Alienation and Theatricality: Diderot After Brecht

This is the first monograph to fully explores Sherwood's use of the classical past.

South Africa has a uniquely rich and diverse theatre tradition which has responded energetically to the country's remarkable transition, helping to define the challenges and contradictions of this young democracy. This volume considers the variety of theatre forms, and the work of the major playwrights and theatre makers producing work in democratic South Africa. It offers an overview of theatre pioneers and theatre forms in Part One, before concentrating on the work of individual playwrights in Part Two. Through its wide-ranging survey of indigenous drama written predominantly in the English language and the analysis of more than 100 plays, a detailed account is provided of post-apartheid South African theatre and its engagement with the country's recent history. Part One offers six overview chapters on South African theatre pioneers and theatre forms. These include consideration of the work of artists such as Barney Simon, Mbongeni Ngema, Phyllis Klotz; the collaborations of William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company; the work of Magnet Theatre, and of physical and popular community theatre forms. Part Two features chapters on twelve major playwrights, including Athol Fugard, Reza de Wet, Lara Foot, Zakes Mda, Yael Farber, Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom, Mike van Graan and Brett Bailey. It includes a survey of emerging playwrights and significant plays, and the book closes with an interview with Aubrey Sekhabi, the Artistic Director of the South African State Theatre in Pretoria. Written by a team of over twenty leading international scholars, The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary South African Theatre is a unique resource that will be invaluable to students and scholars from a range of different disciplines, as well as theatre practitioners.

The idea of the tragic has permeated Western culture for millennia, being closely bound with the concept of the limit of inescapable necessity that has been embodied in and expressed through theatre since the time of the ancient Greeks. This book addresses the question of how the twentieth century - one of the most violent periods of human history - dealt with the fundamental structure that is the tragic. Examining the consciousness of the era through an in-depth analysis of some of the twentieth century's most outstanding texts - including works by Ibsen, Claudel, O'Neill, Brecht, Camus, Beckett, Pasolini, Grotowski, Delcuvellerie and Josse De Pauw - 'Modern European Tragedy' draws a vivid picture of the development that tragedy experienced during this time.

The relationship between law and literature is rich and complex. In the past three and half decades, the topic has received much attention from literary critics and legal scholars studying modern literature. Despite the prominence of law and justice in Ancient Greek literature, there has been little interest among Classical scholars in the connections between law and drama. This is the first collection of essays to approach Greek tragedy and comedy from a legal perspective. The volume does not claim to provide an exhaustive treatment of law and literature in ancient Greece. Rather it provides a sample of different approaches to the topic. Some essays show how knowledge of Athenian law enhances our understanding of individual passages in Attic drama and the mimes of Herodas and enriches our appreciation of dramatic techniques. Other essays examine the information provided about legal procedure found in Aristophanes' comedies or the views about the role of law in society expressed in Attic drama. The collection reveals reveal how the study of law and legal procedure can enhance our understanding of ancient drama and bring new insights to the interpretation of individual plays.

Lorca in English examines the evolution of translations of Federico Garcia Lorca into English as a case of rewriting and manipulation through politically and ideologically motivated translation. As new translations of Federico Garcia Lorca continue to appear in the English-speaking world and his literary reputation continues to be rewritten through these successive re-translations, this book explores the reasons for this constant desire to rewrite Lorca since the time of his murder right into the 21st century. From his representation as the quintessential Spanish Republican martyr, to his adoption through translation by the Beat Generation, to his elevation to iconic status within the Queer Studies movement, this volume analyzes the reasons for this evolution and examines the current direction into which this canonical author is heading in the English-speaking world.

'On Beckett' is a collection of writings about the Nobel Prize-winning author that covers the entire spectrum of his work, and also affords a rare glimpse of the private Beckett.

