Allegorical Play Research Articles

Gender at the Barricades: Women and the Columbia University Uprising of 1968

New York History Winter 2014© 2014 by The New York State Historical Association 8 Gender at the Barricades: Women and the Columbia University Uprising of 1968 Bonnie Stepenoff, Southeast Missouri State University On Sunday, April 28, 1968, a call went out on a student radio station requesting a clergyman because a couple wanted to get married in the midst of a tense period of protests at Columbia University. The bride and groom were among the students unlawfully occupying a campus building. Andrea Boroff and Richard Eagan had planned to be married later in the spring, but they decided to take their vows in the presence of their fellow student demonstrators. Moments before the wedding in Fayerweather Hall, a group of street actors presented an allegorical play about a king who gave his people welfare checks and then sent them off to war. Someone in the crowded building yelled “Clear the steps,” and a few cheering students moved out of the way, as Boroff, wearing jeans, a white sweater, and a veil and holding a bouquet of daisies, appeared next to Eagan, wearing a Nehru jacket and beads. A procession of student demonstrators marched down the stairs carrying candles. The Reverend William Starr, who performed the unofficial ceremony, concluded with these words: “I now pronounce you children of a new age.”1 The couple later married legally, and the bride became an advocate for women’s rights. Twenty years after the events in Fayerweather, Andrea Boroff Eagan published a magazine article about the protests at Columbia entitled “Women were Invisible and Inaudible.” Recalling her experience as a participant in the demonstrations, she wrote, “Back then, we typed, ran the mimeograph machines, made the coffee.” When they were asked to provide the food in Fayerweather, the women demurred, and some of the men took over the job of feeding the strikers. In general, how1 . Jerry Avorn, et al., Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis (New York: Athenaeum, 1969), 129–130. The wedding ceremony appears in the film Columbia Revolt (Newsreel, 1969), Prelinger Archives, Part I: https://archive.org/details/Columbia1969 and Part II: https://archive.org/details/ Columbia1969_2. To mark the 40th anniversary of the demonstrations in 2008, Columbia University organized a conference, Columbia 1968+40. The conference’s website contains a large photo gallery, which can be accessed here: http://www.columbia1968.com/history/photos/. Stepenoff Gender at the Barricades 9 ever, according to Eagan, women played supportive, not leading, roles in the demonstrations. In the influential 1979 book entitled Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left, Sara Evans briefly mentioned the protests at Columbia and noted that male protesters “turned the housekeeping chores over to women.” Evans interviewed Eagan, among other female dissidents of the 1960s, while researching her book. At the time of the Columbia demonstrations, there were signs of change in gender relationships, but in 1968, the “new age” strongly resembled the old one, even among those who struggled mightily against the status quo.2 In Personal Politics, Evans argued that a negative experience in the protest movements of the 1960s motivated women on the left to 2. Andrea Eagan, “Women were Invisible and Inaudible,” New York Newsday, April 24, 1988; New York Times, March 11, 1993. Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 201. Columbia Revolt, a documentary on the 1968 Columbia University demonstrations , by the radical film collective Newsreel. Beginning at 21:47 in Part I, footage from the wedding of Boroff and Eagan is shown. Be advised that the film contains brief depictions of violence and strong language. 10 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY push for gender equality. The experience of women during and after the Columbia protests supports this argument, but there is another lesson to be drawn from this example. During times of struggle, people may call for change and at the same time cling to traditional patterns, habits, roles, and customs. The wedding at Fayerweather Hall, in the midst of a radical protest , is a case in point. The bride, groom...

Somatic Lessons: Narrating Patienthood and Illness in Indian Medical Literature by Anthony Cerulli (review)

