The theatre of civilized excess new perspectives on Jacobean tragedy - Müller-Wood, Anja (Rodopi, 2007)
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002
Includes bibliographical references (pages 194-217) and index
Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1 Relocating the Stage: Reflections on Early Modern Theatre Culture; 2 "All the Ill Man Can Invent": John Webster and His Duchess; 3 Look Who's Talking (Plainly): Dangerous Eloquence in The Atheist's Tragedy; 4 Memory, Mimesis and the Material: Chapman's Scene of Writing (The Law); 5 Theatrical Excess, Critical Practice: Women Beware Women and the Shaping of a Bourgeois Aesthetic; Bibliography; Index
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 so