Dramatic Character Research Articles

Theatre and the Novel from Behn to Fielding by Anne F. Widmayer

Reviewed by: Theatre and the Novel from Behn to Fielding by Anne F. Widmayer Emily Hodgson Anderson Anne F. Widmayer. Theatre and the Novel from Behn to Fielding. Oxford: Oxford, 2015. Pp. xii + 263. £60/ €71/ $75 (paper). "I am, in reality, the Founder of a new Province of Writing," the narrator of Tom Jones asserts, "so I am at liberty to make what Laws I please therein. And these Laws, my Readers, whom I consider as my Subjects, are bound to believe in and to obey." So begins one of the classic, and classically innovative, novels written in the English language. But how innovative is Fielding's novel, really? As Ms. Widmayer compellingly reveals in her book on the relationship of the eighteenth-century novel to the stage, the technique that Fielding here models, of interrupting the flow of narrative to address his reader from, as it were, center stage, was one with deep roots in a theatrical tradition. Central to Ms. Widmayer's argument on conventions shared between stage and page is the concept of "parabasis," or, as defined by the OED, the name of an interlude in ancient Greek comedy, in which the main action is paused while the chorus addresses the audience directly through song. This technique of interruption, itself "a constitutive feature of dramatic literature in Restoration and eighteenth-century Britain," would become a key component of nondramatic prose for authors like Fielding, and it provides the foundation for Ms. Widmayer's investigations into the mutually constitutive effects of the novel on the stage, and the stage on the novel. Her interesting conclusion about these effects is that, in the eighteenth century, "literary works' artificiality is something we are aware of nearly all the time." This is an especially provocative assertion for the literary-historical period said to usher in what Ian Watt termed the rise of "formal realism" [End Page 167] in novels. Thanks to her readings, however, we are encouraged to see "reality as a writerly construct," and formal realism in novels as itself a dramatic technique. Ms. Widmayer pursues this argument through four case studies, authors from the Restoration to the middle of the eighteenth century who wrote both novels and plays: Behn, Manley, Congreve, and Fielding. Self-consciousness is not the only dramatic technique shared between novels and plays that she explores; while my personal interests pulled me toward the sections of her book invested in the evolving representations of verisimilitude in fiction and on the stage, Ms. Widmayer also specifically works to understand how both novelistic and dramatic characters are set up to act "within a three-dimensional space." She charts parallels, in other words, between how these authors set their dramatic characters in spatial relation to one other versus how they do the same (or perhaps do not) for their narrative creations. So, for example, in her chapter on Behn, she contends that scenes in Behn's nondramatic prose novella Oroonoko demonstrate Behn's craft as a playwright when they incorporate specific directions about characters' spatial relationships to each other. This emphasis on placement in turn supports the self-consciousness of the novelistic protagonists, who are aware in this ostensibly nonspectacular genre that they are always on view. For Oroonoko, such self-consciousness in turn underlines his racial otherness; it becomes a way of reinforcing his peripheral status. It also, however, activates a meta-fictional effect for readers similar to that experienced by audience members at the playhouse, who were conditioned to look for the actor behind the character they see being portrayed. Or, as Ms. Widmayer states, "Behn's use of parabasic techniques in her prose reveals the extent to which prose characters are fashioned to similarly give the reading audience a hint of a 'real' person behind the façade of fiction." Such a "hint" is perpetuated in her next case study of Manley, best known for her roman à clef approach to fiction, and an author who likewise emphasizes the voyeuristic qualities of novelistic scenes to trouble the line between what is real (and for Manley, Ms. Widmayer asserts, the idea of the authentic is most often paired with emotion) and feigned. For Congreve, by...

Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity by Nichole E. Miller

Religion & Literature 192 tion of the human-made commonalities between theatrical and religious narrative, masques, and musical deceptions is rather a cause for cautious celebration” (189). Her reading of The Winter’s Tale, in which she suggests that the potentially deceptive qualities of music are the same qualities that allow it to function as a means of healing, is particularly persuasive. Staging Harmony is admirable both in its historical scope and its meticulous attention to detail. The readings of the individual plays are impressively nuanced. Brokaw is particularly sensitive to the ways in which parody can prove unstable, particularly when music is involved. She frequently reminds the reader that even a mocking send-up of the liturgy, for instance, may recall to some listeners the moving power of the original. Throughout, Brokaw draws on previous scholarship and a wide range of historical materials to cast new light on how early modern audiences might have responded to musical performance in the theater. This book will be of particular value to readers interested in the drama, music, and religious controversies of the 16th century. Erin Minear William & Mary Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity Nichole E. Miller Northwestern University Press, 2014. x + 245 pp. $79.95 cloth, $34.95 paperback. Nichole E. Miller’s Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity is an important recent contribution to a now well-established body of scholarship that stages encounters between early modern drama and twentieth-century political, and especially politico-theological, thought. Moderns including Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Kantorowicz themselves turned to early modern texts to articulate genealogies of their own historical moment and of the problem of political theology, understood variously as an inherent religious dimension of political authority, as a historical and conceptual crisis that arises when theological legitimation of political power no longer appears convincing, or, more broadly, as the analogies, exchanges, and oppositions that at once bind together and pull apart religious and political life. In part as a result of their unorthodox theses and in part because they often seemed to subordinate textual commentary BOOK REVIEWS 193 to argumentation of a different kind, to larger claims about modernity as such, works like Schmitt’s Political Theology, Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies have long occupied some middle ground between early modern studies, on the one hand, and theory, on the other. In recent years, however, early modernists such as Julia Reinhard Lupton, Victoria Kahn, Christopher Pye and others have in different ways reclaimed them for their field. As Miller points out, such efforts are always most successful when they seek out and attend to the “productive excess” (3) of encounters between early modern and modern texts: if reading Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of modern politico-theological thought allows us to arrive at unexpected insights about the plays, then early modern texts in turn throw new light on modern thought, illuminating aspects of political theology that the latter may have distorted or left out. Miller’s book identifies one such zone of partial exclusion: she is concerned with “exceptional,”—that is, extra-political—life, with dramatic characters “suspended outside or above what Aristotle defines as the essentially ‘political’ form of life as that of a man among men, a citizen among citizens” (3). According to Aristotle, life apart from political community is either less or more than human, either the life of a beast or that of a god. It belongs either to the outcast who is stripped of citizenship or to the sovereign who transcends the state. Exceptional or bare life is of course already important in Benjamin and later becomes central in Giorgio Agamben’s work. Jacques Derrida, too, engages the Aristotelian distinction between forms of exceptional life, arguing that it ultimately threatens to collapse: the sovereign is always also bestial, and the beast is always also sovereign. According to Derrida, efforts to maintain the distinction between the two rely not least on hierarchies of sexual difference, that is, on figuring the sovereign as masculine and the bestial as feminine. Miller follows this line of thought, aiming in this...

Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play by Michael Y. Bennett

Reviewed by: Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play by Michael Y. Bennett David Krasner ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE WORLD OF THE PLAY. By Michael Y. Bennett. Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies series. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017; pp. 156. In Michael Bennett's thoughtful book, analytic philosophy and dramatic performance share a balancing act between data and potentiality. In the case of analytic philosophy, as explained by Bertrand Russell's landmark essay "On Denoting," logic, mathematics, and epistemology emphasize "knowledge about" and "acquaintance about"—that is, unambiguous (definite data) and ambiguous (indefinite potentiality) knowledge. Definite knowledge employs empiricism (something happens, leading to general knowledge about); indefinite (or subjunctive) knowledge employs logic (something might, should, or could happen, providing an acquaintance about). In theatre the oscillation between definite and indefinite knowledge, or between reality and possibility, coincides with Coleridge's famous maxim, "willing suspension of disbelief." Productions depend on audiences' "willingness" to accept theatre's situated-ness between reality and modality (possibility). Bennett asserts that "fictional entities … exist analogously to 'possible worlds'" (7). The book's fundamental claim is that possible worlds enable theatrical productions to present "the world of the play [through] the developed idea of 're-creation'" (9). Among Bennett's salient points is that theatre is, or should be, a laboratory for analytic philosophers to examine language, reality, and the imagination; theatre also provides a vehicle for considering distinctions among what is, might be, ought to be, and, for theatre, could be "re-created." He confects the various threads of theatre and analytic philosophy, whereby possible worlds initiate theatrical productions. For Bennett, "the world of play is a 're-creation' of our world" (2; emphasis in original). It is neither a reflection, copy, imitation, nor mirror of nature, nor is it a metaphysical abstraction divorced from reality; rather, theatre is a fungible operation recreating modalities of possible worlds. Modal logic, for Bennett, straddles the lines among necessity, reality, and possibility, sharing with fiction (literature or drama) constructs analogous to possible worlds. Theatrical re-creation, then, is what Bennett describes as a "messy" interface between fiction and reality in which a dramatic character has a "dual existence on the page and stage" (10). Characters share characteristics of reality, but reside onstage in their subjunctive sphere of possibility. The book is structured in two parts: part 1 "outlines the problems" of comparing analytic philosophy with theatre, then "develops the (proposed) solutions"; part 2 "applies the proposed solutions" to numerous examples (18). This structure enables the author to proceed systematically from problems inherent in his comparison between analytic philosophy and theatre, to its usefulness in practical terms. In the first part Bennett describes theatrical characters as "dialectical-synecdochic objects," encompassing an "entire range of re-creation" (31; emphasis in original). Dialectical-synecdochic objects exist "as a 're-creation' of our world, through a particular combination of synecdochic elements, which are actually existing subjects and predicates" (38). An actor (might, could, would) proceed according to possibilities (predicates); audiences observe productions through the dialectic process of deciphering reality (what is) and possible worlds (what might be). Audiences compare what is given in the world and what is presented onstage, with reality and possibility existing simultaneously through the imagination. This theory implicitly privileges director-producer over author-writer, because directors can recreate the production-performance as the urcreation of a play. Bennett is sensitive to dramatic texts, but eventually comes down on the side of the director, and by extension the actor, because both are able to create a wide range of interpretive and spontaneous choices (possible worlds). The actor and director are, in a sense, creating possibilities of the character: the actor, guided by the director, embodies the role not merely as a surrogate, or simulacrum, of reality, but rather as a re-creator of various possible worlds, since the role has been and will likely be inhabited by many actors over time, with each performer re-creating the role anew, and by extension creating new and possible worlds. Part 2 examines theatre not as a momentary presence, but as a "past subjunctive," conceptually providing "an accurate description of the temporality of theatre both in the dramatic text and in...

Where Character Is King

This article studies ‘King and Country: Shakespeare’s Great Cycle of Kings’, the RSC’s recent four-play Henriad directed by Gregory Doran and performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in April 2016. In keeping with Doran’s directorial style, the cycle was conspicuously lean on concept, offering few moments of design-driven staging and instead spotlighting character and ensemble acting. The cycle thus presents an opportunity for exploring some of the claims of character criticism, which has recently made something of a comeback in Shakespeare studies. Combining the perspectives of performance theorists, theatre practitioners and literary scholars, character criticism describes dramatic character as a phenomenon constituted through the cooperation of text and body. Thinking about Doran’s Henriad in these terms not only highlights the achievements and flaws of ‘King and Country’ but discloses Shakespeare’s diverse mechanisms for constructing theatrical kings.

