Tragedy Of Love Research Articles

Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England by Huston Diehl

310Comparative Drama tiated being" (163) despite having ignored Latin American theater. Most egregious is the specious rationale for excluding women: claiming that no female dramatist equals in status the selected males, the authors uphold the very dynamic which they lament: "In any case, the condition of women as the most oppressed of the oppressed has received much less attention in published post-colonial drama than it should have done" (166). This emphasis on published texts putatively permits only superficial mention of workshop productions by such figures as Augusto Boal, though such work was over-valued in the analysis of Fugard. Ironies culminate in the final echo of Said's call "to transcend static notions ofidentity" (168) and in the closing reference to Brian Friel and Samuel Beckett, not in acknowledgment of arbitrary omissions but in validation of the study ofpost-colonial theater as a means to understand our own. The value of self-knowledge notwithstanding, this validation veers perilously into that colonial territory of FirsWThird-World hierarchies which post-colonial theory targets, underscoring the contradictions of a text which could have so fruitfully hit the mark. JANET V. HAEDICKE Northeast Louisiana University Huston Diehl. Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Pp. xv + 238. $39.95. In this important new study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theology and literature, Huston Diehl argues "that Elizabethan and Jacobean drama is both a product of the Protestant Reformation—a reformed drama—and a producer of Protestant habits of thought—a reforming drama." Drawing "on the insights of symbolic anthropologists who believe that religious practices help shape both individual consciousness and cultural forms," and focusing on "what Clifford Geertz identifies as 'the disruptive, disintegrative, and psychologically disturbing ' aspects of religion," Diehl treats tragedies by Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Middleton, and Webster "as one area in which the disruptions , conflicts, and radical changes wrought by the Protestant Reformation are publicly explored." Diehl is "particularly interested in the [Reformation] controversies surrounding the images and rituals of the medieval Church because the issues they raise—about representation, art, theatricality, spectacle, interpretation, and imagination—so clearly pertain to the drama": "By inspiring new kinds of rimais, spectacles, and dramas, the reformed religion, I argue, contributes to the formation of a uniquely Protestant theater in early modern England." In her seven rich and concise chapters, Diehl first "gives a historical account of the Protestant reformers' responses to a pronounced iconophilia in Reformation England," then "demonstrates that early Pro- Reviews3 1 1 testant artists as well as Protestant polemicists like John Foxe employ a revolutionary rhetoric that reinterprets the sacred genres and images of the traditional Church and depicts scenes of martyrdom and iconoclasm as powerful and even spectacular theater." In the remaining chapters Diehl turns "to the tragedies themselves in order to explore some of the ways the Reformation, with its radical critique of late medieval piety, its iconoclastic violence against the devotional images of the Roman Church, and its suppression of the Roman Mass and popular religious drama, stimulates theatrical production." Chapter 3 attempts to show, with a special emphasis on Hamlet and Doctor Faustus, "that Elizabethan and Jacobean drama reflexively address the reformers' inquiry into the legitimacy of the theater, exploring Protestant-induced fears that plays seduce and corrupt their audiences." Chapter 4 tries to "analyze the distinctive habits ofmind that the Roman Mass, on the one hand, and the Reformed Lord's Supper, on the other, induce in their worshippers," and to "show how Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies—with their intense exploration of mystery and representation —rehearse the crucial differences between these competing ritual experiences ." Chapter 5 "argues that early modern tragedies represent a world filled with false and demonic as well as divine signs, engaging their spectators directly in the problem of interpretation." Chapter 6 focuses on "representations of erotic love and marriage in Stuart love tragedies" and tries to show "how they interrogate the fatal identification of images and women in early Protestant culture." Chapter 7 analyzes "the way Webster appropriates a Protestant rhetoric ofwitnessing in The Duchess of Malfi, nurturing in his own spectators a selfreflexivity that can best be understood in...

