Dramatic Poetry Research Articles

In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production

In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production

Browning, Grief, and the Strangeness of Dramatic Verse

As a poet, Browning was preoccupied by the dead. Yet mourning the departed was rarely part of his purposes. His poetics privileged the notion of resurrection, yet he was intriguingly deaf to the implications of the trope. Most notably, Browning was uninterested in the grief that might be thought implicit in poetry which claimed to recall the dead yet dealt – of course – always with illusions. This essay considers the implications of that absent grief, and argues that Browning, through that absence, encouraged his readers, among other things, to feel the strangeness of imaginative experience created by dramatic verse.

The Arab ‘Cultural Awakening (Nahda)’, 1870–1950, and the classical traditiona)’, 1870–1950, and the classical tradition

The Classical Tradition is often studied from a Eurocentric point of view. The present article argues that the Arab world is as much heir to the legacy of Greece as the ‘West’. It does so by focusing on the reception of Classical Antiquity during the so-called Arabic ‘Cultural Awakening’ (Nahda), 1870–1950. It investigates more specifically 1) how Greek epic and dramatic poetry, which had not been part of the versions produced during the great translation movement in eighth- to tenth-century Baghdad, was rendered into Arabic; 2) how Greek drama inspired Arabic playwrights, with Taufīq al-Hakīm urging his fellow countrymen to engage with the Classical heritage; and 3) how the greatest Arab intellectual of the twentieth century Tāhā Husain, fought for Greek and Latin teaching in schools and university.

Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections of Romanticism (review)

Reviewed by: Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections of Romanticism Robert Morrison (bio) Joel Faflak and Julia Wright, eds. Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections of Romanticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), pp. viii+287, $50.00 cloth. This collection of 10 essays takes as its declared intention "the construction of nervousness as a figure through which Victorian writers represented their response to the Romantic in a variety of genres" (1). The volume is divided into three sections. "Nervous Containments" features essays on Thomas De Quincey's own collected edition of his Writings (1853–60), George Eliot's verse drama Armgart (1870-71), and Mrs. Julian Marshall's The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1889). "A Matter of Balance" surveys responses to Byron by John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle. "Hesitation and Inheritance" examines the editorial efforts and anxieties of Sara Coleridge, daughter of the poet. For the purposes of the volume, Romanticism is defined as in Goethe's famous formulation: "sickness." It "becomes, for Victorian writers, 'sentimentalism, – observe the editors, "Byronic egotism, radicalism, and sensationalism – a Romanticism with addictive properties and thus a pathology within the body politic that demands either curing or excision" (8). Kristen Guest explores the ways in which illness complicated Carlyle's articulation of a gospel of work and "influenced his attempts to rewrite the narrative of Romantic suffering by providing a metaphor for criticizing a consuming society that seemed to be destroying itself through the excellence of its digestion" (147). Joanne Wilkes compares the published text of Sara Coleridge's 1848 Quarterly review of Tennyson's The Princess to two extant manuscript versions in order to demonstrate how the Quarterly's editor J. G. Lockhart carefully excised the whole of Coleridge's insightful commentary on John Keats. Lockhart, a prime mover in the Blackwood's Magazine Cockney School assaults of 1818-19, was still nervous about Keats's insights and innovations, and even 30 years later did what he could to ensure that Keats was ignored by the Tory press. Donelle Ruwe analyzes Sara Coleridge as a critic who may well have been the first "to suggest that her father's anti-body version of the mind and the imagination was tied to his own inability to confront his bodily weakness and his opium addiction" (250), and as a nervous editor who attempted to control Biographia Literaria, the nervous text of her nervous father. Yet Romanticism often seems a far more complicated project than the essays in this volume allow. Certainly the Victorians bowdlerized, elided, ignored, and deferred their unease with Romanticism, as is amply testified by Matthew Arnold's notorious transformation of the radical Percy Shelley into a "beautiful and ineffectual angel." And certainly such assessments have a remarkable staying power, as Richard Holmes makes clear in the opening of his 1974 biography: "There will always be Shelley lovers, but [End Page 183] this book is not for them. The angel they seek can be found" elsewhere. But as one of the best essays in the present volume demonstrates, Victorian appropriations of Romanticism did not always generate unease. D. M. R. Bentley's "Nervous ReincarNations" explores how nineteenth-century Canadian poets such as Archibald Lampman imported and adapted the English Romantic legacy "for Canadian purposes with an absence of intertextual nervousness," and how Charles G. D. Roberts's "Ave" assimilated the figure of Shelley "without any sign of provincial nervousness or nationalistic truculence" (99, 109). Victorian ideologies are said to depend on a process of "excision, exclusion, and marginalization" as writers "reinvent their Romantic past," but these ideological impulses are slippery, mobile, and traveling both ways (16). Far from excising Byron, many Victorians embraced his gloom and excess as reworked by the Brontës and celebrated Romantic sickness, as in Arthur Symons's famous declaration that "The Decadence Movement" was "an interesting disease." In the Victorian period, "Romanticism was constituted as the Other of Victorian orthodoxy" (9), but such claims sit uneasily beside George Eliot's declaration that in reading Wordsworth she had "never before met with so many of my own feelings, expressed just as I could like," or Lampman's sense that Keats had "found a sort of faint reincarnation...

Whose rhyme is whose reason? Sound and sense in Cyrano de Bergerac

This article proposes a new interpretation of the relationship between poetic form and literary interpretation in Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, focusing on the special affordances of rhyme and meter in dramatic verse and on Rostand's virtuosic exploitation of poetic blending possibilities in Cyrano. I claim that poetic blends play a thematically essential role in this work, at a level far beyond their thematic contribution to most verse drama. Such a reading of Cyranomay thus help to expose general aspects of poetic blending which may be less visibly present in other texts. It also has consequences for our understanding of verbal humor and irony. In the final section of the article, I propose an extension of my analysis of metric and rhyming blends to the beginnings of a cognitive poetic treatment of intertextuality as blending.

Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections of Romanticism (review)

Reviewed by: Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections of Romanticism Kenneth Daley (bio) Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections of Romanticism, edited by Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright; pp. vii + 287. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004, $50.00. "Romanticism," explains the narrator of Middlemarch (1871–72), "which has helped to fill some dull blanks with love and knowledge, had not yet [c.1830] penetrated the times with its leaven and entered into everybody's food; it was fermenting still as a distinguishable vigorous enthusiasm in certain long-haired German artists at Rome, and the youth of other nations who worked or idled near them were sometimes caught in the spreading movement" (172). The most Romantic figure in George Eliot's novel, the young Will Ladislaw, himself an artist and friend of a Nazarene-like German painter, exemplifies specific attitudes the Victorians had come to associate with Romanticism: a cosmopolitan disregard of provincial mores; a rejection of worldly, material interests; a profound enthusiasm for political reform; a commitment to self-culture; and, above all, an oversized capacity for sympathy and emotional reaction. The ten essays in Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections of Romanticism, edited by Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright, focus on the Victorians' ambivalent response to their own constructions of Romanticism and the Romantic subject. Unlike their counterparts on the Continent, English writers of the first half of the nineteenth century never referred to their own contemporary literature as "Romantic," and the Schlegels' famous Classical-Romantic distinction, although well-known in England particularly after the 1813 publication in English of Madame de Stael's De L'Allemagne, never inspired the fierce debates that it did in Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. By the time Eliot published Middlemarch, however, she could count on her readers having some familiarity with the term. Most of the essays in Nervous Reactions address work produced in the years between the Regency and the early 1870s, during which "Romanticism" emerged in England as a provocative literary concept. [End Page 551] The editors propose that nervousness functions as a central trope in the Victorian negotiation of the Romantic subject, identified with excess and an overdeveloped nervous system. Taken together, the essays construct a continuum of nervous reactions to the threat of Romantic sensual anarchy. At one end, a sentimentalized, depoliticized Romanticism is made safe for appropriation; at the other, a dangerous, pathologized Romanticism requires resistance and rejection. As with most collections, individual essays fit more or less loosely within the overarching editorial framework. Grace Kehler's essay on Eliot's verse drama Armgart (1871) argues that Eliot turns to the tradition of the Romantic closet drama as an especially appropriate form to interrogate the possibilities and limits of women's agency, in this case the complex dilemmas of the professional female musician. This is one of my favorite essays in the collection: I am fascinated by Kehler's analysis, as a crucial intertextual frame for Eliot's drama, of eighteenth-century discourse on opera regarding the historical substitution of the prima donna for the castrato. But there is nothing especially nervous in any of this, for there is nothing sentimental or idealizing in Eliot's use of Romantic precursors as a means of challenging the restraints of Victorian gender roles. The editors characterize Eliot's reaction as a "positive nervous response to Romantic precedent" (14), but I have to confess that the import of the oxymoron is lost on me and strikes me as a bit precious. On the other hand, D. M. R. Bentley's essay on Archibald Lampman and the Confederation group of Canadian poets, who flourished between 1880 and 1897, neatly illustrates the Victorian appropriation of Romantic precursors made safe and soothing. In this case, John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley bequeath to their Canadian admirers a therapeutic program rooted in negative capability and a meditative encounter with nature, as well as an English poetic genealogy from which Canadian poets can assert continuity. The Victorian reinvention of Romantic lives is one of the recurrent subjects in the collection. Faflak analyzes Thomas De Quincey's obsessive revising of his autobiography, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), which culminated in the 1856 edition of Confessions...

The historical development and functional characteristics of composite predicates with Have and take in English

Composite predicates2 (abbreviated as CPs) are verbal structures comprising a verb such as give, make, have, take and a deverbal noun (e.g. give an answer, make a call, have a drink, take a guess)....

Ambiguous Difference: Ethical Concern in Byron's Manfred

The paper offers a reading of Manfred that demonstrates how the Byronic sublime challenges the aesthetic frame within which Romantic literature is generally conceived. The paper traces the movement from symbolic presentation to an extreme vision of sublime experience in offering a new reading of Byron's verse drama. The first part of the paper is concerned with how Manfred enacts an inner conflict underlying the emergence of the sublime in a manner that is irreducible to Kantian aesthetics. The second part of the paper deals with the issue of Manfred's unstable nature in comparative and autobiographical terms. A brief examination of key passages in Byron's 'Alpine Journal' suggests a reading of the verse drama that clarifies the author's opposition to a poetics of memory. The third part of the paper focuses on how the Byronic hero cannot be assimilated to well-known models of rational autonomy. The conclusion argues nonetheless that the Byronic sublime provides a paradoxical basis for appreciating the ethical concerns of romantic poetry.

Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide (review)

Wells, Stanley and Lena Cowen Orlin, eds. 2003. Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press. $24.95 se. 744 pp.Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide is aimed at the undergraduate Shakespeare classroom, probably in English rather than performance or film studies. It is fat and long with material, produced by a stellar group of scholars and teachers. In addition to the usual information about biography, the theatre, his society, and his audience included in introductions to Collected Works, the first section offers essays on the conventions of playwriting, changing attitudes towards religion, and ideas of order in early modern England. The second section has chapters on each of the major groupings, called genres here, of work, including all the dramatic forms and nondramatic poetry. Each of these essays offers a reading of a single play in light of the survey of the genre which precedes it. The next section introduces twelve critical approaches, again offering a set of sample readings. The last section is concerned with Shakespeare's Afterlife, and it contains essays on modern theatre, film, translation, and commemoration, among other topics.Few fields in contemporary English studies enjoy the quality and variety of scholarship that Shakespeare studies does. The authors here are among the best-known, and for good reason: their work is exemplary in all facets, from the precision and intelligence of their research to the eloquence and clarity of their exposition. All modern approaches to literary and cultural studies are represented here; no special interests dominate; younger and mature scholars share space in the volume. If one were looking for a summation of the present state of knowledge and interpretation of Shakespeare and his work, written for the undergraduate audience, one need look no further.The editors have done a commendable job of keeping the tone and level of the volume steady, while permitting the distinctive interests and expertise of individual scholars to be heard. In short, this volume is the best of its kind presently available.There are a couple of qualities of the volume, however, which will prevent its adoption in many courses. First, the size is prohibitive: it weighs in at three pounds and paired with the Norton Shakespeare (the cited collected works), the needle on my bathroom scale moves to seven pounds. It's too heavy to have students carry around from class to class with them and too long (744 pages) to get them to digest the material as supplements to the Shakespearean works they are studying. In an ideal world, I would like my students to know this book's contents, and I would like to be able to show them the richness, diversity, and excellence of our knowledge of and pleasure in works which this volume so wonderfully represents. Contrary to popular belief, however, we English professors have more contact with the real world than we would really like to have, and I would have little success in insisting that my students bring this book to class, and not much more in requiring them to read enough of it to make the purchase worthwhile. And practically speaking, the structure of the courses I teach (twelve week courses, divided chronologically at the year 1601, which effectively creates a generic divide between histories and comedies on the one side, tragedies and romances on the other) means that only a selection of the material would be relevant to my students in any one course, and probably not enough to warrant the expense of the book. There is simply too much material here for this Guide to be ordered for courses, although it will be a welcome addition to the resources available to students in the library.second, problems are inherent in the approach to the construction and transmission of knowledge this volume represents. Most of the content is delivered through telling, rather than showing, despite the prevalence of demonstrations. …

Teaching Golden Age Poetry: The Old and the New

Research Article| January 01 2005 Teaching Golden Age Poetry: The Old and the New Edward H. Friedman Edward H. Friedman Vanderbilt University Edward H. Friedman is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. He has published books that focus on Cervantes, the picaresque novel, and Spanish drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He currently is editor of the Bulletin of the Comediantes, and he is the immediate past president of the Cervantes Society of America. He is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the Fulbright Program. His latest study, entitled Cervantes in the Middle, looks at experimental Spanish novels from the mid-sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. edward.h.friedman@vanderbilt.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Calíope (2005) 11 (2): 59–68. https://doi.org/10.5325/caliope.11.2.0059 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Edward H. Friedman; Teaching Golden Age Poetry: The Old and the New. Calíope 1 January 2005; 11 (2): 59–68. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/caliope.11.2.0059 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressCalíope Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2005 The Pennsylvania State University2005The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Getting High on Verse Drama—Melodies, Antitheses and Quirks

Getting High on Verse Drama—Melodies, Antitheses and Quirks

The Knowledge of Shakespeare on the Continent at the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century

