Staging the Emotions in Renaissance Drama: a Comparative Study of the Rhetorical and Performance Strategies in Marlowe, Shakespeare and Kyd

This is a study of the different rhetorical and performance techniques utilized by the major dramatists of the Elizabethan age on the stage. It is an attempt to study the representation of emotional traits of the protagonists in 4 major plays. These plays were not chosen at random, they have remotely similar plots, yet, totally different depiction of the lives and agonies of the characters. The topic of emotion is vast and almost incomprehensible, that is why it was accessed through the study of the ancient texts that examine emotions, namely, Aristotle's On Rhetoric, Cicero's The Orator and others. The book moves back and forth between Marlowe's rhetorically musical dramatisation of emotions and to Shakespeare's emotionally complex and Theater-aware characters by comparison and contrast. Kyd, on the same level, has his own influential use of language and silence in conveying very powerful emotions on and via the stage, so did Shakespeare's Hamlet.