The Spanish Tragedy (International Student Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)

Author: Thomas Kyd
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393614808
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description
Thomas Kyd’s highly influential and popular revenge play is now available in a richly documented and critically engaging Norton Critical Edition. The freshly edited and annotated text comes with a full introduction and illustrative materials intended for student readers. The Spanish Tragedy was well known to sixteenth-century audiences, and its central elements—a play-within-a-play and a ghost bent on revenge—are widely believed to have influenced Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This volume includes a generous selection of supporting materials, among them Kyd’s likely sources (Virgil, Jacques Yver, and the anonymous “The Earl of Leicester Betrays His Own Servant”), Thomas Nashe’s satiric criticism of Kyd, Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon on revenge, and “The Ballad of The Spanish Tragedy,” which suggests the play’s initial reception. “Criticism” is thematically organized to provide readers with a clear sense of the play’s major themes. Contributors include Michael Hattaway, Jonas A. Barish, Donna B. Hamilton, G. K. Hunter, Lorna Hutson, Molly Smith, J. R. Mulryne, T. McAlindon, and Andrew Sofer. A Selected Bibliography is also included.

Beyond "The Spanish Tragedy"

Author: Lukas Erne
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719060939
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 422

Book Description
This is the first book in more than thirty years on the playwright who is arguably Shakespeare's most important tragic predecessor. In Lukas Erne's book, The Spanish Tragedy - the most popular of all plays on the English Renaissance stage - receives the extensive scholarly and criticaltreatment it deserves, including a full reception and modern stage history. Yet as Erne shows, Thomas Kyd is much more than the author of a single masterpiece. Don Horatio (partly extant in The First Part of Hieronimo), the lost early Hamlet, Soliman and Perseda, and Cornelia all belong to whatemerges in this study for the first time as a coherent dramatic oeuvre.

The Spanish Tragedy

Author: Thomas Rist
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472522842
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Book Description
The Spanish Tragedy was the first 'revenge tragedy' on the English Renaissance stage: but for its influence, major dramas including The Revenger's Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi and even Hamlet would not exist as they do. It is thus a key text for the study of Renaissance drama and normally appears in introductory undergraduate courses on Renaissance drama and Shakespeare. Despite its initial smash-hit status, after the closing of the theatres in 1642 the play was only once performed in Britain before its gradual revival in the 20th century. Following its first professional performance in 1973, the play has come to be recognised as a Renaissance classic, receiving frequent performance. This volume will bring together its most insightful and influential modern scholars to produce an edition read both by experts in the field and lovers of Thomas Kyd's drama.

Doing Kyd

Author: Nicoleta Cinpoes
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526108941
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
Doing Kyd reads Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the box-office and print success of its time, as the play that established the revenge genre in England and served as a ‘pattern and precedent’ for the golden generation of early modern playwrights, from Marlowe and Shakespeare to Middleton, Webster and Ford. Interdisciplinary in approach and accessible in style, this collection is crucial in two respects: firstly, it has a wide spectrum, addressing readers with interests in the play from its early impact as the first sixteenth-century revenge tragedy, to its afterlife in print, on the stage, in screen adaptation and bibliographical studies. Secondly, the collection appears at a time when Kyd and his play are back in the spotlight, through renewed critical interest, several new stage productions between 2009 and 2013, and its firm presence in higher-education curriculum for English and drama.

The Revenger's Tragedy

Author: Cyril Tourneur
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719043758
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
This book depicts a morally corrupt universe where the desire for justice is contaminated by the obsession for revenge. The denunciations of sin are countered at each turn by the pleasure characters take in acting or watching adultery, incest & murder.

Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England

Author: Thomas Rist
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351903373
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

Book Description
Considering major works by Kyd, Shakespeare, Middleton and Webster among others, this book transforms current understanding of early modern revenge tragedy. Examing the genre in light of historical revisions to England's Reformations, and with appropriate regard to the social history of the dead, it shows revenge tragedy is not an anti-Catholic and Reformist genre, but one rooted in, and in dialogue with, traditional Catholic culture. Arguing its tragedies are bound to the age's funerary performances, it provides a new view of the contemporary theatre and especially its role in the religious upheavals of the period.

Volpone

Author: Ben Jonson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719051821
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
This Revels Student Edition, with a carefully modernized text, presents new material about Volpone 's debt to the popular Reynard beast epic and Italian commedia dell 'art and discusses its mockery of greed in relation to two Renaissance perversions of the myth of a Golden Age. Referring to famous productions, it pays particular attention to decisions that must be made whenever the play is performed.

Lord Strange's Men and Their Plays

Author: Lawrence Manley
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300206895
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 488

Book Description
For a brief period in the late Elizabethan Era an innovative company of players dominated the London stage. A fellowship of dedicated thespians, Lord Strange’s Men established their reputation by concentrating on “modern matter” performed in a spectacular style, exploring new modes of impersonation, and deliberately courting controversy. Supported by their equally controversial patron, theater connoisseur and potential claimant to the English throne Ferdinando Stanley, the company included Edward Alleyn, considered the greatest actor of the age, as well as George Bryan, Thomas Pope, Augustine Phillips, William Kemp, and John Hemings, who later joined William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Though their theatrical reign was relatively short lived, Lord Strange’s Men helped to define the dramaturgy of the period, performing the plays of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, and others with their own distinctive flourish. Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean offer the first complete account of the troupe and its enormous influence on Elizabethan theater. Seamlessly blending theater history and literary criticism, the authors paint a lively portrait of a unique community of performing artists, their intellectual ambitions and theatrical innovations, their business practices, and their fearless engagements with the politics and religion of their time.

Topicality and Representation

Author: Hammood Khalid Obaid
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443854840
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
This book focuses on the importance of topical reading in understanding Islamic figures and themes, and applies this approach to two landmark Elizabethan plays: George Peele’s Battle of Alcazar and William Percy’s Mahomet and his Heaven. The former is the first English play to present a Moor as a major character, while the latter is the first English play to be based on Quranic material and feature the Prophet of Islam as a major character. In both plays, the book argues, topical concerns played a major role in the formation of Islamic characters and themes, rendering the term ‘representation’ highly debatable. The book also briefly covers other Elizabethan plays that contained Islamic elements, such as Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice, and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus. Topical issues covered in the work include British-Muslim relations, the Spanish Armada, Elizabethan patriotism in literature, Catholic-Protestant tensions in the late 16th century, the gynaecocracy debate, and Elizabethan alchemy and magic.

Distracted Subjects

Author: Carol Thomas Neely
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801489242
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
'Distracted Subjects' offers a feminist analysis of early modern madness. Carol Neely reveals the mobility & heterogeneity of discourses of 'distraction', the most common term for the condition in late 16th & early 17th century England.