True Tragedy Research Articles

The Types of Discrimination and Princess Diana’s Ways to Pursue Her Freedom in Spencer (2021)

This article elaborates the film "Spencer," characterized as "a fable from true tragedy" based on Princess Diana's story. The focus of the research is on how Princess Diana pursued her freedom. The methodology involves a direct viewing and interpretation of "Spencer," analyzing visual scenes and audio dialogues. Following Roland Barthes' semiotic approach, the researcher identifies denotative signs, transitions them into connotative markers, and ultimately explores the mythic stage. Specific scenes, such as Princess Diana encountering a sign urging silence and her secretive actions in the palace, are dissected to reveal layers of meaning. Through semiotic analysis, the article illustrates Princess Diana's attempts to break free from royal constraints. Each scene reflects the conflict between individual desires for freedom and the norms imposed by the royal institution. The study offers a nuanced understanding of Princess Diana's struggle within the royal family's rules and pressures. The analysis provides profound insights into how "Spencer" portrays Princess Diana's quest for personal freedom amidst the rigid regulations of the royal household, employing semiotics as a valuable approach to unravel the meanings embedded in visual and auditory elements of the film.

Rival monarchs: The two versions of 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI

Two early plays in the Shakespeare canon, 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI, exist in widely different versions. For many years, the standard explanation for the discrepancy was that Contention and True Tragedie were untrustworthy texts contaminated by memorial reconstruction. In this essay, I will argue that each needs to be treated in its own terms as an internally consistent play; that anomalies in the text of Contention and True Tragedie are not convincing evidence of memorial reconstruction; and that significant differences in the alternative versions can best be explained as revision and expansion, rather than as abridgement.

Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theatre by Katherine Schapp Williams

Reviewed by: Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theatre by Katherine Schapp Williams Marina Gerzić Williams, Katherine Schapp, Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theatre, Ithaca/London, Cornell University Press, 2021; hardback; pp. 309; R.R.P. US$59.95; ISBN 9781501753503. Katherine Schaap Williams’s book Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theatre is an exciting and transformative study of the relationship between disability and performance in early modern English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Drawing on a social model of disability, which focuses on how those who are impaired are disabled by barriers in society, Williams shows how early modern theatre produces a concept of disability that is ‘interactive, temporally in flux, and constituted through the volatile form of the actor’s body’ (p. 6). Williams explores how theatrical form ‘remakes—and is in turn remade by—early modern disability’ (p. 5). In doing so, Unfixable Forms deepens our understanding of a range of plays, including more familiar works by William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, and Ben Jonson, alongside less well-known unattributed plays such as A Larum for London and The Fair Maid of the Exchange. Williams expertly reads dramatic texts alongside a wide range of sources, including medical treatises, surgical manuals, and philosophical essays. [End Page 276] Unfixable Forms contains an introduction, six chapters, and ends with a coda. Throughout, Williams astutely analyses early modern theatrical practice, and shows how we understand disability in these early modern dramatic texts, both as a ‘cultural analytic and as an aesthetic experiment with the medium of the actor’s body’ (p. 223). In Chapter 1, Williams brings new light to the standard bearer of early modern disability studies, Shakespeare’s Richard III. Williams looks at medieval and Elizabethan historical sources, as well as the unattributed play The True Tragedie of Richard III, to show how disability in Richard III is anything but fixed. Williams’s analysis of performances of Richard III featuring renowned actors such as Colly Cibber, Richard Burbage, and Antony Sher, highlights both the slippage involved in becoming Richard on stage, and the dangers involved in the act of performing disability. In Chapter 2, Williams examines how the character of the lame soldier is represented in works including A Larum for London and Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, and how the staging of these characters differs from early modern medical discourse. Williams shows that while these medical texts champion prosthetics as a means to ‘fix’ bodies damaged from wars, the actor’s body performing ‘lame’ characters, such as Stump and Ralph, ‘points at the body’s disabling’ (p. 57). Chapter 3 offers a detailed discussion about the counterfeit-disability tradition in early modern theatre, in particular the figure of the ‘crippled’ beggar. Williams’s analysis centres on the character of Cripple in The Fair Maid in Exchange and the on-going exchange between the actor’s body (playing Cripple) and that of the characters. While Frank Golding in Fair Maid can borrow Cripple’s prosthetics as props for his counterfeiting, Williams argues that Cripple’s ability to play other roles within the play in fixed. Cripple stands out in his simultaneous surplus and deficiency: he is both a character with a missing limb being played by an actor with an excess leg, as well as character who is crippled and thus incapable of playing other roles. In Chapter 4, Williams considers ugliness—a form of disabling that focuses not on what the body can do, but how the body looks. In her analysis of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Captain, Williams shows how spectators’ assumptions about Jacomo’s distinctive body are undercut by the humorous marriage plot. Similarly, in The Changeling, by Middleton and William Rowley, spectators are conscripted into the gaze of De Flores, who ‘unsettles the normative frame of bodily interpretation’ (p. 132). Chapter 5 considers the sick body, afflicted with palsy, convulsions, and epileptic fits, in works such as Shakespeare’s Othello, Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent, and Jonson’s Volpone, and how they disrupt the text. Williams argues that the display of these convulsions and fits ‘discloses...

