Twenty-six original essays by leading theorists and historians of the pre-seventeenth-century English stage chart a paradigmatic shift within the field. In contrast to the traditional emphasis on individual authors, the contributors to this storehouse of new historical information and critical insight explore the place of the stage within the larger society, as well as issues of performance and physical space, providing an innovative approach to both literary studies and cultural history.
The West has a long and rich dramatic tradition, and its dramatic works typically reflect the social and political concerns of playwrights and spectators. This book surveys the Western dramatic tradition from Ancient Greece to modern America. Included are chapters on great eras of drama, such as the Renaissance; national theatres, such as the theatres of Latin America, Ireland, and Poland; important theatrical movements, such as musical theatre and African American drama; and influential theatre styles, such as realism, expressionism, and surrealism. Entries are written by leading authorities and cite works for further reading. Students of literature and drama will appreciate the book for its convenient overview of the Western theatrical tradition, while students of history and social studies will welcome its illumination of different cultures and traditions. Designed for students, the book overviews Western drama from Ancient Greece to modern America. Included are chapters on great eras of drama, such as the Renaissance; national theatres, such as the theatres of Latin America, Ireland, and Poland; important theatrical movements, such as musical theatre and African American drama; and influential theatre styles, such as realism, expressionism, and surrealism. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor and offers an extended consideration of its topic and cites works for further reading. Students of drama and literature will value the book for its exploration of the Western theatrical tradition, while students of history and social studies will welcome its illumination of different cultures and traditions.
This highly acclaimed full-scale account of Restoration drama vividly chronicles the drama's changing patterns decade-by-decade from 1660 to 1710. Providing a detailed, chronological survey of some five hundred plays, Hume traces the emergence of numerous dramatic modes, studies their interaction and mutual influence, and fully explores the diversity of the plays as they reflect the fads and fashions of a small, highly competitive theater world constantly undergoing political and social change.
The Living Arts Library is specially designed to stimulate children's interest and imagination in all aspects of the international arts. The activity-based approach encourages readers to try for themselves a variety of skills and techniques.
Originally published in 1965. The European dramatic tradition rests on a group of religious dramas that appeared between the tenth and twelfth centuries. These dramas, of interest in themselves, are also important for the light they shed on three historical and critical problems: the relation of drama to ritual, the nature of dramatic form, and the development of representational techniques. Hardison's approach is based on the history of the Christian liturgy, on critical theories concerning the kinship of ritual and drama, and on close analysis of the chronology and content of the texts themselves. Beginning with liturgical commentaries of the ninth century, Hardison shows that writers of the period consciously interpreted the Mass and cycle of the church year in dramatic terms. By reconstructing the services themselves, he shows that they had an emphatic dramatic structure that reached its climax with the celebration of the Resurrection. Turning to the history of the Latin Resurrection play, Hardison suggests that the famous Quem quaeritis—the earliest of all medieval dramas—is best understood in relation to the baptismal rites of the Easter Vigil service. He sets forth a theory of the original form and function of the play based on the content of the earliest manuscripts as well as on vestigial ceremonial elements that survive in the later ones. Three texts from the eleventh and twelfth centuries are analyzed with emphasis on the change from ritual to representational modes. Hardison discusses why the form inherited from ritual remained unchanged, while the technique became increasingly representational. In studying the earliest vernacular dramas, Hardison examines the use of nonritual materials as sources of dramatic form, the influence of representational concepts of space and time on staging, and the development of nonceremonial techniques for composition of dialogue. The sudden appearance of these elements in vernacular drama suggests the existence of a hitherto unsuspected vernacular tradition considerably older than the earliest surviving vernacular plays.
This major study reconstructs the vast history of European drama from Greek tragedy through to twentieth-century theatre, focusing on the subject of identity. Throughout history, drama has performed and represented political, religious, national, ethnic, class-related, gendered, and individual concepts of identity. Erika Fischer-Lichte's topics include: * ancient Greek theatre * Shakespeare and Elizabethan theatre by Corneilli, Racine, Molière * the Italian commedia dell'arte and its transformations into eighteenth-century drama * the German Enlightenment - Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, and Lenz * romanticism by Kleist, Byron, Shelley, Hugo, de Vigny, Musset, Büchner, and Nestroy * the turn of the century - Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Stanislavski * the twentieth century - Craig, Meyerhold, Artaud, O'Neill, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Müller. Anyone interested in theatre throughout history and today will find this an invaluable source of information.
