because jonquil asked (follow-up to Q&A 16)

[truepenny]

Reading list for a hypothetical class on revenge tragedy. I'm assuming a graduate seminar and students who are willing to do a lot of extra reading. I'm also assuming everyone's already read their Shakespeare--at least Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and, you know, the basics.

Seneca, Thyestes (just to get a feel for him)
Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
Shakespeare, Richard III (read with 1, 2, & 3 Henry VI)
Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus
Shakespeare, Hamlet (read with Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)
Tourneur, The Atheist's Tragedy (read with Marlowe, The Jew of Malta--have to get some Marlowe in here somehow, his inky fingerprints are all over the genre--and Jonson, Volpone)
Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness (which is sort of the opposite of a revenge tragedy, and therefore interesting in this context)
Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling
Webster, The White Devil
Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
Tourneur(?), The Revengers Tragedy
Ford, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (which, okay, only a revenge tragedy if you squint, but it's got the Senecan aesthetic in spades)

Plus for secondary reading (even for a graduate seminar, and even with intelligent and eager students, I probably wouldn't assign more than the Pentzell and the Braden and some chapters from Adelman and Bate):
Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest
Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid
Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy (not about revenge tragedy, but still the single most enlightening work of literary criticism on Renaissance drama I've ever read)
Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Privilege
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny.'" (Yeah, I know. A lot of Freud's theories are pernicious nonsense, but the thing in this essay about the return of the repressed and the unheimlich is really useful.)
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
Raymond J. Pentzell, "The Changeling: Notes on Mannerism in Dramatic Form" (also intensely enlightening)
Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation
Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play

Comments

[cheloya.livejournal.com]

Shakespeare, Hamlet (read with Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

I knew I loved you, I just hadn't realised how much. *_* Do we get a reading list for your scifi/fantasy syllabus, too?

[larryhammer]

I'd say 'Tis Pity She's a Whore has a Senecan aesthetic in the trump suit as well as spades.

Just the list itself is enlightening. Thanks for that.

---L.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Ooo, neat, thank you. Adding this to memories for when I have a bit more reading time.

Shakespeare, Hamlet (read with Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

I had the great good fortune, back in my teens, to see these plays done back-to-back with the same cast, sets, etc. R&G is great in any case but it's a lot of fun to see Hamlet run out and deliver the same speech you saw a couple hours ago, with a completely different affect.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Oooh. And it's such a great back-to-back because the leads and the walk-ons are reversed.

Similarly, the best double feature of all time is Casablanca/Play It Again, Sam.

[larryhammer]

Better still: reading them in trilogy with Waiting for Godot in between.

---L.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

God, I feel wistful.

Would you be willing to have a discussion of one or more of those in your LJ sometime?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

In principle, yes. I mean, revenge tragedy is my dissertation topic because I love it. I'm not likely to post about these plays the way I do about, for example, Due South, because I've said it all already (http://www.sarahmonette.com/dis-pref.html). What sort of discussion did you have in mind?

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Could we start with "what is a revenge tragedy"? I'd love to know how Richard III fits in. Does Macbeth as well?

[calanthe-b.livejournal.com]

That is a glorious reading list. I'd sign up in a heartbeat.

[saltypepper.livejournal.com]

OoooOOOoooh! Thanks for this!

Sigh.

[romsfuulynn.livejournal.com]

When I was in college there was an upper level course on literature from this period (but no Shakespeare - there were five or six separate Shakespeare courses) and I remember being caught up in some of these.

Interesting list - I should read Seneca.

[heresluck]

I am sitting here beaming because: Rabinowitz! Also, I can speak intelligently about pretty much all of the primary texts (even the ones I haven't read) because of residual smartness from reading your diss!

I told you about using Buffy to illustrate Rabinowitz's Rules of Narrative, right? Good times.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, you do pretty much have a PhD by proxy there. To go with the one you have in your own right. *g*

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Wot no Marston? - I guess The Malcontent counts as anti-revenge tragedy?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Marston. He-Whom-I-Persistently-Missed. He's my blindspot.

[aedifica]

I actually have a copy of 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, though I haven't gotten around to reading it. I bought it online thinking it was by the modern John M. Ford!

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That M. is crucial. *g*

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I ♥ you and your plays full of poisoned portraits and skulls!

[(Anonymous)]

Just printed this list out for one of my undergrad students (he's not American so he is much better educated than the average).