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.