Gorboduc on Fire
The Pyropoetics of Tyranny in Early Modern England
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12358347 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Harriet Archer (0000-0002-5544-582X, University of St Andrews, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 168-195 |
| Publication date | 2022-04-03 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Exemplaria (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1041-2573 • E-ISSN: 1753-3074 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10412573.2022.2070369 |
| OpenAlex | W4285504240 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 62 |
This article rereads Norton and Sackville’s Inns of Court tragedy Gorboduc (1562) in the light of its neglected preoccupation with fire. It posits the 1561 lightning strike on St Paul’s as a critical context for the play’s emphasis on fire as a motor of providential justice, through the repeated evocation of the myth of Phaethon, and locates its use of fire in performance at the intersection between political intervention and carnival festivity. Noting the play’s coevolution with the fire pamphlet genre, the article suggests that these ephemeral works’ commentary on the relationship between fire and tyranny, in line with sixteenth-century resistance theory and de casibus tragedy, illuminates how Gorboduc’s interests manifest in popular discourse, and allows an interpretation of the play’s imagining of rebellion which foregrounds the irony of its rhetoric of stability and obedience. In dialogue with recent work on the Pyrocene and European pyrophobia, and its implications in relation to Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of civil conflict and the state of exception, the article broadens the existing picture of Gorboduc’s resonance, to read it not just as pivotal in the development of English drama and political theology, but as contiguous with wider patterns of thought in premodern disaster response and narratives of collective action
Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology · Drama · Irony · Literature · Narrative · Obedience · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology · Rhetoric · Sociology · Tragedy (event · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought
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Riot. Strike. Riot
Things of Darkness
The elements
Governing the Commons for two decades
He said What?!?”
The representation and experience of English urban fire disasters, c .1580-1640
Titian's Fire
Organized Violence in the E lizabethan M onarchical R epublic
The Politics of Gorbodu
The North-South Divide in Gorboduc
Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play
Tending the Wild
The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages
Combustion and Society
Introduction
The Culture of Disaster
| Citations per year | 0.33 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |