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Renaissance Drama (renaissance + drama)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	100%

Selected Abstracts

Language, Duality, and Bastardy in English Renaissance Drama

ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE, Issue 2 2004
Nicholas Crawford
By figuring language and thoughts as illegitimate, these locutions displace or confuse a discourse of blood lineage and social status with one that registers uneasiness about the derivation of ideas and their expression. This fantasized genealogy of bastard conceptions and their linguistic progeny signals the mind's growing alienation from the body and reveals an incipient Cartesian separation of the two. As the theater provides a spectacle of words bodied forth, it is often the drama of the early modern period that most strikingly enacts this developing duality so characteristic of modern subjectivity: the movement of language toward a realm imagined to be incorporeal. [source]

Brecht's Pastiche History Play: Renaissance Drama and Modernist Theatre in Leben Eduards Des Zweiten Von England

GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 4 2003
Bruce Gaston
This article examines Brecht's Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England from the historical perspective of its first performances in 1924, paying particular attention to the status of Renaissance drama in Germany and the emerging Modernist movement. This approach runs counter to previous critical discussions which have been implicitly or explicitly comparative. The emphasis on Marlowe has led to a neglect of the many parallels in Eduard II. with works by Shakespeare, works that Brecht, like most educated Germans, would have known. An examination of attitudes to English Renaissance drama during the period leads to the conclusion that Eduard II. is not a criticism of its model, since minimal knowledge of Edward II meant that most of the audience were not in a position to compare the two plays. Rather, the play is a pastiche, a spurious Renaissance history play that emphasised the aspects of Renaissance drama that corresponded to the Modernist aesthetic paradigm, and that also reflected Brecht's own interests and preoccupations. In Eduard II. a Modernist reinterpretation of Renaissance theatre was put up in opposition to the orthodox view of Shakespeare, and thus embodied a challenge to the dominant theatrical tradition which had claimed Shakespeare as its own. [source]

Virtuous Viragos: Female Heroism and Ethical Action in Shakespearean Drama

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2010
Unhae Langis
Virtue, from the Latin vir for manly courage and strength, was the mark of male excellence in Renaissance culture. Embodying both physical and moral strength through the famous figure of Hercules, virtue took on other values of courtly gentility and political prudence as the medieval warrior society was gradually transformed into the modern state. In inverse proportion to the expansion of male virtue, the conception of the virago underwent a corresponding constriction and decline from a manlike, heroic woman to a scold. Encompassing both physical and moral excellence (OED 2a, 7), male virtue came to appropriate the heroic definition of virago, and female virtue, by Shakespeare's time, became confined to chastity (OED 2c). Challenging the traditions of male virtue and female monstrosity in Renaissance drama, this essay examines the virtuous viragos populating the Shakespearean canon, who present themselves as better models of ethical action than men, with whom virtue is etymologically and historically associated. This study examines two nuanced conceptions of female heroism and ethical action centering on the erotic and politic Cleopatra and the chaste, self-affirming Desdemona as virtuous viragos. Moreover, the notion of heroism, traditionally associated with tragedy, translates to the less exalted but more prudentially successful ethical action of viragos in Shakespeare's comedies such as The Taming of the Shrew. I argue that virtuous viragos attain their ethical stature against this male-inflected standard of tragic heroism even while calling for its dismantling and replacement with the more discerning framework of neo-Aristotelian virtue grounded on practical wisdom. [source]

An Apology for Antony.

ORBIS LITERARUM, Issue 4 2008
Cleopatra, Morality, Pathos in Shakespeare's Antony
Taking off from a consideration of Antony and Cleopatra's intermingling of pathetic and moral tragedy, the analysis proposed in the present essay demonstrates how the play's peculiar combination of morality and pathos results in a dialectical critique of both concepts of the tragic. Shakespeare didn't write a straight-forward pathetic tragedy, in fact Antony and Cleopatra questions this very phenomenon from the perspective of the tragicomic Christian theatrum mundi. At the same time, however, the play inverts not only moral tragedy, but also the moral design , the ,exemplary' story of the great Mark Antony's downfall through moral corruption , that Shakespeare inherited from Roman historiography through Plutarch's Life of Antony, medieval historiography, and Renaissance emblematics. In contrast to the recent critical negligence of the moral aspect of the play, as well as the overemphasis on this aspect in early criticism of the play, the analysis proposed emphazises the dialectic of moralism and pathos in Shakespeare's play. The fundamental ambiguity permeating Shakespeare's characterization of Antony as a tragic hero is not only seen to affect the understanding of this particular play, but also, by implication, to question the notion of Shakespeare as a modern dramatist and the view of Renaissance drama as an unequivocal break with the medieval dramatic heritage. [source]