Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to MiltonAshgate Publishing, Ltd., 2006 - 225 pages An examination of political and cultural acts of commemoration, this study addresses the way personal and collective loss is registered in prose, poetry and drama in early modern England. It focuses on the connection of representation of violence in literary works to historical traumas such as royal death, secularization and regicide. The author contends that dramatic and poetic forms function as historical archives both in their commemoration of the past and in their re-enactment of loss that is part of any effort to represent traumatic history. Incorporating contemporary theories of memory and loss, Thomas Anderson here analyzes works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, Marvell and Milton. Where other studies about violent loss in the period tend to privilege allegorical readings that equate the content of art to its historical analogue, this study insists that artistic representations are performative as they commemorate the past. By interrogating the difficulty in representing historical crises in poetry, drama and political prose, Anderson demonstrates how early modern English identity is the fragile product of an ambivalent desire to flee history. conceives the representations of violent loss - secular and religious - in early modern texts as moments of failed political and social memorialization. It offers a fresh way to understand the development of historical and national identity in England during the Renaissance. |
Contents
Reading Martyred History in Titus Andronicus 958 | 19 |
Richard II and the Politics of Murder | 57 |
Edward II and the Aesthetics of Survival | 93 |
The Art of Playing Dead in Revenge Tragedy | 125 |
Royal Death and Renaissance Distraction | 169 |
207 | |
221 | |
Other editions - View all
Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton Thomas P. Anderson No preview available - 2016 |
Common terms and phrases
Actaeon afterlife allegory Andrea Andrew Marvell appears argues bastard bear witness blood body chapter Charles Charles's Christopher Marlowe Chronicles claims commemoration corpse critical cultural dead death describes desire disavowal distorts Duchess Duchess of Malfi early modern echo Edward Edward II effect efficacy effigy Eikon Basilike Elizabeth's England English English Reformation Enterline execution figure Foxe's Gaveston's Gloucester's murder grief Helgerson Hieronimo historical transmission Holinshed imagined inheritance king king's book Kyd's language Lavinia's legacy Lightborn literary living loss Marlowe Marlowe's Marvell Marvell's memory metaphor Milton narrative Ovid past performance Peter Marshall play play's poem political present Prince promise purgatory reading Reformation regicide relationship Renaissance represent representation revenge Revenge Tragedy Revenger's Tragedy rhetoric Richard Richard II ritual royal sacrament scene sense Shakespeare Spanish Tragedy spectators speech Spurio stage suggests temporal theater theatrical thou Titus Andronicus Titus's trauma understanding Vindice's violence Webster words writing York