The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama [Hardcover]

This book constitutes a new direction for feminist studies in English Renaissance drama. While feminist scholars have long celebrated heroic females in comedies, many have overlooked female tragic heroism, reading it instead as evidence of pervasive misogyny on the part of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Displacing prevailing arguments of victim feminism, the contributors to this volume engage a wide range of feminist theories, and argue that female protagonists in tragedies - Jocasta, Juliet, Cleopatra, Mariam, Webster's Duchess and White Devil, among others - are heroic in precisely the same ways as their more notorious masculine counterparts.Introduction: WonderWoman, or the Female Tragic Hero; N. Conn Liebler Euripides at Gray's Inn: Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh's Jocasta; R.S.Miola Visible Hecubas; J.Weil Not Know Me Yet? : Looking at Cleopatra in Three Renaissance Tragedies; M.Still Dixon The Heroic Tragedy of Cleopatra, the Prostitute Queen ; K.Stanton Female Heroism in Heywood's Tragic Farce of Adultery: A Woman Killed with Kindness; T.de Vroom As if a man should spit against the wind; M.Orkin Queen of Apricots: The Duchess of Malfi, Hero of Desire; L.Woodbridge The Morris Witch in The Witch of Edmonton; L.Denker & L.Maguire Sex and the Female Tragic Hero; J.Addison Roberts

I welcome this exhilarating collection which restores the female tragic protagonist to her rightful place as hero. By asserting resemblances as well as differences between women and men, desire and virtue, private and public, authors and audiences, victims and heroes, the volume compellingly challenges longstanding assumptions. The strong voices of the wonderful introduction and the individual essays collectively reframe our understanding of Renaissance tragedy by drawing on old and new contexts in startling ways: Greek tragedy, visual arts, Neoplatonic humanism, Attic and near eastern mythology, medieval morality plays, Morris dancing. The book is essential reading folÃ/