From Iván Hevesy’s Aesthetics and Dramaturgy of the Film Play (1925), Part 2: The Structure and Image Construction of the Film Play

From Iván Hevesy’s Aesthetics and Dramaturgy of the Film Play (1925), Part 2: The Structure and Image Construction of the Film Play Ágnes Matuska and András Szekfü Translated by Melinda Szalóky The Structure of the Film Play The far-reaching differences and deep-seated similarities that can be observed between the film play and the theater play, as well as between the film play and the novel, are derived purely from the technical character of film. It is the technical necessities and the technical possibilities that determine the conception and inner form of the film play. All of these technical factors follow from the fundamental essence of film. This fundamental essence is reproduction: it gives the film play a story and a reality without being limited by the unity of space and time as happens in the theater play. However, this reproductive nature determines not only the aesthetic form and inner dramatic character of the film play; it determines its entire buildup and the minutest detail of its dramatic direction as well. The task of film direction can be divided into two components, from both a theoretical and a practical perspective. The first component is the method of composing the sequence of shots, which is the dramatic structuring of the film play per se, while the other one is the creation of the individual shots, in other words, of the elements of the structure. These two are equally important factors of the film play, and it is difficult to tell which would more obstruct the development of its full dramatic effect: well-composed shots connected in an uncinematic, dragged-out manner or dramatically unfolding but misconceived shots. The conditions for a full dramatic effect in the case of the cinema are completely new, since the whole concept of the scene is given an entirely different meaning in the film play, compared to the theater play. In a theater play, the milieu and the décor change infrequently, most often only at the end of each act, which means that, from the point of view of the direction, it is not the changes of the décor that segment the play. In the theater, the cohesive element is the scene, which is played out with the same characters, since every time a character enters or exits a new scene begins. In film, the milieu, be it natural or a décor, can change countless times. It is because of this, and also because of technical reasons, that the work unit of the director, the scene, is not keyed to the changes of the number of characters but to the changes of milieu. In the film play, a scene, or “shot,” lasts as long as the action evolves in the same milieu or, to put it more precisely, as long as the position of the camera is unchanged. This is because even if the old milieu remains, we get a new shot, a new image, every time the camera changes place, or changes angle, in order to show only a part of the same milieu or to broaden it in some direction, closing up [End Page 61] on a detail or on a face. This segmentation according to shots follows naturally from the technique of the film and from its dramatic expressive possibilities. Film does not give us reality but a reproduction of it, and thus, the point of departure of primary importance for it is not reality but the setup and the point of view that it occupies vis-à-vis reality. Theater drama has a very wide and very broad staging frame in each act. It needs these wide spaces because it has only a few such frames: the entire plot needs to evolve in four or five such wide scenes.24 On the contrary, the film play, making use of its reproductive agility and its unlimited possibilities to change scenes, always tends to narrow down the scene space as opposed to those of the theater. The film play does this simply to guide the attention of the spectators to the most important dramatic moment. At this point, we encounter a phenomenon that again marks the superiority...

Anthropology of acting as an exploration of personal experience: The process of creating the dramatic character

У раду је изведена анализа односа глуме као мимезиса и глуме као експресије.Извођачке уметности су се до XX века ослањале на извођење као мимезис, односно напраксу која опонаша и производи (пре)обликован садржај спољашњег света.Миметичка глума ослањала се на интерпретацију лика и унапред задату изражајност,која је од глумца створила интерпретатора. Глумачка дициплина у другој половиниXX века темељи се на експресивном уметничком поступку. За разлику од глуме каомимезиса, експресивна глума испитује биолошко и културолошко понашање човека уконкретној ситуацији: глумац постаје креатор позоришне ситуације. Референтиоквири процеса извођења у театру се, са позиције спољашњег и идеалног умиметичком извођењу, померају ка унутрашњем, иманентном, експресивномкреирању драмског лика и драмских ситуација, које се реализују у самом тренуткуизвођења. Позоришна антропологија, користећи експресивни стил глуме као објекатсвог истраживања, проучава понашање човека у оквиру позоришних закона и услова.На овој линији експеримената и испитивања природе извођачке уметности настајетеатар лабораторија Гротовског и антрополошки театар Барбе. На основу њиховихистраживања у раду су анализирани и постављени могући процеси трагања задрамским ликом. Као основни елементи процеса на формирању драмског ликапостављају се: прекорачење, артифицијелност, стање транса, тело извођача, сценскибиос, однос са публиком и рефлексивна рационализација уметничког чина. Кључне речи: глума, позориште, извођачке уметности, позоришна антропологија,глума као експресија, глума као мимезис, драмски лик, театарска лабораторија

