Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Part 1 Themes
- Part II Readings
- 11 The Spanish Tragedy and metatheatre
- 12 Doctor Faustus: dramaturgy and disturbance
- 13 Edward II: Marlowe, tragedy and the sublime
- 14 Arden of Faversham: tragic action at a distance
- 15 The Revenger’s Tragedy: Original Sin and the allures of vengeance
- 16 The Tragedy of Mariam: political legitimacy and maternal authority
- 17 The Changeling and the dynamics of ugliness
- 18 The Duchess of Malfi: tragedy and gender
- 19 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore: the play of intertextuality
- Index
11 - The Spanish Tragedy and metatheatre
from Part II - Readings
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2010
- Frontmatter
- Part 1 Themes
- Part II Readings
- 11 The Spanish Tragedy and metatheatre
- 12 Doctor Faustus: dramaturgy and disturbance
- 13 Edward II: Marlowe, tragedy and the sublime
- 14 Arden of Faversham: tragic action at a distance
- 15 The Revenger’s Tragedy: Original Sin and the allures of vengeance
- 16 The Tragedy of Mariam: political legitimacy and maternal authority
- 17 The Changeling and the dynamics of ugliness
- 18 The Duchess of Malfi: tragedy and gender
- 19 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore: the play of intertextuality
- Index
Summary
Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1587-90) is neither the first nor the greatest of Renaissance tragedies. The play often is regarded, however, as perhaps the single most influential play from the golden age of English theatre, regularly performed on the London stage for more than a decade after its first performance, published in ten editions within twenty years of its composition, and generating an intertextual web of adaptations, allusions, parodies and appropriations as rich as that of any play from the period. In this essay, I seek to understand the less-than-obvious reasons for The Spanish Tragedy's nearly unprecedented influence on contemporary and later Renaissance playwrights. The play deserves its foremost position in the 'Readings' section of this Companion, I would argue, not because it invents the Renaissance tragic subject or reinvents classical tragedy for the Renaissance but, rather, because it frees later tragedians from the generic limitations and epistemological determinism of classic, Aristotelian tragedy; it advances the genre, that is, precisely by rejecting its most basic rules and assumptions about the mimetic function of drama. In doing so, it establishes a dramatic mode consistent with the increasing epistemological indeterminacy of post-Reformation European thought and, in the process, establishes its most basic tool - theatrical self-awareness and/or self-scrutiny - as the basis of the early modern, and perhaps the modern, theatrical experience.
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- The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy , pp. 153 - 162Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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