4. World and Language

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we consider the play’s setting in Italy – a region that was thought particularly suited to murder and revenge in the Early Modern period – as well as play’s language.

Course

In this course, we explore The Revenger’s Tragedy, a play which was written in the early years of the seventeenth century, but whose author is unknown. In the first two modules, we think generally about the Early Modern stage, before moving on in the final three modules to think about the play itself – its dramatic antecedents, its setting and language, and the presentation of its central character, the “Revenger” himself, Vindice.

Lecturer

Born in Bristol, and educated at Oxford and St Louis, Dr John Lennard has taught English, American, and Commonwealth Literature in Cambridge, London, and Jamaica over more than twenty years. He has written two widely used textbooks (on poetry and drama) and monographs on Shakespeare, Paul Scott, Nabokov, and Faulkner, as well as two collections of essays on contemporary genre writers in crime, science fiction and fantasy, and romance. Enthusiastic, discursive, widely knowledgeable, and a demon for punctuation (on which he has also published extensively), he has been a popular Summer School Course Leader and lecturer for the Institute of Continuing Education since 1992.