Book dossier

The tragedy of state

by J. W. Lever

The domination of the state over the lives of individuals is a problem of the present-day world. In Jacobean tragedy J.W. Lever finds essentially the same problem in the shape it assumed during the rise of the first European nation states. The English dramatists of the early seventeenth century are seen as giving expression to the ferment of ideas which, only a generation later, precipitated the revolutionary struggles of the 1640s. Some of the major Jacobean tragedies are seen in this book as having a close bearing upon the vital issues of our own age; not only the evils of tyranny but the ambivalent ethics of revolt are explored. When it was first published in 1971, 'The Tragedy of State' presented a challenge to the dominant view of Jacobean tragedy: often interpreted in terms of the Elizabethan World Picture, the drama was held by many in a conservative light. Now increasingly recognized as a forerunner to modern work on the Renaissance, this classic volume has been unavailable in paperback for many years. It is reissued with a new introduction in which Jonathan Dollimore sketches briefly some of the larger critical, intellectual, aesthetic and political issues that concerned Lever and which remain current within contemporary cultural criticism and literary theory. The accompanying references provide students with a guide to recent work which is transforming the study of Renaissance drama.