This study combines a consideration of the general issues affecting Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy with particular comment on plays.

The domination of the state over the lives of individuals is a problem of the present-day world. In Jacobean tragedy J.W. Lever finds essentially the same problem in the shape it assumed during the rise of the first European nation states. The English dramatists of the early seventeenth century are seen as giving expression to the ferment of ideas which, only a generation later, precipitated the revolutionary struggles of the 1640s. Some of the major Jacobean tragedies are seen in this book as having a close bearing upon the vital issues of our own age; not only the evils of tyranny but the ambivalent ethics of revolt are explored. When it was first published in 1971, 'The Tragedy of State' presented a challenge to the dominant view of Jacobean tragedy: often interpreted in terms of the Elizabethan World Picture, the drama was held by many in a conservative light. Now increasingly recognized as a forerunner to modern work on the Renaissance, this classic volume has been unavailable in paperback for many years. It is reissued with a new introduction in which Jonathan Dollimore sketches briefly some of the larger critical, intellectual, aesthetic and political issues that concerned Lever and which remain current within contemporary cultural criticism and literary theory. The accompanying references provide students with a guide to recent work which is transforming the study of Renaissance drama.

A Study Guide for "Elizabethan Drama," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary Movements for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literary Movements for Students for all of your research needs.

One of the smash hits of the late 1580s and 90s, Tamburlaine established blank verse as the poetic line of English Renaissance drama, Edward Alleyn as the first English star actor and Marlowe as one of the foremost playwrights of his time. The rise and fall of a Scythian peasant-warrior who conquers the Middle East and is struck down by illness after burning the books of the Koran is presented in two parts crammed with theatrical splendour and equally spectacular cruelty. Marlowe's original audiences were delighted with the blasphemous and ruthlessly ambitious hero; the introduction to this edition discusses the problems that such a character poses for modern audiences and highlights the undercurrents of the play that lead towards a more ironic interpretation.

Jacobean tragedy is typically seen as translating a general dissatisfaction with the first Stuart monarch and his court into acts of calculated recklessness and cynical brutality. Drawing on theoretical influences from social history, psychoanalysis and the study of discourses, this innovative book proposes an alternative perspective: Jacobean tragedy should be seen in the light of the institutional and social concerns of the early modern stage and the ambiguities which they engendered. Although the stage’s professionalization opened up hitherto unknown possibilities of economic success and social advancement for its middle-class practitioners, the imaginative, linguistic and material conditions of their work undermined the very ambitions they generated and furthered. The close reading of play texts and other, non-dramatic sources suggests that playwrights knew that they were dealing with hazardous materials prone to turn against them: whether the language they used or the audiences for whom they wrote and upon whose money and benevolence their success depended. The notorious features of the tragedies under discussion – their bloody murders, intricately planned revenges and psychologically refined terror – testify not only to the anxiety resulting from this multifaceted professional uncertainty but also to theatre practitioners’ attempts to civilize the excesses they were staging.