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Full-Text Articles in Renaissance Studies
Matrimony And Change In Webster's The Duchess Of Malfi, Margaret L. Mikesell
Matrimony And Change In Webster's The Duchess Of Malfi, Margaret L. Mikesell
Quidditas
Profound changes occurred in the institution of marriage during the Renaissance. Love was gradually replacing fiscal and dynastic considerations as the foundation considered crucial for a binding union. The love marriage was largely a middle-class phenomenon, born of the changing relationship between the family and the state, articulated and refined by Protestant divines, and diffused through aristocratic society. Drama of the period is much concerned with this shift. The bourgeois conjunction of love and marriage triumphs in the aristocratic societies of many a romantic comedy. The weddings at play's end promise a new social order. The disintegration of the old …
Catharsis In Aristotle, The Renaissance, And Elsewhere, Thomas Clayton
Catharsis In Aristotle, The Renaissance, And Elsewhere, Thomas Clayton
Quidditas
In an essay on "Shakespeare and the Kinds of Drama," Stephen Orgel presents an appealing and sympathetic view of Renaissance dramatic-generic theory and practice as original, capacious, and flexible, concluding that, "like Scaliger, Shakespeare thought of genres not as sets of rules but as sets of expectations and possibilities." In relation to this finding, we should perhaps be content to be "unclear about tragic catharsis," because "at least we know it is there, convincing us that tragedy works—even if we do not know how or on whom" (p.120). As the Renaissance read Aristotle, "tragedy achieved its end by purging …