Classical Drama Research Articles

Moral Taint in Classic Greek Drama

Au-dela de l'interpretation moralisante du theâtre grec, l'A. defend la these selon laquelle l'Oedipe de Sophocle fait l'experience non seulement du sentiment de culpabilite, mais aussi de la honte et du regret, qui sont trois emotions morales importantes. A travers la metaphore de la souillure morale, l'A. montre que la honte et le regret jouent un role plus important dans le jugement moral que ne le reconnaissent les moralistes contemporains.

Burmese Nights: the Pagoda Festival Pwe in the Age of Hollywood's ‘Titanic’

The Burmese zat pwe, an exuberant variety show involving almost every kind of performing art, has fascinated foreign visitors to Myanmar for the past hundred years. It continues today as a vibrant amalgam of singing, dancing, acting, and comic improvisation, still performed annually at pagoda festivals. As Burmese scholars have noted, the Burmese performer is primarily a singer and dancer rather than a dramatic actor, and therefore tends to use plays as frameworks for demonstrating virtuosity in these areas. This is reinforced by the training given at the two State Schools of Music and Dance, and while the Drama Department at the University of Culture does acquaint students with dramatic acting, the emphasis remains on music and dance. Moreover, the scripted drama, especially the classical drama, which reached a peak in the mid-nineteenth century, is increasingly omitted from the pwe programme, having gradually been displaced by the pop music that is considered necessary to attract young audiences. Despite such changes, which alarm traditionalists, the pwe performance has shown a resilient flexibility to adapt to audience preferences and remains a lively highlight at the festivals. Catherine Diamond – who has previously written for NTQ on Vietnamese and Turkish theatre, and on oriental approaches to classical tragedy – is a dancer and drama professor who is currently directing for the Thalie Theatre, the only English-language theatre in Taiwan.

Professional Links: Active and Interactive Approaches to Poetry, Drama, and Classics

Discusses six books that offer beginning and veteran teachers classroom-tested ideas to help students read and write poetry and other literature, and interact with each other as they strive to understand and appreciate classic drama and novels. Notes four websites that are good sites for teaching poetry.

Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today

Reviewed by: Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today James F. English Richard Todd. Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today. London: Bloomsbury, 1996. xii + 340 pp. Considering how enormous the book-prize industry has become, how ubiquitous its rhetoric of competition, achievement, and reward, scholarly literature on the topic is surprisingly slim. There is no basic history of the modern literary prize that traces its emergence at the turn of this century from such earlier phenomena as classical drama prizes, university poetry and essay prizes, laureateships, royal society medals, [End Page 529] and state prizes. There is no sociology of the book prize that attempts to situate the prize as a particular form of symbolic capital, or a particular instrument of exchange, within the contemporary economy of literary reward and esteem. And there are virtually no studies of individual prizes that do more than recount anecdotally the most amusing or scandalous moments in a prize’s history or blandly summarize the careers and relative merits of the prizewinners. In general, scholars have turned their attention to literary prizes only when their interest in a particular writer has led them to do so: Poundians have produced much commentary on Pound’s Bollingen Prize, Sartre scholars have detailed Sartre’s refusal of the Nobel, and so on. The proposition that book prizes are more than a nuisance and a folly, that they are in and of themselves a worthy object of academic study, has scarcely been creditable among serious literary critics and historians. In this respect, Richard Todd’s Consuming Fictions makes a definite contribution. Focused specifically on Britain’s Booker Prize for Fiction and on some of the novels and novelists that have effectively defined the field of contenders for that prize over the past two decades, Consuming Fictions is the first study I have seen that sets out to understand the powerful and complex role such prizes have come to play in our culture. And rather than taking for granted, as most of the Booker’s many detractors are inclined to do, that this role must be a destructive one, that prizes have served primarily to further the encroachment of commercial logic onto the literary field and the consequent dilution or degradation of literary value, Todd argues for their essential beneficence. The combination of forces that has “spawned the growth of those prizes, enhanc[ing] their power,” he remarks in his introduction, has also “enhanced our culture.” This thesis, as I will discuss in a moment, is not very firmly anchored in the particulars of the book, which include new and valuable insights into the changing relationships between what Todd calls “the mechanics of commerce” and “the formation of a particular kind of literary canon.” Though the Booker is his central concern, Todd makes clear that the tremendous success of this prize—the dominant place it now holds on Britain’s literary calendar, the great hoopla of publicity that surrounds it, the phenomenal sales boost it can represent, and the many imitators, or “baby bookers,” it has spawned—can only be understood in the context of larger shifts in both the economic [End Page 530] and the symbolic markets for culture, shifts of which it is both a cause and an effect. His first three chapters, which not only provide the most in-depth account yet published of the history and internal workings of the Booker Prize but also detail the growing role of the major chain booksellers in marketing “quality” fiction, the increased importance for British publishers of the American book market, and, more generally, the convergence in Britain of “bestsellerdom” and canonicity, can stand beside the work of John Sutherland as exemplary contributions to the sociology of British literature. Somewhat less valuable are the six chapters that follow, in which Todd offers a series of literary-critical readings of novels by the authors who have contended for Booker Prizes since the early 1980s. Todd’s intention here is to sketch out the contours of the “particular kind of literary canon” that the Booker has helped to produce, and he does succeed to an extent, though it must be said that some...

