English Renaissance Drama Research Articles

A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Images of the Turks in English Renaissance Drama: A Case Study

This study is based on a critical discourse analysis of images widely used for the portrayals of Turks in English Renaissance drama with reference to Philip Massinger’s Renegado. This study intends to develop a systematic method to examine the discursive tendencies in the selected work to determine the frequencies of the use of particular linguistic expressions used to depict the Turks and the ideas that are established and promoted through the recurrently employed images of Turks in order to identify the dominant cultural attitudes and the political, ideological and religious implications of certain discursive representations and constructions. To do so, a structural framework for a thematic content analysis is created and it is based on the identified categories, codes, and themes as to who did what to whom and how. This approach provides a fertile ground for the categorical, thematic, and conceptual examination. The analysis of the data derived from the plays under study provides insight into what patterns and tendencies English Renaissance playwrights generated through their discursive practices and how the frequently used images supported historical, cultural, theological, and ideological productions that played a determining role in the development of certain perceptions, understandings and thoughts about Turks.

Heidi Craig. Theatre Closure and the Paradoxical Rise of English Renaissance Drama in the Civil Wars

<scp>Heidi Craig</scp>. <i>Theatre Closure and the Paradoxical Rise of English Renaissance Drama in the Civil Wars</i>

Notes on Contributors

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreDouglas Clark is a postdoctoral research assistant at the Université de Neuchâtel. His first book project, Performing the Will in English Renaissance Drama, determines the extent to which playwrights were preoccupied with exploring the destructive potential of the will (as both a faculty of the soul and a legal document). He is the author of forthcoming articles on John Donne’s testamentary verse for Studies in Philology, and transgressive acts of willing in Renaissance drama for Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England.Marjorie Garber is William R. Kenan Jr. Research Professor of English and of visual and environmental studies at Harvard University. She is the author of several books on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers, Shakespeare After All, and Shakespeare in Modern Culture, and of books on cultural topics ranging from dogs and real estate to cross-dressing, bisexuality, the use and abuse of literature, and the place of the arts in academic life. Her most recent book is Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2020).Toria Johnson is a lecturer in early modern English Literature at the University of Birmingham (UK), and the author of Pity and Identity in the Age of Shakespeare (D. S. Brewer, 2021). Her recent publications attend to the intersection of law and emotion in early modern Europe, cultures of fear in Macbeth and Othello, and the impact of the Reformation on English understandings of compassion.Kent Lehnhof is a professor of English at Chapman University. He has published some two dozen articles on early modern literature and culture in such journals as Shakespeare Quarterly, Modern Philology, SEL, ELH, and ELR. He is also coeditor (along with Moshe Gold and Sandor Goodhart) of the essay collection Of Levinas and Shakespeare: “To See Another Thus” (Purdue University Press, 2018). He is currently working on a book-length study of vocality and ethics in Shakespeare’s late plays.Martin Moraw is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the American University in Cairo. He is currently completing his first book, Drama of Forms: Genre and Politics in the Time of Shakespeare, which argues that revenge tragedy, the history play, comedy, and romance give dramatic shape to the contradictions that animate the English political conjuncture of the early seventeenth century. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 50, Number 1Spring 2022 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/720378 © 2022 Northwestern University. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Addressing the Need to Revisit Authorship Attributions in English Renaissance Drama

Addressing the Need to Revisit Authorship Attributions in English Renaissance Drama

"Foul, Strange and Unnatural": Poison as a Murder Weapon in English Renaissance Drama

"Foul, Strange and Unnatural": Poison as a Murder Weapon in English Renaissance Drama

A Spanish contribution to the development of the English interlude: From Rojas’ La Celestina to Rastell’s Calisto and Melebea

The interlude has traditionally been regarded as one of the earliest manifestations of English Renaissance drama. This essay contends that, like much English literature of the time, it was also open to the influence of foreign literatures and analyses how the author of the interlude known as Calisto and Melebea, attributed to John Rastell (ca.1525), adapts the Spanish work La Celestina. Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, by Fernando de Rojas (ca.1499/1502-1514). The writing of this interlude relies not only upon the evolution of English forms and genres but also upon the influence of its Spanish literary origin. A close reading demonstrates that the genre of the original work is adapted to the conventions of the English interlude.

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages. Tanya Pollard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+331.

<i>Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages</i>. Tanya Pollard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+331.

Representations of Muslims in English Renaissance Drama

Representations of Muslims in English Renaissance Drama

On Shakespeare's &lt;i&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/i&gt;

The use of disguise is an old stratagem in drama. As a valuable element in comedy, the female page first appeared in Gl' Ingannati, an Italian Renaissance play, written and performed by the Sienese Academy of the Intronati in 1531. But much more importance was still put on the complexity of the plot than the character there. The motive itself came into prominence in the English Renaissance drama when Shakespeare gave his disguised heroines their own individuality. Twelfth Night (1601) comes last of the family tree of Gl' Ingannati. In the main plot, it deals with two loves, one seemingly impossible for the heroine's male disguise, and the other truly so for the sameness of the gender. These loves, however, will eventually be requited by the heroine's fairhfulness and the sudden appearance of her twin brother. It also has the subplot, where one-sided loves are represented as a parody of the main plot. As to the sources of the subplot, none have as yet been known except the general Saturnalian background of the Twelfth Night. Twelfth Night is the best romantic comedy Shakespeare ever wrote until the last act when it suddenly changes its character into a dark ironical comedy. One of the reasons is that England was swept over unexpectedly early by the Continental Renaissance at around the seventeenth century, so that the romantic comedy rapidly went out of fashion. The English theatres were closed in 1642 by the Puritan Revolution. But about twenty years after when they reopened at the Restoration, new comedies performed there were those of pan-European realistic comedies of manners, quite different from the world of fantasy based on the animistic idea of Nature.

