Dramatic Texts Research Articles

:Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater

:<i>Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater</i>

Top Graduate Zhang Xie: The Earliest Extant Chinese Southern Play

Top Graduate Zhang Xie: The Earliest Extant Chinese Southern Play

Writing from the Margins: Re-framing Teresa Deevy’s Archive and her Correspondence with James Cheasty c.1952–1962

This essay explores a unique set of documents, comprising letters and postcards, sent by Teresa Deevy to her friend and fellow Waterford playwright, James Cheasty. To date, Deevy’s correspondence has not been considered separately from her dramatic texts, nor has Cheasty’s work received scholarly attention. Taking a feminist theatre historiographic approach, the essay theorizes the challenges of working with women’s archives, Deevy’s in particular, and conceptualizes the Deevy-Cheasty correspondence as high status research documents that raise Deevy’s archival profile. The thematic analysis of the material focuses on Deevy‘s role as Cheasty’s mentor and illuminates her engagement with Irish theatre practice of the 1950s and 60s. The essay reveals previously unknown aspects of her personal and professional life and contributes new insights relevant to scholars, practitioners, archivists, and students that redirect prevailing narratives concerning Deevy’s ambitions as a playwright and her involvement with Irish theatre practice post 1940.

Metadrama and Language (Language and Metadrama in Major Barbara and Pygmalion: Shavian Sisters)

Metadrama and Language (Language and Metadrama in <i>Major Barbara</i> and <i>Pygmalion:</i> Shavian Sisters)

Unhousing the Archives Around theZong, Again

Unhousing the Archives Around the<i>Zong</i>, Again

Ways and means of creating a comic effect in English drama discourse

The article is devoted to the study of the nature of the authors remark and its functional ability to create a comic effect. At the first stage, an attempt was made to determine the role of the authors commentary in the text of the play. Within the framework of this question, we have highlighted the key characteristics of dramatic discourse, namely, fiction and stylization. Next, we focused on the phenomenon of paratext, presenting the positions of both domestic and foreign researchers regarding the role of paratext in a dramatic work, namely the need to take into account the features of paratext when performing discourse analysis. In addition, in the article we made an attempt to present a brief history of the origin of the term paratext. Thus, the processes of interaction within the pair text-paratext substantiated the need to study the dramatic text precisely through the prism of this correlation. As sources of factual material, we selected plays (The Comedy About a Bank Robbery, The Play that Goes Wrong), the authors of which were a galaxy of British playwrights working in tandem: Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields. In the course of the study, a selection of text fragments was formed, which made it possible to identify a number of authorial techniques for creating a comic effect, the mechanisms of which are repeatedly duplicated from play to play, which makes it possible to suggest the presence of a characteristic comic style inherent in this trio of playwrights. As a basic technique for creating a comic effect, the authors use the interaction of replicas of the characters of the play and remarks that contradict each other, thereby realizing the principle of inconsistency, which in turn becomes one of the basic principles of comedy. Thus, the final part of the study is devoted to the implementation of the principles of absurdity, inconsistency and deceived expectations through the interaction of the authors remark and the dialogue part of the play.

Struggles with Dramatic Form in 16th-Century English Biblical Plays

The aim of the article is to pinpoint how 16th-century biblical drama tried to appropriate its genre and medium to carry the reformist message and in what sense the project turned out to be a self-defeating one. The analysis of selected plays from reformed biblical cycles (The Chester Mystery Cycle, play iv; and “The Norwich Grocers’ Play”) and newly composed drama (John Bale’s plays, Lewis Wager’s Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene, the anonymous “History of Jacob and Esau”), supported with an over- view of the criticism on the matter, reveals some common tensions in the dramatic texts which may have had their roots in the reformist need to eliminate any room for doubt that a theatrical performance could leave. The conclusion is that, in its attempts at striking the right balance between dramatizing and overt sermonizing, engaging and distancing, as well as providing an immersive experience and discouraging it, post-Reformation Scrip- ture-based drama oscillated between being more effective as a performance or as a carrier of the doctrinal message, with the resulting tendency to subvert either the former or the latter.

Henrik Ibsen and Conspiracy Thinking: The Case of Peer Gynt

Henrik Ibsen and Conspiracy Thinking: The Case of <i>Peer Gynt</i>

Stereoscopic London: Plays of Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw and Arthur Wing Pinero in the 1890s, by Gül Kurtulu?