Shakespeare and Postmodern Production: An Introduction

This issue of Theatre Survey explores the condition of postmodern Shakespeare production, and by implication the situation of classic drama on the horizon of the contemporary stage. Working on this issue has been, for both of its coeditors, a surprising experience. Theatre Survey is a distinguished journal in the field of theatre history and historiography, and with this issue we intended to press the journal's agenda toward the history and theory of contemporary culture, generating a series of articles on radical, revisionist, and alternative ways of putting “the ‘classics’ into play.” Because we understand this enterprise—from the Kathakali King Lear to Robert Wilson's When We Dead Awaken to Heiner Müller's Medeamaterial to Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet—to stand in a strategic relation to modernity, we were calling the issue “Performance: Modern and Postmodern.”

Critical Approaches to Goethe's Classical Dramas: "Iphigenie," "Torquato Tasso," and "Die natürliche Tochter"

Critical Approaches to Goethe's Classical Dramas: "Iphigenie," "Torquato Tasso," and "Die natürliche Tochter"

Acting in the Private Theatre of the Ming Dynasty

The performing arts of Chinese classical theatre reached their maturity during the Ming dynasty when the private theatre presented some of the most sophisticated acting available. This article examines the singing, dancing, and role playing of private actors and the functions of literati troupe owners in managing their companies. Based on original historical records rather than scholarly reports, this study views its subject from the perspective of ancient theatregoers. It also makes available for the first time English translations of many Mingperiod theatre commentaries. Grant Shen, who teaches Asian theatre at the National University of Singapore, directed thefirst English-language production of a Yuan zaju play in the classical style (1995). Employing methods of the Ming literati in his direction, he found them useful in today's public performance of classical drama. Professor Shen holds his doctorate from the University of Hawai'i.

Reviews : Critical Approaches to Goethe's Classical Dramas. 'Iphigenie', 'Torquato Tasso', and 'Die natürliche Tochter'. By Irmgard Wagner. (Literary Criticism in Perspective) Columbia SC: Camden House, 1995. (Distributed by Boydell & Brewer, Woodbridge.) Pp. 233. £37.50. Essays on Goethe. By Stuart Atkins. With a Bibliography of the Publications of Stuart Atkins, edited by Jane K. Brown and Thomas P. Saine.

Reviews : Critical Approaches to Goethe's Classical Dramas. 'Iphigenie', 'Torquato Tasso', and 'Die natürliche Tochter'. By Irmgard Wagner. (Literary Criticism in Perspective) Columbia SC: Camden House, 1995. (Distributed by Boydell & Brewer, Woodbridge.) Pp. 233. £37.50. Essays on Goethe. By Stuart Atkins. With a Bibliography of the Publications of Stuart Atkins, edited by Jane K. Brown and Thomas P. Saine.

French Classical Drama and the Tension of Utterance: Racine, Moliere, and Madame de Saint-Balmon

Journal Article FRENCH CLASSICAL DRAMA AND THE TENSION OF UTTERANCE: RACINE, MOLIÈRE, AND MADAME DE SAINT-BALMON Get access MICHAEL HAWCROFT MICHAEL HAWCROFT KEBLE COLLEGEOXFORD Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume LI, Issue 4, October 1997, Pages 395–411, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/LI.4.395 Published: 01 October 1997

Handel's Hercules and Its Semiosis

Modern scholarship is almost unanimous in its praise of Handel's English musicodramatic anomaly Hercules. While there may be no consensus regarding its genre-it has been deemed a secular oratorio (Herbage), a classical drama (Dean, Staged), a choral opera (Hicks and Abraham), an English opera (Charles Jennens, quoted in Abraham), and a mythological oratorio (Larsen)-It has been called 'the highest peak of late baroque music drama' (Paul Henry Lang), 'perhaps Handel's greatest achievement' (Pruniares), and 'the culmination of the Handelian musical drama, and indeed one might say of the whole musical theatre before Gluck' (Romain Rolland).l Along with this praise, collected by Winton Dean in 1959, came Dean's lament that Hercules was then so seldom heard and his suggestion that the culprit was, in the England of the late 1950s, the oratorio tradition: The most popular London revivals are least conspicuous for accuracy, good taste, and artistic sensitivity.2 Although Hercules is surely better known and better performed today than it was before 1959, have yet to come to grips with the fact that Hercules' dismal failure dates back to the composer's lifetime, not just to the nineteenth century. As Ruth Smith has stated in an appraisal of modern criticism of Handel's English oratorios as a whole, we have not discovered why our estimate is often contrary to that of Handel's audience.3

The Lake of Seduction: Body, Acting, and Voice in Helene Cixous's Portrait de Dora

In Portrait de Dora (1976), Helene Cixous explores the possibility of feminine theater by rewriting Freud 's Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria for stage performance. Anticipating her Nom d' Oedipe (1978), Portrait takes as a pretext the myth of Oedipus, which underlies Freud's analysis of the case history, as central to both psychoanalysis and classical drama. Indeed, Portrait de Dora along with her Nom d' Oedipe are innovative attempts to define feminist performance by placing psychoanalysis and classical drama under the scrutiny of the theatrical. By locating Freud's case-history within theater,' Cixous underscores the theatricality of psychoanalytical discourse as the "talking cure," using voice, gestures, staging, ritual, and myth, in order to scrutinize the relationship between the semiotics of symptoms as the "acting out" of the hysteric body and the Symbolic order that authorizes its meaning. Moreover, as Sharon Willis observes, Cixous's Portrait puts into question the theatrical frame itself, and the body staged within it, thereby becoming "exemplary of the critical operations of certain feminist performance practice[s]." Cixous, who takes hysteria as a key to both feminine sexuality and performance, stages Freud's failure with Dora as a disfunctional dramatic operation by depicting his insistence on reading his paternal Oedipal model into Dora's hysteria as ineffective in regard to the real performative throbbing of the hysteric stage. By confronting thereupon the symbolic order of the Oedipal stage with the imaginary theater of pain and seduction that the hysteric's body displays, Cixous challenges the phallocratic origins and prejudices of both classical theater and psychoanalysis. Indeed, if, as Jacqueline Rose observes, Dora's case opens "a dialogue between psychoanalysis and feminism," then Cixous's Portrait not only places this dialogue within a theatrical space, it enlarges the dialogical frame by introducing also the question of the relationship between feminism and theater.

