English Drama Research Articles

The Lost Plays of Ralph Sheldon (1623–1684)

Abstract This article traces the fate of an important group of early English plays in fifty-six volumes, collected by the Warwickshire antiquary Ralph Sheldon (1623-1684) and sold at a Christie’s country house sale at his home nearly a hundred years later. The sale itself in 1781 was an early example of the booksellers ‘ring’ and involved some of the major collectors of early English drama, notably David Garrick, Edmond Malone, and the Earl of Charlemont. The earlier portion of the Sheldon plays, recorded by Anthony Wood in a manuscript list, may have survived as part of the Malone bequest to the Bodleian Library. The Restoration Plays remained largely intact, in some thirty volumes, until the ill-fated sale of Lord Charlemont’s library by his descendants at Sotheby’s in 1865, discussed by Arthur and Janet Ing Freeman in The Library, VII, 23 (March 2022).

From Anatomical Theatres to the Stage: Ferdinand and Dissection in the Duchess of Malfi

Unlike our 21st-century approaches to the disciplines, science and art were inextricably intertwined during the Early Modern Period. Innovations in scientific knowledge were both propagated and critiqued through various literary forms. Operating within the intersection of science and literature, this essay examines John Webster’s 17th-century play, The Duchess of Malfi, as a vehicle for critiquing contemporary anatomical dissections. Building upon Daisy Murray’s Twins in Early Modern English Drama and Shakespeare, and Albert H. Tricomi’s “The Severed Hand in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi,” this essay highlights the ways in which Webster engages with the anatomical dissections of his time. “From Anatomical Theatres to the Stage” begins with an overview of the history of European anatomical theatres and moves into an analysis of twinship as a dissection at birth and its implications for the early modern reader. Then, it considers Ferdinand’s association to witchcraft and his embodiment of the early modern surgeon as a means to showcase the immoral nature of the performance of human dissection. Beyond its demonstration of Webster’s engagement with his contemporary science, this essay ultimately illustrates the inseparability of art and science.

SOME COMPARATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS IN THE HISTORICAL CHRONICLES OF SHAKESPEARE

This article examines some comparative constructions in the historical Chronicles of William Shakespeare. The study of the works of the great English playwright William Shakespeare mainly studied his creative activity or considered his comedies and tragedies (Karpova). Thus, it can be stated that Chronicles have remained out of the attention of researchers, in particular, the consideration of the genre in linguistic and stylistic coverage has remained the least studied. In this study, we consider comparative constructions as a means of imagery in Shakespeare’s Chronicles in comparison with the modern literary language of the 21st century. The study of comparative constructions in Chronicles made it possible to consider and identify differences in the language of the New England period and modern English of the early 21st century in qualitative and quantitative terms. The analysis carried out in the study of comparative constructions with the functional words like, as and than in the historical chronicles of Shakespeare and their comparison with modern literary texts allow us to make some generalizations about the evolution of the syntax of these constructions of the New English period and the change in the status of these functional words. Keywords: Historical Chronicles; comparative constructions; figurativeness; Shakespeare, contextual analysis, parallelism, literary, poetry.

Teaching English through Drama to Arab Learners

This paper accounts for teaching English to Arab learners through dramatic works to facilitate their learning of English as a foreign language (EFL). The study, based on a review of the relevant literature, proposes English drama as a gateway to teaching EFL to Arab learners. It advocates plays as a useful means for addressing the linguistic challenges that mainly relate to vocabulary, syntax, and figurative language. The study rationalizes selecting plays with themes relevant to Arab learners’ socio-cultural experiences and interests. A purposeful selection of plays helps in exploring universal themes and accepting cultural diversity, fostering a deeper understanding of other places and eras. In studying plays, learners engage with characters, dialogue, and emotions. Dramatic techniques, such as role-playing, scene analysis, and live performances encourage active participation and enhance comprehension and appreciation. Above all, comparing Western plays with learners’ literary traditions (e.g., Arabic poetry, folklore, or theatre) promotes critical thinking, cross-cultural awareness, and much more.

Образ Уильяма Шекспира в рассказе Э. Бёрджесса «Встреча в Вальядолиде»

The research aims to shed light on the image of William Shakespeare as presented in A. Burgess’s story “A Meeting in Valladolid”. The lack of scholarly attention to this work, which has never been explored in either Russian or foreign literary studies, contributes to the scientific novelty of both the research itself and its results. The article analyzes the key features of Shakespeare’s image within the context of Burgess’s concept of the creative personality. The paper also examines the role of other characters in the story to fully understand the main character. The research concludes that Burgess recreates and expands upon his concept of William Shakespeare in “A Meeting in Valladolid”. While Burgess’s typical portrayal of Shakespeare as a pragmatic Englishman and gifted writer is present, the story also highlights the humanist dimension of the English playwright. This is achieved through a contrast between the two literary geniuses of the Renaissance, William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes, and an exploration of the fundamental differences between Spanish and English cultures. These differences explain the clash between the two nations and their distinct cultural models, rooted in political, religious, and cultural conflicts between the nations.

