scholarly journals Revenge Tragedy and Classical Philosophy on the Early Modern Stage. Christopher Crosbie. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Pp. vii+310.

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (4) ◽  
pp. E237-E239
Author(s):  
James A. Knapp
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Classical Philosophy

Revenge Tragedy and Classical Philosophy on the Early Modern Stage

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Crosbie
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Faculty Psychology ◽  
Aristotelian Ethics ◽  
Classical Philosophy ◽  
The Duchess Of Malfi

This book discovers within early modern revenge tragedy the surprising shaping presence of a wide array of classical philosophies not commonly affiliated with the genre. By recovering the pervasive influence of Aristotelian faculty psychology on The Spanish Tragedy, Aristotelian ethics on Titus Andronicus, Lucretian atomism on Hamlet, Galenic pneumatics on Antonio’s Revenge and Epictetian Stoicism on The Duchess of Malfi, this book reveals how the very atmospheres and ontological assumptions of revenge tragedy exert their own kind of conditioning dramaturgical force. The book also revitalises our understanding of how the Renaissance stage, even at its most lurid, functions as a unique space for the era’s practical, vernacular engagement with received philosophy.

scholarly journals Demetaphorization, Anatomy, and the Semiotics of the Reformation in Early Modern Revenge Tragedy

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-201
Author(s):  
Attila Kiss
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Figures Of Speech ◽  
Modern Subject ◽  
The Face ◽  
Revenge Tragedies ◽  
Rhetorical Tropes

Abstract Reformation theology induced a profound thanatological crisis in the semiotics of the human being and the body. The Protestant Reformation discontinued numerous practices of intercession and communal ritual, and the early modern subject was left vulnerable in the face of death. The English Renaissance stage played out these anxieties within the larger context of the epistemological uncertainties of the age, employing violence and the anatomization of the body as representational techniques. While theories of language and tragic poetry oscillated between different ideas of imitatio (granting priority to the model) and mimesis (with preference for the creative and individual nature of the copy), the new anatomical interest and dissective perspectives also had their effects on the rhetorical practices of revenge tragedies. In the most shocking moments of these plays, rhetorical tropes suddenly turn into grisly reality, and figures of speech become demetaphorized, literalized. In a double anatomy of body and mind, English Renaissance revenge tragedy simultaneously employs and questions the emblematic and poetic traditions of representation, and the ensuing indeterminacy and ambiguity open paths for a new mimesis.

Servants

2019 ◽  
pp. 126-163
Author(s):  
George Oppitz-Trotman
Keyword(s):  
Social Anxiety ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Drama ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Revenge Plays ◽  
Ethical Relations

Servants in early modern drama have increasingly been investigated less as objects of domination than as subjects capable of affective and ethical relations with their masters. Both sorts of interpretation depend upon the assumption that actual early modern servants are straightforwardly represented in drama of the time. Observing that common players were themselves patronised and liveried servants, and that the theatre itself appeared as a form of mercenary service, this chapter shows how procedures of dramatic figuration implicate identification of the servant in a complex dialectic of discernment. With roots in various sorts of contemporary social anxiety, such difficulties are at their most intense in revenge tragedy. In many places reading revenge plays involves confronting their ability to undo the social concepts used to grasp their historical content.

‘Caviare to the General’?: Taste, Hearing and Genre in Hamlet

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allison K. Deutermann
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Revenge Tragedies ◽  
Absolute Control ◽  
City Comedies

This chapter turns to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, an early modern play deeply interested in, and highly self-consciously about, hearing. Possibly a revision of an earlier revenge tragedy, Hamlet is vitally shaped by the formal contests emerging at the turn of the century. Hamlet himself articulates a Jonsonian model of selective and tasteful theatrical reception, but his own hearing trouble frequently, tragically, undermines his ability to perform such audition. The Prince’s longing for complete and absolute control over his body’s sonic circulation is juxtaposed against Horatio’s more measured, partial reception; it is only in the play’s final moments that the dying Hamlet is released from this doomed, tortured struggle. Hamlet recuperates revenge from charges of embarrassing obsolescence by suggesting that all sounds can be processed thoughtfully, consciously, and carefully -- that no one dramatic sound or form forces its audiences to hear it so unthinkingly, or so violently. The chapter closes by examining Hamlet’s influence on the sound and structure of a handful of Jacobean revenge tragedies and city comedies, with particular attention to the highly sophisticated, generically self-aware The Revenger’s Tragedy.

Introduction: On Revenge Tragedy and the Shaping Influence of Classical Philosophy

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Christopher Crosbie
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Critical Hermeneutic ◽  
Classical Philosophy

This chapter examines how the modern creation of revenge tragedy as a genre has estranged theatrical revenge from most forms of philosophical inquiry in our critical hermeneutic. The first half of the introduction reveals how the constellation of conventions used to identify "revenge tragedy" imprecisely fits the plays it ostensibly describes. After charting how this contributes to obscuring the deeper philosophical investments of theatrical revenge, the chapter briefly summarizes the argument of each of the book’s chapters. The introduction argues that revenge dramatists tether their revenge narratives to specific ontological assumptions about how the worlds they create work and, in doing so, create a sense of retribution as fitting, as seeming consonant with those worlds’ most fundamental operations.

Body and Soul

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Ezell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Classical Philosophy ◽  
The Relationship

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the soul, its nature, and its relationship with the body became focal points for religious, medical, political, and ethical debates, and the choice of vocabulary itself had profound implications in how human and divine nature were represented in early modern English writings. The perceived complexities of the relationship between the body and the soul as delineated in competing schools of classical philosophy provided English writers a fertile ground for analysing the human experience in general and the nature of individual identity. Debates over what happens to the body and the soul at death and at resurrection permeate the writings of the period. During the English Civil War years they were markers of both political and religious affiliations, and this chapter demonstrates how the medical turn in the late seventeenth century focused increasing attention on the separation of soul and mind.

‘She’s Turned Fury’: Women Transmogrified in Revenge Plays

2018 ◽  
pp. 220-236
Author(s):  
Janet Clare
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
Revenge Plays

This chapter explores early modern responses to Hecuba, arguing that whereas Euripides’ Hecuba is a sympathetic tragic heroine and successful avenger, this model was not replicated in early modern plays. Instead the two aspects of Hecuba’s role, that of lamenting mother and ruthless avenger, bifurcate in English revenge tragedy. Pitiful, mourning mothers such as Isabella from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy are unsuccessful, while savage ones, such as Tamora from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Queen Margaret in Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy, are abhorrent and aberrant, inflicting violence from a position of power. In contrast to Germany and France – where artistic treatments of the Biblical Judith decapitating General Holofernes offer a heroic, political image of female vengeance – the chapter argues that in early modern England revenge was definitively not a woman’s business.

scholarly journals O trzech rodzajach abstrakcji

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 7-16
Author(s):  
Damian Leszczyński
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Classical Philosophy ◽  
Method Of Abstraction ◽  
Insight Into

The article discusses three ways of applying the method of abstraction in philosophical research. The first is related to classical philosophy and Aristotle’s method, the second to early modern philosophy referring to mathematics and natural sciences as a model, and the third one to broadly understood transcen-dental philosophy, using a specific type of insight into the structure of the subject.

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