Dramatic Representation Research Articles

“Either his notion weakens, or his discernings / Are lethargied”: Sleeplessness and Waking Dreams as Tragedy in Julius Caesar and King Lear

Drawing on the early modern physiological understanding of sleeplessness and hallucinations, this article examines how Shakespeare’s dramatic representations of insomnia and waking dreams support his tragedies’ iconic emphasis on bodily and mental suffering. To that end, I consider Brutus’s insomnia and the nightly appearance of Caesar’s ghost in Julius Caesar, as well as King Lear’s sleeplessness and his ontological uncertainty about whether his misfortune may be a dream. Whereas Brutus’s vision of Caesar’s ghost is often interpreted as a supernatural visitation, I argue that it can equally be read as a physiological hallucination caused by Brutus’s sleeplessness. Meanwhile I propose that King Lear’s sleeplessness and the metaphorical description of his waking reality as a dream form part of Shakespeare’s design of Lear’s tragedy as one that is primarily concerned with the character’s experience of suffering. In King Lear, I also show how ideas of sleeping and dreaming introduce tragicomic elements which, however, ultimately give further magnitude to the sense of pain and injustice.

Staging the State in Calderón’s “Argenis y Poliarco”

Calderon adapted Barclay’s best-selling political romance Argenis (Paris, 1621) with the title Argenis y Poliarco sometime between 1626 and 1636, the date of its first recorded performance. It was first printed in 1637, in the Segunda Parte of his plays. In comparison with other works from that collection, such as El medico de su honra or the two comedias palaciegas , El mayor encanto amor and El galan fantasma , Argenis y Poliarco is virtually unknown, with only a few critical studies and one recent edition by Alicia Vara Lopez (2015). This edition, coupled with the renewed interest in Barclay’s neo-Latin romance, should inspire critical reconsideration of a play that appeared in a transformative moment in Calderon’s career. After reviewing the scholarship on how Calderon transformed the romance into his distinctive theatrical idiom, I investigate the play’s political meaning and challenge the view that Argenis y Poliarco is above all a palatine play about love. While it is true that Calderon simplifies the plot, by eliminating or pushing offstage the overtly political action and by cutting Barclay’s disquisitions on good government, I argue that the political element is not suppressed. It is, rather, recast in theatrical terms. Calderon’s skillful stagecraft constitutes a dramatic representation of a European political order marked by ambiguity, plurality and contingency, where the destiny of a state is determined in large measure by what happens beyond its borders.

El rito y el drama en la crónica de fray Diego Durán

The discussion is focus on the chronicle of the Dominican friar Diego Duran, specifically on his research about the dramatics aspects of the rituals practiced among the Nahua people of Prehispanic times. Using an ethno historical approach this article presents evidence which shows that dramatic representation was used by the Nahuas to create cultural references.

Repenser la représentation de la violence dans le théâtre français contemporain

Violence has been a pervasive leitmotiv in French theatre for several decades. Michel Vinaver’s 11 septembre 2001 and Olivier Py’s Théâtres both deal with collective violence such as the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Algerian War of Independence. Ordinary, non-spectacular violence is the topic of Christine Angot’s La Peur du lendemain and Yasmina Reza’s Le Dieu du carnage. All four playwrights seem to support the view that the victims are capable of becoming the aggressors, and vice versa. Their aesthetics vary, however, ranging from realistic to non-dramatic theatre as they endeavour to push the limits of dramatic representation, and, perhaps, generate a cathartic effect.

Twenty-first century relevance of Soyinka’s <i>A dance of the forests</i>: a postmodern conceptualization

This article embarks on a re-reading of Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests in order to determine the relevance of the play to the twenty-first century Nigerian cum African society. The re-reading is cast in a postmodern conceptualization because it attempts a deconstructive reading procedure, which reassesses and subverts earlier significations imputed to the text by previous readers, the author and characters in the text itself. It affirms that, to the 21 st century reader, the play is a paradox of dramatic representation which integrates antinomies that are antithetical to progress with a shallow but conceivable salutary vision to the twenty-first century African society. Keywords: Twenty-first century African society, A Dance of the Forests , Antinomies, Post-modernity

Protean Form in Washington Square: Linguistic Experimentation and the Anticipation of Life

