InDr. Faustus, Christopher Marlowe wrote a profoundly religious drama despite the theater's newfound secularism and his own reputation for anti-Christian irreverence.The Aesthetics of ...Antichristexplores this apparent paradox by suggesting that, long before Marlowe, Christian drama and ritual performance had reveled in staging the collapse of Christianity into its historical opponents-paganism, Judaism, worldliness, heresy. By embracing this tradition, Marlowe's work would at once demonstrate the theatricality inhering in Christian worship and, unexpectedly, resacralize the commercial theater.
The Antichrist myth in particular tells of an impostor turned prophet: performing Christ's life, he reduces the godhead to a special effect yet in so doing foretells the real second coming. Medieval audiences, as well as Marlowe's, could evidently enjoy the constant confusion between true Christianity and its empty look-alikes for that very reason: mimetic degradation anticipated some final, as yet deferred revelation. Mere theater was a necessary prelude to redemption. The versions of the myth we find in Marlowe and earlier drama actually approximate, John Parker argues, a premodern theory of the redemptive effect of dramatic representation itself. Crossing the divide between medieval and Renaissance theater while drawing heavily on New Testament scholarship, Patristics, and research into the apocrypha,The Aesthetics of Antichristproposes a wholesale rereading of pre-Shakespearean drama.
This is my body Kobialka, Michal Andrzej
1999., 20091222, 1999, c1999.
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The recipient of the annual Award for Outstanding Book in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, This Is My Body realigns representational practices in ...the early Middle Ages with current debates on the nature of representation. Michal Kobialkai's study views the medieval concept of representation as having been in flux and crossed by different modes of seeing, until it was stabilized by the constitutions of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Kobialka argues that the concept of representation in the early Middle Ages had little to do with the tradition that considers representation in terms of Aristotle or Plato; rather, it was enshrined in the interpretation of Hoc est corpus meum This is my body—the words spoken by Christ to the apostles at the Last Supper—and in establishing the visibility of the body of Christ that had disappeared from view.
The comic playwright Menander was one of the most popular writers throughout antiquity. This book reconstructs his life and the legacy of his work until the end of antiquity employing a broad range ...of sources such as portraits, illustrations of his plays, papyri preserving their texts and inscriptions recording their public performances. These are placed within the context of the three social and cultural institutions which appropriated his comedy, thereby ensuring its survival: public theatres, dinner parties and schools. Dr Nervegna carefully reconstructs how each context approached Menander's drama and how it contributed to its popularity over the centuries. The resultant, highly illustrated, book will be essential for all scholars and students not just of Menander's comedy but, more broadly, of the history and iconography of the ancient theatre, ancient social history and reception studies.
Referencing early modern English play texts alongside contemporary records, accounts and statutes, this study offers an overdue assessment of the relationship between the dramatic efforts of the ...universities and early modern male identity. Taking into account the near single-sex constitution of early modern universities, the book argues that performances of university plays, and student responses to them, were key ways of exploring and shaping early modern masculinity.
En 1871, en medio de los debates sobre el establecimiento de la ópera española, Guillermo Morphy, el Conde de Morphy, publica un artículo de fondo en el que acomete un modelo de drama lírico nacional ...vinculado a la tradición musical centroeuropea. Su proposición constituye un paso adelante hacia el drama lírico moderno que otorgara a España un sitio en la escena musical europea. Este trabajo recupera el movimiento de renovación dentro del nacionalismo musical liderado por el Conde de Morphy durante la Restauración borbónica, con importantes avances en la escena culta musical española. Con este propósito, nos aproximamos a la actividad regeneracionista y crítica musical de Morphy y su influencia en aquellos compositores que estuvieron más unidos a su figura como Tomás Bretón, Pablo Casals e Isaac Albéniz, poniendo el foco de atención en la cuestión de la ópera española como señal de identidad nacional. Recogemos asimismo una relación de los artículos publicados por Morphy en la prensa.
This analysis of five exemplary domestic plays-the anonymousArden of FavershamandA Warning for Fair Women(1590s), Thomas Heywood'sA Woman Killed with Kindness(1607), Thomas Middleton'sWomen Beware ...Women(ca. 1613), and Walter Mountfort'sThe Launching of the Mary, or The Seaman's Honest Wife (1632)-offers a new approach to the emerging ideology of the private and public, or what Ann C. Christensen terms "the tragedy of the separate spheres." Feminist scholarship has identified the fruitful gaps between theories and practices of household government in early modern Europe, while work on the global Renaissance attends to commercial expansion, cross-cultural encounters, and colonial settlements.Separation Scenesbrings these critical concerns together to expose the intimate and disruptive relationships between the domestic culture and business culture of early modern England.Separation Scenesargues that domestic plays make the absence of husbands for business the subject of tragedy by focusing not on where men traveled but on whom and what they left behind. Elements that critics have rightly associated with domestic tragedy-adultery, sensational murders, and the lavishly articulated operations of domestic life-define this world, which, Christensen argues, was equally shaped by the absence of husbands. Her interpretations of these domestic plays invite us to historicize and further complicate the seemingly universal binary between a feminine "private sphere" and a masculine "public sphere."Separation Scenesdemonstrates how domestic drama played an active, dynamic, and critical role in deliberating the costs of commercial travel as it disrupted domestic conduct and prompted realignments within the home.
Informed by film theory and a broad historical approach, Fatal Desire examines the theatrical representation of women in England, from the Restoration to the early eighteenth century—a period when ...for the first time female actors could perform in public. Jean I. Marsden maintains that the feminization of serious drama during this period is tied to the cultural function of theater. Women served as symbols of both domestic and imperial propriety, and so Marsden links the representation of women on the stage to the social context in which the plays appeared and to the moral and often political lessons they offered the audience. The witty heroines of comedies were usually absorbed into the social fabric by marrying similarly lighthearted gentlemen, but the heroines of tragedy suffered for their sins, real or perceived. That suffering served the dual purpose of titillating and educating the theater audience. Marsden discusses such plays as William Wycherley's Plain Dealer (1676), John Vanbrugh's Provoked Wife (1697), Thomas Otway's Orphan (1680), Thomas Southerne's Fatal Marriage (1694), and William Congreve's Mourning Bride (1697). The author also addresses tragedies written by three female playwrights, Mary Pix, Catharine Trotter, and Delarivier Manley, and sketches developments in tragedy during the period.
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