Female Rage from Medea to Lady Macbeth and the Modern World

Dear Colleagues,

In an era in which the rights of women are under attack from multiple angles, from the recent Supreme Court decision in the United States of America, to the quickly increasing restrictions on women in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, one might begin to despair of human beings ever learning the lessons of our own past, and finally leaving behind the ugly tendency to subjugate (slightly more than) half the human race. As women are erased, dominated, and even enslaved by men (who often seem to regard freedom of movement and decision making as an exclusive possession), it might also be instructive to note how literary, poetic, and dramatic portrayals of such dynamics have portrayed, and sometimes reified, but often powerfully challenged the inhumanity of such treatment. What does it say about the authors who have considered this subject (sometimes repeatedly), and what does it say about us as readers and audiences that we seem to need to have this subject put in front of us in every era, relearning and somehow re-forgetting the same lessons again and again?

This Special Issue of the journal Humanities invites contributions that consider the influence of classical tragedy on Shakespearean tragedy, and the literary/dramatic forms that follow, with a special concentration on the way Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, Ovid, and Seneca focus on female grief and/or loss and/or the desire for revenge, and the ways in which that emphasis manifests in Shakespeare's portrayals of multiple female characters (and perhaps even one male character—Hamlet?) experiencing grief and/or loss and/or the desire for revenge.

Questions and/or approaches that would be especially welcome include:

1) How Shakespeare uses/abuses/transforms/challenges/reproduces various Classical portrayals of female grief, anger, revenge, and desire for power and/or self-determination.
2) How a later author/work engages with both various Shakespearean and Classical portrayals of female grief, anger, revenge, and desire for power and/or self-determination.

Prof. Dr. Michael Bryson
Guest Editor

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