Reviewed by: Somatic Lessons: Narrating Patienthood and Illness in Indian Medical Literature by Anthony Cerulli Hartmut Scharfe Anthony Cerulli. Somatic Lessons: Narrating Patienthood and Illness in Indian Medical Literature. SUNY Series in Hindu Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012. xviii + 211 pp. $80.00 (978-1-4384-4387-4). In this beautifully produced book the author discusses mythological narratives in the major medical compendia that describe the origins of various ailments: fever, miscarriage, wasting disease. Thus the first occurrence of fever, that is, the creation of fever, is attributed to Rudra’s wrath when he was slighted by Dakṣsa Prajāpati. It now occurs in humans at the moments of birth and death and when they act improperly. Miscarriage is the consequence of demons taking refuge in women’s bodies and being destroyed by a divinely appointed “embryo taker.” The women had unwittingly invited the demons by improper behavior such as disrespect toward gods, cows, and Brahmins and the love of meat, sleep, and sex. All miscarried fetuses are demons! The wasting disease (rāja-yak. sman, well known from Raghuvaṃśa XIX 50) is caused by “performing actions beyond one’s abilities, suppression of natural urges, drying up, and irregular diet.” In most instances the relation between the ethical lapse and the illness is not specific. However, these stories play only a minor role in physicians’ treatment of the patients (prayer to Rudra is recommended in the case of fever). They illustrate physicians’ religious and cultural attitudes that they bring to their practice and perhaps try to impose on their patients, namely, that disease is ultimately caused by some ethical deficiency or disregard of the dharma (“law,” “righteousness,” or, as I prefer, “functional identity”) as laid down in religious literature. One is reminded of the reaction to Black Death in the Middle Ages or the more recent attitude toward AIDS, as these diseases were considered divine punishment for sinful behavior. The myths suggest the reasons why a person is stricken by a disease, while the theory of the dṣa-s and dhātu-s deals with the mechanics of the illness and its eventual cure. The seventeenth-century allegorical drama Jīv ānandam tries to tie medical and political theory and ethics into an entertaining and educational performance that highlights the insight that one’s health is intimately linked with the surrounding society and one’s role in it. The book is often repetitive and overwritten, with expressions like “rationative concern” (p. 41), “concurrently coincidental” (p. 86), “narrativization” (p. 94), “manipulability” (p. 101), “taxonomize” (p. 177n5), and the pretentious “astrophysical” (p. 112) for simple “astronomical.” Strange is the use of “the gender dyad” (p. 97) meaning “men and women” and “elided these renderings” (p. 106). When a myth is referred to in another chapter, it is called a “minimyth” (pp. 55 and 57) rather than a reference or quote. It is questionable if Caraka really redefined the karma theory as having an effect in this life (rather than after death), [End Page 684] since the notion is also found in Manu IV 156/157 and other law texts as well as Buddhist texts (p. 71). While the author is correct that one should not take Ayurveda as a “strictly scientific” system of medicine divorced from both social and environmental factors or the cultural context of the people’s lives, he overstates, I think, the role the myths play (p. 159) in the actual daily practice of the vaidyas as he himself seems to indicate elsewhere (p. 8). Hartmut Scharfe University of California, Los Angeles Copyright © 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press

‘Olde playes or maskes but Imperfect & little worthe

This article pieces together how the manuscripts from East Anglia of the morality plays The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom and Mankind, and the saints' plays The Conversion of St Paul, Mary Magdalen, and The Killing of the Children survived the literary ‘iconoclasm of the sixteenth century and found their way safely to great research libraries. It explores the way a handful of antiquaries saved the few tattered and undistinguished manuscripts that have come down to us. These were like-minded men from both universities and the Inns of Court who came together to discuss topics of mutual interest in the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries; it was not unlike modern learned societies where friendships and personal associations grow from intellectual common ground. Through their efforts, and the efforts of such distinguished friends as Lord Henry Howard, these six plays (preserved in seven separate manuscripts) were recognized for what they were. Without them we would have little understanding of English morality or saints' plays. Our understanding of ‘place-and-scaffold staging would be limited to the Passion Play in N-Town and, without The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind and Wisdom we would have no idea of the richness of English medieval allegorical drama.

