Under the Tudor monarchy, English law expanded to include the category of "treason by words." Rebecca Lemon investigates this remarkable phrase both as a legal charge and as a cultural event. English ...citizens, she shows, expressed competing notions of treason in opposition to the growing absolutism of the monarchy. Lemon explores the complex participation of texts by John Donne, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare in the legal and political controversies marking the Earl of Essex's 1601 rebellion and the 1605 Gunpowder Plot.
Lemon suggests that the articulation of diverse ideas about treason within literary and polemical texts produced increasingly fractured conceptions of the crime of treason itself. Further, literary texts, in representing issues familiar from political polemic, helped to foster more free, less ideologically rigid, responses to the crisis of treason. As a result, such works of imagination bolstered an emerging discourse on subjects' rights.Treason by Wordsoffers an original theory of the role of dissent and rebellion during a period of burgeoning sovereign power.
This book defines and exemplifies a major genre of modern dramatic writing, termed historiographic metatheatre, in which self-reflexive engagements with the traditions and forms of dramatic art ...illuminate historical themes and aid in the representation of historical events and, in doing so, formulates a genre. Historiographic metatheatre has been, and remains, a seminal mode of political engagement and ideological critique in the contemporary dramatic canon. Locating its key texts within the traditions of historical drama, self-reflexivity in European theatre, debates in the politics and aesthetics of postmodernism, and currents in contemporary historiography, this book provides a new critical idiom for discussing the major works of the genre and others that utilize its techniques. Feldman studies landmarks in the theatre history of postwar Britain by Weiss, Stoppard, Brenton, Wertenbaker and others, focusing on European revolutionary politics, the historiography of the World Wars and the effects of British colonialism. The playwrights under consideration all use the device of the play-within-the-play to explore constructions of nationhood and of Britishness, in particular. Those plays performed within the framing works are produced in places of exile where, Feldman argues, the marginalized negotiate the terms of national identity through performance.
Although representations of medieval Christians and Christianity are rarely subject to the same scholarly scrutiny as those of Jews and Judaism, "the Christian" is as constructed a term, category, ...and identity as "the Jew." Medieval Christian authors created complex notions of Christian identity through strategic use of representations of Others: idealized Jewish patriarchs or demonized contemporary Jews; Woman represented as either virgin or whore. In Western thought, the Christian was figured as spiritual and masculine, defined in opposition to the carnal, feminine, and Jewish. Women and Jews are not simply the Other for the Christian exegetical tradition, however; they also represent sources of origin, as one cannot conceive of men without women or of Christianity without Judaism. The bifurcated representations of Woman and Jew found in the literature of the Middle Ages and beyond reflect the uneasy figurations of women and Jews as both insiders and outsiders to Christian society.Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeareprovides the first extended examination of the linkages of gender and Jewish difference in late medieval and early modern English literature. Focusing on representations of Jews and women in Chaucer'sCanterbury Tales, selections from medieval drama, and Shakespeare'sMerchant of Venice, Lampert explores the ways in which medieval and early modern authors used strategies of opposition to-and identification with-figures of Jews and women to create individual and collective Christian identities. This book shows not only how these questions are interrelated in the texts of medieval and early modern England but how they reveal the distinct yet similarly paradoxical places held by Woman and Jew within a longer tradition of Western thought that extends to the present day.
Focusing on Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Webster and John Milton, Martyrs and Players in Early Modern England argues that the English tragedians reflected an unease within the ...culture to acts of religious violence. David Anderson explores a link between the unstable emotional response of society to religious executions in the Tudor-Stuart period, and the revival of tragic drama as a major cultural form for the first time since classical antiquity. Placing John Foxe at the center of his historical argument, Anderson argues that Foxe's Book of Martyrs exerted a profound effect on the social conscience of English Protestantism in his own time and for the next century. While scholars have in recent years discussed the impact of Foxe and the martyrs on the period's literature, this book is the first to examine how these most vivid symbols of Reformation-era violence influenced the makers of tragedy. As the persecuting and the persecuted churches collided over the martyr's body, Anderson posits, stress fractures ran through the culture and into the playhouse; in their depictions of violence, the early modern tragedians focused on the ethical confrontation between collective power and the individual sufferer. Martyrs and Players in Early Modern England sheds new light on the particular emotional energy of Tudor-Stuart tragedy, and helps explain why the genre reemerged at this time.
