Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I
- PART II
- Introduction to Part II
- 6 Drama of disappointment: character and narrative in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy
- 7 Laughter and narrative in Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy
- 8 Epilogue: Jonson and Shakespeare
- Plays and editions cited
- Works cited
- Index
6 - Drama of disappointment: character and narrative in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I
- PART II
- Introduction to Part II
- 6 Drama of disappointment: character and narrative in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy
- 7 Laughter and narrative in Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy
- 8 Epilogue: Jonson and Shakespeare
- Plays and editions cited
- Works cited
- Index
Summary
An idea I have repeatedly returned to in Part 1 is the potential for failure: the potential for conventions not to work efficiently, for dramaturgy not to be plausible, for theatrical information not to be conveyed clearly or coherently. The success of Renaissance drama, I have suggested, especially in its most spectacular, hyperbolic, theatrical moments, is fueled by this potential for failure. Dramatists and playing companies, writing and performing under conditions of the most exacting and even limiting kind, were unafraid to undertake any task of dramatic representation, no matter how difficult. The awareness dramatists and their plays show of their audiences, and the concessions they make to them, suggest that the potential for failure could as often as not have been a reality; the joy of the drama lies in the space for negotiation between success and failure, a space made most wonderfully vivid in the anecdote of Fowler and his “dead men” with which this book began.
In The Staging of Elizabethan Plays at the Red Bull, G. F. Reynolds says of the final scene of Heywood's 2 Iron Age, in which nine people die, two after having feigned death and risen to fight some more,
the first impression of all this slaughter is distinctly ludicrous; one feigned dead body may be tragic, but a whole stage full, with two conveniently coming to life only to die again seems a little too much. Yet since there is no hint that such scenes were in the least amusing to the Elizabethans, these successive deaths not only at the Red Bull but also at the Globe and the Blackfriars were, I suspect, high spots of tragical effectiveness.
(p. 179)- Type
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002