Malcontent

Abstract: The real subject is not primarily sexual lewdness at all, but “social lewdness” mythically expressed in sexual terms. Burke A Rhetoric of Motives It may be compared to a cage, the birds without dispaire to get in, and those within dispaire to get out. Florio's Montaigne The Duchess of Malfi rewrites The Spanish Tragedy after Hamlet and King Lear . It echoes the early play's concerns with wandering royal women and hysterical royal men, with erotic mobility and killer servants. But it transforms these variables in crucial ways. The erotic mobility shifts distinctly, away from Bel-imperia's rebellious sexual raids and toward the emergent bourgeois and Protestant ideal of companionate marriage. Conversely, the tense fraternal defensiveness is even more embattled. Antonio's outrageous and successful invasion is far from heroic, his initial potency athletic rather than martial. Yet his achievement is, intolerably, fully marital . The Lorenzo figure attracts the lurid energy that his sister and her lover relinquish, and becomes himself uncontrollably eroticized. After Shakespeare's two greatest tragedies the figuration of status narcissism as incest has probably become inevitable. And Pedringano has come fully of age as well. The meditative qualities of the neglected malcontent have by 1614 been refracted among a host of pungent instances: Hamlet, Malevole, Iago, Vindice, Edmund, Kent, Webster's own Flamineo, all contribute to Bosola's strange mixture of calm knowing violence and puzzlement. The seminal issues of The Spanish Tragedy have now, after a full generation of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, produced their curious bitter fruit.

Abstract: Acknowledgments A Note on Citation, Quotation and Abbreviation Introduction: Engaging Doubt PART ONE: THE RECEPTION OF ANCIENT SCEPTICISM IN ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN ENGLAND The Continental Background Crossed Opinions: The Elizabethan Years Seeming Knowledge: The Jacobean Years and Beyond PART TWO: FOOLS OF NATURE, SCEPTICISM AND TRAGEDY Literary Adaptation: Sceptical Paradigms, Sceptical Values Casting Doubt in Doctor Faustus The Spanish Tragedy : Doom and the Exile of Justice The Plague of Opinion: Troilus and Cressida Temporizing as Pyrrhonizing in The Malcontent Mariam and the Critique of Pure Reason False Fire: Providence and Violence in Webster's Tragedies The Changeling : Blood, Will and Intellectual Eyesight Criterion Anxiety in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore Select Bibliography Index

Abstract: I have been called a troublemaker and rumoured to be the mastermind behind an Indian group seeking reburial. I have been totally ignored when my experience and assistance might have been useful. I nearly lost the editorship of Plains Anthropologist because of my views. I have been called an ‘Indian lover,’ a puppet, a sellout, a radical, and a malcontent. Of all the labels, the only one I will accept is that of ‘radical’, and that, not really because I want to. I have had a hard time accepting the role of a radical, because it is not really in my nature. But, I have been made radical by my own, by archaeological colleagues and their actions.