Although Washington Square appears to be a thoroughly assured and compactly structured novel bearing testimony to Henry James’s predilection for dramatic representation, the text provides a site for fertile experimentation with the protean possibilities of fictional form. Washington Square is a realist novel that is not quite realist. While James pays close attention to such pertinent factors as time, place, characterisation and dialogue, a fleeting autobiographical interpolation begins to destabilise predictable generic assumptions. As the narrative unfolds, the reader is drawn into engaging with aspects of the plot that suggest both a moving drama of intense psychological struggle and a modern domestic tragedy. At the same time, the text calls into question frequently accepted referential links to the experiential world by subtly foregrounding its affiliations to the processes of aesthetic production. From this perspective, the protean potential of Washington Square may be regarded as more closely related to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet or Victor Cherbuliez’s now obscure Le Comte Kostia (1863) than to conventionally acknowledged mimetic principles. Such an interpretation is reinforced by James’s consistent foregrounding of the flexible linguistic play of his narrative. Irony is the dominant modality of both the narrator and Dr Sloper, while melodrama in quite distinct guises becomes the expressive medium of the Doctor, as well as his foolishly interfering sister, Mrs Penniman. Morris Townsend, as disingenuous suitor, is an accomplished manipulator of language. This leaves Catherine, the disappointing daughter, vulnerable heiress and rejected bride, to complete the dynamic equilibrium of a rhetorical square (reflecting the title of the novel) with the pathos of her silent endurance. Yet Catherine’s quiet inwardness serves equally as the ethical focus of James’s story. Her frustrated anticipation of, and yearning for, a life of modest recognition and emotional reciprocity is poised against the glittering repartee of James’s scenes and the imaginative cleverness required by the aesthetic enterprise. It is ultimately Catherine’s consciousness that consumes the verbal gymnastics of the novel into the privacy of her chastened, yet resilient, existence. As James understands, the rest must be silence.

Teaching to Hate through Theater: Hate, Violence, and the Invention of Piety in French Passion Plays

AbstractIn the pre‐modern Christian imaginary, the tortured body of Christ represents a theological, visual, and performative conglomerate meant to edify Christian piety while fueling feelings of hate against the Jews. The fifteenth century French Passion Plays – large‐scale dramatic representations about the public life of Christ –are no exception in this sense either. Indeed, as theater historians argue, the plays encompass the minutiae of Christ's ordeal in order to coerce theater audience into cultivating such feelings of both piety and hate. While the persecuted body of Christ is for sure a powerful emotional vector, one should not forget that hate is also articulated through a particular vocabulary stemming out from certain intellectual practices and sources that do not necessarily have racial connotations. This paper will analyze the displacement and adaptation of such vocabularies of hate from its original background to the emotional economy in the plays.

The Ambiguous Table: Dramatic Representations of Women at Dinner

An actual dinner party is nearly always characterized by the presence of three central elements: a meal, a table, and a gathering of people, who usually converse. In this article Campion Decent considers the dinner party as a social event and questions how artists draw on its elements to inform artistic representations of dinner. He examines the use of dining events in drama, notably in five texts authored by women between the late 1970s and the present day–Tina Howe's The Art of Dining (1979) and One Shoe Off (1992), Caryl Churchill's Top Girls (1982), Moira Buffini's Dinner (2002), and Tanya Ronder's Table (2013). These texts share an emphasis on the symbolic idea of food or dining, feature tables with a woman at their centre and offer dialogue allied to the experiences of women. While the dining events that they depict are populated with vastly different characters and distinct conversations, the tables nevertheless function as potent yet ambiguous symbols both of women's oppression and of the potential for creative freedom. This article draws on research in anthropology, sociology, food studies, theatre and performance studies, and women's studies to illustrate the fertile complexity of ideas involved in the symbolic dinner. Campion Decent has recently completed his doctoral studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is an award-winning playwright, with productions at Sydney Theatre Company, the Griffin Theatre, and the National Institute of Dramatic Art, Sydney. He has presented papers at Stanford University, Shanghai Theatre Academy, and Victoria University of Wellington.

