VARIA: Dramatization of Politics in the Age of Shakespeare

The article is concerned with the relationship between politics and aesthetics within the context of English Renaissance drama. It is argued that during the Renaissance politics was very much at the centre of all aesthetic reconstructions of reality. Renaissance writers were keenly interested in the problematization of traditional Christian morality by the advent of political realism, and this interest can be found at every structural level of their works. The article examines the reflection of the issue in a recurrent binary pattern of contrasted characters in select plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare.