Early Drama Research Articles

‘A Black Knot’: Temporalities, Modernisation and the One-Act Plays of J. M. Synge

ABSTRACTJ. M. Synge’s engagement with social modernisation has traditionally been underplayed by scholars, and his one-act ‘peasant’ plays have been seen as typical (though exceptional) examples of early Revivalist drama. On the contrary, this article reveals Synge’s intense preoccupation with modernisation and modernity. Using a variety of unpublished manuscript materials never before discussed in criticism, the article traces the relationship between modernisation and modernism in Synge’s work, arguing that an overt interest in time, space and modernity separates Synge’s one-act plays from those of his contemporaries. Whereas contemporary one-act plays tended towards a minimal spatialisation of time, Synge’s plays insist on pluralisation, and are thus led towards formal crisis. This reading not only prompts us to reconsider the place of modernisation and modernism within the Irish Revival, but also elucidates a marked relationship between the temporal effects of social modernisation and dramatic modernism.

From Stage Scripts to Closet Drama: Editions of Early Chinese Drama and the Translations of Yuan Zaju

Abstract This study will trace the way shifts in performance and textual function reshaped the zaju from its late thirteenth-century appearance to the early seventeenth-century publication of the Yuanqu xuan by Zang Maoxun. Whereas the Yuanqu xuan offered literary texts for readers, the earliest printings from the fourteenth century were most likely based on lead performers' role texts, printed as aids for the audience. The author will also compare changes introduced into the texts by Ming theatrical agencies and their court performances, with the editorial policy of Li Kaixian, among the first to reprint Yuan zaju as the representative literary genre of that era. Long the major source for Western translations of early Chinese drama, the Yuanqu xuan has been selectively drawn on, according to the different aims of its translators: the plays have been used for language study, observation of Chinese daily life, and appreciation of Chinese literature. The author concludes by noting the growing interest in both Japan and the English-speaking world of scholars and translators, in earlier editions of Yuan drama.

Editor's Foreword: “Staging Archaeological Digs”

As recent issues of the EOR have documented, O'Neill's plays have been performed in major cities throughout the world of late: Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Madrid, Cape Town, and Adelaide, South Australia. Theater artists are digging up O'Neill's works and interpreting them anew.In this issue we feature another exciting transnational moment in O'Neill studies: a world premiere of one of O'Neill's early one-acts, Recklessness, together with the Japanese premiere of A Wife for a Life. As Yuji Omori tells us, there is a vibrant group of O'Neill scholars and theater artists in Japan who have been translating and publishing O'Neill's one-act plays (the first edition appeared in 2007), offering workshops and symposia dedicated to O'Neill, and staging these works since 2013. Based in Tokyo, Theatre X has approached O'Neill's early dramas with postmodern experimentation and transcultural lamination in order to make his work fresh—and familiar—to modern Japanese audiences. The use of onstage musicians and slow, stylized movement in Recklessness invoked both the traditions of Noh theater and postmodern theater artist Tadashi Suzuki. Yoking such disparate performance practices together with minimalist set design, the company deconstructed O'Neill's melodramatic play to give it new meaning. We hope to learn more about this group's exciting work in the future.London theater artists appear to be continuing their love affair with O'Neill. The Young and Old Vic are producing bookend pieces from the O'Neill canon. In Fall 2015 the Young Vic staged O'Neill's only comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, while the Old Vic has The Hairy Ape on the docket for spring 2016. As revised and interpreted by director Natalie Abrahami, Ah, Wilderness! is not quite the comedy O'Neill wrote. Polly Heinkel tells us this production was adapted as a memory play, creating a ghost-like O'Neill character who haunted the production. As if buried in the sands of time, the set conveyed a powerful metaphor of excavating the ruins of family history. Another notable London production, not reviewed here, was The Lost Theatre's production of the rarely performed The Emperor Jones—the first production in London since the National Theatre's mounting of it in 2007.Stateside, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) staged two productions central to O'Neill's biographical story: Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Count of Monte Cristo. Dramaturgically, this pairing is rich with meaning. These are the quintessential plays that defined the careers of James and Eugene O'Neill. Moreover, each play represents the epitome of its genre: Monte Cristo (“that God-damn play,” as James Tyrone puts it, that ruined him with its “promise of easy fortune”) is representative of nineteenth-century melodrama and the Romantic theater of the elder O'Neill, while Long Day's Journey, his son's autobiographical masterpiece, is still regarded as the pinnacle of American realism. While OSF planners often create seasons in which productions comment on each other, this particular pairing has unique intertextual poignancy. Serious treatment of melodrama is rare on US stages, Eric Levin tells us in his review, and in spite of using elements from the Peter Sellars/William Davies King postmodern adaptation, OSF reverted to a nineteenth-century aesthetic in its presentation.Last but not least, the Williamstown Theatre Festival offered a high-profile production of A Moon for the Misbegotten, featuring Tony Award–winner Audra McDonald. Gordon Edelstein's production transferred the plot from Irish to African American oppression, suggesting the synergies between the Black and Green Atlantic. Unusual choices were made not only with the casting, as Zander Brietzke's review notes, but also by powerhouse designers (Ming Cho Lee and Jennifer Tipton), whose sparse design boldly omitted the central image of the moon. If we cannot count on the moon and stars to anchor our understanding of Moon, or the familiar Irish American family often found in O'Neill's works, then perhaps we must question what we know more broadly. It is a fitting way to approach O'Neill's last play, which is about one life ending and another starting out in a new direction.As these productions suggest, directors and production artists have transferred O'Neill to their own cultural moments to reimagine his work, throwing out old assumptions about where the foundation lies and excavating deeper. This kind of approach is archaeological, philosopher Michel Foucault would say, because it allows new knowledge formation. We keep digging because who knows what we will next unearth?