›Unübersetzbar‹, ›unspielbar‹…? Racines »Phädra« als Exempel

Beyond the French stage the 17th century’s French classical drama is mostly seen as a sort of exhibit of a historical theatre-museum, not as living theatre. The main argument preventing a current adaption of the French drama is the ›impossibility‹ of translation or even performance of these plays. Re-considering the historically founded definitions of theatre and drama this thesis is exemplarily reviewed in the historical view on the reception of Racines Phedre in the German theatral and dramatic concepts of the 18th and early 19th centuries (and in recent performances).

Tales of Two Cities: Common Good, Common Ground, and the Practice of History

In The Public City, Philip J. Ethington has advanced a deceptively simple thesis: that in 1850 San Francisco's public experience was characterized by a political construction of social life, but that by 1900 this fundamental understanding of society had been displaced by a social construction of political life. By means of this enormously powerful and delicately balanced equation, Ethington here challenges a working principle shared by generations of historians and sociologists: that political behavior is socially determined. The for his research and analysis is San Francisco's public sphere, a carefully delineated place of discourse which included the newspaper, the marketplace, and the site of deliberation in a restricted representative democracy. Mid-century San Francisco was a town born in violence, marked by exploitation, inhabited by many men, few women, and fewer families. Ethington suggests that because the city lacked a substantial private sphere, its public sphere may have taken on an exaggerated significance. He characterizes the city's political expression as romantic republicanism, steeped in the classical drama of public conflict between heroes and villains contesting vice and virtue, and employing theatrical rhetoric to marshall the efforts of all men in triumphant pursuit of an indivisible public good (p. 129). Ethington decodes the organized violence of duels and executions as allegories of manliness and vengeance on the political stage. He offers fresh examinations of the much-discussed Vigilance Committees, noting the rationalization of shocking violence through Ciceronian republican precedent, and

The Oxford book of classical verse in translation

Epic, homerica lyric and elegiac, archaic and classical drama hellenistic and later antique the republic Virgil, Horace, Ovid the later empire.

Des disciplines scolaires à la culture scolaire

Education not only transmits culture, it modifies culture as well. Our present day knowledge of classical Greek drama e.g., has been largely produced by educational selection and use during the Middle Ages.This article concentrates on the drastic reform of spelling education in French schools in 1833 and its effects on French culture. Until that time, only one third of French school teachers were able to spell correctly. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, however, orthography was among the basic subjects taught in primary and secondary education, hampering later attempts at educational modernization.Three major cultural effects of this educational reform are discussed. First, the orthography of the French language, constantly changing until that time, has remained very static ever since. Second, orthography, which until then only concerned printers and scribes, has become a hallmark of the well-educated person. Third, the problem of teaching students to spell correctly inspired French teachers t...

Ambiguity as Agent in Pushkin's and Shakespeare's Historical Tragedies

The question of Shakespeare's influence on Pushkin's work in the period beginning 1824-25 has often been examined in critical works on Pushkin. This influence has generally been construed as one of the decisive factors in Pushkin's poetic and personal maturation away from his early naive Byronism. At the same time, Pushkin found in Shakespeare a release from the outworn conventions of French classical drama that had until then provided the precepts for writers for the Russian stage. For Pushkin, two specific features of Shakespearean drama were congenial: the abandonment of the three classical unities in favor of the primacy of character in dramatic action, and generic mixtures of comedy and tragedy, poetry and prose.

Towards an Italian Theater: Rucellai's Oreste

It is generally acknowledged that tragedy made its way into Western culture through Italian Renaissance playwrights wishing to revive classical drama. To be sure, interest in the concept and function of tragedy was very much alive throughout the Middle Ages, as evinced in the writings of scholars such as Donatus, Isidore of Seville, St. Remigius, and Dante. However, ancient dramatic texts were known mainly in excerpts from various collections or in anecdotal form. Numerous Greek plays were available in the St. Mark library in Venice, but many of those works were translated primarily into Latin.1 The first collection of Seneca's tragedies appeared in the early fourteenth century and their discovery inspired several imitations by humanist authors eager to recover the genre. Typically, most imitators followed the Roman preference for dramatic reading over stage representation. By the early sixteenth century, however, as playwrights began to translate and imitate newly discovered plays, the revival shows a tendency also for performance. Interest was further spurred by the diffusion of Aristotle's Poetics which provided basic guidance and formal authority to writers willing to try their dramaturgical skills. But Aristotelian precepts, though of fundamental importance, were open to a wide range of interpretations and did not constitute, therefore, undisputed canons of dramatic theater. Playwrights were thus left with plenty of freedom in the composition of their works.