Bewhored Images and Imagined Whores: Iconophobia and Gynophohia in Stuart Love Tragedies

Previous articleNext article No AccessOriginal ArticleBewhored Images and Imagined Whores: Iconophobia and Gynophohia in Stuart Love Tragedies*HUSTON DIEHLHUSTON DIEHLUNIVERSITY OF IOWA Search for more articles by this author UNIVERSITY OF IOWAPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by English Literary Renaissance Volume 26, Number 1Winter 1996 Published in association with the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6757.1996.tb01485.x Views: 30Total views on this site © 1996 English Literary Renaissance, Inc.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Sexual Perversity in 'Venus and Adonis'

Late in 1589, Thomas Lodge published his poem Scillaes Metamorphosis: Enterlaced with the unfortunate love of Glaucus. In so doing, he established a new poetic genre, the witty love-poem dressed in the manner of Ovid. Following in Lodge's wake, Marlowe wrote Hero and Leander and Shakespeare Venus and Adonis to judge by frequency of allusions to the former and reprintings of the latter, two of the most popular poems of the age. An earlier tradition, extending back through the middle ages, had moralized Ovid's tales: in the prose dedication to the first edition of his translation, Arthur Golding wrote that the myths of the Metamorphoses were 'outwardly moste pleasant tales and delectable histories', but that they were 'fraughted inwardlye with most piththie instructions and wholsome examples'.1 With not inconsiderable ingenuity, Golding peeled off the narrative skin and found hidden 'inner' moral meanings in the text; he thus contrived to make Ovid sound at least a little like the other major author whom he translated into English: John Calvin. Lodge's poem, by contrast, sets out to enjoy Ovid's poetry of passion, as the Roman poet did himself. Lessons may be learnt from this world of desire and metamorphosis, but they are lessons about the games and the anguish of love. The examples are not wholesome, the instruction is not moralistic. Lodge and his successors show how love is; they don't moralize about how behaviour should be. Golding's argument is that if you give in to passion, you will suffer, whereas the argument of late Elizabethan Ovidianism often seems to be that however you behave, whether you rein in your passion or not, love will make you suffer. Hero and Leander embrace love and end up dead. Adonis rejects love and ends up dead. In Lodge's poem, first Glaucus woos a reluctant Scilla, then Cupid fires an arrow that stops up his wound and cures him of his love; but Cupid also fires at Scilla, so she is in turn afflicted and tries to seduce a now reluctant Glaucus. Cupid, the blind, diminutive, and illegitimate child of Venus, is in every respect a contrary little bastard. But these poems cannot be described as tragedies of love. This is partly because, as in Ovid, metamorphosis lets the characters off the hook: they are arrested in the moment of intense emotion and released into a vital, vibrant, colourful world of anthropomorphic nature. And it is also, pre-eminently, because the poet is ultimately more interested in the beginnings than the

'Coriolanus' -- A Tragedy of Love

Journal Article ‘Coriolanus’ — A Tragedy of Love Get access Paul Dean Paul Dean Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 40, Issue 167, Summer 1991, Pages 117–134, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/40.167.117 Published: 01 July 1991

The Structure of Love: Representational Patterns and Shakespeare's Love Tragedies

The Structure of Love: Representational Patterns and Shakespeare's Love Tragedies

