Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy is a volume of essays investigating European tragedy in the seventeenth century, comparing Shakespeare, Vondel, Gryphius, Racine and ...other vernacular tragedians, as well as neo-Latin dramas by Jesuits and others, and with respect to politics, religion and law. Readership: All interested in European Baroque and Classicist Drama, early modern history and literature, those interested in politics and literature.
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.
‘Re-visioning myth: contemporary drama by women’ examines the diverse ways in which classical myth narratives have been reworked by women playwrights for the European stage. The first in-depth ...assessment of ‘re-vision’ as a phenomenon in women’s drama, this study explores the ideological and aesthetic potential of such practice and silmultaneously exposes the tensions inherent in attempts to challenge narratives that have fundamentally shaped western thought. ‘Re-visioning myth’ examines plays from the 1960s to the 21st century, providing contextualised readings of fourteen theatrical works originating from France, Italy, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, the U.K. and Ireland. Babbage introduces important contemporary playwrights to English speaking readers and audiences, placing these authors and their works into dialogue with others more widely known. From tracing the persistence of classical myths in contemporary culture and the significance of this in shaping gendered identities and opportunities, through to analysis of individual plays and productions, ‘Re-visioning myth’ reveals how myths have served in the theatre as ‘pretexts’ for ideological debate; have enabled exploration of the fragile borders between mythic and the everyday and how revision has been regarded, not unproblematically, as a route towards restructuring the self. Babbage also explores the intersection of re-vision within the contrasting trends of ‘in-yer face’ and postdramatic theatre, and the unique potential for myth rewriting offered by autobiographical solo performance. This will make compelling reading for anyone interested in women’s writing for the theatre or wider practices of adaptation in literature and performance.
Completed shortly before her death in 2019, Tragedy and Philosophy. A Parallel History is the sum of Agnes Heller's reflections on European history and culture, seen through the prism of Europe's two ...unique literary creations: tragedy and philosophy.
Tragic Seneca Boyle, A. J.
1997, 20130513, 2013-05-13, 2002-11-01
eBook
Tragic Seneca undertakes a radical re-evaluation of Seneca's plays, their relationship to Roman imperial culture and their instrumental role in the evolution of the European theatrical ...tradition.Following an introduction on the history of the Roman theatre, the book provides a dramatic and cultural critique of the whole of Seneca's corpus, analysing the declamatory form of the plays, their rhetoric, interiority, stagecraft and spectacle, dramatic, ideological and moral structure and their overt theatricality. Each of Seneca's plays is examined in detail, locating the force of Senecan drama not only in the moral complexity of the texts and their representations of power, violence, history, suffering and the self, but the semiotic interplay of text, tradition and culture.The later chapters focus on Seneca's influence on Italian, English and French drama of the Renaissance. A.J. Boyle argues that tragedians such as Cinthio, Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Corneille, and Racine owe a debt to Seneca that goes beyond allusion, dramatic form and the treatment of tyranny and revenge to the development of the tragic sensibility and the metatheatrical mind.Tragic Seneca attempts to restore Seneca to a central position in the European literary tradition. It will provide readers and directors of Seneca's plays with the essential critical guide to their intellectual, cultural and dramatic complexity.
InThe Stage Life of Props,Andrew Sofer aims to restore to certain props the performance dimensions that literary critics are trained not to see, then to show that these props are not just ...accessories, but time machines of the theater.Using case studies that explore the Eucharistic wafer on the medieval stage, the bloody handkerchief on the Elizabethan stage, the skull on the Jacobean stage, the fan on the Restoration and early eighteenth-century stage, and the gun on the modern stage, Andrew Sofer reveals how stage props repeatedly thwart dramatic convention and reinvigorate theatrical practice.While the focus is on specific objects, Sofer also gives us a sweeping history of half a millennium of stage history as seen through the device of the prop, revealing that as material ghosts, stage props are a way for playwrights to animate stage action, question theatrical practice, and revitalize dramatic form.Andrew Sofer is Assistant Professor of English, Boston College. He was previously a stage director.
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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