Sir Thomas Stukeley, the notorious English courtier, pirate, adventurer and soldier, died at the Battle of Alcazar in Morocco in 1578, while serving in the army of King Sebastian of Portugal. This volume comprises the first modern-spelling, annotated edition of two plays in which he is a major character: George Peele's 'The Battle of Alcazar' (c.1588), and the anonymous 'Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley' (c.1596). In his extensive introduction and commentary, Charles Edelman discusses the plays' authorship, their many textual problems, and what they reveal about Elizabethan performance practices. He also challenges most of the traditional assumptions about them. This edition shows that both works, long held to be unperformable, are instead fascinating and worthwhile representatives of the most exciting age in the history of the theatre. -- .

A scholarly edition of works by Christopher Marlowe. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Una nueva edicion de la primera historia sistematica del teatro en Espana. Esta nueva edicion de las Memorias cronologicas de Jose Antonio de Armona ofrece por primera vez un analisis pormenorizado de las fuentes documentales empleadas por el autor, que constituyen su aportacion mas fundamentlos estudios teatrales. La obra de Armona es la primera historia sistematica del teatro en Espana, desde el final de la Edad Media hasta su propia epoca. Aunque incluye una vision general de la literatura dramatica del Siglo de Oro, se centra principalmente en los aspectos institucionales del teatro. En su calidad de Corregidor de Madrid, le correspondia a Armona el cargo de Juez Protector, maxima autoridad de la administracion de los teatros publicos y los actores, y la mayor parte de sus Memorias se dedica a este tema. Habiendo reflexionado sobre su experiencia como Protector y los problemas planteados por conflictos jurisdiccionales en este ambito, Armona examino sus origenes y evolucion mediante extensas investigaciones en los archivos municipales de Madrid, reuniendo y recopilando una nutrida coleccion de documentos que aclaran multiples aspectos de la historia teatral. Por tanto, sus Memorias estan estrechamente relacionadas con la documentacion municipal publicada en tomos anteriores de las Fuentes para la Historia del Teatro en Espana, y deben situarse en este contexto. En espanol xiv+352 pp., 8 ilus.b/n Fuentes para la Historia del Teatro en Espana, XIV CHARLES DAVIS es Honorary Research Fellow de Queen Mary, Universidad de Londres.

This new collection of essays on Richard Brinsley Sheridan brings the most important British playwright of the eighteenth century back to the forefront of literary and cultural studies of the era. While his pyrotechnic life as a romantic hero, playwright, Member of Parliament, and theatre manager has generated a number of recent biographies, it is Sheridan's works-not just plays but also poetry and orations-that endure. These essays reclaim the legacy of the man of letters and partisan bon vivant who burst from obscurity to become a powerful cultural force in Georgian London. This collection covers the many lives of Sheridan, taking into account both his variegated career and the competing accounts of the man, as well as his early verse, which lays the foundation for his success as a playwright. Chapters are devoted to Sheridan's theatre, and provide innovative readings of his most famous dramatic pieces: The Rivals, The Duenna, The School for Scandal, The Critic, and Pizarro. The volume also includes extensive discussion of the dramatic highs of Sheridan's long political career, thus placing the playwright-politician firmly in the world in which performance and politics were inextricably entwined. Contributors: Mita Choudhury, Jack E. DeRochi, Marianna D'Ezio, Daniel J. Ennis, Emily Friedman, Steven Gores, David Haley, Robert W. Jones, Daniel O'Quinn, Glynis Ridley, John Vance, David Francis Taylor

Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664) was the greatest German poet and dramatist of the 17th century, yet he remains virtually unknown outside his own country. One of the chief reasons for his relative obscurity outside Germany is that almost all studies devoted to him are written in German. Another problem has to do with the inaccessibility of the recondite forms of Baroque literature. This book is designed especially for students and scholars in disciplines other than German, particularly those in comparative literature and the modern languages, where a lack of knowledge about this major German writer distorts a proper international perspective on major figures of the 17th century. But it also addresses the Germanist, especially scholars in Germany; they will find interpretations and a way of presenting them entirely new.

This book traces the development of pastoral drama as it evolved over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Italy. It considers how writers of pastoral drama responded to social, cultural and intellectual pressures and innovations, regarding critical attitudes towards theatre and the arts.

Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage argues that environment and embodied thought continually shaped one another in the performance of early modern English drama. It demonstrates this, first, by establishing how characters think through their surroundings - not only how they orient themselves within unfamiliar or otherwise strange locations, but also how their environs function as the scaffolding for perception, memory, and other forms of embodied thought. It then contends that these moments of thinking through place theorise and thematise the work that playgoers undertook in reimagining the stage as the setting of the dramatic fiction. By tracing the relationship between these two registers of thought in such plays as The Malcontent, Dido Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine, King Lear, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and Bartholomew Fair, this book shows that drama makes visible the often invisible means by which embodied subjects acquire a sense of their surroundings. It also reveals how, in doing so, theatre altered the way that playgoers perceived, experienced, and imagined place in early modern England.

This book recovers a sense of the high stakes of Shakespearean comedy, arguing that the comedies, no less than the tragedies, serve to dramatize responses to the condition of being human, responses that invite scholarly investigation and explanation. Taking its cue from Stanley Cavell's influential readings of Othello and Lear, the book argues that exposure or vulnerability to others is the source of both human happiness and human misery; while the tragedies showcase attempts at the evasion of such vulnerability through the self-defeating pursuit of epistemological certainty, the comedies present the drama and the difficulty of turning away from an epistemological register in order to productively respond to the fact of our humanity. Where Shakespeare's tragedies might be viewed in Cavellian terms as the drama of skepticism, Shakespeare's comedies then exemplify the drama of acknowledgement. As a parallel and a preamble, Gottlieb suggests that the field of literary studies is itself a site of such revealing responses: where competing research methods strive to foreclose upon (or, alternatively, rejoice in) epistemological uncertainty, such commitments bespeak an urge to avoid or circumvent the human in the practice of scholarship. Reading Shakespeare's comedies in tandem with a "defactoist" view of teaching and learning points in the direction of a new humanism, one that eschews both the relativism of old deconstruction and contemporary Presentism and the determinism of various kinds of structural accounts. This book offers something new in scholarly and popular understanding of Shakespeare's work, doing so with both philosophical rigor and literary attention to the difficult work of reading.

This monograph details Gutzkow's recurring use of performance-within-the-play as a means of encouraging an active, political response by the audience. He incorporates an internal audience viewing a performance on stage in order to model an ideal of dramatic reception for the audiences of his own play. Gutzkow structures the narrative contextualization of these performances as reflections of specific issues in the German states of the Vormarz. Beginning with an overview of theoretical and literary texts from the 1830s, this study traces Gutzkow's transferral of self-reflexive structures from his novels of this decade into his first staged play, Richard Savage (1839), and on through Das Urbild des Tartuffe (1844) and Uriel Acosta (1845). It concludes by portraying Der Konigsleutnant (1849) as a transitional work that shows Gutzkow's decision to return to the novel as a consequence of the failure of his plays to attain the reception he intended. By using the coherency of the communicated message instead of fealty to aesthetic norms as the evaluative criteria for discussing Gutzkow's plays, the book exposes an innovative mode of specifically literary social criticism in these works that complements their traditional assessment as documentation of the cultural history of Liberalism in this period.

Rona Munro's 1991 play Bold Girls is a tale of four Belfast women during the Troubles, exploring personal and communal history, and what it means when aspects of a community - ideologies, relationships, and spaces, for example - are threatened. Despite being set in a very specific time and place, the themes are universal: how societies are warped by male violence, dominance, and social privilege, and female subservience to that behaviour. Bold Girls is a case-study of the victims - rather than the perpetrators - of conflict: an unsentimental portrait of women's lives under psychological siege. Gillian Sargent's Scotnote Study Guide provides a comprehensive overview to the characters and themes of Munro's play, as well as its artistic and cultural influences, and is an excellent guide for senior school pupils and teachers alike.

John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's comedy Love's Cure, or The Martial Maid (1615) is an innovative and provocative play that explores the struggle of two transgender siblings, Lucio and Clara, who have been brought up as members of their opposite genders. After twenty years of separation, they are forced to switch around their gender identities, facing fierce scrutiny from their family and the cruelly heteronormative society of early modern Seville. This Revels Plays volume is the first fully annotated, single-volume critical edition of the play ever to be published. The text has been modernised and is accompanied by full commentary. The introduction presents ground-breaking research on the play's remarkable engagement with its Spanish literary sources, and it provides a full discussion of its dating, authorship, and reception by literary critics and in the theatre. -- .

