Abstract This article focusses on Zinnie Harris’s feminist adaptations of three canonical European tragedies: Aeschylus’s Oresteia as This Restless House (2016), John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (c 1613) as The Duchess (of Malfi) (2019), and William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (c 1606) as Macbeth (an undoing) (2023). These works see Harris revisioning conventional tragic plotting and tragic temporalities to explore themes of gendered violence, trauma, and reconciliation. Drawing on debates around tragic form and its relationship with feminist theory, this article assesses the effectiveness of Harris’s strategies for adaptation in unearthing new feminist readings of these classic performance texts, especially her critique of the notion that the dialectic of progress arises from the tragic form itself, from its presumed universality.
Building similarity graph...
Analyzing shared references across papers
Loading...
Trish Reid
Journal of Contemporary Drama in English
University of Reading
Building similarity graph...
Analyzing shared references across papers
Loading...
Trish Reid (Fri,) studied this question.
www.synapsesocial.com/papers/69fd7ef7bfa21ec5bbf074c3 — DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2026-2007