The present book is third in a series of works which aim to expose the complexity and essence, power and extent of the major periods, movements, trends, genres, authors, and literary texts in the history of English literature. Following this aim, the series will consist of monographs which cover the most important ages and experiences of English literary history, including Anglo-Saxon or Old English period, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Restoration, neoclassicism, romanticism, Victorian Age, and the twentieth-century and contemporary literary backgrounds. The reader of these volumes will acquire the knowledge of literary terminology along with the theoretical and critical perspectives on certain texts and textual typology belonging to different periods, movements, trends, and genres. The reader will also learn about the characteristics and conventions of these literary periods and movements, trends and genres, main writers and major works, and the literary interaction and continuity of the given periods. Apart from an important amount of reference to literary practice, some chapters on these periods include information on their philosophy, criticism, worldview, values, or episteme, in the Foucauldian sense, which means that even though the condition of the creative writing remains as the main concern, it is balanced by a focus on the condition of thought as well as theoretical and critical writing during a particular period. Preface Introduction: Approaching Literary Practice and Studying British Literature in History Preliminaries: Learning Literary Heritage through Critical Tradition or Back to Tynyanov Genre Theory for Poetry The Intellectual Background 1.1 The Period and Its Historical, Social and Cultural Implications 1.2 The Philosophical Advancement of Modernity 1.2.1 Francis Bacon and the “New Method” 1.2.2 The Advancement of Classicism: French Contribution 1.2.3 The Social and Political Philosophy: Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan 1.2.4 Rationalists and Empiricists 1.3 The Idea of Literature as a Critical Concern in the Seventeenth Century 1.3.1 The English “Battle of the Books” or “La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes” in the European Context 1.3.2 Restoration, John Dryden and Prescribing Neoclassicism The Literary Background 2.1 The British Seventeenth Century and Its Literary Practice 2.2 Metaphysical Poetry, Its Alternatives and Aftermath 2.3 The Puritan Period and Its Literary Expression 2.4 The Restoration Period and Its Literature 2.5 The Picaresque Tradition in European and English Literature Major Literary Voices 3.1 The Metaphysical Poets I: John Donne 3.2 The Metaphysical Poets II: George Herbert 3.3 The Metaphysical Poets III: Andrew Marvell 3.4 John Milton: The Voice of the Century 3.4.1 L’Allegro and Il Penseroso 3.4.2 Lycidas and Sonnets 3.4.3 Paradise Lost and the Epic of Puritanism 3.5 John Dryden and His Critical Theory and Literary Practice Conclusion: The Literature of a Turbulent Age References and Suggestions for Further Reading Index
How dull plays are killing theatre and what we can do about it. Had I become disenchanted with the form I had once fallen so madly in love with as a pubescent, pimple-faced suburban homo with braces? Maybe theatre was like an all-consuming high school infatuation that now, ten years later, I saw as the closeted balding guy with a beer gut he’d become. There were of course those rare moments of transcendencethat kept me coming back. But why did they come so few and far between? A lot of plays are dull. And one dull play, it seems, can turn us off theatre for good. Playwright and theatre director Jordan Tannahill takes in the spectrum of English-language drama – from the flashiest of Broadway spectacles to productions mounted in scrappy storefront theatres – to consider where lifeless plays come from and why they persist. Having travelled the globe talking to theatre artists, critics, passionate patrons and the theatrically disillusioned, Tannahill addresses what he considers the culture of ‘risk aversion’ paralyzing the form. Theatre of the Unimpressed is Tannahill’s wry and revelatory personal reckoning with the discipline he’s dedicated his life to, and a roadmap for a vital twenty-first-century theatre – one that apprehends the value of ‘liveness’ in our mediated age and the necessity for artistic risk and its attendant failures. In considering dramaturgy, programming and alternative models for producing, Tannahill aims to turn theatre from an obligation to a destination. ‘[Tannahill is] the poster child of a new generation of (theatre? film? dance?) artists for whom "interdisciplinary" is not a buzzword, but a way of life.’ —J. Kelly Nestruck, Globe and Mail ‘Jordan is one of the most talented and exciting playwrights in the country, and he will be a force to be reckoned with for years to come.’ —Nicolas Billon, Governor General's Award–winning playwright (Fault Lines)
English drama at the beginning of the sixteenth century was allegorical, didactic and moralistic; but by the end of the century theatre was censured as emotional and even immoral. How could such a change occur? Kent Cartwright suggests that some theories of early Renaissance theatre - particularly the theory that Elizabethan plays are best seen in the tradition of morality drama - need to be reconsidered. He proposes instead that humanist drama of the sixteenth century is theatrically exciting - rather than literary, elitist and dull as it has often been seen - and socially significant, and he attempts to integrate popular and humanist values rather than setting them against each other. Taking as examples the plays of Marlowe, Heywood, Lyly and Greene, as well as many by lesser-known dramatists, the book demonstrates the contribution of humanist drama to the theatrical vitality of the sixteenth century.