Reading Dramatic Character Through Dramatis Personae in Early Modern Printed Drama

Early modern character lists, frequently overlooked but vital paratexts, have a manifest ability to shape readers' understandings of the plot and characters. This article traces their origins from performance-oriented guides in Tudor interludes, through the para-textual scarcity of playbooks associated with the emergence of professional theaters in the 1580s and 1590s, to their reinvention as maps of fictional social spaces in Stuart and Restoration drama. It argues that, far from being mechanical lists, dramatis personae offered authors a space to revisit their characters and in this bear evidence of authorial self-reflection; furthermore, it evaluates lists provided by stationers as early editorial responses to the dramatic texts. The trends promoted by authors and stationers, however, did not go uncontested by readers who readily appropriated character lists to better suit their needs. Considering the influence of these agents, the article examines the evolution of character lists in the context of publishing and theatrical enterprises, as well as that of turbulent social changes in the seventeenth century.

СУБСТИТУЦИЯ КАК СРЕДСТВО СВЯЗНОСТИ В ДРАМАТИЧЕСКОМ ТЕКСТЕ

Within the framework of the article research attention is focused on substitution as a frequency means of grammatical cohesion of a dramatic text. The paper emphasizes the problem of the types of substitution that are observed in dialogues of dramatic texts, their role in ensuring the cohesion of such texts. The drama “Pygmalion” by B. Shaw is chosen as the factual material of the study. The dialogues of the drama characters, according to the author’s observations, are characterized by semantic transparency and syntactic simplicity, and therefore the researcher (and the reader) has the opportunity to identify easily substitution models and their text-forming functions.

A CENA PERTURBADA: PERSONAGENS DRAMÁTICAS FEMININAS DE GERVÁSIO LOBATO E GUIOMAR TORRESÃO

O artigo recupera três personagens dramáticas femininas pertencentes a duas peças originais: D. Leonor Gonçalves da comédia em um ato A burguesa, da pena de Gervásio Lobato (1850-1895), de 1882 e D. Christiana e D. Gabriela de Educação Moderna, comédia em três atos, escrita por Guiomar Torresão em 1891. Para tanto, faz-se necessária uma breve incursão na história da educação feminina em Portugal no século XIX e o entendimento do papel reservado às mulheres na sociedade coeva.

The principiums of theatre imagological studies in Ivan Franko works: To the historiography of Polish-Ukrainian relations

For the first time in Ukrainian theatre studies the question of usage of imagological instrumentar­ium for researching history of international, in particular, Polish-Ukrainian art relations is raised. The first ex­plorations using imagological elements was found in theatre heritage of Ivan Franko. Using the example of Ivan Franko article on the history of «vertep» drama (Ukrainian Christmas plays) the first facts were discovered of the usage of ethnoimagological approaches in the process of national theatre studies formation. In particular, Ivan Franko’s approaches to the display of specific features of different national characters in vertep drama were analyzed. Firstly, the image of Cossack was anazyled and considered by the author as the first steps to the enthic stage image study of the Ukrainian in the foreign language theatre space. The complexity of methodological instrumentarium of the scholar is researched as a synthesis of source studies, genealogical and comparative studies with separate aspects of imagology.

Reconfigurations of the classical hero in the digital age: Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network and Steve Jobs.

