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    Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama

    Andrew Griffin (Author)

    9781487503482

    Hardback, published 16 October 2019

    208 pages
    23.5 x 15.9 x 1.9 cm, 0.47 kg

    "English Renaissance scholars will find Andrew Griffin’s book an agreeable re-visioning of some familiar plays, while it brings attention to some neglected plays. It’s also an intriguing approach to late Elizabethan and Jacobean drama."

    - Margaret Rose Jaster, Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg (Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme)

    "Andrew Griffin’s deeply learned and painstakingly written book argues that early modern drama participates in or functions as a form of early modern historiography, one in which the competing forms of memorializing human lives and deaths common to this transitional period of history writing ‘abrupt’ the dramatic narration."

    - Yvonne Bruce (Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching)

    In the decades before history was institutionalized as a scholarly discipline, historical writing was practiced variously by poets, record keepers, lawyers, sermonizers, mythologizers, and philosophers. In this welter of competing forms of historical thought, early modern drama often operated as a site in which claims about the nature of historical change could be treated in a frequently conflicting manner.

    To explore this arena of competing forms of historical explanation, Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama focuses on the problem of narrative abruption in a selection of historically minded early modern plays as they rely on various strategies to make sense of biography and fatality. Arguing that narrative forms fail in the face of untimely death, Andrew Griffin shows that the disruption appears as a matter of trauma, making the untimely death both a point of narrative conflict and a social problem. Exploring the formula that early modern dramatists used to make sense of life and death, this book draws on the wider context of this period’s culture of historical writing.

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction: Biography, History, Catastrophe

    1. Richard II, Problem Tragedy
    2. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and the Histories of London
    3. Epic Tragedies in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage
    4. Military Catastrophe and Elegiac History in The Atheist’s Tragedy

    Conclusion: "Making Good the Conclusion": Ben Jonson and Bathetic Overliving

    Notes
    Works Cited
    Index

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