English Renaissance Tragedy: Ideas of Freedom - Hardcover

Holbrook, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1472572815 ISBN 13: 9781472572813

Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare, 2015

Synopsis

This book's underlying claim is that English Renaissance tragedy addresses live issues in the experience of readers and spectators today: it is not a genre to be studied only for aesthetic or “heritage” reasons. The book considers the way in which tragedy in general, and English Renaissance tragedy in particular, addresses ideas of freedom, understood both from an individual and a sociopolitical perspective. Tragedy since the Greeks has addressed the constraints and necessities to which human life is subject (Fate, the gods, chance, the conflict between state and individual) as well as the human desire for autonomy and self-direction. In short, English Renaissance Tragedy: Ideas of Freedom shows how the tragic drama of Shakespeare's age addresses problems of freedom, slavery, and tyranny in ways that speak to us now.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Holbrook is Professor of Shakespeare and English Renaissance Literature at the University of Queensland, Australia, and Director of the UQ Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800). He is the author of Shakespeare's Individualism (2010) and Literature and Degree in Renaissance England: Nashe, Bourgeois Tragedy, Shakespeare (1994), and co-editor, with David Bevington, of The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (1998).

Edition details

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1472572815
• ISBN 13: 9781472572813
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256