Reviewed by: Stereoscopic London: Plays of Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw and Arthur Wing Pinero in the 1890s by Gül Kurtuluş Mary Christian (bio) Stereoscopic London: Plays of Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw and Arthur Wing Pinero in the 1890s, by Gül Kurtuluş; pp. 182. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2020, $48.95. In Stereoscopic London: Plays of Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw and Arthur Wing Pinero in the 1890s, Gül Kurtuluş examines late-Victorian theatrical depictions of metropolitan life in the works of three prominent turn-of-the-century dramatists, paying special attention to "the idea of community as formulated by the needs and requirements of its members" (14). Each of the three main chapters focuses on one well-known play: Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893), and George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1912). The chapters also give secondary attention to other works by the respective dramatists. Along with detailed close readings of the dramatic texts themselves, Kurtuluş draws attention to the London locations portrayed or mentioned in the plays. Some of the neighborhood information she provides is unsurprising—the average reader will probably already know that Mayfair is a posh London district and that Hoxton is not. However, some of these location notes will likely be new to many readers and might suggest new ideas regarding the subtexts of certain scenes. For example, Kurtuluş points out that Clerkenwell, the district inhabited by the troupe of actors in Trelawny of the "Wells" (1898), was an area with centuries of theatrical history, dating back to performances of mystery plays in the Middle Ages—a fact that might well enhance one's enjoyment of Pinero's play, with its themes of nostalgia and theatrical evolution. The book's introduction declares an interest in "the rules imposed by urban society" and the ways in which these rules are dramatized in the selected plays (14). The rules that receive the most attention throughout the book are the demands for women's sexual purity (or at least the appearance of purity), the adherence to prescribed gender roles, and the distinctions between different levels in the social class hierarchy. The author notes numerous details of plot, dialogue, and character that reflect the plays' preoccupation with these social requirements. These analyses, however, might lead readers to ask: If Londoners of this period were made to follow strict expectations regarding gender, sex, and class, then to what extent were these rules and hypocrisies unique to London? In what ways were demands for female chastity in London, and the way such demands were enforced, distinct from the conditions of smaller towns and rural areas? Kurtuluş acknowledges the need to address this question, or nearly acknowledges it, in the analysis of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. She suggests that the Tanquerays' unhappy migration from London to Surrey illustrates that "a shift in setting . . . does not provide a remedy for the Victorian social diseases of class division and repressive morality that infect all the city's inhabitants" (95). The chapter's conclusion adds that "nineteenthcentury London and Victorian Britain in general evinced a quite hypocritical sense of morality and justice" (96). Many scholars of nineteenth-century literature would easily agree with this statement. The book, however, offers no clear response to the obvious follow-up question: If this hypocrisy is characteristic of Britain in this period, what sets London apart? Readers are left to wonder if Kurtuluş is writing a book about theatrical depictions of London or about theatrical depictions of Victorian class hierarchy and sexual mores more generally. [End Page 482] If the title's emphasis on "London" seems incompletely explained by the book as a whole, the Shaw chapter raises questions regarding the time period designated as the book's focus, "the 1890s." Shaw was active as a theater critic and dramatist during the 1890s, but this activity is scarcely mentioned. Instead the chapter focuses on Pygmalion and a handful of other plays—Man and Superman (1903), The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), and Heartbreak House (1919)—all of which were written and set in the twentieth century. These plays offer valuable insights on London, and certainly comment more explicitly on...

‘The Citadel of Scholarship’: Rediscovering Critical IR in Millennium 1:1

‘Critical’ international relations (IR) is usually understood to have originated in the early 1980s. However, a close reading of Vithal Rajan’s ‘An Epitaph for Detached Scholarship’, published in the inaugural issue of Millennium in 1971, tells another story. Rajan’s article was not a work of critical theory per se, but it was in tune with demands, at this time, for establishing a ‘critical university’. Promising to open up university education to all, dispensing with traditional curricula and authoritarian modes of teaching, the critical university, like Rajan’s article, has long since been forgotten. Nevertheless, this moment set the scene for the professionalised establishment of ‘critical’ academia in the decades to come. Rediscovering Rajan’s ‘Epitaph’ thus offers to reconnect critical IR with an earlier, and perhaps more generative, moment of inception. Indeed, even today, Rajan’s creative, provocative, playful text stands out as a rewardingly undisciplined contribution to the discipline.

Od postaci do głosu. O librettyzacji współczesnego dramatu

The analyses presented in the article reverse the traditional course of studies which assume that the poetics of a dramatic text is instrumentally superior to that of the libretto. In order to adapt the hypothesis that contemporary drama is increasingly libretto-like, inserted into its structure is, excerpted by opera theatre researchers, the libretto poetics treated as a genealogical directive specific to the genre which differentiates it from the “third kind” in its classical expressions. The breakup of the basic categories constituting a drama ( character, dialogue and plot ) brings it visibly closer to the traditional operatic libretto with features characterised by Albert Gier, among others. The post-dramatic aesthetics adapted by contemporary opera and drama, which removes the character or reduces it to a voice treated merely as a medium, absolutising the way a word sounds and the poetics of a transsystemic remix all result in the emergence of a common aesthetics of the stage chimaera genre.