The movies The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010) and Steve Jobs (Danny Boyle, 2015) are biographies of two outstanding figures in the digital revolution: the young multimillionaire Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook co-founder and CEO, and the famous co-founder and executive chairman of Apple, Steve Jobs. Written by the renowned screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, what these two movies have in common is that they present different orders or layers of meaning, allowing us to see beyond the life of the protagonists in the interpretation. Sorkin, in both stories, delves deeply into the psychological characteristics of the geniuses. In addition, in both cases, he creates a dramatic character, which can be identified with archetypes and familiar figures from western narrative, the tragic hero and the narcissist. But additionally, he shows these characters as icons of our times and through them presents a reflection on nowadays and the impact the digital revolution has had in the last few decades.

The Analysis of the prototype of cable TV drama characters: "Good Wife" and "Secret Forest"

The Analysis of the prototype of cable TV drama characters: "Good Wife" and "Secret Forest"

The Status of Historical Characters in Drama: Ontological, Aesthetic, and Verisimilar

Usando as representações de Niels Bohr e Werner Heisenberg em Frayn's Copenhagen como pedra de toque, o artigo explora o status ontológico de personagens históricos em drama. Ele argumenta que os personagens de ficção, baseados ou não em indivíduos históricos, habitam um reino de ficção e podem, por uma série de razões, divergir consideravelmente de seus homólogos do mundo real.

“Mark the music”: Shakespearean female characters in contemporary rock music

Through an investigation grounded on the theoretical and methodological guidelines provided by women's studies and reader response theories, this contribution aims to consider the ways in which Shakespeare's female characters are used and reshaped in the lyrics of rock songs written in English by male singer-songwriters, between the 1960s and the 1990s. Given the amplitude of the topic and the ungraspable nature of such fields as popular culture and pop-Shakespeare, the author does not (and cannot) aim to be exhaustive, but rather addresses the issue by selecting four characters, Juliet, Ophelia, Cordelia, and Lady Macbeth, whose musical alter egos will be analysed by the close reading of a selection of songs written and sung by rock singer-songwriters chosen for their representativeness and their popularity. The analysis will try and answer the following questions: which aspects of the dramatic characters are highlighted or, on the contrary, omitted in the songs? What is the function of this musical use of Shakespeare's work? Through their musical identity, do these female characters reinforce or undermine the socio-cultural and psychological oppression of women characteristic of a patriarchal culture? What can the role of these musical offshoots play in the study of Shakespeare's reception?

‘The principal character’: the triad approach and improvisation in teaching

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on a teaching case, Rona, a student in the educational dance-theatre programme that adopted improvisational teaching to deal with her lack of self-confidence. This lack had denied her feeling free and teaching without inhibitions in the classroom. Rona found a way to release her lack of self-confidence by spontaneously acting the ‘character’ of a funny and assertive ‘principal’ for ensuring a flowing dialogue with the pupils without disturbances to the planned procedure of the lesson. I analyse the Rona’s case through Shifra Schonmann’s triadic approach for teacher training, based on the theatrical perception which differentiates between a dramatic character, a social role and a performer’s personality and the through the directions of improvisational teaching.

The Holocaust in Slovak Drama

The article discusses several Slovak plays with the theme of the Holocaust; namely Ticho (Silence) by Juraj Váh, Holokaust (Holocaust) by Viliam Klimáček, and Rabínka (The Woman Rabbi) by Anna Grusková. It also briefly refers to Návrat do života (Return to Life) and Antigona a tí druhí (Antigone and Those Others) by Peter Karvaš, both mediating traumas from concentration camps. Two plays (Ticho and Návrat do života) were written and staged immediately after the Second World War. Karvaš’s Antigona is a rare occurrence of the theme in Slovak drama during the Communism (in the early 1960s), whereas Klimáček’s and Grusková’s plays are recent, both staged in 2012. The article focuses on several aspects of these five plays: on dramatic characters representing “victims”, “witnesses” and “culprits” (Panas, quoted in Gawliński 2007: 19); on references about and/or representation of the Holocaust in dramatic texts; and on the type of the conflict(s) in the plays. It also mentions specific approaches of respective authors when dealing with the theme of the Holocaust, as well as with the relevance of their reflection of the theme for Slovak society in respective periods.

