#4315. How Gabriel Harvey read tragedy*

September 2026publication date
Proposal available till 03-06-2025
4 total number of authors per manuscript0 $

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Journal’s subject area:
Literature and Literary Theory;
Visual Arts and Performing Arts;
Religious Studies;
History;
Cultural Studies;
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Abstract:
In 1579, Gabriel Harvey bound together in a composite collection a surprising group of texts: an Italian grammar, an Italian translation of Terence’s comedies, Lodovico Dolce’s Italian rifacimenti of Euripides’ Medea and Seneca’s Thyestes, and Euripides’ Hecuba and Iphigenia in Erasmus’ Latin. The volume is now dispersed, but all its parts survive. This essay explores the story of this hitherto unknown artefact and what it reveals about Harvey’s reading practices and his engagement with drama, especially Greek tragedy. Harvey probed local detail in the tragedies with attentiveness, and with an eye to recurring observations that revealed the ‘thought’ of these works. He was drawn especially to the political dimension of this ‘thought’. Reading tragedies in juxtaposition, he became interested in their different exploration of rulers’ obligation to rule by their people’s consent. And he found Euripides’ plays particularly endowed with political wisdom, no doubt partly because he believed that they had been co-authored by Euripides’ mentor and Harvey’s own icon of pragmatic wisdom, Socrates.
Keywords:
Gabriel Harvey; history of reading; tragedy

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