르네상스 영희곡과 'Euripides'적 주제

Abstract

This study examines the reception and appropriation of Euripides in the English Renaissance, concentrating upon the domestic tragedies produced and published in the period between 1590 and 1610-namely, Arden of Faversham, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and The Yorkshire Tragedy. It challenges received critical orthodoxy about the afterlife of Euripides in Renaissance England and suggests that Euripidean influence on English Renaissance drama was not always mediated by Seneca, but was received in a more direct manner through Latin, Italian and French translations of Euripides published in the first half of the sixteenth century; that it is to be found not exclusively in Senecan court tragedies but also in domestic tragedies. This study suggests that Euripides provided the vocabulary and structure of argument for domestic tragedy as much as for Senecan court tragedy; that both sub-genres explore such characteristically Euripidean questions as those about traditional ideas of sex and gender, sex roles, and the relationship between family and state. Having emerged at the end of the sixteenth century, domestic tragedy articulates the paradigmatic change in the ideas and ideals of sex, marriage, family and state in post-Reformation England. With the emergence of the early modem state, the distinction between private and public became reconceptualized, and sex roles reformulated. The household came to be identified as private, and to be relegated to a position lesser than that of the state, which was identified as public. Women came to be enclosed within the household, excluded from the public sphere. The conceptual framework of sex roles and the relationship between family and state reformulated in post-Reformation England bears a startling similarity to that produced in the Athenian society Euripides questions in plays such as Alcestis and Medea. This similarity best explains why Renaissance England found Euripides so useful for discussions of its own problems and preoccupations. It explains why figures like Alcestis and Medea and Euripidean themes and concerns were mobilized and appropriated in the domestic tragedies of the period between 1590 and 1610 as idioms and structures of argument in discussing the conflicts and tensions in family and marriage in early modem England.