More Than a Boarding House: Generation of Heterotopia in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party

One of the pioneering playwrights of postwar British drama, Harold Pinter is usually known for his plays’ absurd features and for his combination of elements like comedy and threat in an unprecedented way. Nevertheless, Pinter’s ingenuity cannot merely be confined to such a specific framework, and this paper explores a rather neglected main dramatic element in his most well-known and commonly-studied play The Birthday Party (1959). Taking Michel Foucault’s definition of heterotopia into consideration, this paper analyses the specific selection of a boarding house as the setting of the play and focuses on the spatial markers’ contribution to the ambiguity intentionally engendered by the playwright. Meanwhile, the status of the boarding house put under scrutiny reveals the perfectly heterotopic nature of the place. The boarding house in the play hosts a spectrum of contradictory places in its complicated constitution such as a delivery room, a hideout, a womb, and a playground. In this sense, the boarding house constitutes a catalyser which Pinter employs to further blur the relationships and the dialogue between the characters. This study, investigating all these heterotopic features in detail, once again marks the undeniable influence of the setting on the action and dialogue in a play. By putting an emphasis on the heterotopic features of the setting in The Birthday Party, it underlines the significance of the setting in denying the revelation of a unique and simple conclusion and promoting multiple ways of reading the play.

Investigating the Pragmatics of Swearing in Classic English Dramas

The current work aims at assessing pragmatic uses of swearing in the English classics that include She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith, Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, Macbeth by William Shakespeare, and Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. This paper adopts a quantitative method of analyzing the exact number of daily swearing occurrence, how swearing is used in these texts and the pragmatic functions of swearing. It is shown that swearing is primarily used for purposes of enriching the conflicts and the characters’ relations, with considerable differences in frequency across the works. As for the existential element, it is also heightened by the act of swearing in Doctor Faustus, while the element of emotion overwhelms the authority aspect in Macbeth. Thus, the research is relevant to the analysis of how profanity as rhetorical appeal is used to enrich the overall portrayal of the themes and the characters in classical works.

Exploring the Playwright’s Self-Representation in Tom Stoppard’s Dramatic Works

This article examines two masterpieces by the British playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard: the two-act play The Real Thing and the screenplay Shakespeare in Love. These works employ the author-as-character technique in disparate ways. This study will endeavor to demonstrate how the playwright interweaves artistic and realist elements, as well as the ways in which his intricate techniques of synthesis impact the written page and the theatrical stage.

Adaptation as cultural and medial transfer: George Tabori’s short story and radio play Weissmann und Rotgesicht

George Tabori (1914–2007), a Hungarian-born British playwright of Jewish decent, is closely associated with German Holocaust theatre. Less well-known is his prolific career in German radio drama. This contribution traces the trajectory of Tabori’s short story ‘Weissmann und Rotgesicht’ and its adaptation for German radio in 1978. The overall theme of its narrative can be identified as the issue of competing minoritized groups (Jews and Indigenous Americans), their respective identity politics and mechanisms of ‘othering’. My analysis first asks how the short story presents these questions, as it was written in a North American context primarily shaped by the popular cultural format of the western movie. Secondly, I ask how the topic is culturally and medially transferred to the radio play form, considering the production’s West German context of the late 1970s. My interest is guided by the question whether and how we can read this 1978 radio play as an intervention in the debate on the representation of the ‘Indian’ in popular German culture and its simultaneous erasure, several decades after the Holocaust, of the Jew.

IMAGES OF ARISTOCRATES AND COMMON PEOPLE IN THE TRAGEDIES OF BENJAMIN JOHNSON

The article describes the interpersonal relationships of various states of society of the «post-Shakespearean» era in the artistic work of the outstanding English playwright and actor Benjamin Johnson. Relying on sources and scientific literature, the author of the article tries to recreate the layer of everyday life in London at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, to reveal the problem of the «survival» of actors in the first stationary theater «Globus», their attempts to communicate with aristocrats, the attitude towards famous actors and directors in the English late Middle Ages society The central problem of the research is also the relationship between V. Shaksrip and A. Ferabosko, whose acting troupes shared the «stage» of the «Globus» theater. All these questions are most vividly revealed in Benjamin Johnson’s tragedy «Thrice Crossing the Thames», which was published after his death at the author’s request. The image of English society revealed through the thoughts and worldview of his contemporary is simply amazing. In the author’s opinion, it is also valuable that Benjamin Johnson personally knew V. Shakespeare and A. Ferabosko, the unforgettable young actress Catherine Loster. Research methodology. The content-comparative method, the method of modification of concepts and terms, generalizing and problem-searching methods to reproduce the realities of the era were used to write the article. Conclusion. we see that the place of man and the concept of «humanity» in the English dramaturgy of the «post-Shakespearean» era have changed significantly. In English art, more and more realistic «notes» are felt. Instead of “elevated” and “low” on the pages of books, «street life», «urban slums», relations between new states of society, new social morality come to the English stage. In order to fully feel the depth of these changes, it is worth discovering the realistic human images reproduced by contemporaries of the «post-Neckspearian» era, understanding the criteria of their morality and humanity from the point of view of the author of the dramatic work, who wrote at the crossroads of two great eras.

