Description
| Product ID: | 9781108463300 |
| Product Form: | Paperback / softback |
| Country of Manufacture: | GB |
| Title: | Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies |
| Subtitle: | Violence in the Early Modern Home |
| Authors: | Author: Emma Whipday |
| Page Count: | 274 |
| Subjects: | Plays, playscripts, Plays, playscripts, Literature: history and criticism, Literary studies: general, Literary studies: plays and playwrights, Literature: history & criticism, Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800, Literary studies: plays & playwrights, English |
| Description: | Select Guide Rating This book explores the relationship between Shakespeare's most famous tragedies and the genre of 'domestic tragedy': plays about murder and adultery in ordinary households. In tracing representations of violent homes in early modern culture, Emma Whipday proposes a new way of reading Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth. Domestic tragedy was an innovative genre, suggesting that the lives and sufferings of ordinary people were worthy of the dramatic scope of tragedy. In this compelling study, Whipday revises the narrative of Shakespeare''s plays to show how this genre, together with neglected pamphlets, ballads, and other forms of ''cheap print'' about domestic violence, informed some of Shakespeare''s greatest works. Providing a significant reappraisal of Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, the book argues that domesticity is central to these plays: they stage how societal and familial pressures shape individual agency; how the integrity of the house is associated with the body of the housewife; and how household transgressions render the home permeable. Whipday demonstrates that Shakespeare not only appropriated constructions of the domestic from domestic tragedies, but that he transformed the genre, using heightened language, foreign settings, and elite spheres to stage familiar domestic worlds. |
| Imprint Name: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publisher Name: | Cambridge University Press |
| Country of Publication: | GB |
| Publishing Date: | 2020-10-08 |