William Strode’s The Floating Island: Play and Political Propaganda

In August 1636 Charles I, accompanied by his queen, nephews and Court, decided to pay the University of Oxford a three-day visit. In the previous seven years Archbishop Laud, Chancellor of the University since 1629, had made a number of important improvements to the University, including the building of a new quadrangle at his own old college, St John's; this royal seal of approval showed recognition of Laud's achievements and gave the impression that he had come to possess influence at the highest level. Officially the King was the guest of the University; it was the Public Orator, William Strode, who gave the speech of welcome when the royal party arrived, and the University who footed most of the bill; but it was the Archbishop who masterminded the whole affair.1 Among the entertainments provided for the guests were three plays. Two romantic comedies performed on the second day of the visit were well received, but William Strode's allegorical play The Floating Island, acted at Christ Church on the first evening of the visit, was a failure. What the royal party made of it is not recorded, but the Earl of Northumberland's chaplain thought it 'fitter for schollers then a Court', and Lord Carnarvon, less restrained, considered it the worst play he had ever seen except for one at Cambridge.2 A dedicatory poem which the author later attached to the play makes it plain that there was considerable barracking at the first performance (the second, staged for the university once the royal visit was over, was more successful). For the playwright the evening had clearly been a disaster, and the prologue quickly written a few days later for the repeat performance, to replace that addressed to the royal couple, shows his ruffled feelings:We hope to find Spectatours, and we may,For you'l not act the Humours of the Play;Or fret at Passions e'er you read them calm'dIn the next word. Your stomacks feele no QualmRising through smell of rude Philosophy:Nor shall you finde much more then to descryAn Academick birth.3Plainly for Strode the fault was in the audience, not in the play. Laud's opinion was similar: the play was 'very well penned, yet did not take the court so well'.4Later judgements of The Floating Island have, with justification, been less kind. The genre - half morality play, half masque - has been seen as an unfortunate choice, and the characters, representing various humours or 'Passions', as stilted and wooden. The plot, in which the Passions revolt against the benign rule of King Prudentius, but later realise their mistake and welcome his return, is hardly gripping, and attempts to enliven it with episodes of comedy are not successful. The dialogue attempts to be lively, but the sequence of events is too inconsequential and unmotivated for it to be convincing. The play is laboured, and patently produced with little sense of the dramatic.5Its author, William Strode, was at this time a man in the early stages of what appeared to be a promising career. Like several of his colleagues at Christ Church, he had been schooled at Westminster, where the writing of poetry was encouraged,6 and it was as a lyric poet that he first made his mark. He had arrived at Christ Church in 1617 at the age of fifteen or so;7 only two years later he was a contributor to the volume of Latin verse with which Oxford mourned the death of Queen Anne in March 1619,8 and he continued to contribute Latin verse to University publications for the next two decades. His contemporaries doubtless paid more attention to the poems in English which he produced throughout the 1620s. His love-poetry, elegies, comic verses, occasional pieces, parodies, satires, or 'posies' for necklaces and rings were copied widely in the University and further afield, and his songs were not only transcribed but sung on convivial occasions. Meanwhile he followed the normal academic and clerical course; in the summer of 1624 he had reached the stage of taking his MA, and by 1628 must have passed through the diaconate, since in December of that year he was ordained priest. …

Language Goes on Holiday: English Allegorical Drama and the Virtue Tradition

This article explores the virtue tradition in the English theatrical tradition of morality theater and its fortunes on the professional stage. It explores questions of recognition in allegorical drama by examining “mankind” and “mercy” in the morality play Mankind, the appropriation of this tradition by the forces of commerce in The Three Ladies of London and The Three Lords and Ladies of London, and Jonson’s hilarious use of the tradition in The Devil Is An Ass. Ordinary language philosophy helps to reveal what is at stake in this verbal drama of recognition.

On the Theatricality of the Ci-Poetry in Tang and Song Dynasties

Ci-poetry and drama are both genres of musical literature and the theatricality of the ci-poetry is demonstrated from many different aspects, such as the first-person narration, the emotional lyrics with unique features, the musical dialogues between two people or among many people, the dramatic conflict presented in the lyrics, the dramatic actions and the dramatic situations, etc. There are all kinds of plays in the ci-poetry, namely the serious drama, the comedy, the tragedy, the comedy with tears, the fantasy and the allegorical play. The ci-poetry of the Tang and Song dynasties exerted great influence on drama and on the other hand, the army-joining drama of the Tang dynasty and the miscellaneous drama of the Song dynasty to some extent inspired the creation of ci-poetry. The relationship between ci-poetry and drama confirms the mutual infiltration and cross reference among different literary genres in the Song dynasty.