Shakuntala among the Olive Trees

Mirella Schino reports on a 1993 project run by European director Eugenio Barba, head of Denmark's Odin Teatret, in which thirty Western scholars, actors, and directors worked with Barba and Sanjukta Panigrahi, Indian Odissi dance artist, in a transcultural, communally oriented collaboration designed to explore ways of expressing the Sanskrit classical drama Shakuntala in performance. The work was done in three stages at Fara Sabina, Italy, and Holstebro, Denmark, under the auspices of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA), founded by Barba. Through ISTA, Barba is able to work on methods that differ from but cast light on his work at Odin Teatret.

Postmodern Theatric[k]s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama

Postmodern Theatric(k)s focuses on the voices that have emerged from American experimental theater of the 1960s, voices shaped by the culture of television, film, Pop Art, and rock music. Increasingly, these writers have brought a distinctly new approach to the use of monologue. Deborah Geis argues that in place of the psychological revelation of the Shakespearean soliloquy, these postmodern monologues play tricks by altering, suspending, or rupturing the narrative progress of a play. Character development through monologue is replaced by parody, theatricality, and con games. For some recent performance artists, the notion of character itself explodes, as monologue permits the performer to play at blurring the fictional and the autobiographical.The author begins by tracing the changing role of monologue from classical drama through the early modernists; she also pinpoints the connections between the off-Off- Broadway theater of the sixties and new uses of monologue. The focus then turns to several key American playwrights, including Sam Shepard and David Mamet. Geis shows how monologue, as a technique for giving voice to previously silenced speakers, has played a crucial role in works by feminist and African-American dramatists like Maria Irene Fornes and Ntozake Shange. The author closes with an examination of the works of Spalding Gray and Karen Finley, two performance artists whose monologues display unique efforts at boundary-crossing.As the first study of its kind on monologue in theatrical narrative and as a discussion of recent American playwrights from a comparative critical perspective, Postmodern Theatric(k)s will be of interest to specialists in dramatic theory and criticism, specialists in performance studies, and theater practitioners. The volume will also appeal to readers interested in literary theory, cultural studies, feminism, and performance art.Deborah Geis is Assistant Professor of English, Queens College, City University of New York.

Tragedy: Contradiction and Repression.

Drawing on philosophical and psychoanalytic methods of interpretation, Richard Kuhns explores modern transformations of an ancient poetic genre, tragedy. Recognition of the philosophical problems addressed in tragedy, and of their presence up through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophical texts, novels, and poetry, establishes a continuity between classical and modern enactments. Psychoanalytic theory in both its original formulations and post-Freud developments provides a means to enlarge upon and inform philosophical analyses that have dominated modern discussions. From Aeschylus' classic drama Persians to the hidden tragic themes in Merchant of Venice, from the aesthetic writings of Kant to Kleist's narrative Michael Kohlhaas, Kuhns traces the writing and rewriting of the themes of ancient tragedy through modern texts. A culture's concept of fate, Kuhns argues, evolves along with its concepts and forms of tragedy. Examining the deep philosophical concerns of tragedy, he shows how the genre has changed from loss and mourning to contradiction and repression. He sees the fact that tragedy went underground during the optimism of the Enlightenment as a repression that continues into the American consciousness. Turning to Melville's The Confidence Man as an example of Old World despair giving way to New World nihilism, Kuhns indicates how psychoanalytic understanding of tragedy provides a method of interpretation that illuminates the continuous tradition from the ancient to the modern world. study concludes with reflections on the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Each poet's celebration of the body, and the contribution of the senses to reason, perception, and poetic intuition, is seen as an embodiment of the modern tragic sensibility.