Is our view of how Elizabethan audiences views illegitimacy largely incorrect ?
I’ve read views stating both a lot of tolerance for and intolerance for illegitimacy in Elizabethan England . Which is it? Would Shakespeare’s audiences have sympathized with the character or thought of him as a pure villain unworthy of being called a tragic villain as he is today ?
Here’s a book you might like:
In Renaissance Drama, the bastard is an extraordinarily powerful and disruptive figure. We have only to think of Caliban or of Edmund to realise the challenge presented by the illegitimate child. Drawing on a wide range of play texts, Alison Findlay shows how illegitimacy encoded and threatened to deconstruct some of the basic tenets of patriarchal rule. She considers bastards as indicators and instigators of crises in early modern England, reading them in relation to witchcraft, spiritual insecurities and social unrest in family and State.
Thanks bob_2. I’m inclined not to view Edmund as a tragic figure. Edmund’s actions from the very beginning do not show any other mode of behavior other than ruthless ambition. He is the Machiavellian as interpreted in the popular sense of the word. Is it our relativism today that has softened our view of Edmund or am I looking at it all wrong ? I’m open to other opinions. Are we over analyzing Edmund ‘s complexity ?
I think Shakespeare gets overanalysed all the time. He wrote pot-boilers for Elizabethan audiences and they were obviously fond of a bit of gore (Titus Andronicus.), sly sexual innuendo (Romeo and Juliet), and a few ghosts (if they are children so much the better) to scare the ladies (Richard111).
I did Julius Caesar for English Lit, and had to write pages and pages about the “Significance of the supernatural”, or “Is Brutus really a tragic hero?”. I often thought that The Bard himself would probably have failed those exams.
You would not be the first to think that.
I’ve often thought that any author confronted with a literary analysis of something they’d written, with its exposition of underlying themes and metaphors and symbolism and the like, would find themselves slack jawed in astonishment.
“Look, you, I was just trying to write a good story that would entertain people and earn me some money. I don’t know where you’re getting all that nonsense, but it certainly wasn’t anything I was thinking about when I was writing it!”
Haven’t read much James Joyce recently? 
But even hard-working authors who can crank out a novel in a year or even less put some degree of conscious (and unconscious—they are already well versed in those themes and metaphors) planning into it; you can’t really write well otherwise.
The only thing I’ve ever read by Joyce was Portrait of the Artist, and I didn’t like it at all. It didn’t feel like he was trying to tell a story, it felt like he was trying to show off how clever and intelligent he was, and how nonconformist he was.