Proxemics and Dramatic Space in Early Pastoral Dramas by Lope de Vega

In this paper I analyze the way in which Lope de Vega uses proxemics when (re)creating the dramatic space where he locates the different plots of his early pastoral dramas. The way actors use distances onstage, combined with gestures and sound (sometimes real, others times referred) evokes in the audience’s imagination a place that sounds familiar to them, maybe only conceptually, as we are dealing with a totally codified genre. Other than that, the playwright seems to combine these multisensorial effects with the use of pictorial techniques, prominently employed in landscape painting, in order to create a sense of spatial depth and stage perspective to seduce the mind of the audience. Even though I pay special attention to the use of all these resources when (re)creating rustic and natural locations, essential in these plays, civilian and village locations are also mentioned, even though they are incidental in the plots of the plays analyzed.

Maids, Fishermen, and Storytellers: Rewriting Marginal Characters in Early Qing Drama and Fiction

This paper looks at the ways in which traditionally minor characters are rewritten and manipulated in several stories and plays published in the second half of the seventeenth century. Focusing on the characterization of the storyteller Liu Jingting in Kong Shangren's Taohua shan (Peach Blossom Fan), the maid Nenghong in Li Yu's story “Fuyun lou” (The Cloud-Scraper), and Fisherman Mo in Li Yu's story “Tan Chuyu” and play derived from it, Bimu yu (Sole Mates), I elucidate a process of “character elevation” in which marginal characters who are literary representations of the lower classes are endowed with qualities traditionally seen as the prerogative of the leading characters, who represent the social elite. Rather than reading these upwardly mobile minor characters as fundamentally subversive, I argue that they may be seen instead as literati appropriation of, or fantasy about, the lower classes.

Bourgeois dignity arrives in early Georgian drama

The startling shift in ethical attitudes towards the bourgeoisie in England in the early 18th century shows plainly in the theatre of the time and the beginnings of the modern novel, compared with Shakespeare's time.

