Emotions and Gender: The Case of Anger in Early Modern English Revenge Tragedies

Abstract

This chapter analyse the gendered representation of anger and revenge in early modern English revenge tragedies, focusing on the Senecan tradition that seems to have influenced Cornwallis's thinking, but also on plays that produce a counter-discourse to the Senecan view of anger and revenge. In Seneca's Agamemnon, translated by John Studley, Clytemnestra describes her anger as follows: More elaborately than Seneca's original text, the last four lines of the quotation emphasize the physical aspect of her anger, and describe how the heat of fury eats at her inner organs. Gender does indeed play a role in this representation of anger and the self, as Paster argues, but the role of gender differences not in terms of the biological, hierarchical differences that she brings to the fore. The role of gender here is not prescribed by biological hierarchies: the humoral system does not present a very firm base for a gendered hierarchy of anger.

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