The Swastika and the Stage: German Theatre and Society, 1933-1945 (review)

Reviewed by: The Swastika and the Stage: German Theatre and Society, 1933-1945 John London Gerwin Strobl . The Swastika and the Stage: German Theatre and Society, 1933-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 341. $95.00. This book begins with a provocative introduction: by presenting documented evidence, Strobl explains how the most exciting culture of the Weimar Republic (the culture with which contemporary readers are now most familiar) actually alienated huge sectors of the German population. He studies three educated individuals who were to become leading Nazis—Rainer Schlösser, Hans Severus Ziegler, and Baldur von Schirach—as examples of those who lost out in the cultural revolution of the period. Strobl penetrates the psychology of those who [End Page 524] would later welcome the changes initiated in 1933. You did not have to be highly conservative to be shocked by the politics and aesthetics of avant-garde theater in the 1920s: the radical plays of Erich Mühsam and Ernst Toller, together with director Leopold Jeßner's assaults on the classics, politicized theater by attacking nationalism, and, in the process, cutting well-known texts, sacrificing the poetic recitation of verse drama, and sometimes providing inaudible spectacles. As a result, theater auditoria were often emptied. Subsequent chapters describe what ensued after 1933. Chapter 2 studies "visions of a national rebirth" with a subtle analysis of Hanns Johst's Schlageter, a play designed to evoke "survivor guilt" (41) in its audiences, and a view of the genre of the Thingspiel (enormous open-air shows which plotted the resurrection of the country). The following chapter contains a detailed examination of Eberhard Wolfgang Möller's The Frankenburg Dice Game, which premiered at the Olympic Games in 1936, and examples of Nazi history plays which were promoted after the ban of much directly contemporary representation of the regime. Chapter 4 concentrates on the theatrical treatment of other nations, such as France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, which had disputed regions in which Germans lived. Among the surprises here are the dramas advocating Franco-German reconciliation. In chapter 5 racism comes under scrutiny. Of particular interest are the Deutsche Afrika-Schau, a mixture of colonial exhibition and traveling circus which ran from 1936 to 1940, and the fact that some Nazi dramatists showed sympathy for non-Aryan peoples. Strobl has written a valuable section on the Nazis' difficulties in curbing existing Christian theater and an account of the Third Reich's dramatic propaganda against Catholicism (chapter 6). At times, audience hostility to such material succeeded in a Nazi retreat. Apart from an important aside on amateur theater, chapter 7 deals with the regulations affecting theater during Hitler's regime and is intended to demonstrate the chaos resulting from competing Nazi factions. Local Gauleiters sometimes banned plays officially promoted from Berlin. The last two chapters cover theater and propaganda (chapter 8) and the relationship of members of the profession with the Nazi hierarchy (chapter 9). Strobl sees many middle-class audiences as clinging to notions of entertainment divorced from politics, but also notes that "the more sophisticated Nazis regarded theatre as a safety valve" (190). In a coda, there are wonderful descriptions of the problems caused during the Second World War and the heroic efforts of performers to continue their work. The archival research in this book is unprecedented and reveals many fascinating vignettes hitherto unknown. There are copious details on plays submitted to the Propaganda Ministry for potential production. Among those in the Thingspiel genre, we are treated to some titles: Let There Be Light, The Crusade Against [End Page 525] Poverty, and The Scandal of Inflation (60). We learn of a twenty-year-old laborer who tried to write an allegorical play about the Führer; a fourteen-year-old girl who had penned a play in the hope of earning enough to buy Christmas presents for her family (for there would otherwise be nothing to unwrap); and a woman from the Sudetenland who apologized for sending a typed letter with her play (a drama to thank Hitler for the deliverance of her countrymen), because she had dislocated her right shoulder by waving at the man himself in a surging crowd the...

The Marriage of Bhāvanā and King Best: A Sixteenth-Century South Indian Theory of Imagination

In sixteenth-century South India, the notion of the imagination was strongly thematized as perhaps the defining aspect of the human mind. We examine one striking example, an allegorical play called the Bhāvanā-puruṣottama (“The Marriage of Imagination and King Best”) by Ratnakheta Srinivasa Dīkṣita. Here we see a king searching frantically for his own imagination, the young woman Bhāvanā with whom he is in love, while she, for her part, is absorbed in the uneven and rather frustrating processes of imagining him. The two lovers could be said mutually to determine one another’s existence. On the other hand, imagination, for this poet, is not a matter of discovering something new but of perceiving something that is already there and, by perceiving it, enhancing or intensifying its presence and its activity. At the same time, the imagination focuses on singularities, however elusive: in this period, the general faculty of imagination has become a highly personal matter.

