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.


Three Revenge Tragedies

Three Revenge Tragedies

Author: Cyril Tourneur

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2004-08-26

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 0141958898

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Following the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign in the early seventeenth century, the new court of King James was beset by political instability and moral corruption. This atmosphere provided fertile ground for the dramatists of the age, whose plays explore the ways in which social decadence and the abuse of power breed resentment and lead inexorably to violence and bloody retribution. In Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy, the debauched son of an Italian Duke attempts to rape the virtuous Gloriana - a veiled reference to Elizabeth I. Webster's The White Devil depicts a sinister world of intrigue and murderous infidelity, while The Changeling, perhaps Middleton's supreme achievement, powerfully portrays a woman bringing about her own unwitting destruction. All three are masterpieces of brooding intensity, dominated by images of decay, disillusionment and death.


The Duchess of Malfi

The Duchess of Malfi

Author: John Webster

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 1997-06-15

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780719043574

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More widely studied and more frequently performed than ever before, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi is here presented in an accessible and thoroughly up-to-date edition. Based on the Revels Plays text, the notes have been augmented to cast further light both on Webster's amazing dialogue and on the stage action. An entirely new introduction sets the tragedy in the context of pre-Civil War England and gives a revealing view of its imagery and dramatic action. From its well-documented early performances to the two productions seen in the West End of London in the 1995-96 season, a stage history gives an account of the play in performance. Students, actors, directors and theatre-goers will all find here a reappraisal of Webster's artistry in the greatest age of English theatre, which highlights why it has lived on stage with renewed force in the last decades of the twentieth century.


Shakespeare

Shakespeare

Author: Philip C. McGuire

Publisher:

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 9780333442579

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Each generation needs to be introduced to the culture and great works of the past and to reinterpret them in its own ways. This series re-examines the important English dramatists of earlier centuries in the light of new information, new interests and new attitudes. The books will be relevant to those interested in literature, theatre and cultural history, and to the theatre-goers and general readers who want an up-to-date view of these dramatists and their plays, with the emphasis on performance and relevant cultural history. How do the plays Shakespeare wrote during the final decade of his career differ from those written during Elizabeth I's reign? Philip C. McGuire shows that Shakespeare, the professional playwright, was as responsive to box-office considerations as to artistic concerns, was as dedicated to the financial success of the company of actors with whom he worked exclusively from 1594 onwards as to conveying his vision of the human condition. Concentrating on Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, McGuire shows the impact on Shakespeare's dramaturgy of changes after 1603 in the circumstances - broadly cultural and specifically theatrical - within which he worked. Those circumstances have continued to change, affecting how his 'Jacobean' plays have been - and are today - performed, understood and valued.


The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy

The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy

Author: Emma Smith

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-08-12

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 113982547X

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Featuring essays by major international scholars, this Companion combines analysis of themes crucial to Renaissance tragedy with the interpretation of canonical and frequently taught texts. Part I introduces key topics, such as religion, revenge, and the family, and discusses modern performance traditions on stage and screen. Bridging this section with Part II is a chapter which engages with Shakespeare. It tackles Shakespeare's generic distinctiveness and how our familiarity with Shakespearean tragedy affects our appreciation of the tragedies of his contemporaries. Individual essays in Part II introduce and contribute to important critical conversations about specific tragedies. Topics include The Revenger's Tragedy and the theatrics of original sin, Arden of Faversham and the preternatural, and The Duchess of Malfi and the erotics of literary form. Providing fresh readings of key texts, the Companion is an essential guide for all students of Renaissance tragedy.


A Preface to Shakespeare's Comedies

A Preface to Shakespeare's Comedies

Author: Michael Mangan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-06

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1317895045

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This is an informative and interesting guide to the comedies of love - The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like it and Twelfth Night - which were written in the early part of Shakespeare's career. As well as supplying dramatic and critical analysis, this study sets the plays within their wider social and artistic context. Michael Mangan begins by considering the social function of laughter, the use of humour in drama for handling social tensions in Elizabethan and Jacobean society and the resulting expectations the audience would have had about comedy in the theatre. In the second section he discusses the individual plays in the light of recent critical and theoretical research. The useful reference section at the end gives the reader a short bibliographic guide to key historical figures relevant to a study of Shakespeare's comedies and a detailed critical bibliography.


The Revenger's Tragedy: A Critical Reader

The Revenger's Tragedy: A Critical Reader

Author: Brian Walsh

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-10-20

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1472585429

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The Revenger's Tragedy is one of the most vital, important, and enduring tragedies of the Jacobean era, one of the few non-Shakespearean plays of that period that is still regularly revived on stage and taught in classrooms. The play is notable for its piercing insight into human depravity, its savage humour, and its florid theatricality. This collection of new essays offers students an invaluable overview of the play's critical and performance history as well as four critical essays offering a range of new perspectives.