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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 Freedom shows how the tragic drama of Shakespeare''s age addresses problems of freedom, slavery, and tyranny in ways that speak to us now.>
List of contents
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
GorboducTamburlaine, Parts One and Two
Doctor FaustusThe Jew of MaltaEdward IIArden of FavershamHamletOthelloKing LearAntony and CleopatraThe Revenger's TragedyThe White DevilThe Duchess of MalfiThe Changeling'Tis Pity She's a WhoreConclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Peter Holbrook is Professor of Shakespeare and English Renaissance Literature at the University of Queensland, Australia, and Director of the UQ Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800). He is the author of Shakespeare’s Individualism (2010) and Literature and Degree in Renaissance England: Nashe, Bourgeois Tragedy, Shakespeare (1994), and co-editor, with David Bevington, of The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (1998).
