Renaissance and Reformation, 1982
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
ROMANTIC CRITICISM of SHAKESPEARIAN DRAMA By
ROMANTIC CRITICISM OF SHAKESPEARIAN DRAMA By JOHN g,RAWFORD Associate of Arts Texarkana College Texarkana, Texas 1956 Bachelor of Science in Education Ouachita Baptist University Arkadelphia, Arkansas 1959 Master of Science in Education Drake University Des Moines, Iowa 1962 Submitted to the faculty of .the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF EDUCATION May, 1968 OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OCT 24 1968 ROMANTIC CRITICISM OF SHAKESPEARIAN DRAMA Thesis Approved: Thesis Adviser \ f ,A .. < \ Dean of the Graduate College ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I should like to· thank anumber·of people who helped me in many different ways during· the·preparation· of .this dissertation, notably Dr. David· S. Berkeley,·major adviser, who-lent words of encouragement, guidance, understanding, and patience; but also my committee members, Dr. Darrel Ray·, Pr~ Judson Milburn, and· .Dr~- Loyd Douglas; and. the Oklahoma State University library staff, especially Miss Helen Donart and Mrs • .:fosephine Monk. iii TABLE-OF CONTENTS Chap tel' Page. I. INTRODUCTION •••• 1 II. HAMLET .••• . ' . .. ... 29 III. ANTONY -~ CLEOPATRA • • • • . • • . • • • It • . • • . • .• • a1 ·IV. HENRYV· . ,. ". .• . 122 V. THE· MERCHANT ·QE. VENICE .- . "' . 153 VI. CONCLUSION • • ' . -. ,. 187 BIBLIOGRAPHY • • • • · • . .. 191 iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Of all the so-called schools of Shakespearian criticism, the Romantic has been and continues to be one of the most influential. Per- haps this is true merely because of the impor~ance which the Romantic School places upon the genius of the subj~ct, for all schools of criti- cism recognize Shakespeare's ability at creating effective drama. A more accurate answer, however, probably lies in the fact that "romanti- cism" has a broad base and encompasses so very much. -
Revenge Tragedy and Identity
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Birmingham Research Archive, E-theses Repository REVENGE TRAGEDY AND IDENTITY NURUL FARHANA LOW BT. ABDULLAH (293498) A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts of The University of Birmingham for the degree of Master of Philosophy (B) Contemporary Critical Theory Department of English Faculty of Arts The University of Birmingham September 1999 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT This thesis attempts a reading of Revenge Tragedy using concepts found in Psychoanalytic theory to explore the idea of identity formation. Revenge tragedy was a popular form of drama in the Jacobean period, although the first revenge play, The Spanish Tragedy was written before the end of the sixteenth century. Revenge tragedies feature an individual who takes private action for a crime committed against a loved one, usually because he/she is denied legitimate justice. This type of drama is said to reflect the anxieties of its age, one of which is the question of identity. -
Poison and Revenge in Seventeenth Century English Drama
"Revenge Should Have No Bounds": Poison and Revenge in Seventeenth Century English Drama The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Woodring, Catherine. 2015. "Revenge Should Have No Bounds": Poison and Revenge in Seventeenth Century English Drama. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17463987 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA “Revenge should have no bounds”: Poison and Revenge in Seventeenth Century English Drama A dissertation presented by Catherine L. Reedy Woodring to The Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of English Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2015 © 2015 – Catherine L. Reedy Woodring All rights reserved. Professor Stephen Greenblatt Catherine L. Reedy Woodring “Revenge should have no bounds”: Poison and Revenge in Seventeenth Century English Drama Abstract The revenge- and poison- filled tragedies of seventeenth century England astound audiences with their language of contagion and disease. Understanding poison as the force behind epidemic disease, this dissertation considers the often-overlooked connections between stage revenge and poison. Poison was not only a material substance bought from a foreign market. It was the subject of countless revisions and debates in early modern England. Above all, writers argued about poison’s role in the most harrowing epidemic disease of the period, the pestilence, as both the cause and possible cure of this seemingly contagious disease. -
Shakespeare's Use of the Christian Dimension in Four Major Tragedies
