Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World

Abstract

Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World examines how a series of influential poets, theologians, and humanist critics turned to tragedy to understand providence and agencies human and divine across diverse Reformation milieux. Rejecting familiar assumptions about tragedy, crucial figures like Philipp Melanchthon, David Pareus, Lodovico Castelvetro, John Rainolds, and Daniel Heinsius developed distinctly philosophical ideas of tragedy, irreducible to drama or performance, inextricable from rhetoric, dialectic, and metaphysics. In its proximity to philosophy, tragedy afforded careful readers crucial insight into causality, probability, necessity, and the terms of human affect and action. With these resources at hand, Reformed theologians, poets, and critics produced daring and influential theses on tragedy between the 1550s and the 1630s, all directly related to pressing Reformation debates. And while some poets employed tragedy to render sacred history palpable with new energy and urgency, others marshalled a precise philosophical notion of tragedy directly against spectacle and stage-playing, endorsing anti-theatrical theses on tragedy inflected by Aristotle’s Poetics. Uncovering a tradition of Reformation poetics in which tragedy often opposes performance, the work also explores the impact of these scholarly debates on more familiar works of vernacular tragedy, illustrating how William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and John Milton’s 1671 poems take shape in conversation with philosophical and philological investigations of tragedy. Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World demonstrates how Reformation took shape in poetic as well as theological and political terms while simultaneously exposing the importance of tragedy to the history of philosophy.

Tragedy at Wittenberg: Sophocles in Reformation Europe

“…7 Melanchthon and his circle at Wittenberg in the 1530s and 1540s laid the foundations of these 6 Crucial exceptions include Hartfelder, 363-65; Parente; Rhein; Ritoók-Szalay; Lurie, 2004Lurie, , 2006Lurie, , and 2012. 7 Pollard, 2017; Demetriou and Pollard;Leo, 2015Leo, , 2016Leo, , and 2019Wolfe, 2015 andMiola, 2014 andCrawforth;Ryan, 2015 later developments. Reconciling deep piety with sophisticated Aristotelian theory, their answers to the vexed problems of Christian tragedy complicate our overly neat histories of classical reception.…”

Debating Drama in the Early Modern University: John Case, Aristotle's Politics, and a Previously Unknown Oxford Disputation

“…Russ Leo identifies an "antitheatrical Aristotle," one upon whom Rainolds drew in crafting his philosophy toward dramatic enactment. 45 Leo focuses primarily on the Poetics, a text that has recently been shown to have been more prevalent in early modern England than previously realized. 46 As Leo observes: "While his contemporaries read the Poetics to learn how to write a poem, or to defend poetry, Rainolds recruits Aristotle as an anti-theatrical writer, suspicious of histrionic per for mance and spectacle."…”