9. Restoration Tragedy and the Proscenium Arch

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we think about the development of tragedy after the English theatres were re-opened during the reign of Charles II, focusing in particular on the development of the proscenium arch theatre, the re-writing of Shakespeare for late 17th century audiences, e.g. Nahum Tate's History of King Lear (1681), John Dryden's All For Love (1678), and – for the first time in English history – the use of female actors to play female parts and the development of 'she-tragedy' such as Thomas Otway's The Orphan (1680) and Nicholas Rowe's The Fair Penitent (1702).

Reading list:

John Dryden:
– John Dryden, The Indian Emperor (1665)
– John Dryden, The Conquest of Granada (1670)
– John Dryden, Aureng-zebe (1675)
– John Dryden, All For Love (1678), cf. William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1607)
– John Dryden, Troilus and Cressida (1679), cf. William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (1602)
– John Dryden, Oedipus (1679), cf. Sophocles, Oedipus the King (5th century BC)

Satirising Dryden:
– George Villiers – Duke of Buckingham, The Rehearsal (1671)

Other Playwrights:
– Nathaniel Lee, The Rival Queens, or the Death of Alexander the Great (1677)
– Thomas Otway, The Orphan (1680)
– Thomas Otway, The History and Fall of Caius Marius (1680), cf. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1597) and Coriolanus (1605-8)
– Nahum Tate, The History of King Lear (1681), cf. William Shakespeare, King Lear (1606)
– Thomas Southerne, The Fatal Marriage (1694), cf. Aphra Behn, The History of the Nun (1689)
– Thomas Southerne, Oroonoko (1696), cf. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688)
– Joseph Addison, Cato, A Tragedy (1712)

She-Tragedy:
– Thomas Otway, The Orphan (1680)
– Thomas Southerne, The Fatal Marriage (1694), cf. Aphra Behn, The History of the Nun (1689)
– Nicholas Rowe, The Fair Penitent (1702), cf. Philip Massinger and Nathan Field, The Fatal Dowry (1632)
– Nicholas Rowe, The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714)
– Nicholas Rowe, The Tragedy of Lady Jane Grey (1715)

Course

In this course, Professor John Lennard explores the history of tragedy from its origins in ancient Athens to the present day. In the first three modules, we think about the tragedy of Classical Athens, looking in particular at the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, before turning in the fourth module to Roman tragedy and Seneca the Younger. In the fifth module, we think about how the arrival of Christianity of Europe may have impacted people's views of tragedy in the Middle Ages, before turning in the sixth, seventh and eighth modules to the tragedy of the Renaissance period – including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, Marston, Webster. After that, in the ninth module, we think the Restoration Tragedy of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, before moving on in the tenth module to consider the intersection between tragedy and Romanticism – looking especially at works of Lessing, Schiller, Goethe and Kleist. In the eleventh and twelfth modules, we think about the impact on tragedy of first a new medium – the novel – and then a new technology – the camera. In the thirteenth module, we think about tragedy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, looking especially at the work of Henrik Ibsen, before moving on in the fourteenth module to think about the relationship between tragedy and war – especially the First World War (1914-18). In the fifteenth module, we think about the tragedy and Modernism, looking in particular at the plays of Bertolt Brecht and novels of William Faulkner, before turning in the sixteenth module to think about how tragedy has represented the Sho'ah, i.e. the Holocaust. In the seventeenth module, we return to Modernism by thinking about the works of Lorca and Beckett, before moving on in the eighteenth module to look at tragedy in film and television. In the nineteenth module, we think about tragedy written by non-Western writers and in non-Western contexts, looking in particular at Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956) and the works of the Yoruban writer, Wole Soyinka, before turning in the twentieth and final module to tragedy today and in the future.

Lecturer

Born in Bristol, and educated at Oxford and St Louis, Dr John Lennard has taught English, American, and Commonwealth Literature in Cambridge, London, and Jamaica over more than twenty years. He has written two widely used textbooks (on poetry and drama) and monographs on Shakespeare, Paul Scott, Nabokov, and Faulkner, as well as two collections of essays on contemporary genre writers in crime, science fiction and fantasy, and romance. Enthusiastic, discursive, widely knowledgeable, and a demon for punctuation (on which he has also published extensively), he has been a popular Summer School Course Leader and lecturer for the Institute of Continuing Education since 1992.