English Renaissance Tragedy. This item is unavailable.English Renaissance Tragedy

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.

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 Shakespeares 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).'