Tragedy Archives - Public Seminar

Democracy

Troilus and Cressida and a Diseased Body Politic

Reading Shakespeare in a time of plague

May 28, 2020 • by Emily Pitts Donahoe

We are perennially curious about what Shakespeare can teach us about our own world, hoping to find instruction and solace in his plays, poems, and exemplary turns of phrase. Recently, this curiosity has produced a score of tweets and articles speculating about Shakespeare’s productivity during periods when the plague ravaged London, ...

<em>Troilus and Cressida</em> and a Diseased Body Politic

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Common Decency: Kurt Vonnegut as Moralist

November 25, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

Kurt Vonnegut is often remembered these days as a humorist, a cynic in the Mark Twain mold, a novelist whose imagination ranged far and wide but lacked gravitas, even though he dealt with tragic themes like the Dresden firebombing and the fictional apocalypse of ice-nine. These recollections are, I believe, ...

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Why Comedy Matters

October 24, 2014 • by Dmitri Nikulin

When moral or political decisions are at stake, we often make use of catch-phrases drawn from a repertoire of available drama and literature. For we understand that both our actions and how they are perceived depend on how we frame them. Comedy, of all genres, appears to be the one ...

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What is Shakespearean Tragedy?

November 6, 2013 • by Paul A. Kottman

An excerpt from ‘What is Shakespearean Tragedy?’ forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy

The question ‘What is Shakespearean Tragedy?’ can understandably prompt one to start listing distinctive features of various plays by Shakespeare — as if a successful enumeration of its characteristics would amount to an understanding of the ...