“Made to Feel Wretched”: Royall Tyler and the Trouble with Global Sympathy

I pity you too, replied I, the tears standing in my eyes. --The Algerine Captive At a key moment in the middle of The Algerine Captive (1797), Royall Tyler sends his American narrator, Updike Underhill, to Africa aboard The Sympathy. The slave ship's allegorical name is just one of numerous signs that the novel is concerned with sentiment. Beyond signaling this attention to feeling, The Sympathy invites us to recognize that sentiment carries Underhill into a series of fraught cross-cultural encounters. Tyler conveys the influence of these encounters through depictions of Underhill's affect, including recurring scenes of sympathetic crying, such as the one quoted in the epigraph (126). These scenes suggest that the protagonist cannot resist expressing sympathy for foreign peoples, even as his tears signal the pain and vulnerability that compassion creates. For instance, when Underhill comes to pity enslaved Africans aboard The Sympathy, his sentiment simultaneously attests to his power as an American and destabilizes it through his identification with slaves. Attending to such depictions of affect, this essay builds on prior arguments that sentimental literature of the 1790s expresses anxiety about the tenuous cohesion of the United States to tease out Tyler's concern with how feeling influences international relations and thereby shapes national identity. (1) I contend that his novel illuminates the vital role of foreign sympathy--meaning both Americans' feelings for those outside their country and the compassion they elicit from foreign peoples--in early American literature. Through his depictions of cross-cultural bonds that appear both appealing and troubling, Tyler explores a question central to his work: could Americans create a stable national identity? This concern, evidenced in his earlier play The Contrast (1787), resurfaces throughout The Algerine Captive. The novel begins with a brief narrative of the Puritan past and transatlantic encounters of the 1630s, then jumps ahead to the 1780s to tell the story of its narrator, a Puritan descendant, as he commences a picaresque-style journey. Underhill travels the United States to pursue education and employment. Unable to make a living, he becomes a ship's doctor. His global voyages prove even more unsettling than his efforts to make a home in the United States, as Underhill participates in the slave trade and falls captive to Algerian pirates. By developing themes of rootlessness, slavery, and captivity, Tyler's novel dramatizes pervasive concerns over the potential dissolution of domestic bonds and the destabilizing effects of foreign relations, which preoccupied Americans in the decades following the Revolutionary War. To address these anxieties over the United States and its role in the global sphere, writers and political leaders alike turned to eighteenth-century theories of sentiment. (2) Political rhetoric of the day presumed that shared feeling functioned as a measure of virtue. By imaginatively entering into others' feelings, spectators both signaled their own worth based on their compassion and conferred worth on deserving objects of sympathy whose suffering mattered. For instance, both Kwame Anthony Appiah and Lynn Hunt argue that as the discourses of human rights and abolition emerged in late eighteenth-century England, the British asserted their moral sensibility through their display of sympathy for foreign peoples. In this context, representing US citizens as sympathetic, in part, promised national stability. Not only did the founding fathers suggest that the nation depended on shared feeling to link fellow citizens, but Tyler and a number of contemporary writers asserted that Americans' identity and moral standing in the global sphere likewise depended on their display (or lack) of compassion. (3) Sympathy acquired particular importance as Americans faced the task of redefining their relations both to one another and to the global sphere following the Revolutionary War. …

“Come be off with you”: White spatial control in the representation of Aboriginality in early Australian drama

Scholars of early Australian drama have over-emphasized the stylistic relationship between Aboriginal characters in early Australian drama and blackface characters in early American drama. Focusing on stylistic connections between early US and Australian theatre potentially overlooks the complex ideological similarities in representations of race on the American and Australian stage. This article provides a close reading of two of Australia’s first plays — David Burn’s “The Bushrangers” and Henry Melville’s “The Bushrangers; or, Norwood Vale” — in order to nuance the critical record exploring the influence of American drama on Australian drama around 1830. Looking beyond formal connections between early US and Australian theatre can reveal an ideology of white spatial control underpinning early representations of Aboriginality and blackness in Australian and American drama.

Intrusive hegemonies and localised identities in early South African drama and theatre: 1880 to 1930

Studies in early African drama which focus on the onset of colonialism have often assumed a binary approach, wherein Eurocentric discourses were pitted in mortal combat against backward African cultural forms within the grand narrative of Europe's civilising mission. This article attempts a radical alteration to this focus. It adopts hegemony and resistance theory in order to foreground possibilities for an alternative reading of early South African drama. It departs from the traditional reading of African theatre that views contact between European and African dramatic forms as no more than an attempt at elimination through co-option, arguing for a more nuanced reading wherein attempts at co-option and elimination of African dramatic forms were in fact replete with numerous instances of symbolic resistance. The principal argument is that African forms continued to assert themselves in subtle ways even in those instances where Eurocentric discourses had attempted or apparently succeeded in their elimination, co-option and domestication. We focus on South African drama between 1880 and 1930. We view this era as one that marks the beginning of a contested post-colonial contact zone in early South African drama, in which intrusive Eurocentric cultural hegemonies were resisted by local identities through the efforts of apparently co-opted African drama groups and playwrights of the time.

The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater by Claire Sponsler (review)

Reviewed by: The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater by Claire Sponsler Sheila Coursey Claire Sponsler, The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2015) 308 pp. Claire Sponsler’s The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater builds upon her 2010 TEAMS edition of Lydgate’s Mummings and Entertainments, and uses Lydgate’s “nonliterary” works to pose valuable questions about the field of early theater and the cannon of medieval English literary studies more broadly. Sponsler’s thesis is that theatrical history poses a needed provocation to secular, London-based and Chaucer-centric English literary history. Lydgate’s mummings and disguises demonstrate one body of work marginalized by such a “blinkered” view of literary history, and Sponsler’s book demonstrates how attention to the excluded “nonliterary” disrupts modern assumptions of medieval cultural production (1–5). Lydgate’s “dumbshows” are collaborative, mixed-media works that draw attention to the competition between poetry and performance as “forms of cultural prestige,” underscore the impact of religion in Middle English texts, bring new light to rethinking the vernacular, and consider the involvement of women in dramatic enactments (4–7). Sponsler foregrounds the varying foci of her chapter as attention to different types of “situatedness,” the position of a text between bodies and spaces when collaborated on, performed, read, or inscribed on various spaces (15). These different material crossroads of production and reception allow Sponsor to raise timely questions about the boundaries between literature and theater, the archive and the repertoire. Sponsler’s first and last chapters engage with the material records of early drama. Though these chapters deal the most with the hand of the scribe in shaping early theater. Sponsler makes sure that her reader never loses sight of the fact that the text belongs first and foremost to its material manuscript, including images of many discussed pageants in the subsequent chapters. Chapter 1 examines the scribal practices of John Shirley, the main copyist of Lydgate’s performative works, and the medieval paratext that he constructed around manuscript editions of playtexts. Sponsler uses the wide range of Shirley’s contextual terms for the text—“device,” “bill,” “ordinance”—to [End Page 303] demonstrate the “porosity of representational borders” in Lydgate’s works, and the slippery generic definition of a play (19–20). Chapter 8 returns to this consideration of scribal work with a “dearth of knowledge” rather than a “plenitude of knowledge; Sponsler makes a case for Lydgate’s authorship of The Mumming of the Seven Philosophers based on the manuscript’s possible connections to the “Shirley circle” in London (191–197). In doing so, Sponsler models the challenges of extrapolating from the archive of early theater. Both of these chapters demonstrate impressive original archival research, and provide concrete examples of Sponsler’s larger claim of the challenges and rewards of attempting to construct a performance repertoire in early theater. In between these two studies, Sponsler uses her observations in the archive to inform readings of Lydgate’s various performative events; chapter 2 engages with Lydgate’s role as vernacular poet, and his mummings as performances that re-inscribed political and civic identities and spaces. Sponsler terms Lydgate’s approach towards language “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” an orthodox form of the vernacular that relies on borrowings and assimilations (38). This form of English poetics, Sponsler argues, brings together in an imagined urban community fractured London factions in pageants such as the Mummings for the Mercers and Goldsmiths (38–39). Chapters 4 and 5 consider Lydgate as transcriber or glosser of other London performances: chapter 4 addresses Henry VI’s royal entry into London as a pageant of “inscriptive force,” mapping out “real or imagined relations” between the crown and town (122–123). Sponsler categorizes Lydgate’s verse as “transcription” capturing words, performance, and response to Henry’s royal event (131). This transcription demonstrates the collusion between inscription and performance in medieval pageantry, in comparison to the “textualizing” of Lydgate’s Procession of Corpus Christi that Sponsler studies in chapter 4. Sponsler argues that Lydgate’s Procession is based on an actual Corpus Christi Procession produced by the...

Il fantastico nella drammaturgia italiana del primo Novecento

The article offers a concise outline of the presence of fantastic in Italian early twentieth-century drama, with the intention to demonstrate that it was not only through narrative, but also through dramatic composition that Italian fantasy made a place for itself in the last century. The analysis focuses in particular on four moments in this theatrical trend: a play of Enrico Annibale Butti strongly influenced by Poe; the occult side of futurist «teatro sintetico» (synthetic theatre); the group of «grotesque» playwrights, with a particular attention to Luigi Antonelli’s work; and the presence of “magical realism” in Massimo Bontempelli’s plays.

