Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Shakespeare's great tragedies – Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus , and Antony and Cleopatra – belong to the period around 1600–8. No tragedies which we consider great by anyone else have survived from those years. There were other dramatists writing tragedies during this time – Ben Jonson, Sejanus, his Fall (1603), John Marston, Antonio's Revenge (1604), George Chapman, The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois (1604) – but none of these has ever replaced or seriously rivaled Hamlet , for example, in terms of critical attention. It is as if, for a number of years, the stage was simply overwhelmed by Shakespeare. The question of Shakespeare's contemporaries, however, as might be expected, is a good deal more intriguing than this summary account suggests. In terms of tragedy, Shakespeare's key contemporaries were Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster. Kyd and Marlowe belong to the 1590s (Kyd died in 1594, Marlowe in 1593), the period of Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet , while Middleton, like Webster, was writing between 1602 and 1624, the period of the major tragedies, but also going on beyond them. As has often been noted, Kyd and Marlowe made Renaissance tragedy possible, changing the uninspiring drama of the 1580s into something new, at once exciting and daring. Middleton and Webster, like Jonson, Marston, Chapman, Thomas Heywood, ... log in or subscribe to read full text