Visualizing textual similarity of Shakespearean suspect texts: An examination of the Henry VI plays

Abstract The relationship between Shakespeare’s First Folio and early printings, published in his lifetime, has been a matter of dispute for centuries. A computer program that I have developed visualizes the fluctuating quality of textual correspondences between Folio texts, Henry the Sixth, Part Two and Three, and texts that have been suspected as memorial reconstructions of the Folio, The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York. The memorial reconstruction hypothesis assumes increased similarity between the two texts when an alleged actor–reporter is on the stage or speaking and vice versa. The visualization of similarity between two texts, based on the Dice similarity metric, does not show a strong association between the fluctuation of similarity and actor–reporter factors, which challenges the memorial reconstruction hypothesis on statistical grounds. In addition, the distribution of line-by-line similarity scores suggests scene division is a considerable explanatory factor for fluctuating similarity, which is not inexplicable, considering the practice of collaborative writing in the early modern playhouse.

The Authorship of The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York

The Authorship of <i>The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York</i>

Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594. Edited by Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. v+324.

<i>Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594</i>. Edited by Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. v+324.

Beautified Q1 Hamlet

Q1 Hamlet (1603) routinely sets prose speeches so that they appear to be blank verse. This article argues that such was an attempt to confer prestige upon the text, particularly in the wake of the saturation of Shakespeare books on the literary marketplace around 1600 – a phenomenon that saw his prose works achieve less favour than those in pentameter. The publishers of Q1 Merry Wives (1602) and Q1 Hamlet may have hedged their bets on these Shakespeare texts by amplifying their verse, long the gold standard of the Shakespearean brand. Like The True Tragedie of Richard III (published 1594) and The Famous Victories of Henry V (entered 1594), which presented their opening pages to readers as iambic pentameter, Q1 Hamlet seems to have beautified its dialogue for readers in the early modern book marketplace.

Stephen Gill Pens Poetry for Personal Therapy

About 300 years before Christ, Aristotle describes catharsis in his Poetics to show the impact of true tragedy on the audience. In the nineteenth century, Josef Breuer, the companion of Sigmund Freud, was the first to use Aristotelian concept in the realm of psychology. One template of catharsis is the use of a musical instrument for a tired person to feel relaxed. In literature, one example is Oedipus Rex in which Oedipus unknowingly marries his biological mother. Another example is Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It is often said that reading any work about murder or to see it on the television can be a healing therapy.

O'Neill (Unexpected)

O'Neill (Unexpected)

“He Just Snapped”

This article presents findings and recommendations for journalists and educators based on a study of more than 20 years’ reporting of infanticide, filicide and family murder–suicide in the United Kingdom’s national and regional press. On average, 50 children die each year at the hands of parents in the United Kingdom, and the deaths receive significant media attention. This study finds journalists exhibit a gender-biased trend in their writing depending on the sex of the perpetrator. Furthermore, most media coverage fails to acknowledge that killings by men are often the culmination of long-term domestic violence. Findings suggest news values and sourcing strategies are distorting the true picture and foregrounding tragedy narratives for the predominantly male perpetrators, often blaming women for leading a loving father to “snap”. In sharp contrast, mothers who kill are more negatively portrayed. The research finds that crime reporters need training in domestic violence to look beyond simplistic stereotypes.