VARIA: Dramatization of Politics in the Age of Shakespeare

The article is concerned with the relationship between politics and aesthetics within the context of English Renaissance drama. It is argued that during the Renaissance politics was very much at the centre of all aesthetic reconstructions of reality. Renaissance writers were keenly interested in the problematization of traditional Christian morality by the advent of political realism, and this interest can be found at every structural level of their works. The article examines the reflection of the issue in a recurrent binary pattern of contrasted characters in select plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare.

English Renaissance Drama: Status of Women in “The Duchess of Malfi”

Renaissance dramas mostly illustrate gender relations and women’s complex roles of empowerment. Writers of that time examined the social issues of this day through dramas that usually featured a strong female character at the centre of the play, societal issues such as the stereotypical role of the female, elements of class-consciousness, and the role of faith in a patriarchal society. Analysis of literature in this type gives the researchers much pressure to reveal real situations of that period. The main topic of this article is to analyze John Webster’s “ The Duchess of Malfi”.

Site Unscene: The Offstage in English Renaissance Drama. By Jonathan Walker. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017; pp. xvi + 220, 18 illustrations. $99.95 cloth, $34.95 paper, $34.95 e-book.

Site Unscene: The Offstage in English Renaissance Drama. By Jonathan Walker. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017; pp. xvi + 220, 18 illustrations. $99.95 cloth, $34.95 paper, $34.95 e-book.

Theatricalising the Theology of Patient Revenge in English Renaissance Drama

Parmi les tropes les plus communs de la tragédie anglaise de la Renaissance, on trouve l’idée de l’impossibilité pour le héros souffrant d’appliquer à sa situation la notion chrétienne de patience. La « patience » en tant que vertu chrétienne résiste à la représentation dans le contexte du théâtre commercial et profane. En dépit de cette difficulté, on rencontre de nombreux exemples dans le théâtre élisabéthain et jacobéen qui tendent à donner une forme dramatique aux diverses conceptualisations théologiques de la patience chrétienne et aux expériences dévotionnelles qui en découlent. À l’aide de Hamlet et King Lear de Shakespeare, on verra que la difficulté qui consiste à appliquer la vertu de la patience à la passivité dramatique sert dans ces pièces à mettre en mouvement des moments dramatiques éthiques qui compliquent des procédés comme le délai, la durée, l’évitement et la mise en abyme. Un détour par The Spanish Tragedy de Thomas Kyd permet de clarifier ce point dans le contexte de l’émergence de la tragédie de vengeance et de son éthique de la patience dans la vengeance, sur la scène élisabéthaine commerciale.

Beyond Shakespeare's land of ire: Revisiting Ireland in English Renaissance drama

AbstractThere has been much critical work on the symbolic centrality of Ireland to English Renaissance literature and drama. To focus on the latter, Shakespeare's histories have been read topically in terms of the contemporaneous Irish wars and also more historically, in terms of English colonialism in Ireland. Topical readings have been followed by allegorical approaches with, for instance, attention to Othello's “ghostly Irish subtext” (Hadfield, ) or Troilus and Cressida's memories of Elizabethan conflict in Ireland (Parker, ). Such interpretations suggest scholarly imaginativeness, the discovery of surprising meaning about a text we thought we knew, albeit within a Shakespeare‐centric frame. They further suggest the capacity of Ireland to enter a play's imaginary—as problem, as image, as other world. At stake here, then, are interrelated questions about what Ireland is doing in English Renaissance drama, where and when we expect to find it, and how we read it. This essay re‐examines the question of why and how Ireland features in plays by Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists. This deceptively simple question is intended to revisit some assumptions that underpin current critical understandings. Why Ireland features in plays has been largely understood as a function of historical contexts and processes: critics and scholars have turned to these as an important site of explanation, with the early modern colonialist discourse on Ireland given special prominence as a determinant of meaning. However, this focus has sidelined other considerations. This article argues for a broadening of context, beyond a focus on topical resonance, to allow for a consideration of dramatic genre and form, the imitative nature of dramatic writing, and the theatre companies themselves, as important factors that shaped how a text and context like Ireland and the Irish found its way into a play. This approach treats representations as a series of reciprocal markings, intertextual echoes, and foregrounds the capacity of a play to make meaning within its own frame. The objective here is less about discounting the political and ideological work of Renaissance plays than about exploring their possibilities to (re)imagine the early modern “land of ire.”

Site Unscene: the Offstage in English Renaissance Drama by Jonathan Walker

Site Unscene: the Offstage in English Renaissance Drama by Jonathan Walker

The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters: Gender, Transgression, Adolescence. Jennifer Higginbotham. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Pp. vi+225.

<i>The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters: Gender, Transgression, Adolescence</i>. Jennifer Higginbotham. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Pp. vi+225.

Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1991, xx+182 pp.

Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1991, xx+182 pp.

Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama, Macmillan, 1991. xiii+305 pp. / Janet Clare, 'Art made tongue-tied by authority': Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship, Manchester U. P., 1990, xiii+224 pp.

Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama, Macmillan, 1991. xiii+305 pp. / Janet Clare, 'Art made tongue-tied by authority': Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship, Manchester U. P., 1990, xiii+224 pp.

Interrogation and Subversion in the English Renaissance Drama

Interrogation and Subversion in the English Renaissance Drama

Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama: Tragedy, History, Tragicomedy. John E. CurranJr . Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2014. xxiv + 334 pp. $95.

Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama: Tragedy, History, Tragicomedy. John E. CurranJr . Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2014. xxiv + 334 pp. $95.