This collection of essays makes an important contribution to scholarship by examining how the myths and practices of medical knowledge were interwoven into popular entertainment on the early modern ...stage. Rather than treating medicine, the theater, and literary texts separately, the contributors show how the anxieties engendered by medical socio-scientific investigations were translated from the realm of medicine to the stage by Renaissance playwrights, especially Shakespeare. As a whole, the volume reconsiders typical ways of viewing medical theory and practice while individual essays focus on gender and ethnicity, theatrical impersonation, medical counterfeit and malfeasance, and medicine as it appears in the form of various political metaphors.
Contents: Introduction; Part I Performance and the Practitioner: Performing arts: hysterical disease, exorcism, and Shakespeare's theater, Kaara L. Peterson; 'No faith in physic': masquerades of medicine onstage and off, Tanya Pollard; 'Note her a little farther': doctors and healers in the drama of Shakespeare, Barbara Howard Traister. Part II Race, Nationhood, And Discourses Of Medicine: Hot blood: estranging Mediterranean bodies in Early Modern medical and dramatic texts, Carol Thomas Neely; 'Some love that drew him oft from home': syphilis and international commerce in The Comedy of Errors, Jonathan Gil Harris; Elizabethan racial medical psychology, popular drama, and the social programming of the Late-Tudor black: sketching an exploratory postcolonial hypothesis, Imtiaz Habib; Infectious rape, therapeutic revenge: bloodletting and the health of Rome's body, Catherine Belling. Part III Competing Discourses: The Fille Vièrge as Pharmakon: the therapeutic value of Desdemona's corpse, Louise Noble; Transformation and degeneration: the Paracelsan/Galenic body in Othello, Stephanie Moss; Cankers in Romeo and Juliet: 16th-century medicine at a figural/literal cusp, Lynette Hunter. Works cited; Index.
The stages of property Surwillo, Lisa
The stages of property,
c2007, 20071222, 2007, 2007-01-01
eBook
Through an integrative historicist approach to a wide range of literary texts and archival documents,The Stages of Propertymakes an important statement about the cultural, societal, and political ...roles of the theatre in Spain during the 1800s.
This volume considers the influential revival of ancient philosophical skepticism in the 16th and early 17th centuries and investigates, from a comparative perspective, its reception in early modern ...English, Spanish and French drama, dedicating detailed readings to plays by Shakespeare, Calderón, Lope de Vega, Rotrou, Desfontaines, and Cervantes.
Hamlet's address to Yorick's skull is at the heart of the Shakespearean canon, but is often conflated with the equally famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy in act 3, scene 1. This article reasserts ...the importance of the skull property by examining its afterlife on the modern stage, arguing that the use of real human remains in productions of Hamlet reveals a strong desire on the part of actors and theatergoers to be part of a kind of sacred lineage. The play text makes it clear that we can never be entirely sure whose skull it is that the gravedigger hands to Hamlet; it might be that of the prince's jester, a great lady, or a horse thief. The use of actual skulls -- many of which have their own complicated life histories -- as stage properties underscores the transgressive potential of the scene and testifies to the theater's ambivalent relationship to narratives of transcendence.
In an impressively comparative work, Jane K. Brown explores the tension in European drama between allegory and neoclassicism from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century. Imitation of nature is ...generally thought to triumph over religious allegory in the Elizabethan and French classical theater, a shift attributable to the recovery of Aristotle'sPoeticsin the Renaissance. But if Aristotle's terminology was rapidly assimilated, Brown demonstrates that change in dramatic practice took place only gradually and partially and that allegory was never fully cast off the stage. The book traces a complex history of neoclassicism in which new allegorical forms flourish and older ones are constantly revitalized. Brown reveals the allegorical survivals in the works of such major figures as Shakespeare, Calderón, Racine, Vondel, Metastasio, Goethe, and Wagner and reads tragedy, comedy, masque, opera, and school drama together rather than as separate developments. Throughout, she draws illuminating parallels to modes of representation in the visual arts. A work of broad interest to scholars, teachers, and students of theatrical form,The Persistence of Allegorypresents a fundamental rethinking of the history of European drama.