Analysis of Plot of Synge’s Play “Rider to the Sea”

The research offers a plot analysis in Synge’s play “Rider to the Sea”. This play is written in 1902 describing a complex family life story. This play will be analyzed by using the structure method focusing on the plot development of the play. The story of the play "Rider to the Sea" is interesting since it portrays the different side of family where the family life is still dependent on the men’s efforts in their family. Roles of the men in the story are very important because the family life cannot run well without men’s contribution. The Riders to the Sea has a unique place in dramatic history. The essence of its uniqueness lies in the creation of a true tragedy within its boundaries of a one act play. At first sight, the plot would seem too trivial and the characterization too faintly sketched to enable the playwright to build up and communicate the typical momentum of a high tragedy. To reach the aim of the analysis, the writer uses the qualitative research. The result is expected to give the reader a better understanding of the description of the plot of the play “Rider to the Sea.” Keywords : plot, simple plot, complex plot

‘Upstart Crow’? The Myth of Shakespeare’s Plagiarism

In his deathbed pamphlet Greenes Groatsworth of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance (1592), Robert Greene warned his fellow playwrights to beware of the actors, ‘those Puppets (I meane) that spake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours’, and especially ‘an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers’ who ‘is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a countrey.’ In 1787 Edmond Malone took this to be an accusation of plagiarism, and used it to justify his theory that Greene had written the unauthorized Quartos, The First Part of the Contention (1594) and The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of York (1595), and that Shakespeare ‘new-modelled and amplified these two pieces’ to create what the 1623 Folio calls The Second and Third Part of King Henry VI, without acknowledging his debt, thus arousing Greene’s anger. Malone had no evidence for this theory, and it was comprehensively demolished by Peter Alexander in 1929 and by H. O. White in 1935. Despite their work, John Dover Wilson revived Malone’s theory in 1951, and it continues to produce claims that Shakespeare was a plagiarist. This essay examines all the writings of Greene in which he criticizes the actors, showing that he repeats over and again, in very similar terms, the same basic accusation that they depend on the playwrights yet unjustly enjoy more prestige and financial reward. Greene never accused Shakespeare of plagiarism.

The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio. By Emma Smith.

Emma smith is one of the stars of her generation of Shakespearean scholars. Fans of her writing and her Approaching Shakespeare podcasts, of whom I am one, will be delighted to see her intelligence and wit on display in her monograph The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio. We are treated to Smith's masterfully incisive abilities as a prose stylist (‘Words are promiscuous in Shakespeare's comedies, not people’) and her respectful but hilariously ironic distance (observing that the performance of King Lear at Whitehall at Christmas was ‘admittedly, rather a bleak choice for the festive season: it's not quite It's A Wonderful Life’). This has all the earmarks of a splendidly engaging introduction to the Shakespeare First Folio. But then one notes a factual inaccuracy, perhaps a minor slip. Then another. And then another. And soon one begins to question every assertion that Smith makes. For instance, Smith classifies ‘The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (printed in 1595 and retitled in the Folio 3 Henry VI)’ as one of the ‘single-edition plays that were not reprinted, and therefore may not have been especially popular’ (p. 55). But this is categorically false. The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York was reprinted in 1600 and again in 1619. Moreover, the fact that Thomas Pavier gave the Henry VI plays pride of place in his planned collection suggests that they may actually have been among the most marketable and popular of Shakespeare's plays at the time.

Shakespeare's stage traffic: imitation, borrowing and competition in Renaissance theatre

Shakespeare's Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre, by Janet Clare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. 305+ xi. Hardcover. $99.00Shakespeare 's Stage Traffic starts by declaring its aim to be to explore interplay of imitation, borrowing, and competition in the ambience of Shakespeare's theatre, and is particularly interested in situating Shakespeare himself firmly within such networks of traffic and exchange rather than as any kind of unique exception-in seeing Shakespeare, in fact, as an adapter. Seeing plays as fundamentally in dialogue with each other, Clare understands the production of plays as an essentially mercantile activity. Such move is part of the Zeitgeist rather than critical revolution, but Clare is wellinformed, scholarly, and sensible, and it is after all part of her point that noth- ing is ever wholly new. Clare is particularly careful about her terms, giving nuanced accounts of borrowing, authorship, source study, intertextuality and imitation, in ways which combine to offer neat guide to the protocols and preferences of much of the current landscape of literary criticism of the early modern period, especially in the form of critical editions, although her primary aim in considering such matters is to tracje] the contribution of the often neglected pre-text to the interweaving of text, context, and performance event (24).The book has eight chapters which consider range of genres and move through Shakespeare's career in roughly chronological order. The first chapter, and the Dramaturgy of the Queen's Men, offers a close intertextual study of King John and Richard` which promises to capture something of the effect of the Shakespeare histories on members of an audience with prior experience of the plays performed by the Queen's Men (30). Despite its title there is very little Marlowe in this chapter, but Clare is insightful in her discussion of Peele, and there are some suggestive details in her argument that A True Tragedy influenced Richard III. The second chapter, Deposing Kings, reads Richard II in relation to Edward II and Woodstock. Of course there are issues of dating at stake here, and Clare's strategy for bypassing them is uncharacteristically disingenuous: ?Whether Woodstock was composed and performed in the 1590s; or written in the 1590s and revised in the 1600s, before Richard II; or written and revised in the 1600s, following Richard II, is in sense incidental' (63). The third chapter relates The Shrew to A Shrew and The Comedy of Errors to the wider context of the Gesta Grayorum as whole. argues that A Shrew is independent of The Shrew, though here again Clare has to be bit gung-ho about questions of dating, declaring It is preferable surely to jettison these vexed questions of derivation and listen, instead, to the dialogue between texts (99), which comes dangerously close to that old bread-and-butter exercise of compare and contrast. …