Antony and Cleopatra and Rosmersholm: "Third Empire" Love Tragedies

1 COMPARATIVE •rama Volume 20Spring 1986Number 1 Antony and Cleopatra and Rosmersholm: "Third Empire" Love Tragedies Errol Durbach "W. Shackspear and his influence on Scandinavian Art": all we know about the lecture that Ibsen delivered on Shakespeare in November of 1855 is its mangled title;l and although Halvdan Koht has done his best to project what Ibsen might have said, his essay on "Shakespeare and Ibsen" remains highly speculative. After gathering all the scattered allusions and Ibsen's occasionally mischievous misquotations from Shakespeare , Koht concludes his study of dramatic connections by endorsing Edmund Gosse's rather lame insistence that there is "something of Shakespeare" in Ibsen simply because there has to be.2 Arguments for influence are, at best, hazardous. In 1852 Ibsen saw Shakespeare on stage for the first time, in Copenhagen : productions of Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and As You Like It; and in 1855 he directed Livet i skoven (Life in the Forest), an adaptation of As You Like It, which ERROL DURBACH is Professor of English and Theater at the University of British Columbia. He has previously published in Comparative Drama, and is the author of 'Ibsen the Romantic': Analogues of Paradise in the Later Plays (1982). Currently he is working on a study of Erotic Tragedy. 2 Comparative Drama closed after two performances in Bergen.3 What else he might have seen (or read in Danish translation) remains a matter for further speculation. Influence, such as it may be, might have come from secondary sources: from Hettner, or from Georg Brandes' three-volume study of Shakespeare which Ibsen received from the author in October 1896. The first comparative studies of Shakespeare and Ibsen argued polemically not for influence, but for Ibsen's superiority. The argument is unmistakably Shavian: Shakespear had put ourselves on the stage but not our situations. Our uncles seldom murder our fathers, and cannot legally marry our mothers; we do not meet witches; . . . and when we raise money by bills we do not promise to pay pounds of our flesh. Ibsen supplies the want left by Shakespear. He gives us not only ourselves , but ourselves in our own situations. The things that happen to his stage figures are things that happen to us. One consequence is that his plays are much more important to us than Shakespear's.4 It is a witty argument. But if we no longer die by leaping on our swords or applying asps to our bosoms, neither do we plunge headlong from bridges into the mill-race. The whole point about the Ibsenian situation is that one doesn't do that sort of thing in the bourgeois world. The situations in Ibsen are as wonderful and as remote as anything in Shakespeare. For succeeding generations of comparatists, the two great playwrights are no longer in competition. For Eric Bentley, Ibsen is Shakespearean "only in being genuinely imaginative and poetic."5 For George Steiner, Ibsen is the first dramatist in over two centuries to have provided a dramatic alternative to the Shakespearean theater.6 And for Inga-Stina Ewbank, while Ibsen's Nordic temperament is crucially different from Shakespeare 's English sensibility, their visions nevertheless bear strange and remarkable affmities.7 It is in this spirit that I want to discuss Antony and Cleopatra as an erotic tragedy where, as John Danby has suggested in his famous essay, "Judgment knits itself back into character as it might do in Ibsen, and character issues from a mutable and ambiguous flux of things."8 Against this play I would like to place Ibsen's Rosmersholm. In an unstable world of shifting political alliances and warring conflicts , two pairs of middle-aged lovers look for consolation against universal collapse in a domain of intensely private Errol Durbach3 romantic ideals—only to confront the human fallibility at the heart of their relationship. Two great value systems—Roman nobility and Egyptian sensuality, Christian conservatism and pagan energy—merge, "melt" into each other with corrosive effect, and disintegrate. "[F]rom the very union which seems to promise strength," as Danby observes in his discussion of Antony and Cleopatra, "dissolution flows."9 What I want to investigate, in comparing the two plays...

The Comic Structures of Tragic Endings: The Suicide Scenes in Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra

J N TRAGEDIES OF LOVE, AS DISTINCT FROM TRAGEDIES in which love is made subordinate to revenge, ambition, or some other emotion, the two lovers theoretically have equal claims on the role normally reserved for a single protagonist. In the Shakespeare canon this equal claim is signaled by the title: Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and, if one wishes to include a play that is not generically a tragedy. Troilus and Cressida. Although love tragedy, broadly defined, was eventually to become a popular form on the Jacobean stage, the genre was a new one when Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet in 1594 or 1595. As Clifford Leech observes, until Romeo and Juliet appeared, love on the public stage seems to have been solely an element in comedy or in those romantic plays which Sidney mocked in his Apology for Poetry.In choosing the well-known Romeo and Juliet legend for his first tragedy of love, Shakespeare either stumbled upon or deliberately sought out a solution to the major problem inherent in the two-protagonist tragedy: that of orchestrating an ending in which two characters separately yet jointly undergo tragic downfalls and deaths. What particularly interests me about the pattern of events with which Romeo and Juliet ends is that Shakesneare used it again, several vears later, in Antonv and Cleopatra. Both love tragedies conclude with a tragic sequence consisting of the feigned death of the heroine, followed bv the suicide of the lover, then the heroine's resurrection, and finally, a second suicide. This pattern confers upon each of the four title characters a role characteristic of the tragic protagonist-that of causing the death of another. Each lover indirectly and inadvertently brings about the death of the beloved, and each dies nobly by his or her own hand, believing that death is preferable to life without the beloved.

“The Dark Disorders of a Divided State”: Otway and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

scenes from Romeo and Juliet dealing with the forbidden love of Marius jr., son of Caius for Lavinia, daughter of Metellus, one of the leaders of Sylla's faction. Otway's combination of Plutarch and Shakespeare has tended to strike critics as so odd and audacious that serious criticism of the play is rarely attempted. George Odell describes the combination as an astounding idea, and J. C. Ghosh writes the play off as a clumsy patchwork with the seams staring.l More recently, Kerstin P. Warner, who is sympathetic if confused about the play, finds it difficult to fathom what inspired Otway ... to graft Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet onto such forbidding material.2 As R. D. Hume points out, for modern ears the substitution of Roman names for the household names of Romeo and Juliet a substitution which produces lines such as Marius, Marius! wherefore art thou MariusT9 (11.267) can only seem ridiculous.'^ However, the parts of the play are more successfully harmonized than this suggests. In both his Roman tale and the Shakespearean love tragedy, Otway develops his characteristic themes of the limits of rationality, the failure of discourse, and the collapse of order. The feuding fathers of Romeo and Juliet disturb the peace of Verona and their brawls result in

Elizabethan Love Tragedy, 1587-1625 (by Leonora Leet Brodwin); Love and Death in Renaissance Tragedy (by Roger Stilling); Passion Lends Them Power (by Derick R. C. Marsh)

Journal Article Elizabethan Love Tragedy, 1587-1625 (by Leonora Leet Brodwin); Love and Death in Renaissance Tragedy (by Roger Stilling); Passion Lends Them Power (by Derick R. C. Marsh) Get access Elizabethan Love Tragedy, 1587-1625. By Leonora Leet Brodwin. New York: New York University Press, 1971. Pp. xii + 404. $13.50.Love and Death in Renaissance Tragedy. By Roger Stilling. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. Pp. x + 303. $15.00.Passion Lends Them Power. A Study of Shakespeare's Love Tragedies. By Derick R. C. Marsh. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976. Pp. 240. $19.00. Charles R. Forker Charles R. Forker CHARLES R. FORKER, Professor of English at Indiana University, has edited Shakespeare's Henry V and James Shirley's The Cardinal and is the author of numerous essays on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 30, Issue 1, Winter 1979, Pages 107–111, https://doi.org/10.2307/2869671 Published: 01 January 1979

Michael Long. The Unnatural Scene: A Study in Shakespearean Tragedy. London: Methuen and Company; New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1976. 266 pp. £6.50; $19.50. - Derek R. C. Marsh. Passion Lends Them Power: A Study of Shakespeare's Love Tragedies. Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1976. 240 pp. $19.

