This article discusses how the recent film adaptation of Macbeth directed by Joel Coen (2021) uses nature imagery – most prominently birds – to visualise ambiguities of literal and metaphorical ...meaning already inherent in the language of Shakespeare’s play, as well as Akira Kurosawa’s filmic adaptation Throne of Blood (1958). My arguments focus on the visual strategies used in Coen’s film to stylise the language of Shakespeare’s text for today’s cinematic audiences by drawing attention to the ways in which elements of nature are connected to specific characters, serving as harbingers of their emotional states and developments.
Conscience on stage Kallendorf, Hilaire
Conscience on stage,
c2007, 20071013, 2007, 2007-01-01
eBook
This study outlines and reiterates the relationship of theatre to casuistry, the Jesuit contributions to Spanish literary theory and practice, and the importance of casuistry for the study of early ...modern subjectivity.
In this conference report, we look back on our first digital conference, a challenge which ultimately came with many silver linings. Among the highlights: The online setting made our event more ...inclusive, with approximately 100 participants from across the globe attending the four-day drama event. This report highlights the keynotes, workshops, and talks shared at the 2020 Drama in Education Days.
Perfect disguises Goodnight, Kristina; de Graaff, Rick; van Beuningen, Catherine
Scenario (Cork),
08/2021, Volume:
XV, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Dutch secondary school pupils seldom speak the foreign language in class, citing anxiety as a primary factor (Haijma, 2013). Implementing improvisational drama techniques (IDTs), however, could help ...ameliorate this situation by generating positive affective reactions, such as confidence and joy, and in turn stimulate pupils to speak. The concept IDT in this study contains two key elements. Firstly, participants take on roles in fictitious situations. Secondly, the activities must elicit spontaneous speech as to offer language learners opportunities to practice real-life communication, which is central to the goal of this research. The question driving this study was: What types of IDTs induce positive affective reactions among pupils and, as such, have the potential to stimulate spoken interaction in FL classrooms? The study yielded 77 IDTs associated with positive affective reactions through a literature review and an analysis of student teacher reflections on their IDT use in their English classrooms. This combined evidence lends credence to the conception that it could be the essence of improvisational drama that generates positive reactions, rather than the type of activity—the essence being an invitation to enter a fictional world, combined with the improvisational element that readies learners for spontaneous interactions.
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.
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.
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.
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