‘A true sign of a readie wit’ : Anger as an Art of Excess in Early Modern Dramatic and Moral Literature

Anger is an excessive passion in the early modern period, both in most treatises on the passions and in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. This article examines the representations of anger and the contradiction of a passion which is both admired when it is the excessive outburst of a great hero such as Achilles, and condemned because it is seen as violent, uncontrollable and uncivilized. It seems that in the early modern treatises on the passions as well as in some English plays of the same period (comedies or tragedies) anger becomes an outward appearance more than the essential part of a temperament