THE KNOWLEDGE OF SHAKESPEAEE ON THE CONTINENT AT THE BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. The question of continental interest in Shakespeare during the period immediately preceding the publication of Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques, was discussed, for Germany, by R. Gen?e in his valuable Shakespeare in Deutschland more than thirty years ago; for France more recently by J. J. Jusserand1. My object in the following notes is to add some facts to the evidence already collected, and to indicate the relations in which several of the items stand to their English sources and to each other. The earliest mention of the name Shakespeare in a book printed on the continent, is to be found in the Unterricht von der Teutschen Sprache und Poesie, published at Kiel in 1682 by the famous * Polyhistor/ Daniel Georg Morhof: ?et John Dryden fyxtgar tt>ofl aelafyrivortber Dramatica Poesi gefdjrieben.3)ie (Sttgeftanber bte cr fyterin atifufyrt, feinShakespeare, Fletcher, Beaumont, tjon weldjettid) nid)t$ gefetyen fyabe2. And in Adrien Baillet's Jugemens des Savans, printed at Paris in 168586 , the name Shakespeare appears for the first time in a French book, it being included in a list of the principal poets of the British islands3. But for both France and Germany the first knowledge of the English poet which went beyond the mere name, was drawn from Sir 1 B. Gente, Geschichteder Shakespeare* schen Dramen in Deutschland, Leipzig, 1870, and J. J. Jusserand, Shakespeare en France sous Vancien regime, Paris, 1898 (English translation, London, 1899), where referencesto other literature on the subject will be found. 2 In the chapter Von der Engelldnder Poeterey, p. 250 (the passage is quoted by A. Koberstein, Vermischte Aufsatze,Leipzig, 1858, pp. 163 ff.,and by Gente, p. 60). The name ' Shakespeare' also occurs in the summary of Morhofs chapter (p. 227) and in a quotation fromCamden's Remains(p. 232). In a subsequent chapter Vonden Schauspielen, Jonson and Milton are mentioned, not Shakespeare. Later editions of the Unterricht appeared in 1700 and 1718. 8 Jusserand, p. 141 (English translation, p. 176). On a still earlier ms. notice of Shakespeare in France, see p. 137 (170). [105] J. G. ROBERTSON 313 William Temple's widely-read Essay on Poetry. A French translation of this essay appeared in the (Euvres melees of Temple, published at Utrecht in 1693 and frequently in subsequent years. Here (p. 366) occurs the statement: ' Je ne suis point etonn6 de voir jetter des cris & repandre des larmes a beaucoup de Gens, lors qu'ils lisent certaines Tragedies de Sckake-spear.' Here, too, was to be read that claim for the superiority of the English dramatist to all others ancient or modern, in the quality of ' humeur,' Shakespeare having been the first to introduce it on the English stage. The second reference to Shakespeare in a book written by a German is based on Temple. It occurs in a tract, Vindiciae nominis Germanici} cojitra quosdam obtrectatores Gallos (Amsterdam, 1694), one of the many replies to the famous charge brought against the Germans by Bouhours, that they were deficient in ' esprit.' The tract takes the form of a letter by J. F. C. (i.e. J. F. Cramer1) to F. B. Carpzow. On p. 35 is to be found the following : Quantam autem poetices vernaculae facultatem habeant Angli, non ita pridem demonstravit Templeus Equcs...Sidnejum, Equitem Anglum, omnibus & Anglis & exteris Poetis, qui aut nostra aut major am nostrorum aetate ingenii laude praestiterunt , anteponere longo intervallo ; Spencerum comparare cum Petrarcha & Ronsardo? Shakespearium cum Molierio, in genere comico ; & in ludicra dictione, Joannem Minceum, Equitem, praoferre etiam Tasso & Scarroni, vir compluriuin linguarum & omiiium hujus generis elegantiarum callentissimus non dubitat2. In January, 1702, the Acta Eruditorum, that magnificent monu? ment of German learning, industry and cosmopolitan literary interests, had a little more information to offer on the subject of Shakespeare. In a review of Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poetry, the critic, in summarising the work, quotes (p. 38) the following passage, which could hardly have failed to impress the German mind: Tantis enini eum laudibus eftert,ut si non ingenio, certe arte superatum ab eo putet ipsum Shakespearium, qui ut eruditus minus fuit, ita ingenio modernos omnes Poetas & tantum non veteres quoque...

Alexander Smith and the Bisexual Poetics of A Life-Drama

In a sense, the binary restriction on culture postures as the precultural bisexuality that sunders into heterosexual familiarity through its advent into culture. From the start, however, the binary restriction on sexuality shows clearly that culture in no way postdates the bisexuality that it purports to repress: It constitutes the matrix of intelligibility through which primary bisexuality itself becomes thinkable. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble Our pulses beat together, and our beings Mixed like two voices in one perfect tune, And his the richest voice. Alexander Smith, A Life-Drama (1) MOST COMMENTATORS ON ALEXANDER SMITH'S A LIFE-DRAMA, FIRST PUBLISHED in biweekly installments in the Critic from March 1, 1852-January 15, 1853 before becoming the lead poem in Smith's debut volume of Poems (1853), (2) make two points: the poem seems to exist more for the sake of the images that constantly disrupt its narrative than for the story itself, and the narrative shifts from transgression to redemption when, abruptly, the poet Walter pledges himself at the end to union with the woman he formerly wronged and to go[ing] forth 'mong men .../... in the armour of a pure intent. / Great duties are before me and songs (Smith, p. 211). In other words, the poem culminates in chivalric masculinity and heterosexual union--compensatory assurance after earlier solecisms against form, taste, and moral decorum. Rarely do nineteenth-century reviewers or recent scholars direct attention to another feature of the text, the origin of Walter's love of image-making, and of his poetic vocation, in an intimate friendship with an unnamed male poet. His achievement of a poem, in contrast--publicly acknowledged work--is tied to a narrative of heterosexual transgression recuperated by heterosexual union. I want to suggest that the two most notable features of Smith's Life-Drama--its preoccupations with image-making and with erotic transgression--are founded on bisexual poetics, the embedding of male-male desire within an unconventional courtship narrative. I here use in the broadest sense to indicate a poet's implied principles. Bisexuality, I argue, is the medium through which Smith imagines the action or plot of his verse drama and also an authorizing principle that allows poet and poem (including its proliferating imagery) to emerge. Bisexuality, defined by its instability and unpredictable sequence of erotic objects, (3) is also associated with a distinctive world view. As Maria Pramaggiore observes, Bisexual epistemologies--ways of apprehending, organizing, and intervening in the world that refuse one-to-one correspondences between sex acts and identity, between erotic objects and sexualities, between identification and desire--acknowledge fluid desires and their continual construction and deconstruction of the desiring subject. (4) However conventionally the poem ends, the epistemology of A Life-Drama is bisexual in the terms Pramaggiore identifies. Indeed, the culmination of the closet drama's bisexual narrative in marriage and armored masculinity exemplifies Judith Butler's arguments about Freud's distinction between infantile bisexuality and subsequent ego development, a distinction that in Freud's work underwrites the interdependence of culture and gender binaries. In A Life-Drama, as in the scenario Butler identifies in her critique of Freud, (5) the very swerve into compulsory heterosexuality at the poem's end is the medium through which the poem's prior investment in bisexuality and bisexual poetics becomes legible. In this essay, accordingly, I trace the bisexual plot of the verse drama, its interweaving of same-sex desire with heterosexual romance, of effeminate men with assertively desiring women. Ultimately the poem's bisexual poetics do more than trouble gender norms, however: they enable Smith to perform Byronism and thereby to mediate a more threatening scandal, the suggestion that a great poet is not born but made by a sponsoring editor and literary critic. …

