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MARLOWE'S DIDO AND THE STAGING OF CATHARSIS

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From: AUMLA : Journal of the Australasian Universities Modern Language Association
Date: 20070501
Author:Potter, Lucy

In the nineteenth century, Anthony Trollope described Marlowe's Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage as a "pretty quaint, and painful" version of Virgil's Dido and Aeneas story.1 The play's relationship to the Virgilian narrative continues to inform Dido criticism today, and has led to much discussion about the play's genre.2 In this essay, I argue that Dido is a tragedy that rewrites Virgil's epic by calling upon the theories of catharsis put forward in Aristotle's Poetics.

Dido is an exercise in generic transformation, one that experiments with and enacts certain possibilities in the Poetics ...

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