Towards “that republic in which complexions do not matter”: Derek Walcott’s <i>Drums and Colours</i> Fifty Years On

Derek Walcott’s three hour pageant, Drums and Colours, commissioned to celebrate the inauguration of the West Indian Federation was first performed at the West Indian Festival, April 25 – May 1, 1958. Some feel that the nationalist and didactic thrust of this early drama blunted it value as art. It is, however, the opinion of this paper that this play provides one of the earliest conceptual maps for Walcott’s orchestration of key thematic occupations such as the quarrel with history, racial and cultural syncretism and the evolution of a distinctive West Indian theatre style. Fifty years after the breakup of the Federation led to nationhood for the various territories beginning with Jamaica and Trinidad, the play is still a relevant gauge of Walcott’s conceptual evolution on issues as diverse as the role of the artist in West Indian society, his thesis on historical amnesia and the benefit of the proto-Christian virtues of compassion and forgiveness in the fashioning of modern Caribbean societies.

David Fennario, Bolsheviki: A Dead Serious Comedy

David Fennario, born David Wiper in the working-class district of Verdun-Pointe-Saint-Charles at the tip of Montreal island, is considered one of English Canada’s foremost playwrights. His earliest play, On the Job (1976), as well as the acclaimed Balconville (1979), the first bilingual drama in the history of Canadian theatre, have both won the prestigious Chalmers Award, while Joe Beef (1991), where he revisits the origins of his community adopting the Brechtian epic style, has won the Prix...

Video Film Recording: A New Production Paradigm For 1960s BBC Drama

Critical orthodoxies around British television drama suggest the ‘developmental model’: a transition from a ‘theatrical’ production mode based around live performance mediated through multi-camera studio, to a ‘cinematic’ mode utilising film, post-production editing, and location shooting. As Jacobs (2000) has argued, the introduction of videotape in 1958 arguably did little to change the model of studio production until the late 1970s: ‘… segments of drama lasting up to 30 minutes continued to be recorded on videotape in continuous time ‘as if live’ until the introduction of time-coded signals on the tape in the mid-1970s … In this way some of the style and aesthetics of early pre-1955 television had considerable longevity’ (Jason Jacobs, The Intimate Screen: early British television drama, Oxford, 2000, 24). Drama produced in the multi-camera studio could be transferred to film, but this ‘telerecording’ method—filming straight off a monitor—was deemed low quality and was largely unsuitable for sale to the lucrative US market. This paper examines an abortive attempt by the BBC to develop a method of combining multi-camera studio production with outputting direct to film. Known variously as ‘videofilm,’ ‘Video Film Recording’ (VFR) or ‘Intervideo,’ this process attempted to combine electronic multi-camera technique with the medium of film to provide high-quality film programmes without compromising the speed and efficiency of multi-camera studio production. The resulting programmes would maximise studio use and require minimal post-production editing, but would produce high-resolution filmed programmes for the international market. However, the system was never developed to the stage where it was used in regular production. Drawing on files at the BBC Written Archive, this paper examines the development of the VFR system in the 1960s and the reasons for its failure.

Aparna Gollapudi Moral Reform in Comedy and Culture, 1696–1747Moral Reform in Comedy and Culture, 1696–1747. Aparna Gollapudi. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. xii+185.

<i>Aparna Gollapudi</i> Moral Reform in Comedy and Culture, 1696–1747<i>Moral Reform in Comedy and Culture, 1696–1747</i>. Aparna Gollapudi. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. xii+185.

Staging and Filming John Bale's Three Laws

This article discusses a pilot research project by EDOX (Early Drama at Oxford) featuring John Bale's allegorical play Three Laws (1538-9): the project included research into the historical circumstances surrounding the play's writing and early stagings, a live contemporary production, and a documentary film. Bale's play is wordy, theologically dense, and formulaic in structure: it proved also to be full of dramatic potential. This article explores Bale's engagement with drama as a vehicle for theological teaching. It also narrates the challenges and opportunities Bale's script presented to the EDOX team for bringing the past and present into productive relation. The Oxford setting of both live performance and film encouraged engagement with the city's Reformation history through the work of a lesser-known voice in English theatre: a not-Shakespearean commentary on sixteenth-century English religion and politics which continues to resonate today.