Rediscovering Bruegel: Art and History in Michael Frayn’s Headlong

British playwright and novelist Michael Frayn’s 1999 novel Headlong centers on an art historian’s discovery of the lost sixth painting from the collection Months or Seasons that Flemish painter, Pieter Bruegel is believed to have painted in 1565. Throughout the novel, driven by a quest to authenticate and possess the painting, the protagonist Martin Clay is engrossed in a thoughtful and thorough examination of Bruegel’s art renowned for busy tableaus of peasants, harvesters, hunters engaged in daily and rural activities. From religious conflicts, biblical conventions to allegorical landscapes, labors of the months within the framework of changing seasons, Bruegel’s artistic milieu has been interpreted and elicited in diverse and opposite ways. For that reason, Clay’s speculations about the political, intellectual and symbolic history behind the painting are not only the substance of the book, but the lengthy and diligent research he takes on also provides historical backdrop of the Netherlands in early sixteenth century, a time of atrocity and oppression as a result of Spanish rule. In view of that, this study aims to examine and understand how Martin’s journey turns into a headlong venture carrying thematic elements found in Bruegel’s works delving into the complexities of human behavior. Frayn not only brings the missing masterpiece to life with relevant descriptions projecting Bruegel’s idiosyncratic style and legacy, he also explicates its iconography-iconology in a political, and art historical context showing affinity with the narrative and artistic traditions of Dutch genre paintings.

‘A trouble to the whole house’: the Frankford's plague‐time home in Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness

AbstractCriticism in early modern English drama continues to expose the socio‐spatial anxieties generated by plague that shaped both plays and the playhouse space. What has not yet been considered in any detail, however, are the numerous public health measures born out of these anxieties that altered the lived experience of space during outbreaks. This article begins to address this lacuna by reading Thomas Heywood's domestic tragedy A Woman Killed with Kindness through the lens of contemporary plague prevention. Plague policy repurposed the home into a space that might not only contain the infected but, with competent governance, might also provide the first line of defence against infection. Woman Killed, a play that likely premiered in the wake of an outbreak, is vigorously alert to the dynamics of plague‐time domestic space and the onus placed on householders to cleanse and manage the home and its peripheries. This article examines how Heywood draws on plague prevention practices to introduce and remove ‘infectious’ sources to and from the Frankford home. Heywood utilizes the cultural immediacy of plague measures to expose and explore the dangers of female adultery that, like plague, threatened the integrity and autonomy of domestic space.

A Pragmatic Analysis of Conversational Implicatures in English Drama and their Role in Teaching Critical Literacy

This study aims to explore the role of conversational implicatures in English drama in developing students’ critical literacy. It identified conversational implicatures conveyed by characters of the selected drama texts, provided possible interpretations of the implicatures basing on Grice’s Cooperative Principle maxims, and critically analyzed the role of conversational implicatures in English drama in developing students’ critical literacy. The data were collected from the implicatures conveyed by the characters of two selected drama texts. These are ‘Family Abuse’ by Bernard Mersier and ‘The Edge’ by Paul Symonloe. Grice’s pragmatic theory of Cooperative Principle and its maxims were used to identify and interpret conversational implicatures in the selected drama texts. Forty-two (42) conversational implicatures were identified from these texts. These implicatures were categorized into types basing on the four conversational maxims, and each conversational implicature was taken as data. Using Grice’s interpretive model and the social context of the drama, what the characters implied by their utterances were explained together with the reasons for the implicatures. The Luke and Freebody’s four resources model of critical literacy was then used to study the role of conversational implicatures in English drama in developing students’ critical literacy. The study concluded that conversational implicatures in English drama develop students’ critical literacy by enabling them to study a drama text from a social angle and evaluate the social aspects that may have influenced the meaning of the characters ‘utterances. Therefore, it was suggested that drama texts should be used in language teaching and learning as they ease the teaching of conversational implicatures which can foster the development of students’ critical literacy.