Michael Long. The Unnatural Scene: A Study in Shakespearean Tragedy. London: Methuen and Company; New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1976. 266 pp. £6.50; $19.50. - Derek R. C. Marsh. Passion Lends Them Power: A Study of Shakespeare's Love Tragedies. Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1976. 240 pp. $19. - Volume 31 Issue 4

Iago; Shakespeare: Othello; Elizabethan Love Tragedy 1587-1625; Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Tradition; Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: Henry VI and Its Literary Tradition; Source and Meaning in Spenser's Alleory; Voices of Melancholy; The World of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries; Shakespeare Survey, 24; The Quarto Copy for the First Folio of Shakespeare; John Donne's Poetry

Iago; Shakespeare: Othello; Elizabethan Love Tragedy 1587-1625; Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Tradition; Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: Henry VI and Its Literary Tradition; Source and Meaning in Spenser's Alleory; Voices of Melancholy; The World of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries; Shakespeare Survey, 24; The Quarto Copy for the First Folio of Shakespeare; John Donne's Poetry

Shakespeare's Tragedies of Love

Shakespeare's Tragedies of Love Shakespeare's Tragedies of Love, by H. A. Mason. Chatto & Windus. £2.25. A. L. French A. L. French Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume V, Issue 4, Summer-Autumn 1971, Pages 393–403, https://doi.org/10.1093/camqtly/V.4.393 Published: 01 July 1971

H. A. Mason. Shakespeare's Tragedies of Love: An Examination of the Possibilities of Common Readings of Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear and Anthony and Cleopatra. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970. xi+ 290 pp. $7.50. - Stanley Wells. Literature and Drama With Special Reference to Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971. viii+ 117 pp. $2.

H. A. Mason. Shakespeare's Tragedies of Love: An Examination of the Possibilities of Common Readings of Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear and Anthony and Cleopatra. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970. xi+ 290 pp. $7.50. - Stanley Wells. Literature and Drama With Special Reference to Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971. viii+ 117 pp. 4.25 (cloth). (Distributed in the United States by Humanities Press, New York.) - Volume 24 Issue 4

“Ocular Proof” in Othello and its Source

Shakespeare's selectivity in adapting a novella from Giraldi Cinthio's De Gli Hecatommithi into his own Othello has long been apparent; students of Shakespeare's play have stressed his transformation of the source by speeding up the action, condensing the plot, reassessing the characterization, and transfiguring the commonplace attitudes toward an interracial marriage presented in the source into a tragedy of love. But no one has demonstrated how a close comparison of single words and phrases in Othello and in the novella can help us to understand how the transformation took place, how words and phrases such as vedere cogl' occhi, vendetta, satio, and la giustizia divina are translated imaginatively into the thematic imagery of ocular proof, the configuration of revenge, satisfaction, and satiation, and the movement from justice to mercy which Desdemona offers to Othello. Clearly, such a comparison of the play and its source affords a critical perspective upon the verbal drama especially. But studies of the imagery in Othello neglect its source entirely, and source studies, merely footnoting the verbal parallels as they appear, seem to maintain the critical view that marvels how Shakespeare could have created so much out of so little. It is as if Shakespeare's characteristic ingredient, the poetic interplay of words and images in the verbal fund of his drama, had no parallel in the verbal fund of his source.

