Marguerite A. Tassi

This book highlights the stories of women from premodern history and literature through models of adaptations, retellings, and criticism such as poems, plays, and essays. In reviving these voices from the background, it widens the appeal and accessibility of scholarship in the humanities.Creative composing processes draw research through the imagination and experience of the writer, an act which can help explore qualities of historical events and literary figures that are still relevant today. The four authors of this book demonstrate these approaches through creative adaptations and responses to Biblical and Classical writings, Greek mythological figures, medieval narratives, powerful historical women, plays by Shakespeare, and works by other early modern English writers. What distinguishes this book from other scholarship on the premodern is its collaborative and interdisciplinary foundation, as well as its emphasis on literary and hybrid genres.Offering interdisciplinary ways of reading, thinking about, and reconceiving literature and scholarship in a way that invites dialogue and further creative responses, this volume provides humanities teachers with effective pedagogical tools to inspire deeper engagement and understanding in their students.

This book highlights the stories of women from premodern history and literature through models of adaptations, retellings, and criticism such as poems, plays, and essays. In reviving these voices from the background, it widens the appeal and accessibility of scholarship in the humanities.Creative composing processes draw research through the imagination and experience of the writer, an act which can help explore qualities of historical events and literary figures that are still relevant today. The four authors of this book demonstrate these approaches through creative adaptations and responses to Biblical and Classical writings, Greek mythological figures, medieval narratives, powerful historical women, plays by Shakespeare, and works by other early modern English writers. What distinguishes this book from other scholarship on the premodern is its collaborative and interdisciplinary foundation, as well as its emphasis on literary and hybrid genres.Offering interdisciplinary ways of reading, thinking about, and reconceiving literature and scholarship in a way that invites dialogue and further creative responses, this volume provides humanities teachers with effective pedagogical tools to inspire deeper engagement and understanding in their students.

Can there be a virtue in vengeance? Can revenge do ethical work? Can revenge be the obligation of women? This wide-ranging literary study looks at Shakespeare’s women and finds bold answers to questions such as these. A surprising number of Shakespeare’s female characters respond to moral outrages by expressing a strong desire for vengeance. This book’s analysis of these characters and their circumstances offers incisive critical perceptions of feminine anger, ethics, and agency and challenges our assumptions about the role of gender in revenge. In this provocative book, Marguerite A. Tassi counters longstanding critical opinions on revenge: that it is the sole province of men in Western literature and culture, that it is a barbaric, morally depraved, irrational instinct, and that it is antithetical to justice. Countless examples have been mined from Shakespeare’s dramas to reveal women’s profound concerns with revenge and justice, honor and shame, crime and punishment. In placing the critical focus on avenging women, this book significantly redresses a gender imbalance in scholarly treatments of revenge, particularly in early modern literature.

In Elizabethan England, dramatists and painters were both achieving the greatest degree of artistic excellence yet witnessed, but they were also in a state of transition, vying for social status and patronage, as well as struggling against religious reformers' accusations of idolatry and eroticism. This interdisciplinary study brings to light the radical, inventive ways in which dramatists such as Shakespeare, Lyly, and Marston appropriated painting and subtly competed with painters to advance their own art and defend theater against Puritan attacks. They transformed painting into a provocative stage property and trope that enhanced the language of their scripts and the audience's imaginative participation in the drama. At the same time, they reflected a profound ambivalence towards painting by staging scenes with painters and pictures that emphasized the dangerous powers inherent in visual images and image-making, thus drawing attention to the controversial moral and social status of English painters during the Reformation. Marguerite Tassi is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Kearney.