The frequency of using conditional sentences in drama, based on the analysis of three drama texts: Flour in the veins by Igor Štiks, Crocodile Lacoste by Zlatko Topčić and Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

This paper deals with the frequency of use of conditional sentences in contemporary dramas that were not originally written in English but were translated into it. The hypothesis that the paper tries to prove here, states that conditional sentences are not used so frequently in modern dramas, unlike classical plays, which is tried to be proved by analyzing three plays, one of which was written in Croatian (Flour in the veins by author Igor Štiks), and the other in Bosnian (Silvertown / Crocodile Lacoste, by author Zlatko Topčić), both translated into English. Finally, the third drama, Romeo and Juliet, is a classic drama by William Shakespeare. Since the two plays that served as a basis for this analysis, were not originally written in English, the first part of the paper provides a theoretical background on conditional sentences and types of conditional sentences in Croatian, then in English, listing potential translational equivalents of conditional sentences in both languages. The results of the analysis conducted on three dramas, clearly show that the hypothesis was successfully confirmed. However, although only three plays were analyzed, it is expected that the results would be similar in case there were more plays.

Anger, Faith and Bewildered Fragments of Self: The Shaping of Ethos in an Argentinean Translation of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis

4.48 Psychosis is British playwright Sarah Kane’s final play. Its opening took place at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in London in June 2000, only a few months after Kane’s suicide at King’s College Hospital. The initial reception of the play was surrounded by controversy in the United Kingdom, with some reviewers and critics interpreting the theatrical text as primarily autobiographical (Urban 2011, p. 304; Claycomb 2012, p. 113). Informed by a socio-discursive perspective, which specifically looks at the construction of ethos (Amossy 2009, 2010; Author 2017; Author 2019, 2020), this research aims at contributing to the study of subjectivity in translated drama. Focusing on Rafael Spregelburd’s Argentinean Spanish translation of 4.48 Psychosis, published by Losada in 2006, we explore the shaping of subjectivity in the translated dramatic text highlighting the way in which the persona of the translator builds within and beyond the translated text. The case under study features the task of a drama translator who, probably on account of his vital presence in the Argentinean theatrical landscape, is often perceived as integral to the performance text. In this article, we will argue that an analysis of 4.48 Psychosis and, for that matter, of the translation of the play, based on the facts of the playwright’s life, may lack in substance and is, therefore, unproductive to assess the complex quality of the piece. While Spregelburd’s translation uses dramatic strategies and techniques that successfully foster the image or ethos of a rupturist playwright, it still stresses the autobiographical character often attributed to the text. This is particularly evident in the female gender construction of the main voice in the play, which is ambiguous in the source text. Our analysis therefore specifically looks at certain subjective forms in the translated text such as the use of inflected female marked adjectives. In a complementary fashion, our study also identifies the use of masculine forms and masculine generic forms to translate indeterminate forms in the original, which help establish antagonisms between female and male construed identities in the target text. This view, which becomes dominant in the translated text, is reinforced by the image or ethos of the translator as this is shaped within the translated dramatic text and its paratexts. Our analysis also explores the subjective construction of the translator’s persona and positioning in the target dramatic text and system. Assessed within the framework of Spregelburd’s whole production, detailed consideration is given to the use of paratextual devices as well as the translator’s own declarations in interviews.

Mofokeng’s dramatic play, Senkatana, epitomises intertextuality

SM Mofokeng’s dramatic text Senkatana (1982) is a classic Sesotho tragedy. The drama has been adapted from the well-known Basotho folktale Moshanyana wa Senkatana. There are also certain authors that inspired Mofokeng to create Senkatana. Intertextuality has played an important role in creating Mofokeng’s masterpiece. The protagonist is Senkatana, whose fall is caused by his own good intentions. Audiences and readers develop pity and horror for Senkatana for the situation in which he finds himself. No one can help him emerge from his circumstances, nothing can help him choose the safe way as opposed to the tragic one. Senkatana, the tragic hero, does not make decisions independently, because badimo, the ancestors and God, control his destiny, and he cannot fight badimo and God. The central argument in this article is that Mofokeng’s dramatic text attains meaning from other texts and authors. Senkatana’s meaning appears to be content-bound, but when readers look at its content, it is boundless because it refers to other previous texts. For the purpose of this article, the theory of intertextuality will serve as the point of departure to investigate the manner in which folktale, Greek tragedy, Shakespeare and the Bible generate meaning in the act of Mofokeng’s writing of Senkatana.