Plato’s perspectivism

This paper defends a ‘perspectivist’ reading of Plato’s dialogues. According to this reading, each dialogue presents a particular and limited perspective on the truth, conditioned by the specific context, aim and characters, where this perspective, not claiming to represent the whole truth on a topic, is not incompatible with the possibly very different perspectives found in other dialogues nor, on the other hand, can be subordinated or assimilated to one of these other perspectives. This model is contrasted to the other models that have been proposed, i.e., Unitarianism, Developmentalism, and ‘Prolepticism’, and is shown to address and overcome the limitations of each. One major advantage of ‘perspectivism’ against the other interpretative models is that, unlike them, it can do full justice to the literary and dramatic character of the dialogues without falling into the opposite extreme of turning them into literary games with no positive philosophical content. To say that Plato’s dialogues are ‘perspectivist’ is not to say that they contain no ‘doctrines’ on the soul, for example, but, on the contrary, to stress the plurality of doctrines, with the observation that each is true within the limits of the argumentative function it is introduced to serve and of the specific dialogical context.

ПРОБЛЕМАТИКА МЕТОДУ ФІЗИЧНИХ ДІЙ К. С. СТАНІСЛАВСЬКОГО В КОНТЕКСТІ СУЧАСНОГО ТЕАТРАЛЬНОГО ПРОЦЕСУ

Мета роботи. Дослідити проблематику «Методу фізичних дій» (МФД) К. Станіславського в контексті сучасного театрального процесу та визначити психологічні механізми активізації сценічних почуттів актора-образу. Методологія дослідження передбачає застосування структурно-функціонального, дедуктивно-гіпотетичного методу, що дозволяє аналізувати структурні елементи, принципи МФД і формулювати власні гіпотези. Наукова новизна дослідження полягає в тому, що вперше досліджена проблематика МФД К. С. Станіславського на основі психології творчості й визначені психофізичні механізми активації сценічних почуттів актора на шляху до створення сценічного образу. Висновки. К. С. Станіславський заснував МФД на принципі єдності фізичного й психічного існування актора на сцені та експериментально розвивав його в театральній педагогіці. Наразі окремі теоретичні засади «методу» переосмислюються практиками театру, і він розвивається в межах «Методу дієвого аналізу» та «Етюдного методу». Сучасний театральний процес збагачується науковими концепціями, які визначають продуктивні механізми активації сценічних почуттів актора на шляху до створення сценічного образу.

The under-diagnosed green-eyed monster: Otello syndrome and how to manage it

Otello syndrome derives its name from Shakespeare's drama (character) and, clinically, describes a person with delusions of the partner's infidelity. A variety of other psychopathology may present: obsessive-compulsive features, alcohol dependency, voyeurism, sadism, possessiveness and domineering, hyper-sexuality, paranoid attitude, abuse of different nature, violent behaviour, including, occasionally, homicide. Yet, in the author's opinion, the syndrome, unless it presents itself as obviously absurd, is frequently missed.Management is rather difficult and does not always result in recovery but, if not treated with neuroleptics, it would render any other means of treatment useless. The condition could pose a diagnostic challenge. Moreover, it also poses an ethical dilemma whether to warn the spouse of the psychotic condition of the partner, the poor prognosis and possible implications of its existence. Moreover, the long-term partners of such patients frequently present with the symptoms of dependency, submissiveness or even masochism.The paper discusses the abovementioned issues, including the likely psychodynamics, biological background, historical and social elements and possible effective management.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.

“The Stamp of Martius”: Commoditized Character and the Technology of Theatrical Impression inCoriolanus

“The Stamp of Martius”: Commoditized Character and the Technology of Theatrical Impression in<i>Coriolanus</i>