Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama

2003 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 597
Author(s):  
Susan Hrach Georgecink ◽  
Karen Raber
Author(s):  
Lisa S. Starks

This chapter applies Maurizio Calbi’s concept of Shakespeare’s contemporary spectrality, based on Derridean “hauntology,” to Ovid in the early modern era. It explores Ovid as an icon of lovesickness and theatricality, with interconnections between these terms, in early modern representations of and debates on the theatrical experience itself. The chapter moves from the height of Ovidian theatre to its shadowy afterlife – focusing primarily on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Jonson’s Poetaster, and the obscure interregnum closet drama Ovids Ghost – to explore the uncanny returns of spectral Ovids in related discourses concerning metamorphic illusion and the “self-shattering effects of painful love.”


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