The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment

The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment

The Life and Death of a Futurist Poet: Speculations on The Hairy Ape

ABSTRACT What might O’Neill have made of futurism, the Italian movement that had been creating a sensation in the artistic world since 1909? The Hairy Ape perhaps provides the answer. In that play O’Neill arguably transformed Marinetti’s prose “Manifesto of Futurism” into a dramatic text that presented futurism as destructive, misogynist, and inherently bound to fail. An intertextual examination suggests that one might profitably read The Hairy Ape as O’Neill’s negative answer to Marinetti’s ideas about poetry and art. If the futurists had a free rein, O’Neill seems to imply, they would reduce cultural life to a new level of primitiveness. This, in turn, suggests a critique of the futurists’ affinity with fascism.

Monodrama in Malaysian National Dramaturgy: a Retrospective of the Emergence of the Genre

The article focuses on the well-known Malaysian dramatic texts, created in the last third of the twentieth century, the generic features of monodrama in these plays being the main research subject. The purpose of the analysis is to demonstrate monodramatic nature of the works and to establish the time of the birth of Malay monodrama, as well as the reasons why the genre for a long time was not denominated as such. The analysis involves historical-cultural, analytical and comparative methods. Historical and cultural method allows to scrutinize the genre under study in the context of the post-realistic theater of Malaysia, which was born as a reaction to the tragic events of the second half of the twentieth century in the country. Analytical method is used to identify the essential generic features of the studied texts, whereas with the help of comparative method, the artistic features of these texts are matched with the genre characteristics of monodrama. Today, the Malay monodrama is undeservedly deprived of the attention of specialists, although its role on the stage of the country is quite noticeable. This determines the novelty and relevance of the work. The performed research shows that Malay monodrama is much older than is commonly believed, and has existed for almost half a century. The study of the plays "Lazri Meon" by Abdul Samad Said and "Not Suicide" by Dinsman made it possible to identify the most important monodramatic features in them (the subject of representation, the dramatic plot and the conflict), thereby pushing the lower timeframe of existence of this genre in Malay playwriting first until the 1990s, and then - the 1970s. The appearance of a non-classical genre less than a quarter of a century after the birth of Malay drama also allows us to acknowledge the accelerated development of this type of literature in Malaysia.

Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev ed. by Dassia N. Posner, Kevin Bartig and Maria De Simone

Reviewed by: Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev ed. by Dassia N. Posner, Kevin Bartig and Maria De Simone Anna Muza THREE LOVES FOR THREE ORANGES: GOZZI, MEYERHOLD, PROKOFIEV. Edited by Dassia N. Posner and Kevin Bartig, with Maria De Simone. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021; pp. 460. The volume under review considers the whimsical comedy of three oranges as scripted, first, by Carlo Gozzi in eighteenth-century Venice; by Vsevolod Meyerhold in early twentieth-century St. Petersburg; and just a few years later by Sergei Prokofiev, whose opera is the best-known work of the three in the New World. An (equally) international collective of scholars offer erudite, insightful, and truly interdisciplinary readings of the dramatic texts, realized and unrealized performances, artistic controversies, and of a continuous creative absorption of ideas, styles, and techniques. The volume’s title is elegant yet unduly restrictive: In addition to the three titular artists, the book presents other seminal authors enamored of commedia dell’arte, such as German Romantics and Russian Symbolists, whose sensibilities and influences are specifically addressed in Natalya Baldyga’s and Vadim Shcherbakov’s contributions but resonate throughout the volume. Examining the pertinent theatrical, cultural, and critical history of the Italian masks, the book also brings to light some of the less famous yet remarkable figures (such as the theatre scholar and practitioner Konstantin Miklashevsky featured in Laurence Senelick’s essay, and the artist Boris Anisfeld in John E. Bowlt’s). As a result, the scholarly volume dedicated to a series of extremely fluid theatrical texts and events is as sparkling and fascinating as the delightful source material itself. The main elements of the whimsical plot retained by all of its co-creators concern a prince first cursed by an inability to laugh and then sent on a romantic pursuit of three oranges, which eventually prove to enclose three fair maidens, one of whom becomes the prince’s bride. Each of the book’s three parts— “The Fiaba,” “The Divertissement,” and “The Opera”—contains a translation of a verbal script produced by Gozzi in Italian (1772), by Meyerhold in Russian (1913), and by Prokofiev in French (1919). The English translations are done, respectively, by Maria De Simone, Dassia Posner (who has also participated in rendering the rhyming verse in Gozzi’s text), and Kevin Bartig. The editors-translators have meticulously examined and coordinated the scripts to preserve and reveal borrowings, correspondences, and emendations. The scholarly precision, historical sensitivity, and literary quality of the three translations are matched by a theatrical thrust: all (re)create the vivid atmosphere (I might say, ecology) of live, audience-oriented theatre. As Posner observes in her sharp overview of the collection’s main goals and themes, the “fairy-tale manifestoes” by the three great artists are extremely relevant to our ongoing attempts to “rethink what is primary in stage performance” (3). The volume not only discusses but also invites stage practice. All translated texts are stage-ready: framed and enhanced by the research, they can be used in all kinds of training and studio work, interdisciplinary courses, and full-scale productions. Gozzi’s “Reflective Analysis of the Fairy Tale ‘The Love of Three Oranges,’” written eleven years after its actual stage performance, is striking in its montage of scripted parts and “self-referential commentary,” which includes, in De Simone’s words, “descriptions of mise-en-scène, audience reactions, [End Page 414] and Gozzi’s explanations of his formal experiments” (6). “Analysis” provides a conceptual trajectory for the collection not only as the origin of the itinerant plot, but also as a template for daring generic innovations, assertive self-awareness, and metatheatricality. The historical and histrionic background on Venetian theatre (provided by Alberto Benuscelli, Guiletta Bazoli, and Domenico Pietropaolo) is also helpful in building an arch from the past to the future, and vice versa. That commedia dell’arte inspired Meyerhold, Prokofiev, and other modernists is well-known, yet the essays in Three Loves reach beyond the triviality of “everything new is the well-forgotten old.” Ted Emery’s chapter, aptly titled “Carlo Gozzi’s Reactionary Imagination,” underscores Gozzi’s fierce anti-Enlightenment stance staged in his “imaginary fairy-tale worlds” (109), which...

