Early Drama Research Articles

Gold, Land, and Labor: Ideologies of Colonization and Rewriting The Tempest in 1622

Various associations of The Tempest (1611) evoked in John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's The Sea Voyage (1622) suggest that the two plays are engaged in a dialogue that reveals their divergent ideologies. I argue here that The Sea Voyage critiques the colonial ideologies expressed in the earlier play. By confronting The Tempest 's silence on piracy, the later play focuses on the practice of European privateering, transferring the characteristics of barbarity and savagery, attributed to the non-Western "other" in The Tempest , to the European pirates. By valorizing labor and connecting it with temperance, The Sea Voyage exposes the unreality of Gonzalo's plantation on the one hand, and the exploitative nature of Prospero's governance on the other. Finally, the Amazonian commonwealth in The Sea Voyage interrogates further the western right to impose cultural norms on the natives that Prospero and the Europeans arrogate to themselves.

Preface

Preface DAVID MILLS University of Liverpool Medieval Drama first knew it was medieval in the late sixteenth century and it betrayed itself into painting a picture of itself as peasant drama in the Later Chester Banns: By Craftes men and meane men these Pageanntes are played And to Commons & Contrymen accustomablye before.1 This view was readily adopted by antiquarians and picked up in scholarly histories. For E. K. Chambers, in 1903, this drama had its roots in church liturgy and only became drama as such when it left the church and became fully secularized.2 Here was an example, it seems, of truly popular drama from the people, by the people, for the people. So this view prevailed up to the midtwentieth century when a sudden renaissance of early drama scholarship came about. Surprisingly, very little attention had, up to that time, been given to these plays and the evidence for their production. It is true that the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain, preventing God from being acted on a stage by a human being, also precluded performance experiments, but in 1951 the ban was ignored when the government urged a number of cities to celebrate the Festival of Britain by putting on their plays as examples of their and the country’s heritage. Although these productions were on fixed sets and for paying audiences , the attention of the citizens was drawn to the quality of their texts and stagecraft, especially at York. There had also been individual scholars who were not convinced of the validity of the critical framework established by Chambers, though he was still regarded as the great authority, to the degree that I was told by Glynn Wickham that his Early English Stages was initially turned down by an academic press because Chambers had said all that was needed on the subject.3 But it was the 1965 book by Hardison that fully exposed the pre-suppositions 1 Chester’s later Banns are found in REED: Chester, ed. by Lawrence M. Clopper (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), pp. 285–95. 2 E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage (London: Oxford University Press, 1903). 3 Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages,  to  (London: Routledge and Paul; New York, Columbia University Press, 1959). Yearbook of English Studies, 43 (2013), 1–3© Modern Humanities Research Association 2013 and short-comings of Chambers’ approach and, in a way, cleared the path for a new look at the evidence for the production of these early plays.4 Additional impetus resulted from the growth of departments of drama in universities and colleges with their focus on performance and the gradual shift of emphasis in English departments from a focus purely on the words of the text to a concern to develop a language for exploring the visual as well. By now, individuals had begun to produce new, accurate editions of all categories of the early plays, not just the large cycles, and were looking at the contexts for their performance through the exploration of contemporary documentary evidence and modern productions both in academic and civic and community centres. Many younger scholars were drawn to the study of early drama by the fascination of what was not known and waiting to be discovered and, perhaps too, by the fact that this ‘new’ subject had no scholarly hierarchy. Informal, friendly meetings between people of shared enthusiasms and like minds were soon formalized on both sides of the Atlantic (Medieval English Theatre (METh), Leeds Medieval Congress, and Records of Early English Drama (REED)) and slightly more recently in Europe (Société Internationale pour l’étude du théâtre médiéval (SITM)) into regular conferences where ideas were and are shared and debated, accompanied by performances that trigger yet more ideas. By far the most ambitious project undertaken is that of REED which has broken the boundaries between the plays and other kinds of entertainment , medieval and renaissance, and has broken too the monopoly among scholarly priorities that were, in the past, given to Shakespeare and the London theatres. A teacher of the renaissance revival of medieval drama has, since the midtwentieth century, been concerned not only for what the text means but also how the...

