Sex and Satiric Tragedy in Early Modern England
Sex and Satiric Tragedy in Early Modern England

Author: Gabriel A. Rieger

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1351900943

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Drawing upon recent scholarship in Renaissance studies regarding notions of the body, political, physical and social, this study examines how the satiric tragedians of the English Renaissance employ the languages of sex - including sexual slander, titillation, insinuation and obscenity - in the service of satiric aggression. There is a close association between the genre of satire and sexually descriptive language in the period, author Gabriel Rieger argues, particularly in the ways in which both the genre and the languages embody systems of oppositions. In exploring the various purposes which sexually descriptive language serves for the satiric tragedian, Rieger reviews a broad range of texts, ancient, Renaissance, and contemporary, by satiric tragedians, moralists, medical writers and critics, paying particular attention to the works of William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton and John Webster

The Changeling
The Changeling

Author: Thomas Middleton

Publisher:

Published: 1653

Total Pages: 104

ISBN-13:

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The Changeling is a popular Renaissance tragedy in which the relationship between money, sex, and power is explored. Frequently performed and studied in University courses, it is a key text in the New Mermaids series.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy

Author: Michael Neill

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-08-18

Total Pages: 993

ISBN-13: 0191036145

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The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy presents fifty-four essays by a range of scholars from all parts of the world. Together these essays offer readers a fresh and comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare tragedies as both works of literature and as performance texts written by a playwright who was himself an experienced actor. The opening section explores ways in which later generations of critics have shaped our idea of 'Shakespearean' tragedy, and addresses questions of genre by examining the playwright's inheritance from the classical and medieval past. The second section is devoted to current textual issues, while the third offers new critical readings of each of the tragedies. This is set beside a group of essays that deal with performance history, with screen productions, and with versions devised for the operatic stage, as well as with twentieth and twenty-first century re-workings of Shakespearean tragedy. The book's final section expands readers' awareness of Shakespeare's global reach, tracing histories of criticism and performance across Europe, the Americas, Australasia, the Middle East, Africa, India, and East Asia.

Jacobean Tragedy
Jacobean Tragedy

Author: Irving Ribner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-31

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1315302136

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The work of dramatists such as George Chapman, Thomas Heywood, Cyril Tourneur, John Webster, Thomas Middleton and John Ford can profitably be studied as attempts to construct a new moral order in response to the absence or weakening of the religious sanction. In this study, first published in 1962, the author examines these texts in detail, and throws a great deal of light on the plays as plays. This title will be of interest to students of English Literature, Drama and Performance.

Jacobean Drama as Social Criticism
Jacobean Drama as Social Criticism

Author: James Hogg

Publisher:

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13:

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This collection of essays looks at the social criticism of such authors as Middleton, Webster, Massinger, Ford, John Fletcher, as well as considering the activities of the Actors' Companies and the production of Latin plays. Political criticism is found in the form of allusion in the tragedies, while the comedies are seen as mocking the shortcomings of the professional, middle and lower classes, some of the satire being directed against the way of speaking of the characters depicted.