An Analysis of the Relationship between Shenxian Daohua Ju and Daoism of the Yuan Dynasty

The Shenxian daohua ju of the Yuan dynasty closely relates to Daoism. However, the essence and boundary of these two concepts have not been clearly defined and delineated in the existing research, which leads to confusion in analyzing their relationship. This article provides methodologies for defining Shenxian daohua ju and Daoism. Based on the extant Yuan zaju texts and confined to the themes of seclusion, deliverance, and ascending to immortality, we enumerate the particular dramatic texts of Shenxian daohua ju. Then, we limit the objects of the concept of Daoism to specific Daoist sects in history and highlight that the criteria for determining whether a Shenxian Dao (Celestial Being Sect) belongs to Daoism are provided by the officially recognized Daozang (Daoist canon). According to the above understanding of these two concepts, we explore their relationship from the following perspectives. First, in terms of composition subjects, these include the frustrated Confucian literati, the vassal Kings, and the imperial literati; the Shenxian daohua ju written by frustrated literati in the Yuan dynasty is not the embodiment of Daoist doctrines as some of the researchers conclude. Second, in light of the “aesthetic distinction”, we can also take Shenxian daohua ju as pure literary works and interpret these dramas from their literary structures and rhythmical forms. Third, from the perspective of the literary tradition, although with the adoption of Daoist themes, the Shenxian daohua ju of the Yuan dynasty still belongs to the Confucian poetic tradition. Its negation of secular life and advocacy of the ideal world follow the Confucian poetic teachings of “criticizing those above”. Objectively speaking, due to the influence of Daoism, the Shenxian daohua ju with the Daoist themes breaks through the taboo topics prescribed in Confucian literary principles to a certain extent and enriches Chinese literature.

Лингвотипирование этномаркированных символов в креолизованном тексте британской телевизионной драмы

The undertaken study aims to map the dominants of the British linguistic society based on the analysis of ethno-marked symbols in the structure of the creolized text of an authentic British television drama. The article provides examples of planetary-molecular modelling of the British national character. The linguistic and cultural potential of the creolized text and ethno-representative symbolization is specified. The linguo-conceptological fields corresponding to the components of “Englishness” are classified. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the cartographic approach to the presentation of the data obtained on the basis of the interpretation of the actual language layer, and the ascertainment of a correlation between the current projection of the British national identity and its static samples in diachrony. The results obtained allow us to develop a mental-associative map of the British national character based on creolized language patterns; to fix the relationship between the index of the quantitative representation of ethno-marked symbols and the level of the ethno-axiological potential of the dominants denoted by them in the context of the British linguo-society in wide and current-time perspectives.