Quoting Baseball: The Intellectual Take on Our National Pastime

F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed that baseball was "a game played by idiots for morons."1 In this paper I will examine the views of the intelligentsia—erudite, "cultured," but nonbaseball individuals, including prominent artists, historians, scientists, statesmen, educators, philosophers, humorists, novelists—as they interpret what baseball is all about. We all know about Twain's observation of the "drive and push and rush" of baseball in the "raging" nineteenth century, and Longfellow's rage for "ball, ball, ball" that can rid Bowdoin students of their "torpitude," and Whitman's "hurrah game" that fills our lungs with oxygen.2 But Whitman also had his reservations. In a discussion with his friend Tom Harned in 1889, Whitman asked: "Is it the rule that the fellow who pitches the ball aims to pitch it in such a way the batter cannot hit it? Gives it a twist—what not—so it slides off, or won't be struck fairly?" On Tom's affirmative Whitman denounced the custom roundly: "The wolf, the snake, the cur, the sneak, all seem entered into the modern sportsman—though I ought not to say that, for the snake is snake because he is born so, and man the snake for other reasons, it may be said."3 This is reminiscent of Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard, on why he wished to drop baseball as a college sport: "Well, this year I'm told the team did well because one pitcher had a fine curve ball. I understand that a curve ball is thrown with a deliberate attempt to deceive. Surely this is not an ability we should want to foster at Harvard."4 "It is impossible to understand America without a thorough knowledge of baseball." No, that's not Jacques Barzun, but artist Saul Steinberg, who wrote: "Baseball is an allegorical play about America, a poetic, complex, and subtle play of courage, fear, good luck, mistakes, patience about fate, and sober self-esteem."5 [Begin Page 82] "Anyone who does not understand the game cannot hope to understand the country." No, again not Barzun, but George Grella, University of Rochester English professor, who wrote: "In its theory and practice baseball embodies some of the central preoccupations of that cultural fantasy we like to think of as the American Dream."6 This is what Barzun should have written: "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind and greed and selfishness of America had better learn baseball."7 What cultured American wrote the following? I've gotten so disgusted with baseball, I don't follow it anymore. I just see the headlines and turn my head away in shame from what we have done with our most interesting game and best, healthiest pastime.... The commercialization is beyond anything that was ever thought of.... Other things are similarly commercialized and out of proportion. But for baseball, which is so intimately connected with the nation's spirit and tradition, it's a disaster. Answer: Jacques Barzun.8 And back to President Eliot in the 1880s: "I think baseball is a wretched game.... I call it one of the worst games, although I know it is called the American national game."9 Gore Vidal's father, Gene, a pioneer aviator: "Baseball is the favorite American sport because it's so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it."10 Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt's daughter: "Father and all of us regarded baseball as a mollycoddle game. Tennis, football, lacrosse, boxing, polo, yes: they are violent which appealed to us. But baseball? Father wouldn't watch it, not even at Harvard."11 Journalist and humorist Kin Hubbard: "Knowin' all about baseball is just about as profitable as bein' a good whittler."12 Television critic Marshall McLuhan: "Baseball will always remain a symbol of the era of the hot mommas, jazz babies... and the fast buck."13 Vannevar...

L'allégorie théâtrale au début du XVIe siècle: le cas des pièces «profanes» de Marguerite de Navarre

In the sixteenth century, allegory was old, but allegorical drama was relatively new. This is both a hermeneutical and a stylistic phenomenon that has not yet led to re-consideration of Marguerite de Navarre’s “secular” plays. These works are generally considered atypical, in the sense that she uses outdated “medieval” dramatic forms in order to formulate new contents. But this is only partially true, as our study of the context of Le Mallade shows, because these forms were neither “old” nor “medieval.” Marguerite was engaged, in her own way, in the general adventure of theatrical allegory, and the separation of form and content is a critical fallacy. This article also argues that the combined form and content of Marguerite’s plays might have been determined by the situations in which they were represented.

Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet: The Sacred and the Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony. Sylvia Huot

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsAllegorical Play in the Old French Motet: The Sacred and the Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony. Sylvia HuotLawrence EarpLawrence Earp Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 98, Number 1Aug., 2000 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/492912 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 2000 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet. The Sacred and the Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony

The motet began as a form of sacred vocal music in several parts; a cantus firmus or tenor, drawn from sacred Latin chant, served as a foundation for one or more upper voices. The French motet was a well-established form by the middle of the thirteenth century, as were bilingual motets that combined at least one French and one Latin text among the upper voices. Though some attention is paid to melodic structure and the relationship between text and music, this book focuses on the literary artistry of the texts of French and bilingual motets, notably the special feature of motets that distinguished them from other medieval lyric forms: the phenomenon of polytextuality. The author analyzes both the interaction of the texts within a motet (when there is more than one texted voice) and the relationship between the texted voice(s) and the tenor. Although some French motets employ vernacular refrains as tenors, the vast majority use Latin tenors, thus maintaining an explicit tie to the liturgical origins of the genre. This presence of sacred and profane elements within a single motet presents an interpretive dilemma that the author suggests can be resolved through an allegorical or parodic reading; indeed, she argues that the tension between allegory and parody is an essential feature of the French motet. The book examines the creative juxtaposition of sacred tenors and vernacular lyric motifs, and the resulting interplay of allegorical and parodic meanings, focusing in particular on the female persona as object of desire and as desiring subject, and on the motives of the separation and reunion of lovers. The author's analysis also discusses the links between the French motet and the secular lyric, the allegorization of love poetry in sermons and mystical texts, sacred parody, and the playful use of liturgical and biblical citations in erotic poetry.

The Entrance of Beatrice in Dante's <em>Purgatorio</em>: Revelation, Duality and Identity

The Entrance of Beatrice in Dante's Purgatorio: Revelation, Duality and Identity In Cantos XXIX and XXX of his Purgatorio, Dante-poet sets up and then presents what has generally been considered to be the climax of his Divina commedia: Dante-pilgrim's long-awaited reunion with Beatrice. Of course the entire poem, from Canto I of the Inferno, has been in a sense a set-up leading to this moment, but in these cantos Dante, like any good showman, steps up and concentrates the sense of anticipation and of revelation, pushing them to the highest levels seen thus far in the poem. Canto XXIX presents us with a pageant, a processionai masque, to use Dorothy Sayers' characterization (303), a sort of heavenly medieval sacra rappresentazione; yet this functions as a prologue, a ritual preparation or warm up act to the main event of Dante's meeting with Beatrice in Canto XXX, rather like the lavish ritualized processionai that precedes a bullfight. Fascinating as this procession is, with its neh visual symbolism and complex allegorical elements, I have chosen in this essay to focus on the first part of Canto XXX, the actual entrance of Beatrice, and Dante's initial contact with her: it is the moment in the poem when Dante's personal drama is suddenly and With its finally unveiled. direct appeal to the emotions and led us its dramatic effectiveness, it reveals elements of a modem first profane drama in Dante in contrast to the sacred allegorical drama which has up to it. Using this passage (approximately the half of Canto XXX) I hope to investigate, with the help of a variety of commentators, how Dante's unique manipulations of language and poetic structure express the idea of transformation and the underlying theme of duality, which are so fiindamental to this moment in the Commedia. Within this context I also wish to discuss the meaning of seeing or vision for Dante, as well as the issues of identity and personalization, issues which are cruciai not only to this passage but to the entire poem. The idea of Dante-pilgrim's transition in this part of the Commedia from a to a universal physical to a spiritual perception of his world (also seen as a transition from the realm of the rational to the realm of faith, or from a personal orientation) has been discussed by several commentators. Francis Fergusson

The Play of Allegory in the Autos Sacramentales of Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-1781) was one of the most brilliant (although largely unheralded) writers in the history of European allegory. This work examines the playwright's allegorical drama as well as his theory of allegory. Calderon's allegorical drama consists of over 70 so-called autos sacramentales. The auto was a one-act drama, usually in the form of personification allegory, that was intended for performance at the festivities held annually in connection with the Feast of Corpus Christi in celebration of the Eucharist. Calderon was the most popularly successful dramatist of the genre, and scholars almost universally consider him to be the most artistically sophisticated and inventive of auto playwrights. Unlike other theoreticians of allegory, Calderon left no sustained piece of writing on his chosen subject. What he did leave, however, was discussion of allegory scattered throughout the autos: the dramas' personified characters pause frequently in the very midst of the action to speak learnedly about the definitions, nature, and importance of allegory. By analyzing and synthesizing these remarks, Barbara E.Kurtz reconstructs Caldeon's theory of allegory. This volume should prove invaluable to scholars of Spanish literature and to students of allegory in general.

