This book constitutes a new direction for feminist studies in English Renaissance drama. While feminist scholars have long celebrated heroic females in comedies, many have overlooked female tragic heroism, reading it instead as evidence of pervasive misogyny on the part of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Displacing prevailing arguments of "victim feminism," the contributors to this volume engage a wide range of feminist theories, and argue that female protagonists in tragedies - Jocasta, Juliet, Cleopatra, Mariam, Webster's Duchess and White Devil, among others - are heroic in precisely the same ways as their more notorious masculine counterparts.

This book focuses on female tragic heroes in England from c.1610 to c.1645. Their sudden appearance can be linked to changing ideas about the relationships between bodies and souls; men's bodies and women's; marriage and mothering; the law; and religion. Though the vast majority of these characters are closer to villainesses than heroines, these plays, by showing how misogyny affected the lives of their central characters, did not merely reflect their culture, but also changed it.

Contains essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from both hemispheres as well as substantial reviews of books and essays dealing with medieval and early modern English drama before 1642. This volume addresses the conditions of theatrical ownership and dramatic competitionto those exploring stage movement and theatrical space.

In John Banks’s Female Tragic Heroes, Paula de Pando offers the first monograph on Restoration playwright John Banks. De Pando analyses Banks’s civic model of she-tragedy in terms of its successful adaptation of early modern literary traditions and its engagement with contemporary political and cultural debates. Using Tudor queens as tragic heroes and specifically addressing female audiences, patrons and critics, Banks made women rather than men the subject of tragedy, revolutionising drama and influencing depictions of gender, politics, and history in the long eighteenth century.

Introducing the reader to important topics in English Renaissance tragedy, this Companion presents fresh readings of key texts.

In this volume, 8 lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace the kaleidoscopically shifting dramatic forms, performance contexts, and social implications of tragedy throughout the period and across geographic, political, and social references. They attend not only to the familiar cultural lenses of English and mainstream Continental dramas but also to less familiar European exempla from Croatia and Hungary. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment brings together 40 of the most important scholars and intellectuals writing on the subject today. Extending the purview of feminist criticism, it offers an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion. In addition to sophisticated textual analysis drawing on the methods of historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and posthumanism, a team of international experts discuss Shakespeare's life, contemporary editing practices, and performance of his plays on stage, on screen, and in the classroom. This theoretically sophisticated yet elegantly written Handbook includes an editor's Introduction that provides a comprehensive overview of current debates.