Judith P. Aikin, A Language for German Opera. The Development of Forms and Formulas for Recitative and Aria in Seventeenth-Century German Libretti. 2002

Scholars of German Baroque literature and music have waited a very long time for a book such as this. While Judith Aikin presents an excellent overview of the development of the German opera libretto from its inception with Martin Opitz and Heinrich Schütz's Dafne in 1627 until the founding of the Hamburg Opera in 1678, her main focus is to answer several questions long unanswered by scholarship: Why did German-language opera develop so slowly? Why did the development of recitative in the German language lag far behind that in Italian? What hindered the natural alternation between aria and recitative in German? Why did contemporary musicians find German verse so difficult to set to music? And, the question which provides the prime impetus for this study, what kinds of verse were necessary for opera in German? Her undertaking reminds the reader of passages from Günter Grass' Das Treffen in Telgte in which the elderly Heinrich Schütz, in search of appropriate German verse to set to music, participates in the fictitious meeting of German poets at Telgte after the end of the Thirty Years' War. He hopes to find there dramatic poetry to set to music, that is, “auf deutsche Worte Madrigale zu komponieren”. Aikin's book explains why, in the 1650's, Schütz was still seeking German verses to compose in the operatic style he had first experienced in Italy many years before.

The Rebirth of Tragedy: Yeats, Nietzsche, the Irish National Theatre, and the Anti-Modern Cult of Cuchulain

The Rebirth of Tragedy:Yeats, Nietzsche, the Irish National Theatre, and the Anti-Modern Cult of Cuchulain Michael Valdez Moses (bio) I am no Nationalist, except in Ireland for passing reasons; State and Nation are the work of intellect, and when you consider what comes before and after them they are, as Victor Hugo said of something or other, not worth the blade of grass God gives for the nest of the linnet. —W. B. Yeats, 1937 I Nearly all theorists of drama from G. W. F. Hegel to the present assume that the advent of modernity increasingly renders classical forms of tragedy aesthetically moribund and politically irrelevant. According to this historicist view, the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles survive, but only as historical artifacts within the culture museum of modernity. They may inspire modern thinkers and artists, but their forms, themes, and contexts cannot be revived except as an exercise in antiquarianism. Friedrich Nietzsche and W. B. Yeats provide striking, if rare instances of the critic and dramatist who refused to accept the historicist premises underlying the modern view of Attic tragedy. Nietzsche, no less than Hegel, regards the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles as antithetical to many of the values and institutions of European modernity, but for that very reason, [End Page 561] in his The Birth of Tragedy, he looks to the modern operas of Richard Wagner as both marking a genuine rebirth of the spirit of classical tragedy and heralding a revolutionary antimodern turn in the cultural history of modern Europe. Yeats, whose dramatic and critical works were influenced by Nietzsche, attempted, in no less hubristic a manner, to effect a rebirth of premodern, ritualized, and aristocratic tragedy within the apparently uncongenial confines of contemportary Irish politics. What Yeats found so attractive in Nietzsche was a shared hostility, even repugnance, to what both men considered the defining features of European modernity, and a common conviction that the forces of modernization might be resisted by bringing about a cultural rebirth of the spirit of ancient tragic drama. Yeats's drama and theatre criticism thus represent a sustained effort, a lá Nietzsche, to resist the notion that aristocratic tragedy and ritual theater are historically irrecoverable. Yeats saw his efforts to assist in the rebirth of ancient tragedy as an essential part of a militant cultural and political program to free modern Ireland from imperial British rule. Yeats's literary midwifery aimed to establish a free and independent Irish nation that would offer a counterweight to the forces of (English or British imperial) modernity. Though nationalism itself might be said to be a distinctively modern ideology, Yeats hoped to cultivate an independent Irish nation on nominally premodern or non-modern grounds. As the twentieth century wore on, however, Yeats grew increasingly disenchanted with the actual Irish Free State that emerged after 1921 and with the forms of Irish nationalism that predominated in the 1920s and 1930s. Oddly, his disappointment did not lead him to abandon, but rather to intensify his efforts to promote an "anachronistic" form of dramatic tragedy, which he imagined would serve as a kind of cultural counterweight to the increasingly modernizing Irish nation-state that came into existence after formal independence. Yeats's continuing efforts to create a ritualistic, heroic, cultic, and antidemocratic form of dramatic tragedy from 1916 onwards represented his vigorous attempt to cultivate an "alternative" form of Irish modernity that was as much at odds with the British imperialism (and English culture) as it was with the predominant and increasingly official strains of modern Irish nationalism of the 1920s and 1930s. As a founding member of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, and later a leading dramatist, co-director, manager, and polemicist for the Irish National Theatre Society (founded in 1902 and better known after 1904 as the Abbey Theatre), Yeats looked to an "ancient" form of tragic verse drama to play a leading, even decisive role in revivifying and remaking Irish national culture at a time when prospects for Irish Home Rule, to say nothing of Irish national independence, were bleak. But despite his dominant position in the Abbey Theatre in its early years, Yeats ultimately found that his own heroic verse...

