Publication details
"V svém loži mrtev" : spící oběti a váhaví vrazi v alzbětinských historiích
| Title in English | "Dead in his bed" : Sleeping Victims and Hesitant Murderers in Elizabethan Histories |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Divadelní revue |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Mass media, audiovision |
| Keywords | Elizabethan drama; Elizabethan histories; William Shakespeare; sleep; murder; 2 Henry VI; Thomas of Woodstock; Edward II; Richard III; The True Tragedy of Richard III |
| Description | Between 1590 and 1595, several Elizabethan history plays were staged that contained a scene with an assassination of an aristocratic figure in his bed. According to the common pattern (or theatergram), the (innocent or penitent) character was approached usually by a couple of hired murderers, one of which has suddenly an attack of conscience, expressing doubts about the morality of the deed, yet, ultimately, killing the victim anyway. All of the plays in question (the Second Part of William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, his Richard III, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, and the anonymous Thomas of Woodstock and The True Tragedy of Richard III) show remarkable thematic and verbal similarities that can hardly be explained by a mere coincidence or an accidental borrowing of one author from another. The present article analyses the parallels between the individual scenes and attempts to shed some light on the possible genesis and development of the theatergram. The text argues that, although the topic of victimisation of a sleeping figure had been a popular dramatic trope since the Middle Ages, the specific form of the dramatic situation was developed probably within one Elizabethan theatrical company (the Earl of Pembroke’s Men) as a kind of fashionable wave to satisfy the tastes of the then audiences. All of the plays is question are, in one way or another, connected with the young Shakespeare, who seems to have picked up the trope to make use of it both in the discussed period and his later works, in which we can find the original theatergram in a more complex and, perhaps, more sophisticated form. |
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