دور الحكاية في مسرحية عشوائي للكاتبة ديبي تاكر جرين

Storytelling is a theatrical method employed by playwrights to delve into the profound aspects of a character's psyche. It allows characters to directly communicate with the audience serving multiple functions within the play. Moreover, this task can be executed by a protagonist or multiple characters, and occasionally even by actors who are not directly engaged in the play's action. Playwrights have employed this form in different periods throughout the history of drama. Debbie Tucker Green, A Black British playwright, employs the technique of storytelling in her play random to engage the audience in responding to street violence in London. The present paper aims to focus on this play, particularly on the act of storytelling, as the researcher observes that existing studies often discuss Tucker Green's plays solely within the context of her identity as a Black writer addressing issues within Black communities, neglecting to explore her unique stylistic approach. So, this study aims to fill in this gap. Tucker Green , unlike other Black playwrights, portrays traumatic experiences of loss and violence through her distinctive style of writing. By utilizing storytelling, she effectively depicts the feelings and thoughts of her characters, thus raising awareness among the audience about the vulnerability of Black citizens.

The Playhouse Effect: John Webster, Deixis and Story-Telling in the Theatres of Jacobean London

The recent (2014) inauguration of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, a reconstruction of an archetypal Jacobean indoor playhouse, on London’s Southbank, has led students and scholars of early modern theatre once again to focus attention on original playhouse performances, just as they did when its older sibling Shakespeare’s Globe opened its doors in 1996. The earlier assumption that the differences between open-air amphitheatres and indoor playhouses conditioned the way plays were written and acted is now enjoying a new lease on life, and yet there has been little research conducted in order to substantiate this otherwise perfectly logical intuition. Drawing on the insights of drama theorist Manfred Pfister as well as the linguistic concept of deixis, this article compares the language and plotting of three plays by the Jacobean playwright John Webster: The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi and The Devil’s Law Case. Each play was first staged under significantly different circumstances within the theatrical landscape of Jacobean London, which makes them a singularly illustrative case study of how an early modern English dramatist adapted his style in order to meet the demands of the city’s diverse performance conditions.

The national text of Hannah Cowley’s drama “A Day in Turkey; or the Russian slaves”

The paper analyzes the specificity of imagological representation in the play “A Day in Turkey; or The Russian Slaves” (1791) by Hannah Cowley, a prominent English 18 th -century playwright. We consider the literary and historical-political contexts and pretexts of Cowley’s drama in connection with the most outstanding geopolitical events of the last decade of the 18 th century (the Great French Revolution, the Russian-Turkish War of 1787-1791) and outline a number of plays, which belong to the “oriental text” of English drama. A peculiar feature of the play “A Day in Turkey; or The Russian Slaves” is the realization of imagological heteroglossia as well as the interaction of particular national representations in the framework of political and feminist discourse. This interaction is analyzed based on the national images of Russia, Turkey and France, regarding the genre strategies of the play. Special attention is paid to “the Russian text” of the drama marked by a positive evaluation of the national hetero-image and the absence of imagological aggressiveness, which is quite natural in the case of rival countries. Russian personages carry the main ideological load of the play, embodying the author’s humanistic message.

Parental Perspective on Their Children’s English Learning for Elementary Students through English Drama Performance

Children’s education required support from their learning contexts, both at school and at home. Teachers and principals provided instructions and guidance at school, while parents provided indispensable support to their children’s education. Their perception and insight related to their children’s education were critical to their success. This qualitative study aimed to discover parental perspectives on elementary school children’s English drama performance and how their perspective was paramount to the success of their children’s learning. This study involved 42 parents of elementary school students. Data was collected using a self-report questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. Data was analysed using Interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA). The results show that three co-related pillars were important to achieve learning objectives: students, teachers, and parents. To support their children, parents needed to respond and perceive how teachers educate their children. Collaboration between teachers and parents was indispensable. The findings suggest parental agreement that English drama performance improved their children’s English skills, despite the complication that came with the activities. In general, parents perceived English drama performance as an essential part of their children’s English skills development. The parental perspective helped English teachers set a better teaching technique to achieve the learning objectives, review, and consider the appropriate learning strategies for the following school year.

English Drama and the Fundamentals of Healthy Marriage

English Drama and the Fundamentals of Healthy Marriage

Political and Social Commentary in Contemporary English Drama: Angels in America by Tony Kushner, the History Boys by Alan Bennett and the Crucible by Arthur Miller

Political and Social Commentary in Contemporary English Drama: Angels in America by Tony Kushner, the History Boys by Alan Bennett and the Crucible by Arthur Miller

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’S DOCTOR FAUSTUS AS A MORALITY PLAY

Christopher Marlowe was the greatest of Shakespeare’s predecessors. He may be regarded as the true founder of English drama. Though he was born and brought up in very poor family.he was able to get good education