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Renaissance Drama and Prose
The poetry of the English Renaissance between 1580 and 1660 was the result of a remarkable outburst of energy. It is, however, the drama of roughly the same period that stands highest in popular estimation. The works of its greatest representative, William Shakespeare, have achieved worldwide renown. In the previous Middle English period there had been, within the church, a gradual broadening of dramatic representation of such doctrinally important events as the angel s announcement of the resurrection to the women at the tomb of Christ. Ultimately, performances of religious drama had become the province of the craft guilds, and the entire Christian story, from the creation of the world to the last judgment, had been reenacted for secular audiences. The Renaissance drama proper rose from this late medieval base by a number of transitional stages ending about 1580. A large number of comedies, tragedies, and examples of intermediate types were produced for London theaters between that year and 1642, when the London theaters were closed by order of the Puritan Parliament. Like so much non-dramatic literature of the Renaissance, most of these plays were written in an elaborate verse style and under the influence of classical examples, but the popular taste, to which drama was especially susceptible, required a flamboyance and sensationalism largely alien to the spirit of Greek and Roman literature. Only the Roman tragedian Lucius Annaeus Seneca could provide a model for the earliest popular tragedy of blood and revenge, The Spanish Tragedy (1589?) of Thomas Kyd. Kyd s skillfully managed, complicated, but sensational plot influenced in turn later, psychologically more sophisticated revenge tragedies, among them Shakespeare s Hamlet. A few years later Christopher Marlowe, in the tragedies Tamburlaine the Great, Part I (1587), and Edward II (1592?), began the tradition of the chronicle play of the fatal deeds of kings and potentates. Marlowe s plays, such as The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (1588?) and The Jew of Malta (1589?), are remarkable primarily for their daring depictions of world-shattering characters who strive to go beyond the normal human limitations as the Christian medieval ethos had conceived them; these works are written in a poetic style worthy in many ways of comparison to Shakespeare s.
المادة المعروضة اعلاه هي مدخل الى المحاضرة المرفوعة بواسطة استاذ(ة) المادة . وقد تبدو لك غير متكاملة . حيث يضع استاذ المادة في بعض الاحيان فقط الجزء الاول من المحاضرة من اجل الاطلاع على ما ستقوم بتحميله لاحقا . في نظام التعليم الالكتروني نوفر هذه الخدمة لكي نبقيك على اطلاع حول محتوى الملف الذي ستقوم بتحميله .
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