The terrorist, the artist and the citizen: Oscar Wilde and Vera

This article links Oscar Wilde’s prose writings with his earliest drama Vera, or The Nihilists (1880, rev., 1883) and suggests how the idea of terrorism and political violence was a spectacle and threat that Wilde acknowledged and encompassed in his writing and thought. I discuss Wilde’s adoption of a Hegelian view of the development of civilisation and suggest that during his 1895 trials he cast himself self-consciously as at once agitator and scapegoat, finding that his own life had come to imitate his art though not in the ways with which we are commonly familiar. Modern terrorism from its roots in 1870s Russian political unrest is recognised as both a new force and a familiar fantasy which shapes literature.

Corpus Christi Plays at York: A Context for Religious Drama by Clifford Davidson (review)

Clifford Davidson. Corpus Christi Plays at York: A Context for Religious Drama, with contribution collaboration with Sheila White. AMS Studies the Middle Ages, No. 30. New York: AMS Press, 2013. Pp. xii + 242. $84.50. English medieval drama, which has come down us only small body texts, has produced stunning amount research into its contexts. Clifford Davidson, who established the EDAM (Early Drama, Art, and Music) Project at the Medieval Institute Western Michigan University the 1970s (1) (and for long time was editor Comparative Drama) is one the most prominent pioneers this truly interdisciplinary approach. The very first sentence the book review states that the importance the local in historical time and (ix), for the study the Corpus Christi plays was brought home him more than forty years ago, on his first visit St. Michael-le-Belfry near York Minster. The title modestly promises a context, but with equal justice one could distinguish five or six contexts. These do not strictly coincide with the subject matter one chapter each, but there certainly is distribution emphases. Chapter 1 (York Guilds and the Corpus Christi Plays) concentrates on the social and administrative context and offers important insights into local conflicts surrounding the production the pageants. Guilds often pleaded poverty that prevented them from participating. After the Reformation there was also reluctance on the part individuals, as the four drapers who refused support their guild's Death the Virgin 1554. The Corporation York harshly rebuked this great encoragyng suche lyke wilfull persones and disordre the sayed craftes (11; after REED York 1:313). The wording suggests that the refusal reflected more general mood, but it also shows that the Corporation felt strongly about continuing the plays. In 1569, year after Elizabeth's succession the throne, they were banned under pressure from the ecclesiastical authorities (16), but against, apparently, the wishes most York's citizens (167). Chapter 2 (The York Plays and Visual Piety) concentrates on an aspect religious mentality and devotes considerable space the effect playing out the Passion scenes. While allowing that the spectators were not necessarily uniformly reverent (49), Davidson concludes that Bakhtinian spirit blasphemous Schadenfreude about Christ's suffering at the hands the Torturers is most unlikely. Strong support for this view comes from the antitheatrical, Wycliffite Tretise Miraclis Pleyinge, which admits that the Passion plays often move spectators to compassion and devocion, wepinge bitere teris (50). The subject is also touched on chapter 3 section (67-69) called Blood, Suffering, and Devotion, and the book returns it the final, collaborative chapter. In the main, chapter 3 (The Color Devotion) deals with the painters' contribution the overall effect the pageants; it benefits particularly from Davidson's earlier work on the material culture medieval York. Chapter 4 (The Pageant Route, the City as Stage, and the Sacred), which treats the physical context the pageants, is special interest that it touches on the relationship between the Corpus Christi procession and the Corpus Christi play or pageant. The traditional view that the play or plays somehow evolved from the procession is almost certainly untenable. In the York records, which are far from providing complete picture, however, the first mention the play antedates that the procession, if only by year. (2) Plays growing out of the procession have created logistical problems that seem impossible overcome. As Davidson puts it, instead ever having been joined, it is more likely that the pageants and the procession had always been separate (87). But even this arrangement would have involved logistical complication (87). …

Syntax and subtext: Diachronic variables, displacement and proximity in the verse dramas of Shakespeare and his contemporaries