"Their Tragic Scene": The Phoenix and Turtle and Shakespeare's Love Tragedies

ULIET'S What's a name? is an expression of one of By Shakespeare's most persistent poetic interests: that of describ* j T w ing a person, quality, or emotion by suggesting that the pow* OiJ Mt , ers of ordinary communication are not sufficient the task. * l Her apostrophe functions dramatically the scene, of course, for Juliet does not know that Romeo can hear her; but the speech draws attention an aspect of literary composition which obviously intrigued Shakespeare throughout his career. Theseus describes it as part of the poet's function, as a challenge of articulation-to give to airy nothing / A local habitation and a (Dream V. i. i6-I7). The tricks of strong imagination, he goes on, demand a localization of emotion, so that capriciously imagining some fear a dark night, how easy is a bush suppos'd a bear! In larger terms, Theseus' subject is the tenuous reliability of language name something, whether Montague's son or the composite of emotions called love. For the recognition of truth, our folly-prone perceptions need some helping grace similar that required by the poetic vocabulary for accurate definition of intangibles; Theseus' speech comes near the end of a play full of the comical results of human and fairy blindnesses. The problem suggests more than the causes of laughter. The deceptions and follies of comedy, even as they delight us A Midsummer Night's Dream, are not distant from those frailties of human perception which, Shakespeare's tragedies, frequently prevent distinction between good and evil by appearances alone. We cannot separate Shakespeare's intense poetic curiosity the problem of identifying the truth with words from his conviction, as a responsible human being, that it must be set forth, implicitly, a moral context. In spite of Elizabethan coutesy books, Richard of Gloucester and Claudius are villains while they smile, and the horror Shakespeare desired raise Iago's not what I am may have been greater than we realize. Again and again characters probe into the defining characteristics of love, hate, beauty, or constancy-that which is in a name-frequently their own bewilderment. Occasionally the device does not ring true, and Shakespeare's interest will outstrip the verbal requirements of a scene: Romeo laments,

Byron and the Story of Francesca da Rimini

Few stories captured and held Byron's imagination as tenaciously as that of Francesca da Rimini. In addition to its association with Dante, who became one of his favorite poets, there was evidently something about the tragedy of love involving a married woman, her husband, and her husband's brother that Byron found especially fascinating. The many amorous triangles in his poetical narratives, as well as the exaltation of romantic love sanctified not by religion but rather by sincere emotion, show that he was temperamentally sympathetic with the basic elements of Francesca's adulterous passion. In his customary way of assimilating whatever he admired, he even identified himself and his halfsister, Augusta Leigh, with Dante's unfortunate lovers of Rimini. After frequent recourse to the story of Francesca, Byron associated himself with it to such an extent that he interwove his own autobiography with it and, I believe, reflected the original tragedy as a strangely configured, though curiously revealing, tragicomedy in the first canto of Don Juan.

Not Wisely but too Well. Shakespeare's Love Tragedies.

Franklin M. Dickey: Not Wisely but too Well. Shakespeare’s Love Tragedies Get access Not Wisely but too Well. Shakespeare’s Love Tragedies. By Franklin M. Dickey. San Marino, California: The Huntington Library, 1957. Pp. xii + 205. $5.00. Albert Howard Carter Albert Howard Carter University of Arkansas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 9, Issue 3, Summer 1958, Pages 403–405, https://doi.org/10.2307/2867350 Published: 01 July 1958

Not Wisely but too Well: Shakespeare's Love Tragedies

Not Wisely but too Well: Shakespeare's Love Tragedies

Flaming Minister. A Study of Othello as Tragedy of Love and Hate; Queen Elizabeth's Entertainment at Mitcham: Poet, Painter and Musician; The Painfull Aduentures of Pericles Prince of Tyre

Journal Article Flaming Minister. A Study of Othello as Tragedy of Love and Hate; Queen Elizabeth's Entertainment at Mitcham: Poet, Painter and Musician; The Painfull Aduentures of Pericles Prince of Tyre Get access Flaming Minister. A Study of Othello as Tragedy of Love and Hate. By G. R. Elliott. Cambridge ( Duke U.P.). 34s.Queen Elizabeth's Entertainment at Mitcham: Poet, Painter and Musician. Edited by Leslie Hotson. Cumberlege ( Yale U.P.). 20s.The Painfull Aduentures of Pericles Prince of Tyre. By George Wilkins. Edited by Kenneth Muir. University Press of Liverpool. 6s. R. A. Foakes R. A. Foakes Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 10, Issue 55, Spring 1954, Pages 20–21, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/10.55.20 Published: 01 March 1954

Flaming Minister. A Study of Othello as Tragedy of Love and Hate.

Flaming Minister. A Study of Othello as Tragedy of Love and Hate.