Reading of Waiting, Time and Social Change in S. N. A. Agoro’s Something To Die For

The study of waiting and time, hope and none fulfilment of hope, came into literary limelight in literature particularly in the dramas of Samuel Beckett, the absurdist playwright and others like Albert Camus, Martin Esslin and Eugene Ionesco. The subject is most prominent in Samuel Beckett’s seminal dramas - Waiting for Godot (1956) and End Game (1957). In these dramas waiting is presented as a static experience that generates the rise and fall of hope. It breeds frustration, alienation, faithlessness and depersonalization. The act of waiting as a critical feature of the human condition is the most significant and intense thematic engagement in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The study notes that aside the circle of the absurd art in drama, the subject of waiting and time has not been given adequate dramatic representation by dramatists outside the absurd background. It is against this backdrop that we attempt to explore the depiction and treatment of waiting, time and social change in the dramatic universe of existentialism created by some playwrights who have not been given scholarly attention. The study shall therefore undertake a dialectical consideration of the concept of waiting and time in Agoro’s Something to die Foran existential drama and raise new judgment in the appreciation of waiting and time from the perception of Christian reflection in literary limelight and scholarship.Keywords: dialectics, waiting and time, social change, absurdism, existentialism

Tres Tristes Teresas

Tres Tristes Teresas Dale Shuger The tagline on publicity for the recent biographical play of the life of Teresa of Ávila, God’s Gypsy, reads “Before she was a saint, she was a woman.”1 However, after she was a woman, but before she was a saint, she was a text. Of course, we can only know figures of the sixteenth century through their textual legacy, but in Teresa’s case we are more easily misled into thinking we know the true Teresa because among her writings is a first-person account of her spiritual development. The very title of that text—el Libro de la vida—invites us to speculate as to the relationship between life and life-story, and indeed, Teresa’s life has been a frequent subject of dramatic representation. It should come as no surprise, given the Baroque penchant for theater, that Teresa’s life should have been the subject of comedias de santos during the seventeenth century, but modern playwrights continue to return to Teresa. The past five years have seen at least three new productions that place Teresa on stage: the aforementioned God’s Gypsy, Jesús Mayorga’s La lengua en pedazos, and a 2014 Almagro production titled Escrito por Santa Teresa de Ávila. These works—a full-ensemble American production adapted from Barbara Mujica’s historical novel Sister Teresa, a two-person imagined dialogue between Teresa and an unnamed Inquisitor, with much of the dialogue drawn from the Vida, and a one-woman show with a script composed entirely of Teresa’s own writings—reflect the diversity of dramatic approaches to the relationship between Teresa and her words. To adapt Alison Weber’s observation that Teresa’s Life had “three lives” in her own times,2 we might say that these three plays represent not so much three divergent dramatic approaches to Teresa’s life as three divergent approaches to the relationship between her life and her Life. [End Page 378] I propose to examine these traditions,3 not for the purpose of judging their theatrical merits or historical accuracy, but because the divergent approaches shed light on the nature of the original work and original Teresa, and on the nature of the relation between those two. At first glance, the adaptation of an autobiography to theater would seem a simple reversal of the initial autobiographic process; writing an autobiography converts a life into a text, adapting the text to the stage would re-embody the text, re-creating the life. However, lives are not large files that can be compressed and then unzipped to their original state. And, of course, theater is not life; while stage may restore image and sound to the written word and flesh to the speaking subject, the space of the stage and the time of the play are not the space and time of life. This article considers three paradigmatic productions that diverge in the linguistic and performative strategies chosen to bring Teresa to life: Lope de Vega’s Santa Teresa de Jesús (1622), José María Rodríguez Méndez’s Teresa de Ávila (1982), and Jesús Mayorga’s La lengua en pedazos (2009). The comparison is useful because the theatrical choices can reflect back and give more insight into the text itself and the life it purports to tell/be. The theatrical adaptations of Teresa’s life began shortly after her death, when Lope de Vega wrote Santa Teresa de Jesús for her canonization.4 Lope’s play is loosely based on Teresa’s life, most likely drawn from the Church accounts prepared in the canonization process and not the Vida itself, which is never quoted in the play. Lope overlays the historically documented facets of his subject’s life with the elements of two distinct generic traditions: the comedia de enredos, and hagiography. The comedia overlay dominates the first Act, with two rival lovers competing for Teresa’s hand. This plot is entirely fictitious, an elaboration on a few scant mentions in the Vida that Teresa was attracted to a cousin and distracted by “vanidades.” The biographical truth of the first act lies in the representation of Teresa’s doubts...