SHAKESPEARE'S USE OF THE CHRISTIAN DIMENSION IN FOUR MAJOR TRAGEDIES, AND ITS DRAMATIC EFFECT ON EARLY AUDIENCES by Janet Mary Cockin A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of MASTER OF PHILOSOPHY The Shakespeare Institute Stratford upon Avon University of Birmingham April 2003. University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. SUMMARY. Christian values permeated all aspects of human activity in sixteenth century England; the basic truths of Christianity were largely unquestioned, and these would underlie the views on life and death, whether consciously formulated or not, of most of those who made up Shakespeare's first audiences. I explore the ways in which Shakespeare responded to, and significantly departed from, his sources in four major tragedies with Christian (or non-pagan) backgrounds: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello andMacbeth. In the first chapter, I discuss the prevailing religious tensions in England as Shakespeare was growing up, and the theological instruction he is likely to have received. I examine the interaction of these theological ideas with the cultural exploration of ideas taking place in the English Renaissance. -
Revenge Tragedy | Eleanor Prosser (Essay Date 1967)
Literary Criticism (1400-1800): Revenge Tragedy | Eleanor Prosser (essay date 1967) Revenge Tragedy | Eleanor Prosser (essay date 1967) ©2009 eNotes.com, Inc. or its Licensors. Please see copyright information at the end of this document. Eleanor Prosser (essay date 1967) SOURCE: Prosser, Eleanor. “Revenge on the English Stage, 1562-1607.” In Hamlet and Revenge, pp. 36-73. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1967. [In the following essay, Prosser examines a vast array of revenge tragedies in an effort to elucidate “the moral response of the Elizabethan audience to revenge itself.”] Although a study of the Elizabethan revenge play normally restricts itself to plays related to the “Kydian formula” as defined by Fredson Bowers, our concern in this chapter is with the moral response of the Elizabethan audience to revenge itself. If we can determine the audience's reaction to specific revenge motifs in any type of play (in a Biblical drama such as David and Bethsabe, a chronicle history such as Edward II, or a comedy such as The Dumb Knight, as well as in a revenge play proper such as The Spanish Tragedy), we should be better prepared to recognize established conventions. For an audience, a given convention evokes a given response: a bastard son who chafes at his inferior position is a dangerous fellow, whether he appears in Much Ado About Nothing or King Lear. We shall, accordingly, examine all plays produced between 1562 and 1607 in which revenge is a clearly defined motive.1 To understand the full impact of the revenge motif on the Elizabethan audience, we should probably start with the medieval drama. -
The Subjectivity of Revenge: Senecan Drama and the Discovery of the Tragic in Kyd and Shakespeare
THE SUBJECTIVITY OF REVENGE: SENECAN DRAMA AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE TRAGIC IN KYD AND SHAKESPEARE JORDICORAL D.PHIL THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE SEPTEMBER 2001 But all the time life, always one and the same, always incomprehensibly keeping its identity, fills the universe and is renewed at every moment in innumerable combinations and metamorphoses. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you have risen already - you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn't notice it. Will you feel pain? Do the tissues feel their disintegration? In other words, what will happen to your consciousness. But what is consciousness? Let's see. To try consciously to go to sleep is a sure way of having insomnia, to try to be conscious of one's own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a beam of light directed outwards, it lights up the way ahead of us so that we do not trip up. It's like the head-lamps on a railway engine - if you turned the beam inwards there would be a catastrophe. 'So what will happen to your consciousness? Your consciousness, yours, not anybody else's. Well, what are you? That's the crux of the matter. Let's try to find out. What is it about you that you have always known as yourself? What are you conscious of in yourself? Your kidneys? Your liver? Your blood vessels? - No. -
University of California
UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Playing With Lives: Theatricality, Self-Staging, and the Problem of Agency in Renaissance English Revenge Tragedy Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5tn4k6vq Author Condon, James Joseph Publication Date 2009 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Playing With Lives: Theatricality, Self-Staging, and the Problem of Agency in Renaissance English Revenge Tragedy A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by James Joseph Condon December 2009 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Deborah Willis, Chairperson Dr. John Ganim Dr. Stanley Stewart Copyright by James Joseph Condon 2009 The Dissertation of James Joseph Condon is approved: ____________________________________________ ____________________________________________ ____________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements This project would not have been possible without the patient and insightful guidance I enjoyed during my graduate studies at UC Riverside. I would very much like to thank professors John Briggs, Andrea Denny-Brown, John Ganim, and Stanley Stewart for their encouragement and active involvement in my development as a scholar of medieval and early modern literature. In particular, though, I would like to thank professor Deborah Willis, my dissertation committee chair, whose generosity, critical engagement, and tireless support have remained a constant source of inspiration and reassurance. Any success I enjoy is due in no small part to them. I am also eternally grateful to my friends, family, and peers, who have suffered patiently through my neglect as I worked on this project. Without their much needed perspective and unflagging affection, I would not have been able to emerge from this process unscathed. -
Frank Ardolino
32 Translating Contexts: The Purpose of Hieronimo’s Soliman and Perseda Playlet in The Spanish Tragedy Frank Ardolino Soliman and Perseda was entered in the Stationers’ Register on November 20, 1592. Like The Spanish Tragedy, it was an anonymous and undated play, whose first edition exists in a unique copy assumed to be published in 1592. Further, it was registered one month after Abel Jeffes entered his edition of The Spanish Tragedy by Edward White, who was involved in a legal battle with Jeffes over Arden of Faversham and The Spanish Tragedy. Finally, like The Spanish Tragedy, the original edition was followed by a subsequent edition which claimed to be “newly corrected and amended” but provided only two important emendations accompanied by a “haphazard” correction of spelling and punctuation errors (Murray viii). Its direct bibliographic, thematic, and stylistic similarities to Hieronimo’s revenge playlet have given rise to the inevitable and probably warranted conclusion that the author of The Spanish Tragedy also wrote Soliman and Perseda (Erne 161). The chronological relationship between the anonymous play Soliman and Perseda and the Soliman and Perseda play-within-the- play in The Spanish Tragedy is difficult to ascertain. Did Kyd expand the playlet into the play after he wrote The Spanish Tragedy, as Lukas Erne has maintained (160)? Or did Kyd write the play first and then reduce and adapt it for the play-within-the- play? Hieronimo explains that he wrote the playlet when he was a student and is adapting it now at the opportune time for revenge. Is this Kyd, in the guise of an author analogue, saying that he has condensed Soliman and Perseda to create Hieronimo’s revenge playlet? Although it is impossible to state with certainty who is the author or what is the order of composition for these works, it is important to analyze the reasons for Kyd’s inclusion of the material in The Spanish Tragedy. -
The Paradox of Elizabethan Revenge
THE PARADOX OF ELIZABETHAN REVENGE FROM HORESTES TO HAMLET ANTON CHARLES ARULANANDAM MASTER OF ARTS - HONOURS 1995 THE UNVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES THE PARADOX OF ELIZABETHAN REVENGE FROM HORESTES TO HAMLET CONTENTS Acknowledgement Page 2 List ofIllustrations Page 3 Abstract Page 4 Introduction Page 5 Chapter One Page 33 Chapter Two Page 55 Chapter Three Page 75 Chapter Four · Page 93 Chapter Five Page 112 Conclusion Page 142 ACKNOWLEDGMENT I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to my Supervisor, Dr. Richard Medelaine, and Co-Supervisor, Professor Mary Chan, who not only awakened my serious interest in the drama of the English Renaissance, but tolerated and encouraged this graduate student in the preparation of this thesis. I also wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Bruce Johnson, Professor Michael Hollington, Associate Professor Roslyn Haynes and Associate Professor Peter Alexander, Head, School of English, the staff of the School of English and my colleagues, Pauline Byrnes and Brian Couch, and my wife, Edith, for their assistance and encouragement. A significant debt is owed to the numerous critics mentioned in the footnotes and Bibliography for their scholarly discourse on the revenge genre. Anton C. Arulanandam 2 December 1995. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Gratefully Acknowledged The Revenge of Orestes From Boccaccio's De Mulieribus Claris, Ulm, 1473, fol.xxxv verso, p. 32. The Murder of Horatio in The Spanish Tragedie From the edition of 1633, p. 54. The Revenge of Titus Andronicus From The Lamentable and Tragical History of Titus Andronicus, a ballad ( British Museum, Huth 50 - 69). p. 74. ( By kind courtesy of Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage ofElizabethan Tragedy, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1963, ps. -
