The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance |
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Author:
Robert N. Watson
By University of California Press
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List Price: $58.00
Our Price: $49.59
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Product Description
How did the fear of death coexist with the promise of Christian afterlife in the culture and literature of the English Renaissance? Robert Watson exposes a sharp edge of blasphemous protest against mortality that runs through revenge plays such as The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet, and through plays of procreation such as Measure for Measure and Macbeth. Tactics of denial appear in the vengefulness that John Donne directs toward female bodies for failing to bestow immortality, and in the promise of renewal that George Herbert sets against the threat of closure.
Placing these literary manifestations in the context of specific Jacobean deathbed crises and modern cultural distortions, Watson explores the psychological roots and political consequences of denying that death permanently erases sensation and consciousness.
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death versus politics in centering criticism, 2001-02-21
This book kept me going as I researched a dissertation on English Renaissance Tragedy several years ago. These days, one wades through tons of writing on the tragic genre in which none of the principal themes of tragedy are discussed. Watson argues for the primacy of psychological over political factors in literary experience. Since death extinguishes the individual, and since we are all individuals destined to extinction if not distinction, tragedy's representations of the extinction of carefully drawn personalities that dramatists make us care about, are narcissistic exercises for the spectator, and for the culture, to contemplate. Death, argues, Watson, must be repressed for life to be conducted, but we crave tragedy's message because it tears that veil back, if only temporarily. Watson did not have to convince me, but he did give me comfort against the rabid politicization of this genre, and of the entire literary production of the English Renaissance. He talks first of The Spanish Tragedy, then does some Shakespeare plays, and then does an extended discussion of John Donne. I think I recall that Herbert makes his way in there, too. It is a wonderful book. His essay, "Tragedy," in the CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO RENAISSANCE DRAMA, is a digest of his thinking on this topic. An excellent source for this kind of work is also Thomas F. Van Laan's "The Death-of-Tragedy Myth" in ... Journal of Dramatic Criticism, or something like that. Also Bert O. States' book, The Pleasure of the Play."
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 820.9354
EAN: 9780520084940
ISBN: 0520084942
Label: University of California Press
Manufacturer: University of California Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 430
Publication Date: 1995-02-08
Publisher: University of California Press
Studio: University of California Press |
