ABSTRACT
Martyrs and Players examine how Tudor-Stuart tragedy was shaped and coloured by the culture of Reformation-era religious violence. Early modern tragedy is steeped in violence. Any serious study of tragedy must consider the problem of why people willingly, not to say eagerly, devote money and time to witnessing a spectacle of pain and suffering. As a literary genre, tragedy returned to prominence in the Renaissance for the first time in many centuries. Tragedians exploited that crisis to produce a form of tragedy that bears its marka tragedy where catharsis is offered in the deaths of the victims but is at the same time undercut. Eagleton's overarching interest is in revisiting George Steiner's question of whether or not tragedy can or should exist in contemporary society and, from there, in articulating a vision of the tragic that squares with his progressive Marxism.
