The Expense of Spirit

The Expense of Spirit integrates feminist and historicist critical approaches to explore the dynamics of cultural conflict and change in English Renaissance drama.

Mary Beth Rose is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature and editor of Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives.

What is especially interesting here is the sophistication with which Rose develops her argument in relation to dramatic genres. She is acute in registering the ways that the ideological inconsistencies evident in nondramatic texts become the stuff of dramatic conflict, and occasionally resolution, on stage. Trenchantly and persuasively, Rose argues that the shift of focus in tragedy from the Elizabethan concern with public action to the Jacobean preoccupation with domestic life and individual psychology witnesses the new dignity and significance assigned to private life.