English Renaissance Tragedy Ideas of Freedom [Hardcover]

This book's underlying claim is that English Renaissance tragedy addresses live issues in the experience of readers and spectators today: it is not a genre to be studied only for aesthetic or heritage reasons. The book considers the way in which tragedy in general, and English Renaissance tragedy in particular, addresses ideas of freedom, understood both from an individual and a sociopolitical perspective. Tragedy since the Greeks has addressed the constraints and necessities to which human life is subject (Fate, the gods, chance, the conflict between state and individual) as well as the human desire for autonomy and self-direction. In short,English Renaissance Tragedy: Ideas of Freedomshows how the tragic drama of Shakespeare's age addresses problems of freedom, slavery, and tyranny in ways that speak to us now.

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chronology of Authors and Works

Note on the Texts

PART ONE: TRAGEDY AND FREEDOM

Introduction

The Tragic Genre

Tragedy: Freedom, Order, and Tyranny

Freedom, Tyranny, and Order in the English Renaissance

The Rhetoric of Disenchantment

Going to the Theatre in Shakespeare's London

PART TWO: PURSUING FREEDOM IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE TRAGEDY

Gorboduc
Tamburlaine, Parts One and Two
Doctor Faustus
The Jew of Malta
Edward II
Arden of Faversham
Hamlet
Othello
King Lear
Antony and Cleopatra
The Revenger's Tragedy
The White Devil
The Duchess of Malfi
The Changeling
'Tis Pity She's a Whore

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Relies on incisive close readings of individual characters to argue that the tragic genre served as a traditional vehicle for radical expressions of political subversiveness, religious heterodoxy, and cultural relativism. -Shakespeare Quarterly