Overview
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. - See more
at:
http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/english-renaissance-tragedy-9781472572806/#sthash.g78AvNyK.dpufThis
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. - See more
at:
http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/english-renaissance-tragedy-9781472572806/#sthash.g78AvNyK.dpufTragedy
delivers bad news - it tells us, for one thing, that we are not in
control of out own lives. So why should we pay attention to it,
especially in a democratic culture in which autonomy and self-direction
are prized goals? English Renaissance Tragedy: Ideas of Freedom attends
to this question in the context of the drama written in and around the
time of Shakespeare. Arguing that tragedy of this period engages our
interest in matters of fundamental importance, Peter Holbrook explores
the ways in which the genre raises and debates (but by no means
resolves) a range of questions to do with human liberty.