French origins of English tragedy
French origins of English tragedy
Richard Hillman
Copyright Date: 2010
Published by: Manchester University Press
Pages: 232
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt155j5hk
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French origins of English tragedy
Book Description:

Richard Hillman applies to tragic patterns and practices in early modern England his long-standing critical preoccupation with English-French cultural connections in the period. With primary, though not exclusive, reference on the English side to Shakespeare and Marlowe, and on the French side to a wide range of dramatic and non-dramatic material, he focuses on distinctive elements that emerge within the English tragedy of the 1590s and early 1600s. These include the self-destructive tragic hero, the apparatus of neo-Senecanism (including the Machiavellian villain) and the confrontation between the warrior-hero and the femme fatale. The broad objective is less to "discover" influences – although some specific points of contact are proposed – than at once to enlarge and refine a common cultural space through juxtaposition and intertextual tracing. The conclusion emerges that the powerful, if ambivalent, fascination of the English for their closest Continental neighbours expressed itself not only in but through the theatre.

eISBN: 978-1-84779-309-6
Subjects: Language & Literature
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-vi)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. vii-vii)
  3. Acknowledgements
    Acknowledgements (pp. viii-viii)
  4. Textual note
    Textual note (pp. ix-x)
  5. 1 Introduction
    1 Introduction (pp. 1-15)

    This project applies to tragic patterns and practices a long-standing critical preoccupation of mine: the dynamic imaginative engagement of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English dramatists and audiences with French texts and contexts.¹ As I have previously argued, that engagement is founded on historical causes, cultural as well as political, but sustained by the continuing imbrication of England’s most pressing national and religious concerns with French ones.² It is also, paradoxically, an engagement that testifies, from the broad historical perspective, to a process of disengagement. English and French nationhood, for the first time since the Norman Conquest, are each now...

  6. 2 On the generic cusp: Richard II, La Guisiade and the invention of tragic heroes
    2 On the generic cusp: Richard II, La Guisiade and the invention of tragic heroes (pp. 16-32)

    Early modern English tragedy is a richly unstable phenomenon not least in its variant approaches, by comparison to Senecan and French Humanist precedents, to an element that the genre imposes in some form: the tragic protagonist. I am far from taking for granted the mimetic model that may be read into the ‘mature Shakespeare’, which has tended to loom as a telos in critical retrospect. On the contrary, beginning with an approach to Othello by way of Samson and Holofernes in Chapter 4, and notably across discussions of Hamlet and Antony inFrench Reflections, I put a premium on the...

  7. 3 Out of their classical depth: from pathos to bathos in early English tragedy; or, the comedy of terrors
    3 Out of their classical depth: from pathos to bathos in early English tragedy; or, the comedy of terrors (pp. 33-61)

    We tend to take for granted the creaky neo-Senecan machinery of the ghostly framing device in Kyd’sThe Spanish Tragedy, if not to snigger at its naïveté, as Beaumont found it easy to do inThe Knight of the Burning Pestle: ‘When I was mortal, this my costive corpse / Did lap up figs and raisins in the Strand . . .’ (V.290–1).¹ I propose here to listen attentively to those creaks and to some of their French-accented reverberations through English tragedy from the late 1580s on.The Spanish Tragedyserves as a natural starting point because the on-stage...

  8. 4 Staging the Judith jinx: heads or tales?
    4 Staging the Judith jinx: heads or tales? (pp. 62-96)

    Since around the end of the twentieth century, war has again broken out as a favoured topic in the criticism of early modern English drama, and it is perhaps not coincidental that a culture of war has simultaneously returned to prominence, if not dominance, not least in English-speaking societies. The still-entrenched New Historicist and Cultural Materialist presumption of mimetic complicity between an age’s political occupations and its intellectual preoccupations seems determined to validate itself. In any case, that presumption, by and large, has governed recent approaches to early modern theatrical warfare: an impressive array of contemporary cultural documents on military...

  9. Works cited
    Works cited (pp. 97-104)
  10. Index
    Index (pp. 105-118)
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