Beyond the Canon: Second Looks at Oft-Neglected Books

For most lovers of serious ‘literature’ – a term that now encompasses a vast number of works classic, historical, sometimes readable, sometimes less so – the problem of choosing WHAT to read can loom large. Long gone are the days when, with diligence, a large swath of the “greats” of “world” literature (meaning European culture) could be consumed. Too many other continents and their authors have crowded onto the scene. Reading habits, of course, vary as greatly as eating habits at a buffet: some savor the singular flavor of each dish before passing on to the next; others enjoy the way each dish complements or clashes with its neighbors. Even on the plate, some diners eat all of one food group before touching the next while others eat sequentially, a slurp of soup, a bite of meat, a forkful of vegetable, in a continual circle. Similarly, some readers take on everything by a single author before moving to the next, while others jump about eras and genres in a less rigid manner. Both methods have their proponents – and in reading, at least, both have their drawbacks as well. The samplers can miss small delights while exclusively pursuing the great dishes, while the savorers can become so engrossed in the major and minor works of an author, an era, or a genre, that they have little time to pursue tasting much of what lies before them. “Beyond the Canon”, then, will be an occasional feature in Crossroads soliciting recommendations of works which might otherwise escape notice: not necessarily “great” works – or even great reads – but ones which illumine, challenge, and/or entertain – though not necessarily all together. With the increasing interest in using literature as a tool for analyzing cultural values, some guidance or hints from those familiar with what’s out there will certainly be appreciated. There will be few limitations: Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso though well known goes mostly unread in its entirety. The same can be said of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Numerous early dramas languish anthologized but (for the most part) ignored. Washington Irving’s series of biographies surely offer some valuable insights, if not into the subject, at least into the mind of the author and the attitudes of the times. And whether obscurely familiar (like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk), lesser or failed (say, Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc) or nearly unknown (like George Schuyler’s Black No More), the right notice can prompt others to pick up the book and try it. Crossroads looks forward to your submissions. * * * * * *

Plays and Playcoats: A Courtly Interlude Tradition in Scotland?

The reign of Henry VIII saw a flourishing of court drama in England. Recent critical interest has sharpened our awareness of the varied uses of theatricality at the Tudor court, from performance games and disguising through spectacular revels to more and less elaborately developed spoken plays. Henry's personal interest in performance and his apparent readiness to accept drama as an instrument of debate as well as entertainment seem to have encouraged not only dramatic activity itself, but also the survival of evidence. This evidence suggests an increasing prominence of the courtly interlude through the first half of the sixteenth century: printers published texts from playwrights such as Skelton, Rastell, and Heywood while historical records and anecdotes, along with wardrobe accounts, point to a range of other interludes. Both texts and reports suggest that court theater became a recognized and at times highly developed mode of topical comment. This is a period when court drama played an important role in the assertion, celebration, and critique of royal power. (1) If we turn away from Henry's court and look north beyond the Tudor kingdom, what theatrical culture do we find in Scotland, England's close but antagonistic neighbor? James IV's marriage to Henry's sister Margaret in 1503 had confirmed relations between the two countries and their monarchs as both intimate and conflicted. Both royal establishments acknowledged and exploited the consciously spectacular court culture of the early sixteenth century. (2) So did the Stewart courts of James IV and James V support any kind of comparably lively and searching interlude culture? The question is hard to address, primarily because of the difficulty besetting any analysis of early drama in Scotland: the notorious lack of surviving pre-Reformation dramatic texts. Apart from a few fragments from quasi-dramatic games, we have only Sir David Lyndsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, and the two existing versions of that script document, not a court production but large-scale public, outdoor performances in the 1550s. (3) Without scripts the search for a Scottish interlude tradition seems frustrated before it begins. The picture is slightly less blank than this suggests, however. Lyndsay's text is complemented by a detailed, vivid, and revealing eyewitness account of what is plainly a court interlude, played before the king and queen at Linlithgow on the Feast of the Epiphany in 1540 and widely taken to prefigure the Thrie Estaitis. (4) Dramatizing the complaints of a poor man to a king and his parliament, the play addresses the corruption and oppression exercised by courtiers and, more especially, by the Church. Its vividly direct and immediate acknowledgment of topical events, of its courtly audience and of James V among the spectators, along with the king's apparent knowledge and approval of its content and his use of the performance as a political tool, all mark this as similar in type to the English courtly interlude. (5) Our knowledge of the play rests on a report passed to the English commander of Berwick, Sir Thomas Eure, as evidence of James V's attitudes to Church reform. (6) What can be detected of the play's reception might indeed suggest that the political courtly interlude was by then a familiar form in Scotland. Eure, who sent details of the play to Thomas Cromwell in London, states without surprise: thay have hade ane enterluyde played--he is interested in the political content of the play, not by the fact of its performance. In Scotland there is no surviving notice of the interlude at all, and this very lack of any contemporary comment or reflection might imply that its performance was, in itself, nothing out of the ordinary. What the report certainly reveals is that in 1540 a confident and theatrically sophisticated political interlude was performed at James V's court, apparently exciting no surprise. Might this suggest a developed but now lost tradition of court interludes in Scotland? …

