The Elizabethan Modern Tragic

Elizabethan tragedies and history plays have often been examined together due to their shared themes and tonal affinities. Moving alongside yet beyond genre-based studies of tragedy, The Elizabethan Modern Tragic addresses the tragic as a philosophical phenomenon and explores its theatrical configurations in Elizabethan political histories and tragedies. Focusing on the political as the common thread of both genres, the book interrogates the play texts on the issues of identity, conflict, and exercise of power: what is the role of water imagery in defining English political identity? Do religion and faith retain their position as cornerstones of political authority? Is decision-making based on positive, foundational values, or rather on the exception? How are these problems connected to the philosophy of the tragic and to the negative at its core? Through close readings of a wide selection of plays, the book argues that the staging of these political questions enables the poetic intellects of the time to articulate a distinctly modern tragic awareness long before the conventional onset of modernity.