Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre

Liebler’s highly original argument focuses upon tragedy as the formal representation of real social action and conflict. She views the community, not just the protagonist, as the real subject of the drama. Festive tragedy is concerned with ritual practice whose function is, as King Lear’s Tom O’Bedlam put it, ‘to prevent the fiend and to kill vermin’, that is, to protect and purge. The violation of this ritual practice jeopardizes the survival of the entire community.
Into her argument Liebler weaves the work of cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner and Mary Douglas and theories of drama by Aristotle, Brecht, Artaud and Girard. The result is a powerful, elegantly written work which extends the study of Shakespeare’s tragedies into whole new areas of anthropological criticism and dramatic theory.