A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Early Modern Age Volume 3

Early modern tragedy was a glorious hybrid, a variegated collection of texts and performances reflecting a wide range of models and influences—some classically inspired, emerging from learned traditions and mythological adaptations; some native-born out of folktales, biblical narratives, ballads, legends, and other forms from popular culture—and some combining all of the above. Contemporary attempts to define it usually offered overviews of stories or persons that begin in prosperity and end in failure. The search for a definition of early modern tragedy continues precisely because such definitions generally proved unsatisfying or unhelpful, without nuance, and often missed the celebratory qualities that have steadily drawn readers and audiences to these performances for centuries. Shakespeare and his contemporaries in England and across Europe produced tragedies whose audiences required more fluid parameters than simple boilerplate definitions allowed.
In this volume, eight lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace the kaleidoscopically shifting dramatic forms, performance contexts, and social implications of tragedy throughout the period and across geographic, political, and social references. They attend not only to the familiar cultural lenses of English and mainstream Continental dramas but also to less familiar European exempla from Croatia and Hungary.
Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.