Metropolitan Tragedy

"Marissa Greenberg's fascinating exploration of early modern tragedy in the city of London produces fresh and original readings of visual prints, religious and polemical tracts, and literary authors from Shakespeare and Massinger to Milton. Scrupulously researched and lucidly written, the book is an important intervention in scholarship on early modern tragedy, urban geography, and law, justice, and punishment. Greenberg brings a welcome consideration of genre to historicist scholarship and breaks new ground with a series of dazzling juxtapositions of texts and contexts." -- Laura Knoppers, Department of English, University of Notre Dame "Metropolitan Tragedy is a wide-ranging and provocative book that makes major contributions to ongoing critical conversations in space theory, historicist treatments of early modern drama, and genre theory." -- James Mardock, Department of English, University of Nevada, Reno

Breaking new ground in the study of tragedy, early modern theatre, and literary London, Metropolitan Tragedy demonstrates that early modern tragedy emerged from the juncture of radical changes in London’s urban fabric and the city’s judicial procedures.

Breaking new ground in the study of tragedy, early modern theatre, and literary London, Metropolitan Tragedy demonstrates that early modern tragedy emerged from the juncture of radical changes in London’s urban fabric and the city’s judicial procedures. Marissa Greenberg argues that plays by Shakespeare, Milton, Massinger, and others rework classical conventions to represent the city as a locus of suffering and loss while they reflect on actual sources of injustice in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London: structural upheaval, imperial ambition, and political tyranny.

Drawing on a rich archive of printed and manuscript sources, including numerous images of England’s capital, Greenberg reveals the competing ideas about the metropolis that mediated responses to theatrical tragedy. The first study of early modern tragedy as an urban genre, Metropolitan Tragedy advances our understanding of the intersections between genre and history.