The Politics of Rhetoric: The 1561 Antwerp Landjuweel

In 1561, the leading chamber of rhetoric of Antwerp, De Violieren, hosted a Landjuweel, or regional festival of drama, processions, tableaux, and poetry, for thirteen other larger chambers of Brabant, followed immediately by a Haechspel, a similar but less elaborate festival for four smaller chambers.1 These events were both festivals and competitions, and there had been a series of six of them in various towns of the region at seven-year intervals between 1515 and 1541. De Violieren had been the winning chamber on the last occasion that is to say, they had won the prize in the most prestigious category, the Spel van Sinne, or allegorical play on a set theme and it was therefore by convention their responsibility to organize the next such event. The unsettled circumstances in the country had caused a gap of twenty years rather than seven, but this Landjuweel when it eventually took place was on a scale that had not been seen before and was not to be seen again. In this paper I examine the introductory and closing material provided by the host chamber, De Violieren, which attempts to set the tone for the occasion and to provide the presentations with a moral, political, literary, and even economic context, in which Rhetoric is the key figure. Two of these framing pieces are explicitly associated in the printed volume of texts with the name of Willem Van Haecht, the factor or designated writer of De Violieren (in theory, all the members of a chamber were expected to write in one genre or another, and preferably in several, but in practice by this time, at least, the public productions of most chambers tended to be scripted by one or more recognized specialists); it is very probable that the rest of De Violieren' s introductory and concluding material on this occasion was also written by Van Haecht, who edited the commemorative 1562 volume of texts.2

Orrery and the London stage: A loyalist's contribution to restoration allegorical drama

(1990). Orrery and the London stage: A loyalist's contribution to restoration allegorical drama. Studia Neophilologica: Vol. 62, No. 1, pp. 43-59.

Calderon de la Barca at the Tercentenary: Comparative Views

A New Generation of Calderon Critics, 1981 Calderon's Conception of the Comedia Calderon, the German Idealist Philosophers, and the Question of Christian Tragedy Liturgical and Allegorical Drama:The Uniqueness of Calderon's Auto Sacramental Calderon and Shakespeare: The Romances The Spanish Priest and the Mexican Nun: Two Views of Love and Honor On Love and the Human Condition: A Prolegomenon to Calderon's Mythological Plays The Return of Astraea: An Astral-Imperial Myth in Calderon's La vida es sueno Euripides and Calderon The Second Self: Painting and Sculpture in the Plays of Calderon

