Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance

Rebecca Bushnell is Professor of English and Dean of the College, University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice and Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles' Theban Plays, both from Cornell, and editor of A Companion to Tragedy. Rebecca W. Bushnell here explores the image of the tyrant in English Renaissance drama in light of the traditional opposition between the "proper king and unstable, effeminate, and histrionic tyrant found so often in Western political treatises and tracts. Bushnell traces the early modern image and language of tyranny through a wide range of texts, including morality plays, Humanist statecraft literature, and resistance tracts, as well as canonical tragedies.