The Jeu d’Adam is the oldest theatrical text written in a vernacular language that has come down to us in its entirety. Composed around the mid-twelfth century, it has survived in only a single ...witness (Tours, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. n° 927, cc. 20r–40r) datable to the second quarter of the thirteenth century. The peculiarity that better characterizes the Jeu d’Adam is undoubtedly its large apparatus of Latin stage directions, aimed to regulate its staging scrupulously. The zeal lavished in the attempt to regulate diction by a pervasive and careful use of punctuation marks is very important. Considering the dating of the code, it appears sufficiently diversified, contemplating the punctus planus, placed both at the foot of the letter and in the middle position, the virgula (´), the punctus elevatus (.´) and the punctus interrogativus (two points with one or two virgulae on their top). The iterated use of the punctus interrogativus to indicate an interrogative or exclamatory intonation – extremely rare in the other manuscripts of the same time – is motivated both by the will to suggest in turn the appropriate intonation for the sentences in the form of direct speech, and by the ‘paraliturgical’ character of the Jeu, shaped by the concrete needs of the staging without however never abdicating its edifying purposes.
Alessio Torino ("Gli inferi come spazio scenico in Plauto", pp. 35-51) sostiene que en las comedias de Plauto hay numerosas referencias, mayoritariamente simbólicas, relacionadas con el inframundo, ...que el dramaturgo suele utilizar para representar alguna pérdida de los personajes, ya sea de la propia identidad o del dinero. Sin embargo, el desarrollo de la acción todavía recae en los personajes masculinos. Además, examina las sententiae y su finalidad en el texto dramático a partir de cinco variables, como qué personajes las enuncian o reciben, en qué momentos se formulan, qué ideas o temas están presentes o cuál es su objetivo. En suma, esta autora muestra cómo los proverbios referidos a animales en las comedias sirven como factores dinamizadores del argumento, aportando mayor carga cómica. Łukasz Berger: "Gestión
With the arrival of the new media era and the continuous development of China’s domestic IP dramas, the downturn in domestic TV dramas has been broken, more and more IP dramas obtain higher audience ...rating rely on the Internet, and it becomes a phenomenon hot style. Vietnam is geographically adjacent to China, and they have similar cultures. A lot of Vietnamese culture is derived from Chinese culture, and they are heavily influenced by the values and lifestyle of Confucius in the past, Chinese film and television is a literary genre familiar to Vietnamese, which is one of the most important components of daily entertainment. This paper will research on how to use the Internet to strengthen the import of film and television culture to Vietnam, so that Chinese IP dramas can also increase the audience rating in Vietnam and enhance the cultural export.
This title was first published in 1988: In this book the author has translated five postwar experimental Japanese plays and recreated the artistic, social and spiritual milieu in which they were ...created. He describes the turning point in Japanese thinking about the nature and limitations of a Western-oriented modern culture, and the creation of "underground" theatres which in which evolved a new mythology of history. Professor Goodman sees these developments as an interplay between personal and political (ie revolutionary) salvation.
The first biographical dictionary in any Western language devoted solely to Chinese women, Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women is the product of years of research, translation, and writing by scores of China scholars from around the world. Volume II: Twentieth Century includes a far greater range of women than would have been previously possible because of the enormous amount of historical material and scholarly research that has become available recently. They include scientists, businesswomen, sportswomen, military officers, writers, scholars, revolutionary heroines, politicians, musicians, opera stars, film stars, artists, educators, nuns, and more.
Romantic Tragedies Parker, Reeve
03/2011, Letnik:
v.Series Number 87
eBook
Troubled politically and personally, Wordsworth and Coleridge turned in 1797 to the London stage. Their tragedies, The Borderers and Osorio, were set in medieval Britain and early modern Spain to ...avoid the Lord Chamberlain's censorship. Drury Lane rejected both, but fifteen years later Coleridge's revision, Remorse, had spectacular success there, inspiring Shelley's 1819 Roman tragedy, The Cenci, aimed for Covent Garden. Reeve Parker makes a striking case for the power of these intertwined works, written against British hostility to French republican liberties and Regency repression of home-grown agitation. Covertly, Remorse and The Cenci also turn against Wordsworth. Stressing the significance of subtly repeated imagery and resonances with Virgil, Shakespeare, Racine, Jean-François Ducis and Schiller, Parker's close readings, which are boldly imaginative and decidedly untoward, argue that at the heart of these tragedies lie powerful dramatic uncertainties driven by unstable passions - what he calls, adapting Coleridge's phrase for sorcery, 'dark employments'.
Exploring theater practices in communist and post-communist Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, this book analyzes intertextuality or “inter-theatricality” as a political strategy, designed to criticize ...contemporary political conditions while at the same time trying to circumvent censorship. In the Soviet bloc the theater of the absurd, experimentation, irony, and intertextual distancing (estrangement) were much more than mere aesthetic language games, but were planned political strategies that used indirection to say what could not be said directly.Plays by Romanian, Hungarian and Bulgarian dramatists are examined, who are “retrofitting” the past by adapting the political crimes and horrifying tactics of totalitarianism to the classical theatre (with Shakespeare a favorite) to reveal the region’s traumatic history. By the sustained analysis of the aesthetic devices used as political tools, Orlich makes a very strong case for the continued relevance of the theater as one of the subtlest media in the public sphere. She embeds her close readings in a thorough historical analysis and displays a profound knowledge of the political role of theater history.
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