingsfeartobetyrants,and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humors, that with stirring the affects of admira tionandcommiserationteacheththeuncertaintyofthisworld,anduponhow weakfoundationsgildenroofsarebuilded,thatmakethusknow Qui sceptra saevus duro imperio regit, Timet timentes, metus in auctorem reditu Tragedyinallthesedefinitionsreflectsamorallyclearuniverseinwhichthere is abright red line separating “Vertue” from “vice,” and the genre’s point is unam¬ biguouslydidactic:toteachitsconsumerstoavoidcorruption,eithermoral or political, which also means obey your superiors, or you will face terrible IntertextSyVoX. 12, No. 1-2 2008 ©Texas Tech University Press 9 0 I N T E R T E X T S consequences. As such, the official message of tragedy overlaps with An Homilie agaynst Disobedience and Wylful Rebellion (1570): God “not only ordained that in families and households the wife should be obedient unto her husband, the chil¬ dren unto their parents, the servants unto their masters, but also [...] people should be obedient [to the ‘special governors and rulers’] God has appointed” (sig. Aiiiv). In both cases, offenses against moral or political order result in disas¬ ter. The theory of early modern tragedy thus closely anticipates Augusto Baol’s argument that Greek tragedy constituted aform of repression in that catharsis served to reinforce the status quo (130). Practice, however, was adifferent matter entirely. As both David Scott Kastan and Jean E. Howard have pointed out, once tragedy entered the public theatre, the certainties fall away and in their place we find “a veritable factory of experimenta¬ tion”(Howard,“Geography”50;seealsoKastan5-9andHoward,“Genre”298). Farfromconfirmingmoralpieties,Elizabethantragedyfromtheverystartinter¬ rogates them.4 To give but two examples, in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1585-1587), three out of the four versions of Don Andrea’s death (the exception being the mendacious narrative by Viluppo) demonstrate that Andrea’s death resulted from the fortunes of war, not misdeeds or murder. Andrea’s desire for revenge, consequently, has no legitimacy, and the play depicts aworld in which theimpulseforviolenceisalways,alreadypresent,butwithoutastablegroundor origin.ArdenofFavershamendswithaninnocentman,Bradshaw,executedalong withtheguiltypartiesforArden’smurder.“Mybloodbeonhisheadthatgivethe sentence!” are Bradshaw’s last words, but the Mayor does not care: “To speedy execution with them all!” (Sc. 18.38-39). Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Iwant to argue, fully participates in this rede¬ finition of tragedy as the contestation of values.^ More specifically, Iargue that RomeoandJuliet'sunsetdingquestionsabouttheefficacyofauthorityfiguresarise from the very specific historical circumstances of the Crisis of the 1590s, the periodofsignificantunrestcausedbythedisastrouscropfailuresofthatdecade. ThisconnectionhasbeenexploredbyChrisFitter,andIamgreatlyindebtedto hisexcellentarticle.Fitter,however,concentratesontheplay’sexplorationof class antagonism” and “social inequity” (163, 177), and therefore accords with otherscholarswhofindRomeoandJulietcritiquingoneaspectofElizabethan culture or another. Isuggest, however, that the play’s focus is in fact much wider and deeper than previously allowed. Drawing on the skepticism toward estab¬ lishedauthoritygreatlyintensifiedbytheCrisisofthe1590s,IsuggestthatShake¬ speare created atragedy in which he questions the major forms of conventional authority—secular, religious, parental, patriarchal—and all are found wanting.® The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet does not lie, as Laurence Stone once commented, in how “they brought destruction upon themselves by violating the norms of the society in which they lived” (70). Nor is it exclusively that “the norms themselves bringaboutthetragedy,”asSnyderargues(“Ideology”95).AssumingthatVerona mirrors England and that we are meant to use English, not Veronese, cultural 9 1 HERMAN: Tragedy and the Crisis of Authority in Romeo and Juliet expectations to interpret the play, it becomes evident that...