In this study of serious verse drama (tragedies and history plays) by Shakespeare and his contemporaries of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods, language is seen as a resource for achieving immediacy or distance, situating the play either in a contemporary socio-political framework or else in a national-historical past. The empirical basis for this claim lies in a study of archaic versus innovative syntactic constructions. It is shown that in the early 1590s Shakespeare and his contemporaries made very frequent use of verb-second in declaratives, and tended to avoid do-support in interrogatives. In early Jacobean serious drama, however, “verb-second” had almost disappeared and do-support rose to around 50% of interrogative contexts. Whereas in the earlier period an archaic effect was created by retaining Middle English constructions that ordinary usage had by now either abandoned, or was in the process of doing so, the language of Jacobean serious drama aligned itself on the respective ambient linguistic norms. It is argued that these syntactic preferences conveyed a stylistic effect suitable for representing distance and/or alterity, either with respect to the past or to a foreign context: both perspectives involved late Elizabethan national identity concerns. Conversely, the adoption of contemporary linguistic norms in Jacobean high drama achieved an effect of proximity, facilitating “here-and-now” allusiveness to contemporary themes, especially those of court intrigue and cynical acquisitive materialism.

Harold Pinter: The Theatre of Power by Robert Gordon (review)

Reviewed by: Harold Pinter: The Theatre of Power by Robert Gordon William Hutchings (bio) Robert Gordon . Harold Pinter: The Theatre of Power. Michigan Modern Dramatists 3. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Pp. 216. $49.50. The third volume of the Michigan Modern Dramatists series edited by Enoch Brater, Robert Gordon's Harold Pinter: The Theatre of Power, provides a comprehensive overview of Pinter's stage oeuvre from The Room through Celebration. As the Director of the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London (where he is also Professor of Drama), Gordon is an eminently qualified guide for such a study, and his book is likely to remain the standard for such volumes for a generation. The four major themes that he establishes early in the introduction will be quite familiar already to Pinter aficionados: • the territorial imperative, whereby the individual struggles to claim and/ or defend his or her particular space (usually interior) and thus assert and/ or protect his or her identity; • the exercise of power through the language of authority; • sex, gender, and the construction of identity; and • questions of time and memory. Yet in contrast to those reviewers and scholars who denigrate Pinter's later, shorter plays "as disappointingly didactic political propaganda" (1), Gordon rightly insists that the above themes "are repeatedly recapitulated, rethought, and elaborated in new ways in later plays. Throughout his career, he experimented with new variations of core structural and thematic motifs, whose origin can usually be traced to an initial idea from an earlier play" (2). Accordingly, Pinter's now complete oeuvre can be assessed with an entirely appropriate emphasis on the later works, which, like Beckett's late-career "dramaticules," tend to edulcorate the decades-earlier full-length works, shortening their form and often perforce removing any semblance of comedy but refining and intensifying the presentation of preoccupations that had actually "been there" all along. [End Page 251] In Gordon's analysis, Pinter's first play, The Room, "establishes the aesthetic terms of Pinter's early theater, which does not aim to communicate an overarching 'meaning' in an allegorical or symbolic manner, but which invites the spectator to 'live through' the experiences of a group of people in a virtual universe that operates in parallel to her or his everyday world. By removing the conventionally logical exposition of a 'well-made' naturalistic play that functions to reassure the spectator that it is possible to piece together all the parts of the dramaturgical puzzle in order to supply a coherently historical rationale for the action, the revelation that there may not ever be a logical explanation for the events of a human life comes as a genuine shock" (23-24). Such a statement is a particularly apposite introduction to No Man's Land, by far Pinter's most notoriously difficult and indeterminate play—by the analysis of which any guidebook to his plays can be judged. By this criterion, Gordon's analysis succeeds admirably—in part by openly admitting at the outset that its "plot is entirely baffling [since t]here is no discernible framework of exposition that might enable a spectator to decipher the many puzzles presented by the fragmentary action being witnessed on stage" (107). The play thus becomes "a highly original experiment...[in which] the play models for the audience an experience of how it feels to be in a world of bewildering surfaces, rather than supplying a straightforward allegorical meaning" (122). In effect, therefore, Pinter deconstructs the most fundamental premises of naturalistic drama itself; precedents can then easily be found in his earlier works, not least among them the radical indeterminacies of The Homecoming with its often ominous subtexts, its unrelenting one-upsmanship among men who obsessively define and reassert status within the all-male domain of their household, and the indomitability of Ruth, sovereign among them despite the indeterminacies of her past and present life. Gordon also offers a number of original and often surprising intertextual links to other plays, such as an alleged structural affinity between The Room and Terrence Rattigan's "well-made" one-act The Browning Version, produced in 1947. Less convincingly, perhaps, "the intricate negotiations of...