Restoration Shakespeare: Viewing the Voice by Barbara A. Murray (review)

744 Reviews with an emphatic 'Yes'. It is a necessary book. It will be useful to lecturers and stu? dents of filmand of theatre, and to those who wish to use films of Shakespeare's plays as a means of focusing on questions of performance. The volume sent for review was a hardback edition. I hope that it will soon be available in paperback. I shall certainly be recommending it to my students, both at undergraduate and at postgraduate level. University of Reading Brian Woolland Restoration Shakespeare: Viewing the Voice. By Barbara A. Murray. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses in conjunction with Modern Humanities Research Association. 2001. 306 pp. ?35. ISBN 0-8386-3918-6. This is the firstbook to consider all the adaptations of Shakespeare's plays between 1660 and 1682: during these years, the theatre in London was undergoing major changes which gave the visual dimension a whole new significance. The introduction of actresses, forinstance, had far-reaching implications on Shakespearean production. Innovations in stagecraft, such as moveable scenery and machinery for sophisticated spectacular effects,also meant that adaptations on the Restoration stage tended to emphasize the visual dimension. This is not to say that the aural sphere lost its im? portance, as is testifiedby the employment of orchestras which provided music during performances and intervals. The 'grand manner of Restoration acting style' (p. 28) also privileged the aural dimension. Accounts by Restoration commentators, among which are Pepys's lively remarks on his experience as a theatregoer, reveal the emotional effectthat the combination of the visual and the aural had on the audiences. Similarly, treatises on dramatic poetry (for instance, those by Dryden and Flecknoe) point to the idea that that 'the audience is capable of making all sorts of imaginative transferences' (p. 30). This evidence leads Murray to reassess the widely held assumption that Restoration drama was principally preoccupied with the decorum imposed by neoclassical rules. In the introduction, she argues that 'the overriding need was both to make [Shakespeare's] language operate more like speaking pictures, in coherent visual imagery and metaphor [. . .] and also to accommodate this language to the added emotional power of scenery, music, and acting delivery' (p. 32). The section ofthe book entitled 'Laws and Lovers' focuses on the fiveShakespeare adaptations of the 1660s, among which are Davenant's The Law against Lovers (an amalgamation ofMeasure for Measurewith Much Ado About Nothing), The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince ofDenmark (also probably by Davenant), and Dryden and Davenant's The Tempest; or, The Enchanted Island. The frequent use of 'metaphorical depiction of issues concerned with civil order' (p. 61) and other linguistic alterations in the versions of this decade were often complemented in performance by the insertion of special effectswhich exploited new stagecraft. The images evoked verbally were underlined visually, sometimes with an ironic effect,on the stage. The second part of Murray's study, 'Miseries and Civil War', analyses the Shake? speare adaptations between i674and 1682. Except forthe'lavishly spectacular'(p. 93) operatic version of The Tempest and Duffet's burlesque reply to it, The Mock Tem? pest?both produced in 1674 by,respectively, the Duke's and the King's Company? the remaining ten adaptations were produced between 1678 and 1682. Unlike the earlier plays, which disclose 'an almost [. . .] philosophic interest in the topics at their heart and had made use of comedy more readily than tragedy to deploy it' (p. 89), the later group is exclusively concerned with histories and tragedies. The feeling of anxiety and uncertainty characterizing the language and imagery of these versions is MLR, 99.3, 2004 745 not surprising given the threat of civil unrest in the years of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis. Political topicality is evident in all these rewritings of Shakespeare's plays, including Shadwell's The History of Timon ofAthens, theMan-Hater, Ravenscroft 's Titus Andronicus, Otway's The History and Fall of Caius Marius, and Tate's notorious adaptation of King Lear. But even if the preoccupations revealed by these plays are of a more serious nature, they share an important trait with the plays of the 1660s: their verbal 'depictive power' (p. 140) is reinforced...

