Category: Literature Essays + Analysis
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Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Poltimore House and Grounds, Devon, August 2019) – A Midsummer with heart!
There was a great deal to laugh about in this production. More impressive, though, was the way it left the audience smiling afterwards. This was a Midsummer with heart as well as humour – a most rare vision indeed…
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Antonio’s Revenge: The Metatheatrical Ghost
In this paper, I argue that throughout Antonio’s Revenge Marston establishes a clear relationship between the appearances of ghostly characters and glaring shifts in his play’s tonal register. Specifically, ghosts – primarily the recurring figure of Andrugio – appear to both signpost and facilitate a gloriously self-aware metatheatrical undercurrent designed to entertain and emotionally unsettle…
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“I depart laughing”: Living Death in the “The Lady’s Tragedy”
Few plays explore the rich dramatic potential of living death as explicitly as Thomas Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy (or, The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, as the play is sometimes known), a tragedy that in the first three acts alone presents suicide, grave-robbing, defiled corpses, and ghosts. Middleton did *not* do these things by halves.
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3-Minute Reads // Antonio’s Revenge: a peek into Marston’s metatheatrical closet…
For a Senecan-styled tragedy of inordinate bloodshed, things work out remarkably well for the characters who survive John Marston’s 1602 Antonio’s Revenge…
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Self-harm as spectacle in “Measure for Measure” (Donmar Warehouse, 2018)
Sometimes a play can be so callous, so poorly-judged, so utterly tone-deaf that one isn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. On this occasion, however, my mind is rather made up.
Writus Andronicus 