"The Maid's Tragedy, The Second Maid's Tragedy, Valentinian, and The Duchess of Malfi appeared on the English stage at a time when disenchantment with King James and nostalgia for Queen Elizabeth cast doubt on the traditional analogy between maleness and authority. In their sensational portrayal of politics and sex, these revenge tragedies challenge the dogmas of patriarchalism and absolutism on which James based his rule." "Focusing initially on the first three plays, Eileen Allman examines the genre's resident tyrants, revengers, androgynous heroes, and virtuous heroines."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

From folk ballads to film scripts, this new five-volume encyclopedia covers the entire history of British literature from the seventh century to the present, focusing on the writers and the major texts of what are now the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In five hundred substantial essays written by major scholars, the Encyclopedia of British Literature includes biographies of nearly four hundred individual authors and a hundred topical essays with detailed analyses of particular themes, movements, genres, and institutions whose impact upon the writing or the reading of literature was significant. An ideal companion to The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, this set will prove invaluable for students, scholars, and general readers. For more information, including a complete table of contents and list of contributors, please visit www.oup.com/us/ebl

The plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries are increasingly popular thanks to a spate of recent stage and screen productions and to courses that set Shakespeare's plays in context. This Reader's Guide introduces students to the criticism and debates that are specific to the drama of playwrights such as Jonson, Middleton, Dekker and Webster. Pascale Aebischer explores recent critical developments in key areas including: - How the plays were staged and printed - Innovative editions of plays - How the plays represent and contest the dominant ideologies of the Jacobean period - Dramatic genres - The representation of the human body and of social, gender and race relations - Modern productions on stage and screen Featuring suggestions for further research and reading, and a filmography of commercially available film versions of non-Shakespearean drama, this is an invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in the diverse plays of the Jacobean age.

Mantic elements are manifold in the English drama of the Renaissance period: they are supernatural manifestations and have a prophetic, future-determining function within the dramatic plot, which can be difficult to discern. Addressing contemporaries of Shakespeare, this study interprets a representative number of revenge tragedies, among them The Spanish Tragedy, The White Devil, and The Revenger's Tragedy, to draw general conclusions about the use of mantic elements in this genre. The analysis of the cultural context and the functionalisation of mantic elements in revenge tragedy of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline era show their essential function in the construction of the plot. Mantic elements create and stimulate audience expectations. They are not only rhetoric decorum, but structural elements, and convey knowledge about the genre, the fate of which is determined by retaliation. An interpretation of revenge tragedy is only possible if mantic providentialism is taken into account.

This book, the first to trace revenge tragedy's evolving dialogue with early modern law, draws on changing laws of evidence, food riots, piracy, and debates over royal prerogative. By taking the genre's legal potential seriously, it opens up the radical critique embedded in the revenge tragedies of Kyd, Shakespeare, Marston, Chettle and Middleton.

What is revenge, and what purpose does it serve? On the early modern English stage, depictions of violence and carnage—the duel between Hamlet and Laertes that leaves nearly everyone dead or the ghastly meal of human remains served at the end of Titus Andronicus—emphasize arresting acts of revenge that upset the social order. Yet the subsequent critical focus on a narrow selection of often bloody "revenge plays" has overshadowed subtler and less spectacular modes of vengeance present in early modern culture. In Civil Vengeance, Emily L. King offers a new way of understanding early modern revenge in relation to civility and community. Rather than relegating vengeance to the social periphery, she uncovers how facets of society—church, law, and education—relied on the dynamic of retribution to augment their power such that revenge emerges as an extension of civility. To revise the lineage of revenge literature in early modern England, King rereads familiar revenge tragedies (including Marston's Antonio's Revenge and Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy) alongside a new archive that includes conduct manuals, legal and political documents, and sermons. Shifting attention from episodic revenge to quotidian forms, Civil Vengeance provides new insights into the manner by which retaliation informs identity formation, interpersonal relationships, and the construction of the social body.

Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court constitutes the first full-length study of Jacobean nuptial performance, a hitherto unexplored branch of early modern theater consisting of masques and entertainments performed for high-profile weddings. Scripted by such writers as Ben Jonson, Thomas Campion, George Chapman, and Francis Beaumont, these entertainments were mounted for some of the most significant political events of James's English reign. Here Kevin Curran analyzes all six of the elite weddings celebrated at the Jacobean court, reading the masques and entertainments that headlined these events alongside contemporaneously produced panegyrics, festival books, sermons, parliamentary speeches, and other sources. The study shows how, collectively, wedding entertainments turned the idea of union into a politically versatile category of national representation and offered new ways of imagining a specifically Jacobean form of national identity by doing so.

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.

This study considers parallel issues in revenge tragedies of the early seventeenth-century and violent cinema of the last thirty years. It offers a series of provocative explorations of death, revenge and justice, and gender and violence. What happens when we connect The White Devil with Basic Instinct ? The Changeling or Titus Andronicus with Straw Dogs ? Doctor Faustus with Se7en ? Taxi Driver with The Spanish Tragedy ? Appealing to those with an interest in either drama or film, written in an engaging style, the book also reconsiders the high /popular culture divide, and reflects on the enduring significance of the revenge motif in Western culture over the past four hundred years, particularly in the post 9/11 context.

Beginning with the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 and concluding with reactions to the accession of William and Mary, The Politics of Rape is the first full-length study to examine theatrical representations of sexual violence in the latter-half of the seventeenth century.