Augusta Webster and the Lyric Muse: The Athenaeum and Webster's Poetics

DURING THE LAST DECADE SCHOLARS HAVE SHOWN INTEREST IN NINETEENTH-century women who wrote in the dramatic form masculinized by such poets as Browning and Tennyson. (1) In her own day, Augusta Webster was compared favorably to Robert Browning, and she herself pays tribute to Browning in Transcript and a Transcription, a for Examiner of Browning's The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, a later collected in A Housewife's Opinions. However, Webster published in every genre, actually producing proportionately little in the way of dramatic monologue. In fact, in the last twenty-four years of her life, the prolific Augusta Webster published no dramatic poetry at all; consequently, we cannot assume that she defined herself as a writer of dramatic poetry. We need to take a more comprehensive look at a woman who promises to figure prominently in contemporary Victorian studies. Gaining insight into just how Augusta Webster did define herself as a writer has been complicated, I think, by her high profile socio-political life and by her feminist interests. Indeed, because Webster worked for the London branch of the National Committee for Women's Suffrage in the 1870s and served on the London School Board in the 1880s, we have naturally been interested in literary work that seems to us to reflect her feminist concerns. However, Webster had another profession from 1884 until her untimely death from cancer in 1894: she worked for the Athenaeum, primarily as a poetry reviewer. In this position she was able to articulate a fair[y complex system of poetics based on a balance of technical ability, innovation, and self-discipline. Significantly, this system pertains mainly to lyric rather than to dramatic poetry. In keeping with convention, her contributions to the Athenaeum were anonymous, but the marked editor's file, housed at City University London, provides an important context for a discussion of Webster's work. (2) These review essays are frequently comprehensive enough to allow Webster to situate poetic composition within a fairly extensive theoretical context. In 1881, three years before she joined the Athenaeum, Webster published A Book of Rhyme, included in which is a sequence of metrically ordered, inter-rhyming poems that she originally called English Stornelli, and later, in the 1893 reprint, English Rispetti. In 1881 as well, Webster wrote the earliest dated fourteen-line Petrarchan sonnet in her unfinished sonnet sequence that was published posthumously in 1895 as Mother and Daughter. Therefore, throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, Webster's poetic leanings were decidedly lyric, and the few dated sonnets suggest a continuity between the rispetti, the sonnets, and the critical reviews in the Athenaeum. I intend in this paper to study the English Rispetti, a controlled form with conventions of its own, within the context of some of the poetics Webster articulates so eloquently in the Athenaeum. While Webster's principles of poetic construction obviously evolved during her years as poetry critic, the pre-Athenaeum rispetti seem to apply all the important theoretical points relating to the balance of creative innovation and conformity to convention that she uses to measure excellence in the Athenaeum. Hence, Webster theorizes in her Athenaeum reviews the precision in language and attention to form that she demonstrates in the rispetti. In substance, as well as in language and form, the Rispetti mark an important phase in Webster's creative life, for the sequence is an ironic presentation of the complexity of human existence in its temporal and temporary state. One might argue that the human preoccupation with the brevity of life and the inexorable march of time has been a sustained preoccupation in literature, but the Victorian sense of time, drastically transformed into an understanding of the implications of deep time by the publications of Darwin and his predecessors, finds its way into a great deal of nineteenth-century literature) Webster's presentation of human life and human love, as much as her facility with the dramatic, connects her to Browning, for the rispetti underscore the irony of a human existence that is limited and finite even as they celebrate the power and mutability of human love. …

Philology Meets Text Encoding in the New Scholarly Edition of Henrik Ibsen's Writings

In Norway, the project Henrik Ibsen’s Writings is currently establishing a new historical–critical edition (both electronically and in print) of the complete writings of playwright Henrik Ibsen. In the years the project has existed, there has been a continuing internal discussion on the relationship between philology and text encoding. This paper outlines the philological principles of the project and describes its methods of establishing texts and ensuring quality. It also looks at and describes, in detail, the consequences of combining philology and text encoding through examples of problems solved in the encoding of complex changes in manuscripts as well as parallel structures in verse dramas. The paper concludes that it is very important, in a project such as Henrik Ibsen’s Writings, to focus on the relationship between philology and text encoding because of the influence, even in the smallest details, of these on each other.

Gender, Theatre, and the Origins of Criticism: From Dryden to Manley by Marcie Frank

188 post-Restoration versions reveals that patriarchal authority was increasingly viewed as problematic and unstable. She does not consider that changes in genre, tone, performance (particularly the advent of the actress), and audience between 1610 and 1685 might also account for the considerable differences between pre- and post-Restoration versions. Dryden and Howard’s The Indian Queen and Dryden’s The Indian Emperour ‘‘appropriate Indian culture as a strategy for overcoming political and ideological instability in England.’’ Ms. Hutner argues that the central conflicts in these plays (competing forms of royal authority and Old World vs. NewWorld)are ‘‘enacted symbolically as a fight over the [noble native] female body.’’She perceptively suggests that Davenant’s The Cruelty of the Spaniardsin Peruand SirFrancis Drake may have influenced Dryden and Howard’s depictions of Spanish colonialism . Behn’s The Widow Ranter differs from the others analyzed for two reasons.Behn examines ‘‘the complex interrelationship of white and native women, and the oppression of women in general in a colonial context.’’ And, while Behn’s accounts of the New World also attempt‘‘to resolve England’s turbulent politics,’’ they depict a world ‘‘already fallen . . . inaccessible . . . and contaminated by . . . greedy white colonialists.’’ Statements such as ‘‘the Restoration [was] England’s first major period of imperial and colonial expansion’’and ‘‘Virginia [was] England’s firstsuccessfulcolony ’’ suggest that Ms. Hutner is unaware that English colonial discourseoriginated in relation to Ireland, not the New World. That Irish women are as rare on the seventeenth -century English stage as African women or American Indian women is significant. Don-John Dugas Towson University MARCIE FRANK. Gender, Theatre, and the Origins of Criticism: From Dryden to Manley. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2003. Pp. ix ⫹ 175. $55. This book is interesting, if at times frustrating. Ms. Frank’s argument is that criticism emerged in late seventeenthcentury England in writing for and about the theater, an argument condensed in her term ‘‘the critical stage,’’ which denotes both the central role of the stage in founding critical discourse and the significance of this period as an epoch, a ‘‘stage’’ of criticism’s history. The places where Ms. Frank turns to articulate and trace the implications of her argument are the writings of Dryden—primarily essays and prologues that accompanied the publication of some of his early plays—and texts by Behn, Trotter, and Manley, whom Ms. Frank sees following in Dryden ’s footsteps. What makes Dryden pivotal for Ms. Frank is the way that he develops a genealogical relationship to the literary tradition, placing himself in a line of succession of great native English poets , primarily Jonson, Shakespeare, and Milton. This in turn permits Dryden himself to function as a reference point for others—here Behn, Trotter, and Manley, each of whom acknowledges Dryden’s authority as a way to gain access to that tradition. Dryden’s innovation, Ms. Frank argues , using An Essay of Dramatic Poesy and particularly his Prefaces to Troilus and Cressida, Oedipus Rex, The State of Innocence, and All for Love, is to position himself in a critical relationship to his sources in Shakespeare, Sophocles, and 189 Milton. For Ms. Frank, Dryden defined the past as an ‘‘age’’ unlike the present that is both the originating point of a national literature and the source of an inheritance in need of improvement by more sophisticated writers, such as himself . His construction of Shakespeare as a ‘‘Universal Genius’’whose writings are available to all regardless ofstatusorgender , made that tradition available to later writers. Ms. Frank aims to reassert the centrality of theater to the emergence of critical discourse;toarguefortheimportance of Dryden as a foundational figure in that process; to sketch out a line of critical inheritance running from Dryden through several women writers of the next generation ; and to trace the shift from the Court to the public sphere as the place where criticism takes place. But she builds these broad arguments and sweeping claims on a narrow set of texts and examples. Some of her readings feel strained, for example, the conflict between Octavia and Cleopatra in Dryden’s All for Love being an allegory of male poetic competition. Perhaps more important , the argument of the book turns on terms that seem...