Dramatic Allegory, or, Exploring the Moral Play

Dramatic Allegory, or, Exploring the Moral Play Joanne Spencer Kantrowitz Most current writing on the morality play can be classified as products of two approaches developed during the early twen­ tieth century. While the work of the last fifteen years or so does reflect the critical categories developed since 1945 and, more recently, the mythic emphasis of Northrop Frye, the basic con­ ceptions still derive from the work of E. N. S. Thompson and Willard Famham. Thompson presents his categories in terms of motif or subject, an approach which easily dovetails into the creation of archetypes; Famham’s perception of a rise-fall-rise pattern extends a view of drama which has dominated the twenti­ eth century until fairly recently.1 Although these approaches linger on, recent scholarship shows some signs of other descriptions of the morality play.2 My own preliminary attempt, here, centers on a view of that genre as dramatic allegory. I coin the term to emphasize simi­ larities between the narrative and the theatrical which are two manifestations of allegorical art. While this essay is hardly a final statement, I see the morality play as not basically mimetic at all. Rather, it is a didactic, allegorical drama whose character lies in the exposition of a thesis. This thesis determines the selec­ tion, the ordering, and the emphasis of plot and character. While “morality play” is itself a cloudy term, I use it roughly as a vague description of the didactic drama which occurs in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries until that surprising change of emphasis took place in the latter’s closing decades.3 As an at­ tempt to reconstruct an aesthetic from the sources of the period itself, my approach emphasizes literary history. My inductive description is structural analysis, based on narrative and dramatic allegory during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; however, the 68 Joanne Spencer Kantrowitz 69 final section sketches a way to test these conclusions against the evidence of contemporary rhetoric. But before new formulations are developed, we should dis­ entangle ourselves from the hypotheses of the past. Because the morality play is usually studied as background for Elizabethan drama, current scholarship still refers back to authorities who sought the origins of the characterization and mimetic plot de­ veloped by Elizabethan playwrights. (This evolutionary ap­ proach was the literary analogy to Darwin’s origin of the species.) The central idea to emerge from these studies is the “psychomachia principle,” an idea which is adopted by Lewis in The Allegory of Love and by the current authorities on the morality play, Bernard Spivack and David Bevington. Since the idea has reached the point of mere repetition, we should examine one of its earliest statements, that oft-cited monograph, E. N. S. Thompson’s “The English Moral Play,” published in 1910.4 According to Thompson, Prudentius is the “father of the morality play” because “he established [in the Psychomachia] . . . the idea upon which all those plays were based.” Despite the difference between drama and narrative poem, and despite the substitution of the “realism of everyday life for the romance of the outworn epic,” the plays were “in spirit and in general plan . . . only a retelling of the fourth-century allegorical epic” (p. 333). Thompson rests his generalization on an analysis of The Castle of Perseverance as a psychomachia, a battle of vir­ tues and vices for the soul of man. Thus we have “the full-scope morality play,” a definition based on four extant texts (the Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, Wisdom, and Everyman), a fragment (Pride of Life), and passing references to lost Pater Noster plays.5 Thompson’s argument depends on assumptions which may be overlooked once a view becomes authoritative. Obviously, the definition generalizes only over the Macro Moralities. He treats the early Tudor drama after 1500 as a series of departures from his basic model. Such classification derives from the medieval-renaissance division of English history, a view which rightly is less authoritative today.6 Aside from this, other as­ sumptions cling to Thompson’s essay and continue to clog re­ cent discussion. Approaching the Castle of Perseverance, Thomp­ son cautions the reader, one “should remember that its author 70 Comparative Drama...

The Theme And Structural Significance Of Leonid Andreev's The Black Masks

No MAJOR WORK OF Andreev has provoked less comment than his allegorical drama The Black Masks. This is particularly surprising in view of the great importance which he himself attached to it. He wrote to the critic A. Evlakhov in 1916: "For me personally 'The Black Masks' is the most important of my works; it is the closest to me and psychically the dearest (despite its many formal defects)." Although he is referring here primarily to its theme, a greater impression was made by the structural and formal peculiarities of the play when it appeared in St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1908 in the seventh of the Sipovnik ("Wildbriar") almanacs. Whilst most theatre-goers, according to the contemporary critic Kozlovskij, were discouraged by the complexity of the work from even attempting to understand the thought expressed in it, many theoreticians of the "new theatre" were intrigued by Andreev's manner of treatment. It is maintained by the present writer that the source of this interest was due recognition of the fact that Andreev had attempted in the play to put into practice certain theoretical principles which were the subject of keen debate in theatrical circles at the time. But before this aspect of the play's significance can be discussed, it is necessary to establish briefly what Andreev was trying to depict in the play; the "what" must precede the "how."

New Allusions to a Game at Chesse

It is well known that the performance in August, 1624 of Thomas Middleton's allegorical play A Game at Chesse, dealing with the Spanish marriage, caused a furore in London theatrical circles, and that the king (then on a progress), learning of it through the Spanish ambassador, ordered its suppression. No attempt, however, has been made to collect the references which this public satire would naturally occasion in the news-letters and private correspondence of the day. Of the allusions given below from these sources, five (nos. 1, 5, 8, 13, 14) have not been noticed before by students of the drama and two (nos. 3, 7), although previously known, are given accurately for the first time. Nos. 2, 6, 9-12, although they have already been correctly printed, are here summarized (within brackets) for the convenience of the reader and included in the series, in proper chronological sequence.