The Revenger's Tragedy is one of the most vital, important, and enduring tragedies of the Jacobean era, one of the few non-Shakespearean plays of that period that is still regularly revived on stage and taught in classrooms. The play is notable for its piercing insight into human depravity, its savage humour, and its florid theatricality. This collection of new essays offers students an invaluable overview of the play's critical and performance history as well as four critical essays offering a range of new perspectives.

Representation and Reception: Brechtian 'Pedagogics of Theatre' and Critical Thinking deploys German playwright Bertolt Brecht's theory of drama and performance, what he calls "the pedagogics of theatre", to create modes of critical thinking in the classroom. Extrapolating on Brecht's estranged forms of representation-narrative, story, montage, Verfremdungseffeckt or alienation, tableaux, ostension (showing), gestus, masks and music-Burney constructs an original "3-R Pedagogy" or "spiral of semiosis"-"Rethinking/Replaying/Re-cognition"-that is designed to create critical thinking and "complex seeing". Her dramatic production of Brecht's Lehrstuck, or learning-play, The Exception and the Rule, for a non-literate, working-class audience in Hyderabad, India, critically analyses how audiences make meaning through image, word and ideology, gesture, memory, collective experience and personal (hi)stories.

This volume frames the concept of a national play. By analysing a number of European case studies, it addresses the following question: Which play could be regarded as a country's national play, and how does it represent its national identity? The chapters provide an in-depth look at plays in eight different countries: Germany (Die Rauber, Friedrich Schiller), Switzerland (Wilhelm Tell, Friedrich Schiller), Hungary (Bank Ban, Jozsef Katona), Sweden (Gustav Vasa, August Strindberg), Norway (Peer Gynt, Henrik Ibsen), the Netherlands (The Good Hope, Herman Heijermans), France (Tartuffe, Moliere), and Ireland. This collection is especially relevant at a time of socio-political flux, when national identity and the future of the nation state is being reconsidered.

Trevor Griffiths has been a critical force in British television writing for over three decades. His successes have included the series Bill Brand (1976), his adaptations of Sons and Lovers and The Cherry Orchard (1981) and his television plays, The Comedians (1979), Hope in the Year Two (1994) and Food for Ravens (1997). During his creative life he has negotiated the issues of genre, politics, identity, class, history, memory and televisual form with a sustained creativity and integrity second to none. And he has parallelled this career with one as equally as eminent in the theatre, as well as the slightly more problematic forays into film-writing for Warren Beatty's Reds and Ken Loach's Fatherland. John Tulloch's Trevor Griffiths is also, however, a work that looks at such a creative and successful career from a number of different angles. For example, Griffith's televisual work coincides with the emergence of media and cultural studies and so Tulloch reflects on how critical citation moves from Marx to Derrida from the 70s throught to the 90s, mirroring the increased theorisation of media studies. He also looks at the dialogic relationship of Griffiths as the radical critic and the radical critique of cultural studies. Both a canny work on Griffiths, as well as a pertinent work for students introducing them to to broader concepts, theories and methods within the field, Tulloch's work will be read widely by students and academics in a range of disciplines.

Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance seeks to address the representation of the humors from non-traditional, abstract, and materialist perspectives, considering the humorality of everyday objects, activities, and performance within the early modern period. To uncover how humoralism shapes textual, material, and aesthetic encounters for contemporary subjects in a broader sense than previous studies have pursued, the project brings together three principal areas of investigation: how the humoral body was evoked and embodied within the space of the early modern stage; how the materiality of an object can be understood as constructed within humoral discourse; and how individuals' activities and pursuits can connote specific practices informed by humoralism. Across the book, contributors explore how diverse media and cultural practices are informed by humoralism. As a whole, the collection investigates alternative humoralities in order to illuminate both early modern works of art as well as the cultural moments of their production.