The Counselorand Tragic Recognition

AbstractAt first glance McCarthy's recent screenplay seems to be a rather formulaic Aristotelian tragedy. But on closer examination, its unflinching look at cartel violence raises questions that have long animated critical debate about tragedy. Is tragedy more about the existential plight of a lone individual or the political crisis of a community? Is tragic recognition a matter of stoic acceptance or solidarity with the suffering? Does tragedy veil particular contingent instances of loss and violence as immutable aspects of the human condition? Is true tragedy resolutely pessimistic? If so, is tragedy effectively dead in the modern West, which has inherited religions of messianic hope and mythologies of secular progress? Or do these currents open up the possibility of new forms of tragedy? The Counselor explores all of these questions, and it ultimately stages a choice between two possible responses to the tragic—stoic resignation or radical hope.

Staging Power in Tudor and Stuart English History Plays: History, Political Thought, and the Redefinition of Sovereignty by Kirstin M. S. Bezio

Reviewed by: Staging Power in Tudor and Stuart English History Plays: History, Political Thought, and the Redefinition of Sovereignty by Kirstin M. S. Bezio Meg Pearson Staging Power in Tudor and Stuart English History Plays: History, Political Thought, and the Redefinition of Sovereignty. By Kirstin M. S. Bezio. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015; pp. 238. Kirsten Bezio’s book argues that the Renaissance stage participated intensely in the debate over sovereignty via the history play. Limiting its scope somewhat by addressing only chronicle plays set in the UK that “focus primarily on governance and sovereignty; and whose interest in history is didactic and actively political,” the book addresses dramas ranging in critical popularity, from Shakespeare’s Henry V to Robert Davenport’s King John and Matilda, resulting in a satisfying survey of the subgenre (1). A substantial introduction presents the origins of monarchy and defines what Bezio terms the “sovereign–subject compact” in the centuries leading up to the Wars of the Roses. The author shows that prior to the Magna Carta and indeed before the Norman Conquest, the ancient Britons practiced kingship based on mutual obligation: the king was responsible for upholding the written statutes of the law and the more traditional common law, and the people were responsible for their obedience to that law, as well as remaining capable of judging and even rejecting the behavior of their king as needed. Bezio’s characterization of both the explicit limits on the monarchy and the ancientness of those limits changes the conversation regarding the perception of monarchy in pre-Tudor times. In this light, for example, the strict absolutist discourse that emerges under the Stuart kings becomes particularly alien within the context of an English tradition of the sovereign–subject compact. The book covers the period from 1400 to 1642 and the closure of the public theatres. The chapters, which are arranged chronologically and cover different periods, all contain a brief overview of the royal history of the period under consideration, followed by discussions and analyses of the history plays printed or performed during that time frame, and finishing with a summary of the arguments considered in the chapter. The first chapter covers the long period from 1400 to 1558 to explore the repercussions of the Wars of the Roses on perceptions of the monarchy. Henry VII asserted greater sovereign autonomy than his predecessors, but the role of the barons in tearing the nation apart in the prior conflict made the notion of a limited Parliament and peerage more attractive, particularly to the middle and lower classes. Bezio describes how Henry VII and his canny son bolstered their providential kingships through the theatrical, particularly pageants and progresses. The chapter suggests, although not entirely persuasively, that Henry VII originated the use of drama “not only for political ends on behalf of the crown, but as a way for the populace to participate in political discourse” (32). The following chapters cover the relationship of theatricality and the monarchy under the rise and reign of Elizabeth I to argue that the early public stage, and history plays in particular, represents a shift toward using the theatre as propaganda—a charge that may be somewhat overstated. Chapter 3 offers access to several rarely studied early history plays, such as The Troublesome Raigne of King John (1587), The Scottish History of James IV (1587), and The True Tragedy of Richard III (1588), and Bezio groups these plays, along with Edmund Ironsides, together for their “focus on the English tradition of limited monarchy as the sovereign ideal” (65). Specifically, she convincingly presents The True Tragedy, with its crowning of Richmond by election, as offering a solution to the problem of succession that troubled the English during the later years of Elizabeth’s reign. These succession anxieties occupy the frame of chapter 4 in which Bezio delves into her richest vein of material, for this period finds over forty English history plays registered or produced, a number of which staged a limited monarchy surrounded by councilors, peers, and commoners, particularly Shakespeare’s Henriad and King John. In the concentrated chapter that follows it, “The Queen’s Councilors: Censorship, Courtly Silence, and the Secrets of the Succession (1600...

Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays. Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. viii+475.

<i>Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays</i>. Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. viii+475.

War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials

War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work, by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 243 pages. As our everyday attention grows saturated by media reports of bloodshed, massacre, and atrocity, this moment in twenty-first century presents us with challenges of literacy, epistemology, and ethical response. How can we resist consuming representations of mass and systemic violence as sensation and spectacle, and instead bear witness to suffering of disempowered? How do we dismantle forms of knowledge and affect that erase this pain or appropriate it into narratives designed to bolster dominant ideologies? And how might we create new epistemologies, new ways of feeling, that work toward repairing and averting such psychic and material ruptures? Cathy J. Schlund-Vials's War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work explores how Cambodian American writers and artists grapple with difficult task of giving shape and texture to a history that is searing and almost ungraspable. When tragedy assumes a massive scale, numbers and quantity paradoxically gesture toward what is immeasurable: Between 1975 and 1979, over course of three years, eight months, and twenty days, Khmer Rouge was responsible for deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians (21 to 25 percent of extant population) due to execution, torture, starvation, overwork, and disease (2). Loss of this magnitude feels beyond apprehension, but Schlund-Vials eloquently points out that emotional and material labor of Cambodian American artists in confronting their traumatic history provides necessary alternatives to official practices of selective and forestalled justice. This Cambodian American memory work helps to mitigate against what Schlund-Vials calls the Cambodian a recasting of Nixon's and Reagan's Syndrome. Conservative politicians and pundits believed that American military and moral superiority were undermined by an anti-interventionist domestic during era of Vietnam War (also known in Vietnam as American War). The Cambodian Syndrome, by contrast, comprises a useable past for a pro-intervention imperial politics. George W. Bush, for example, justified US military presence in Iraq and Middle East by portraying absence of American intervention during Khmer Rouge regime as true tragedy, a framing that erased role that US bombings of Cambodia between 1969 and 1973 played in enabling rise of Khmer Rouge. Like American heads of state, government representatives in Cambodia likewise stage acts of selective remembering that entail strategic forgetting. Vietnamese occupiers in 1979-1989 era, invested in legitimating their rule of Cambodia, emphasized criminality of previous regime at expense of its victims' needs, while former Khmer Rouge members participating in current Cambodian government leadership call upon fellow citizens to bury past (175). It is this transnational set of amnesiac politics (13), argues Schlund-Vials, that 1.5-generation Cambodian American writers and artists work against. In suggesting how musical tones and samples disinter dead, or how trope of birds potently conveys embodied struggles of migration and dislocation, or how literary genres like autobiography become subject to judicial cross-examination, Schlund-Vials skillfully integrates aesthetic, political, historical, and juridical considerations into her assessment of diasporic cultural production. In absence of legal justice, she argues, remembrance activists stage alternative means to justice, healing, and reclamation, makeshift and grassroots practices of restoration designed to stand in when official reparations seem elusive (18). In thirty years between Khmer Rouge atrocities and her composition of book, only one official had been convicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity. …

Harry the Sixth by Shakespeare’s Globe, and: The Houses of York and Lancaster by Shakespeare’s Globe, and: The True Tragedy of the Duke of York by Shakespeare’s Globe (review)

Harry the Sixth by Shakespeare’s Globe, and: The Houses of York and Lancaster by Shakespeare’s Globe, and: The True Tragedy of the Duke of York by Shakespeare’s Globe (review)

‘The cunning of their ground’: The Relevance of &lt;i&gt;Sejanus&lt;/i&gt; 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.