From Dread to Mockery: The Scenes of Death in The Spanish Tragedy and The Revenger’s Tragedy
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
This essay aims to reach a more comprehensive understanding of Elizabethan and Jacobean England’s attitudes toward death through a close investigation of the scenes of death in The Spanish Tragedy and The Revenger’s Tragedy. Whereas The Spanish Tragedy directly speaks directly to the anxieties about death as permanent annihilation, which were caused by the Protestant abolition of purgatory, The Revenger’s Tragedy communicates a different kind of sentiment about death that cannot be completely explained through the notion of fear of eternal damnation. I contend that the representations of death in The Revenger’s Tragedy are much more theatrical and artificial than those in The Spanish Tragedy and that the emphasis on the theatricality and artificiality of the scenes of death in The Revenger’s Tragedy considerably weakens the emotional and psychological significance of the representations of death. Only the entertainment value of death is emphasized in The Revenger’s Tragedy, making its view of death much more secular than the understanding of death presented in The Spanish Tragedy. In understanding death mainly in corporeal and material terms, The Revenger’s Tragedy somehow “overcame” the Elizabethan anxieties about death as eternal damnation, and in this sense, despite its lack of psychological depth, The Revenger’s Tragedy is more proto-modern than The Spanish Tragedy.
Abstract
This essay aims to reach a more comprehensive understanding of Elizabethan and Jacobean England’s attitudes toward death through a close investigation of the scenes of death in The Spanish Tragedy and The Revenger’s Tragedy. Whereas The Spanish Tragedy directly speaks directly to the anxieties about death as permanent annihilation, which were caused by the Protestant abolition of purgatory, The Revenger’s Tragedy communicates a different kind of sentiment about death that cannot be completely explained through the notion of fear of eternal damnation. I contend that the representations of death in The Revenger’s Tragedy are much more theatrical and artificial than those in The Spanish Tragedy and that the emphasis on the theatricality and artificiality of the scenes of death in The Revenger’s Tragedy considerably weakens the emotional and psychological significance of the representations of death. Only the entertainment value of death is emphasized in The Revenger’s Tragedy, making its view of death much more secular than the understanding of death presented in The Spanish Tragedy. In understanding death mainly in corporeal and material terms, The Revenger’s Tragedy somehow “overcame” the Elizabethan anxieties about death as eternal damnation, and in this sense, despite its lack of psychological depth, The Revenger’s Tragedy is more proto-modern than The Spanish Tragedy.
참고문헌 (12)
- Broude, Ronald, "Revenge and Revenge Tragedy in Renaissance England", Renaissance Quarterly, 28(1), pp.38~58 (1975)
- Cutts, David, "Writing and Revenge: The Struggle for Authority in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy", Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 22, pp.147~159 (1996)
- Diehl, Huston, "Inversion, Parody, and Irony: The Visual Rhetoric of Renaissance English Tragedy", SEL, 22(2), pp.197~209 (1982)
- Hartley, Andrew James, "Social Consciousness: Spaces for Characters in The Spanish Tragedy", Cahiers Elisabethains: Late Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 58, pp.1~14 (2000)
- Kyd, Thomas, "The Spanish Tragedy" (1989), A & C Black
- McMillin, Scott, "Acting and Violence: The Revenger’s Tragedy and Its Departures from Hamlet", SEL, 24(2), pp.275~291 (1984)
- Neill, Michael, "Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy" (1997), Oxford UP
- Sakiroglu, Belgin, "Senecan Drama and Its Influence on The Spanish Tragedy and The Revenger’s Tragedy", Journal of Arts and Sciences, 5, pp.61~70 (2006)
- Shapiro, James, "‘Tragedies naturally performed’: Kyd’s Representation of Violence in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama", pp.99~113 (1991), Routledge
- Simmons, J.L, "The Tongue and Its Office in The Revenger’s Tragedy", PMLA, 92(1), pp.56~68 (1977)
- Smith, Molly, "The Theater and the Scaffold: Death as Spectacle in The Spanish Tragedy", SEL, 32(2), pp.217~232 (1992)
- Tourneur, Cyril, "The Revenger’s Tragedy" (1991), A & C Black