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.
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.
eBook
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.
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.
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.
As well as 'play-makers' and 'poets', playwrights of the early modern period were known as 'play-patchers' because their texts were made from separate documents. This book is the first to consider ...all the papers created by authors and theatres by the time of the opening performance, recovering types of script not previously known to have existed. With chapters on plot-scenarios, arguments, playbills, prologues and epilogues, songs, staged scrolls, backstage-plots and parts, it shows how textually distinct production was from any single unified book. And, as performance documents were easily lost, relegated or reused, the story of a play's patchy creation also becomes the story of its co-authorship, cuts, revisions and additions. Using a large body of fresh evidence, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England brings a wholly new reading to printed and manuscript playbooks of the Shakespearean period, redefining what a play, and what a playwright, actually is.
Breaking new ground in the study of tragedy, early modern theatre, and literary London,Metropolitan Tragedydemonstrates that early modern tragedy emerged from the juncture of radical changes in ...London's urban fabric and the city's judicial procedures. Marissa Greenberg argues that plays by Shakespeare, Milton, Massinger, and others rework classical conventions to represent the city as a locus of suffering and loss while they reflect on actual sources of injustice in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London: structural upheaval, imperial ambition, and political tyranny.
Drawing on a rich archive of printed and manuscript sources, including numerous images of England's capital, Greenberg reveals the competing ideas about the metropolis that mediated responses to theatrical tragedy. The first study of early modern tragedy as an urban genre,Metropolitan Tragedyadvances our understanding of the intersections between genre and history.
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