The Search for Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France (review)

REVIEW ESSAYS censorship) to condemn Spanish colonies and slavery, but to remain silent on French analogues. Writers such as Montesquieu, Diderot, and Crébillon fils offer a "metaleptic reversal between colonial history and Orientalist discourse" (17). The "displacement of the whole problem of slavery" from Western colonies to the Eastern world translates enslavement into political or domestic "servitude." Here may be the place to raise the question why, in a work devoted to gender, colonialism , and eroticism, Dobie focuses almost exclusively on male writers. Had she looked at George Sand's representation of colonialism and slavery in Indiana, the explicit parallelism between forms ofthe Other could have led her to very different arguments about nineteenth-century literary politics. Dobie writes boldly, laying out her claims in an emphatic first person, even where her support may be sketchy. Her style is contestatory, as she narrowly distinguishes her work from that of previous critics such as Richard Terdiman in Discourse/Counter-Discourse, and especially feminists such as Kari Lokke, Marilyn Brown, or Julia Douthwaite in Exotic Women. Her method, she insists, is one of"double reading," somewhat like the "aporias" ofdeconstruction, where a point is both made and red-lined. Political categories ofrace and sex are unstable (23); texts obstruct their own discourse and invite plural interpretations (24). Yet Dobie also repeatedly attacks deconstructive readings of gender and language, arguing that "deconstruction and ethnocentrism go hand in hand" as binaristic modes of social thought (120). Typically she pairs thematic readings oforientalist voyeurism and eroticism with the thesis that the texts she considers deconstruct themselves epistemologically. Her close readings of language point, she suggests, toward Heidegger's concept ofaletheia, or the irreducibility ofrepresentation. It is no surprise that Dobie is fascinated by the figure ofthe mummy to be unwrapped , and by the myth that the act ofunwrapping can bring the woman herself back to life. Perhaps this figure represents the dream ofall critics that their spelling out oftexts can cast a reanimating spell. Margaret R. HigonnetUniversity ofConnecticut REVIEWS MARY ANN FRESE WITT. The Searchfor Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France. Ithaca/London: Cornell UP, 2001. xii + 259 pp. Before and after World War II, at least in the United States, the idea ofmodem tragedy was taken up by left-leaning or egalitarian dramatists. Elmer Rice's prose and Maxwell Anderson's verse dramas aspired to enact the tragedy ofthe common man that, by end ofthe 1940s, was perhaps best realized by the late Eugene O'Neill and the early Arthur Miller. In Europe, however, the effort to create tragedy for the twentieth century was largely the work ofartists with fascist or at least right-wing sympathies. Instead of embracing the depiction of the ordinary and everyday, Italian and French dramatists and theatre critics longed for an elitist dramatic genre with ancient roots, one that would support the ideology of a fascist present. In The SearchforModern Tragedy Mary Ann Frese Witt examines the drama of Gabriele D'Annunzio and Luigi Pirandello under Mussolini and of Henry de Montherlant and Jean Anouilh under the German Occupation. She is also careful VcH. 27 (2003): 170 THE COMPARATIST to show the context, political and critical, in which these plays first appeared, providing many of the ideas about tragedy discussed by pro-fascist critics such as Sylvio D'Amico in Italy and Robert Brasillach and Thierry Maulnier in France. The book is argued clearly and persuasively and offers ample evidence. Witt looks not only to the scripts ofthese dramatists but to their non-dramatic writings for clues to the intent behind their plays. By aligning their public statements with their artistic achievements, she is able to locate ideas that consistently flow through all their works but have remained, to readers and scholars alike, undetected. Thus, D'Annunzio, who has been viewed popularly as the prototypical fascist playwright, appears at times to have been in skeptical opposition to Mussolini, while Pirandello, who after the Second World War was placed in the pantheon ofmodem dramatists, emerges not as an alienated, non- or apolitical intellectual but as an active and even fervent supporter ofthe fascist regime. Indeed, Witt's analysis ofEnrico Quatro, which has been read for decades as...