Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies: Disrupted Homes on the Early Modern Page, Stage and Street
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis offers a significant reappraisal of the relationship between Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and the genre of domestic tragedy. In situating these tragedies in the context of portrayals of disrupted homes in cheap print, I explore social, spatial, ideological, and psychological constructions of the domestic in early modern England. I demonstrate how Shakespeare uses these constructions to stage how societal and familial pressures shape individual agency; how the integrity of the house is associated with the body of the housewife; and how household transgressions render the home permeable. Chapter One examines how the political analogy of the household with the state is negotiated in three shrew-taming plays, in ways that prefigure Shakespeare’s appropriations of domestic tragedy. Chapters Two, Three and Four explore these appropriations: Chapter Two argues that Shakespeare transfigures popular conceptions of adulterous murderesses in creating the figure of Gertrude; Chapter Three traces how Othello stages the relationship between domestic enclosure, female chastity, and illicit privacy; and Chapter Four suggests that Othello and Macbeth borrow dramaturgical tropes from domestic tragedies in staging household murder. Chapter Five compares Macbeth’s use of popular conceptions of withcraft with the later borrowings of The Witch of Edmonton, and argues that Shakespeare and Rowley, Ford, and Dekker use similar sources, to divergent effects. The innovations of domestic tragedy challenge the distinctions of early modern generic theory, showing how the transgressions of those in subordinate gender and class positions can attain tragic stature and threaten the security of the state. This thesis argues that in Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, Shakespeare creates new versions of domestic tragedy, using heightened language, foreign settings, and elite spheres to stage familiar domestic worlds. I thus propose a new way of understanding Shakespeare’s tragedies, domestic tragedy, and the significance of the disrupted home in early modern culture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".