Bücher von Domenico Lovascio

Enthusiastically praised by Charles Lamb and A. C. Swinburne but unjustly neglected since the early twentieth century, Thierry and Theodoret dramatizes events from medieval French history, and it makes them particularly memorable by portraying the scariest villainess in early modern drama -- the unblinkingly evil Brunehaut, whose relentless pursuit of self-determination in the guise of unchecked sexual freedom leads her to plot the assassination of her two sons and a human sacrifice. The play explores the delicate nexus between misogyny, gender paradigms, and power in a patriarchal system, while glancing at recent political events in Paris and London in a way sufficiently aslant not to raise the censor's eyebrows. With its disenchanted depiction of royalty, its eerie instability in terms of genre, and its black comic overtones, Thierry and Theodoret strikes as a distinctive specimen of tragic drama in the Jacobean mould and ranks as one of the most powerful plays in the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators. This Revels Plays volume is the first fully annotated critical edition of the play, and the first to attribute it to Nathan Field alongside Fletcher and Philip Massinger. It provides a thorough introduction reassessing the play's engagement with its classical and contemporary sources -- including Shakespeare -- and discusses the dating, authorship, and reception of this bizarrely captivating play, pointing the way for future scholarship, especially of a historical or gender-based nature. With its modernized spelling and detailed on-page commentary, this edition makes the play newly accessible to readers, students, and theatre practitioners.

This is the first fully annotated, single-volume critical edition of Fletcher and Massinger's The False One, with an introduction that offers new insights on the date and the theatre of the play's first performance, freshly examines its sources and explores the theatrical potential of a play that has hitherto been lost to the dramatic repertory. -- .

Examines Fletcher's Roman plays and identifies disorientation as the unifying principle of his portrayal of imperial Rome. The book sheds new light on his intellectual life by arguing that his dramatization of Rome exudes a sense of scepticism over the authority of Roman models resulting from his irreverent approach to the classics. -- .