CLUBFEET AND KYPSELIDS: CONTEXTUALISING CORINTHIAN PADDED DANCERS IN THE ARCHAIC PERIOD

The significance behind the imagery of the padded dancer, orkomast, traditionally has been connected to early drama, Dionysos, or ritual practices. Most Archaic Corinthian vases that include these figures portray them dancing, and a percentage of those dancers also illustrate a deformity of the foot. This article attempts to contextualise the clubfooted padded dancer within its political, cultural and geographic boundaries by offering an explanation for the end of production of these figures in Corinth. The lame padded dancer may have been a localised symbol offering political commentary on historical traditions of lameness within the tyrannical family of Corinth. Its production and discontinuation may be connected to the rise and fall of this family.

Postmodernism and Language in Sam Shepard’s True West and Tooth of Crime

Sam Shepard has gained a reputation as one of America's foremost living playwrights. In over forty plays, Shepard has broken down traditional notions of dramaturgy in combining both modernist notions of the absurd and familiar icons from the American cultural landscape with an energy tinged by anarchy and violence. Moreover, Shepard has been considered by many critics as a postmodern dramatist. Hassan (1987) piles up a lengthy list of artists from various disciplines whose names epitomize postmodernism for him. The playwrights are: Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter and only Sam Shepard and August Wilson from America. One characteristic of postmodern literature in general, is a focus on the instability of meaning and the inadequacy of language to completely and accurately represent truth, along with an irony and playfulness in the treatment of linguistic constructs. In other words, there is a questioning of language as a medium of perception and communication. Language can name the pain but it can’t be the pain; language cannot reach the actual individual feeling. Language is not strong enough to convey the intense emotion. In postmodern poetics, there is a paradigmatic shift from the idea that language is transparent to the disclosure of its physicality, its intimacy, its obdurate persistence, and its paradoxical fragility. Thus, language is an insufficient means for transforming the ideas that exist in one's mind. The aim of the present article would be to present the ways in which the dramatic language of Sam Shepard, as a postmodern drama, demonstrates inadequacy of language in communication. In order to reach this goal, however, a number of his early dramas will be brought under scrutiny with regard to their language and style from the postmodern point of view.

Book Review: Playing Doctor: Television, Storytelling, and Medical Power by Joseph Turow

Playing Doctor: Television, Storytelling, and Medical Power. Joseph Turow. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. 451 pp. $37.50 pbk.The heroic has long been a staple part of U.S. popular culture, with memorable characters like Dr. Kildare, Hawkeye Pierce, and Gregory House, among others. In this and expanded 2010 update of the 1989 book of the same title, Joseph Turow of the University of Pennsylvania thoroughly examines seventy years of television's representations of the medical profession, heavily influenced by institutional and intertextual contexts. Turow weaves together a rich history of these portrayals, using interviews with television producers, writers, and others involved with production, popular press articles, and detailed examples from medical dramas and other genres that portray doctors. His comprehensive book is valuable, not just for fans or television scholars studying medical dramas, but for anyone interested in the use of entertainment media as a prosocial tool, and in the relationship between media and institutions.Playing Doctor begins with an updated introduction, in which Turow provides a detailed explanation of the television production process, emphasizing that an array of external factors, including the medical institutions in America, health care policies, and medical organizations, indirectly and directly influence the characters, story lines, and other elements of a doctor show, which work together to create a reality that is far from an accurate mirror of American health care. At the same time, the stories told by these programs mark moments in cultural history that change and evolve-for example, the eternally optimistic 1960s Marcus Welby, M.D. differed greatly from the much darker St. Elsewhere, although both share some generic components.Turow explains the rise of the heroic as a figure in popular culture by outlining the shiftin medicine from a trade in the late 1800s to an esteemed profession. He then begins his impressive history of representations of medicine, starting not with the first television doctors of the 1950s, but with Dr. Kildare and other film characters of the 1930s and 1940s, demonstrating how these depictions originated the formulas replicated over the next seventy years. The chapters that follow move chronologically through each decade, addressing even failed (and therefore extremely obscure) fictional medical programs, as Turow takes us through the medical archetypes established in early dramas, controversies about bringing humor into the operating room in M*A*S*H, the new cynicism of St. Elsewhere, and other themes that emerged as this genre evolved. Throughout, Turow skillfully situates all of the fictionalized stories to the people, organizations, and formulaic constraints that helped create them.This updated 2010 version includes two additional chapters on contemporary entertainment medical programming, beginning in the 1990s with the failed Clinton health care plan. He discusses the influence of ER and, to a lesser extent, Chicago Hope on transforming the medical drama genre. …

