The Performance of Male Nobility in Molière's Comédies-ballets
The Performance of Male Nobility in Molière's Comédies-ballets

Author: Gretchen Elizabeth Smith

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13:

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The comedie-ballet was a spectacular theatrical genre which blossomed in the first year of Louis XIV's absolute rule (1661), flourished under the friendship of king and playwright during that decade (1664-1670), and faded even as Louis turned his attention to the new French opera in the early 1670s. Though it lasted little more than a decade, it stands not only as a unique chapter in Moliere's career as a playwright but as a singular style of theatre. Focusing on the topics of male nobility and class tensions, Gretchen Smith examines a unique performance genre in a new way: through its premiere performances in the context of the places, periods, performers, and the semiotics of practical theatre. Through telling the story of the comedies-ballets, the author redefines the Baroque as an era which shaped our post-modern ideas about performance as a social as well as theatrical construct, about magnificence as a commodity and a product to be bought or exported, about the seduction of the public spotlight, and about the political outcome of patronage and art. dimensions that are often neglected or understudied by literary scholars. Grounded in the disciplines of theatre history, literary analysis, semiotics, performance study, and gender studies, this study will also be useful for scholars French, European and early modern history and literature. It contributes much to our understanding of Moliere, the genre of the comedie-ballet, and the various layers of meaning in royal festival theater.

Psychosomatic Disorders in Seventeenth-Century French Literature
Psychosomatic Disorders in Seventeenth-Century French Literature

Author: Bernadette Höfer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1317073878

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Bernadette Höfer's innovative and ambitious monograph argues that the epistemology of the Cartesian mind/body dualism, and its insistence on the primacy of analytic thought over bodily function, has surprisingly little purchase in texts by prominent classical writers. In this study Höfer explores how Surin, Molière, Lafayette, and Racine represent interconnections of body and mind that influence behaviour, both voluntary and involuntary, and that thus disprove the classical notion of the mind as distinct from and superior to the body. The author's interdisciplinary perspective utilizes early modern medical and philosophical treatises, as well as contemporary medical compilations in the disciplines of psychosomatic medicine, neurobiology, and psychoanalysis, to demonstrate that these seventeenth-century French writers established a view of human existence that fully anticipates current thought regarding psychosomatic illness.

Ritual Design for the Ballet Stage
Ritual Design for the Ballet Stage

Author: Hanna Walsdorf

Publisher: Frank & Timme GmbH

Published: 2019-02-28

Total Pages: 548

ISBN-13: 3732903737

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The Turkish ceremony in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme has been popular with audiences for almost 350 years and remains one of the bestknown scenes of early modern French theatre. This newly researched volume spotlights the Turkish ceremony in its original technicolor, presenting numerous important discoveries that have never before been published. It shows that even in a field as thoroughly investigated as the collaboration between Molière and Lully at the court of Louis XIV, there is still much new source material to be discovered, and many new connections to be made. As the multidisciplinary essays examine the burlesque Turkish scene from a social, political, textual and iconographic view point they unearth, time and again, flaws, omissions and errors transmitted in earlier scholarship. Ritual Design is a must-have volume that sets the record straight.

Historical Dictionary of French Theater
Historical Dictionary of French Theater

Author: Edward Forman

Publisher: Scarecrow Press

Published: 2010-04-27

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0810874512

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The term "French theater" evokes most immediately the glories of the classical period and the peculiarities of the Theater of the Absurd. It has given us the works of Corneille, Racine, and Moliere. In the Romantic era there was Alexander Dumas and surrealist works of Alfred Jarry, and then the Theater of the Absurd erupted in rationalistic France with Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The Historical Dictionary of French Theater relates the history of the French theater through a chronology, introduction, bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors, trends, genres, concepts, and literary and historical developments that played a central role in the evolution of French theater.

Vaux and Versailles
Vaux and Versailles

Author: Claire Goldstein

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2008-01-09

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 9780812240580

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Goldstein shows how the connection between Vaux and Versailles is at the heart of classical style. She retraces the roots of Versailles in Fouquet's short-lived experiment, and destabilises any easy understanding of the court of the Sun King as the origin of French national style.

Commedia dell'Arte in Context
Commedia dell'Arte in Context

Author: Christopher B. Balme

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-04-05

Total Pages: 709

ISBN-13: 1108670571

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The commedia dell'arte, the improvised Italian theatre that dominated the European stage from 1550 to 1750, is arguably the most famous theatre tradition to emerge from Europe in the early modern period. Its celebrated masks have come to symbolize theatre itself and have become part of the European cultural imagination. Over the past twenty years a revolution in commedia dell'arte scholarship has taken place, generated mainly by a number of distinguished Italian scholars. Their work, in which they have radically separated out the myth from the history of the phenomenon remains, however, largely untranslated into English (or any other language). The present volume gathers together these Italian and English-speaking scholars to synthesize for the first time this research for both specialist and non-specialist readers. The book is structured around key topics that span both the early modern period and the twentieth-century reinvention of the commedia dell'arte.

Visions of the Courtly Body
Visions of the Courtly Body

Author: Christiane Hille

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2013-01-09

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 305006255X

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In 1603, the beginning of the Stuart reign, painting was of minor importance at the English court, where the elaborately designed masques of Inigo Jones served as the prime medium of royal representation. Only two decades later, their most celebrated performer, George Villiers, the First Duke of Buckingham had assembled one of the largest and most significant collections of painting in early seventeenth-century Europe. His career as the personal and political favourite of two succeeding monarchs – James I and Charles I – coincides with the commission of a number of highly ambitious portraits from the hands of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck that displayed his body in spectacular manner. As the first comprehensive study of Buckingham’s patronage of the visual arts, this book is concerned with the question of how the painted image of the courtier transferred strategies of social distinction that had originated in the masque to the language of painting. Establishing a new grammar in the competing rhetorics of bodily self-fashioning, this recast notion of portraiture contributed to an epistemological change in perceptions of visual representation at the early modern English court, in the course of which painting advanced to the central art form in the aesthetics of kingship.

Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body
Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body

Author: Mark Franko

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-06-30

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 019979443X

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Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body is a historical and theoretical examination of French court ballet over a hundred-year period, beginning in 1573, that spans the late Renaissance and early baroque. Utilizing aesthetic and ideological criteria, author Mark Franko analyzes court ballet librettos, contemporary performance theory, and related commentary on dance and movement in the literature of this period. Examining the formal choreographic apparatus that characterizes late Valois and early Bourbon ballet spectacle, Franko postulates that the evolving aesthetic ultimately reflected the political situation of the noble class, which devised and performed court ballets. He shows how the body emerged from verbal theater as a self-sufficient text whose autonomy had varied ideological connotations, most important among which was the expression of noble resistance to the increasingly absolutist monarchy. Frankos analysis blends archival research with critical and cultural theory in order to resituate the burlesque tradition in its politically volatile context. Dance as Text thus provides a picture of the complex theoretical underpinnings of composite spectacle, the ideological tensions underlying experiments with autonomous dance, and finally, the subversiveness of Molieres use of court ballet traditions.