The Tyranny of the Male Preserve

Within this paper I draw on short vignettes and quotes taken from a two-year ethnographic study of boxing to think through the continuing academic merit of the notion of the male preserve. This is an important task due to evidence of shifts in social patterns of gender that have developed since the idea was first proposed in the 1970s. In aligning theoretical contributions from Lefebvre and Butler to discussions of the male preserve, we are able to add nuance to our understanding of how such social spaces are engrained with and produced by the lingering grasp of patriarchal narratives. In particular, by situating the male preserve within shifting social processes, whereby certain men’s power is increasingly undermined, I highlight the production of space within which narratives connecting men to violence, aggression, and physical power can be consumed, performed, and reified in a relatively unrestricted form. This specific case study contributes to gender theory as an illustration of a way in which we might explore and understand social enclaves where certain people are able to lay claim to space and power. As such, I argue that the notion of the male preserve is still a useful conceptual, theoretical, and political device, especially when considered as produced by the tyranny of gender power through the dramatic representation and reification of behaviors symbolically linked to patriarchal narrations of manhood.

Dramatic Representation and Meaning of Modern/Woman “Na Hye seok”

Dramatic Representation and Meaning of Modern/Woman “Na Hye seok”

The Catholic Question, Print Media, and John O’Keeffe’s The Poor Soldier (1783)

John O’Keeffe’s play The Poor Soldier (1783) should be read against the backdrop of Irish Catholic loyalist productions in the second half of the eighteenth century, a period when Irish Catholic leaders began organizing to press for greater political, religious, and economic rights. To recover this political subtext, this article reconstructs a media landscape that encompasses Irish, as well as English print productions, street performances, and military displays. I focus attention, in particular, on the debate in the press and print media during the period of the American Revolutionary War when the British army began accepting Irish Catholic recruits. O’Keeffe intervened in this debate through his dramatic representation of Patrick, the poor soldier; this Irish Catholic war veteran’s story is this playwright’s attempt to answer the character question behind the broader Catholic question.

The view from outside

What aesthetic interest do we have in watching films? In a much debated paper, Roger Scruton argued that this interest typically comes down to the interest in the dramatic representations recorded by such films. Berys Gaut and Catharine Abell criticized Scruton’s argument by claiming that films can elicit an aesthetic interest also by virtue of their pictorial representation. In this article, we develop a different criticism of Scruton’s argument. In our view, a film can elicit an aesthetic interest that does not come down to an interest in the dramatic representation or in the pictorial representation. We will argue that this is a distinctively cinematic interest. In section I we outline Scruton’s argument. In section II we point out an interest in how the cinematic medium presents the portrayed subject as detached from the spectator’s environment. In section III, by referring to Wittgenstein’s account of the contemplation from outside, we contend that the interest in films introduced in section II can count as an aesthetic interest. In section IV we argue that both documentaries and fiction films can elicit this kind of interest. In section V we compare the three different kinds of aesthetic interest that, in our view, a film can elicit. In section VI we describe the corresponding kinds of cinematic achievements.

Sayo, zurrón y cayado: vestimenta y atrezo en el teatro de Juan del Encina

This paper studies the existence of a topical configuration of the rustic shepherd in the dramatic works by Juan del Encina. To do this, I analyze the shepherd’s costume most common in its dramatis persona by tracking the various implicit iconic stage directions preserved in the dramatic dialogues. Convinced of the duality of the dramatic text, I intend to extract the elements of the most recurring disguise in the shepherd of Encina to show the conventional codification created by the playwright for its rustic characters on stage. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to analyze the shepherd on stage, that is, to study the performative text, paying particular attention to their physical appearance, their typical costumes, and props, because these elements were very important for the Renaissance viewers. I also propose to show the diverse functions of the costume in his dramatic representations of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. The purpose is to cancel the already worn assertion of the first Castilian theater as lacking of theatricality.

