English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality - Hardcover

Woodbridge, Linda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521884594 ISBN 13: 9780521884594

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2010

Synopsis

Vengeance permeates English Renaissance drama - for example, it crops up in all but two of Shakespeare's plays. This book explores why a supposedly forgiving Christian culture should have relished such bloodthirsty, vengeful plays. A clue lies in the plays' passion for fairness, a preoccupation suggesting widespread resentment of systemic unfairness - legal, economic, political and social. Revengers' precise equivalents - the father of two beheaded sons obliges his enemy to eat her two sons' heads - are vigilante versions of Elizabethan law, where penalties suit the crimes: thieves' hands were cut off, scolds' tongues bridled. The revengers' language of 'paying' hints at the operation of revenge in the service of economic redress. Revenge makes contact with resistance theory, justifying overthrow of tyrants, and some revengers challenge the fundamental inequity of social class. Woodbridge demonstrates how, for all their sensationalism, their macabre comedy and outlandish gore, Renaissance revenge plays do some serious cultural work.

About this title

Review:

"This is a brilliant and convincing way to account for early modern England's obsession with leveling the score."
-David Hawkes, Arizona State Univercity, TLS

Book Description:

Why was revenge drama so popular in Shakespeare's time, and why did supposedly forgiving Christian audiences relish such bloodthirsty, vengeful plays? This book addresses these questions, exploring black comedy and sensationalism, what it means that revengers use economic terms like 'pay', and revengers as political revolutionaries and egalitarians.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0521884594
• ISBN 13: 9780521884594
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 350