Kyoung-Min Han, From Dread to Mockery   pp. 139~159 (21 pages)

Abstract

This essay aims to reach a more comprehensive understanding of Elizabethan and Jacobean England’s attitudes toward death through a close investigation of the scenes of death in The Spanish Tragedy and The Revenger’s Tragedy. Whereas The Spanish Tragedy directly speaks directly to the anxieties about death as permanent annihilation, which were caused by the Protestant abolition of purgatory, The Revenger’s Tragedy communicates a different kind of sentiment about death that cannot be completely explained through the notion of fear of eternal damnation. I contend that the representations of death in The Revenger’s Tragedy are much more theatrical and artificial than those in The Spanish Tragedy and that the emphasis on the theatricality and artificiality of the scenes of death in The Revenger’s Tragedy considerably weakens the emotional and psychological significance of the representations of death. Only the entertainment value of death is emphasized in The Revenger’s Tragedy, making its view of death much more secular than the understanding of death presented in The Spanish Tragedy. In understanding death mainly in corporeal and material terms, The Revenger’s Tragedy somehow “overcame” the Elizabethan anxieties about death as eternal damnation, and in this sense, despite its lack of psychological depth, The Revenger’s Tragedy is more proto-modern than The Spanish Tragedy. 
  
 저자 키워드 
  
 Thomas Kyd, Thomas Middleton and Cyril Tourneur, The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger’s Tragedy, revenge tragedy, scenes of death, anxieties about death, eternal annihilation, theatricality