Estructuras dramáticas y zoomorfismo en Los gatos de Jesús González Dávila

Mexican author Jesús González Dávila shows in his Los gatos a primitive world wherein irrationality prevails and the ideals of civilization and progress are destroyed. In this dramatic representation of the slums of Mexico, children learn to act pragmatically, discarding their dreams and aspirations in order to obey their instincts. González Dávila grew up in the rugged landscape of Sabinas, Coahuila, and later worked with street children in Mexico City, an experience from which he captures in his drama the vulnerability of childhood. The play was written in the 70’s and reworked in 1999, but its subject remains valid. The author retains a mysterious, poetic spirit in the representation of Mexican children, especially Polo, his iconic character. The main dramatic structures of the play are studied through the lens of Dramatology, while that of Ethology provides a zoomorphic perspective of the characters.

Landscaping the body: Anatomical-geographical bawdy in Aristophanes and Shakespeare, and politically incorrect humour

In this article two bawdy passages are compared. In Aristophanes’ Lysistrata , Athenian and Spartan negotiators, driven to a state of desperation by their women’s sex-strike, map out their respective sexo-territorial demands on the sexy body of the personified Reconciliation . In Shakespeare’s The comedy of errors , again, Dromio of Syracuse is trying to escape from the rotund kitchen maid Nell, who believes that he is her husband, Dromio of Ephesus. In both passages a woman’s body is imagined as a geopolitical entity to be mapped out by men. Thus, geographical allusions occur which ostensibly denote real contemporary geopolitical entities in 411 BC or AD 1592, but often connote allusions, some of them obscene, to female body parts. In taking issue with the interpretation that real women are debased by the depiction of fictional women in these passages, I base my arguments on (i) the underrated positive function of humour; (ii) the generic function of comedy; (iii) the illusionary nature of dramatic representation; (iv) the carnivalesque; and (v) the probable composition of the audience.

Flying Free from History and Reality: Dramatic Representations of the “Crocodile Dilemma” in the Theatre of Martin McDonagh

Flying Free from History and Reality: Dramatic Representations of the “Crocodile Dilemma” in the Theatre of Martin McDonagh

Anthropo-Scenes: Theater and Climate Change

The scale and complexity of climate change, as well as its often incremental and unspectacular nature, pose formidable obstacles to dramatic representation. Wallace Shawn’s recent play Grasses of a Thousand Colors (2009) subtly distorts the conventions of the thesis play, or drama of ideas, to reveal the habits of mind that are responsible for our species’ steady progress towards ecological disaster. His ‘drama of bad ideas’ is read as a response to what scientists are calling the ‘Anthropocene’ to designate the current era of anthropogenic climate change. The play uses some of Shawn’s abiding themes, especially food and sex, to propose a new understanding of the human, beyond psychological subjecthood and sociopolitical agency: the human is to be reconceived as a geophysical force, with behaviors and practices that produce catastrophic ‘scale effects’ and call for a new species-centric consciousness that will override the ecological myopia of more narrowly-defined group identities such as gender, class or nation.

Reforming the Armed Camp: Soulcraft in Plato's Laws

The Laws is often read as Plato’s most political work, in which he departs from the imaginative abstractions of the Republic and offers his more sober reflections on the proper political framework for a real city. Against this interpretation, I argue that the Laws, like the Republic, is primarily about soulcraft or character education. As such, we cannot look to the Laws’ city in speech for direct insight into Plato’s practical political reasoning; it functions rather as a heuristic device, much like in the Republic. Through careful attention to the dramatic framing of the dialogue, the Laws emerges not as a vessel for conveying Plato’s blueprint for an actual city, but as a depiction of one man’s attempt to awaken the passion for learning in two old men from what he calls an armed camp (στρατόπeδον) — a place that, unlike a city, never enjoys any luxuries like festivals or other forms of leisure but rather is always preparing for war against foreigners (666e). Read in this light, it becomes clear that one of Plato’s central intentions in the dialogue is to convey the importance of cross-cultural engagement. Though the stasis characterizing a regime isolated from the outside world seems to allow for the protection of its good elements, such isolation stifles the spirit of learning and thus detracts from the regime’s goodness. In such cases, it takes the voice of a foreigner to awaken the dormant passion for wisdom. Ultimately, my interpretation of the Laws as offering a dramatic representation of the epistemological benefits of cross-cultural engagement not only challenges traditional readings of the dialogue as Plato’s most political work, but also the commonplace view of Plato as xenophobic.