A Guide to Hamlet Criticism
University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 1937 A guide to Hamlet criticism. Helen Moran University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Moran, Helen, "A guide to Hamlet criticism." (1937). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1842. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/1842 This Master's Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. This title appears here courtesy of the author, who has retained all other copyrights. For more information, please contact [email protected]. UNIVERSIIJ.1Y 01<" LOUISVILLE A G U IDE T 0 HAM LET C R I TIC ISM A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty Of the Graduate School of the University of Louisville In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Of Master of Arts Department of English By Helen Moran Year 1937 F A GUIDE TO HAMLET CRITICISM :: TABLE OF CONTENTS CONTENTS page Preface v ., Chapter I The Shifting Trends in 1 Shakespeare Criticism II The Origin and Development 23 of the Early Romantic Cri tici sm of Ha1111et (1784 - 1900 ) III The Realists' Hamlet 41 (1866 - 1936) IV The Twent ieth Century 75 Romanticists' Hamlet r; Conclusion 98 : Bibliography 105 1- .. - ..... ~--~--- ---~ PRE F ACE A Guide to "Ham1et" Criticism is the story of the after-life of Shakespeare's tragic hero. -
The Origins of English Revenge Tragedy Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture
EDINBURGH CRITICAL STUDIES IN RENAISSANCE CULTURE EDINBURGH CRITICAL STUDIES IN RENAISSANCE CULTURE Reads Victorian literature and science as artful practices that surpass the theories and discourses THE ORIGINS OF supposed to contain them ARTFUL EXPERIMENTS What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? ENGLISH REVENGE Artful Experiments seeks to answer this question by approaching the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much centred on discourses of established knowledge as it is on practices of investigating TRAGEDY what is no longer or not yet knowledge. The book assembles various modes of writing, from poetry and sensation fiction to natural history and philosophical debate, reading them as ways of knowing or structures in the making, rather than as containers of accomplished arguments or story worlds. Offering innovative interpretations of works by George Eliot, Robert Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and others, alongside in-depth studies of philosophical and scientific texts by writers such as John S. Mill, Thomas H. Huxley, George H. Lewes and F. Max Müller, Artful Experiments explicates and re-conceives the relations between the arts and the sciences, experience and language as well as practice and theory. For many Victorians, the book argues, experimentation was just as integral to the making of literature as writing was integral to Philipp Erchinger the making of science. Philipp Erchinger is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Düsseldorf. Cover image: Louis Pasteur -
John Webster's the White Devil
JOHN WEBSTER’S THE WHITE DEVIL: A LITERARY ARTIFACT OF THE JACOBEAN STRUGGLE FOR POWER BY KING, POPE, AND MACHIAVEL by KATHERINE JEANNETTE MOODY CAREY (Under the Direction of Charles B. Davis) ABSTRACT This past century, playwright John Webster has gained in prominence within the canon of English Renaissance dramatic literature. Webster published his first independently written play, The White Devil, in 1612. The play’s title proves enigmatic because no single character within the text is identified as the white devil. Re-examining the play’s title in terms of historical and cultural significance, I posit that Webster’s elusive white devil is the papacy fraught with corruption and abuse of absolute power. I also wish to examine Webster’s play as a comment on the corruption and abuse of absolute political power within the reigning monarchy of James I. Jacobean England’s power structure was evolving from a medieval feudal system toward a class structure including a thriving professional stratum with earning potential, land purchase opportunities, and municipal government representation. Corruption and abuse of power threatened this new-found bourgeois power. If James and the Catholic Church were to realign, divine right absolutism could destroy England’s evolving class structure. Literary anthropology and new historicism offer an avenue for discourse on The White Devil as a seventeenth-century literary artifact. Both James and the papacy claimed divine right absolutism to rule, both considered themselves above subjugation to human law, both demanded complete obeisance of subjects, and both abused their power. Because censorship restricted playwrights’ comments on the reigning monarch, anti- Catholic rhetoric could be enacted onstage, offering the same warning in a safely veiled package.