Duque de Rivas’ El desengaño en un sueño: A Contradictory Repudiation of Romanticism

Although the Duque de Rivas did not live to see the debut of his drama El desengaño en unsueño , according to many friends and biographers the drama was his favourite dramatic work. Despite the author's feelings for it, the play continues to suffer from decades of scholarly neglect. The drama appears to be a harsh condemnation of the author's previous rebellion against paternal authority, or the AntiguoRégimen. In this essay, however, I argue that while Rivas was indeed becoming more ideologically conservative at the time he was writing El desengaño en un sueño, the presentation of paternal authority is more complex than critics have previously acknowledged, that a closer reading of the drama alongside his earlier drama Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino suggests a continued ambivalence on Rivas’ part towards paternal authority and that, in many ways, the hero Lisardo is more of a liberal Romantic than his mestizo predecessor.

Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence M. Clopper, and David Mills, Cheshire Including ChesterCheshire Including Chester. Edited by Elizabeth Baldwin , Lawrence M. Clopper , and David Mills . Records of Early English Drama. 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pp. x+1231.

<i>Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence M. Clopper, and David Mills,</i> Cheshire Including Chester<i>Cheshire Including Chester</i>. Edited by Elizabeth Baldwin , Lawrence M. Clopper , and David Mills . Records of Early English Drama. 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pp. x+1231.

Mendel's Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama. By Tamsen Wolff. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; pp. x + 280, 8 illus. $90 cloth.

Mendel's Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama. By Tamsen Wolff. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; pp. x + 280, 8 illus. $90 cloth.

Theatre histories: an introduction

Authors Acknowledgements Preface: Interpreting performances and cultures Part I: Performance and theatre in oral and written cultures before 1700 1. Oral, ritual, and shamanic performance Case studies: Yoruba ritual as and contingency in the ritual process Intepretive approach Theories of and improvisation Korean Shamanism and the power of speech Interpretive approach Speech act theory 2. Religious and civic festivals: Early drama and theatre in context Case studies: Classical Greek theatre: Looking at Oedipus Interpretive approach Cognitive spatial relations Christians and Moors: Medieval performance in Spain and the New World Interpretive approach Cultural hierarchy 3. Early theatre in the court, temple, and marketplace: Pleasure, power, and aesthetics Case studies: Plautus's plays: What's so funny? Interpretive approach, Part I Henri Bergson's theory of laughter Interpretive approach, Part 2 Bergson's theory in historical perspective Kuttiyattam Sanskrit theatre of India: Rasa-bhava aesthetic theory and the question of taste Interpretive approach Reception theory Case study: Kathakali dance-drama: Divine play and human suffering on stage Interpretive approach Ethnography and history The Silent Bell: The Japanese no play, Dojoji Interpretive approach Feminist and gender theory, modified for medieval Japan Part II: Theatre and print cultures, 1500-1900 4. Theatre and the state, 1600-1900 Case studies: Moliere and carnival laughter Interpretive approach Mikhail M. Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque Kabuki and bunraku: Mimesis and the hybrid body Interpretive approach Mimesis, hybridity, and the body Shakespearean sexuality in Twelfth Night Interpretive approach Queer theory 5. Theatres for knowledge through feeling, 1700-1900 6. Theatre, nation, and empire, 1750-1900 Case studies: Theatre iconology and the actor as icon: David Garrick Interpretive approach Cultural studies and theatre iconology Theatre and hegemony: Comparing popular melodramas Interpretive approach Cultural hegemony 6. Theatre, nation, and empire, 1750-1900 Case studies: Friedrich Schiller's vision of aesthetic education and the German dream of a national theatre Interpretive approach Studies in national/cultural identity The Playboy riots: Nationalism in the Irish theatre Interpretive approach Cognitive linguistics Part III: Theatre in modern media cultures, 1850-1970 7. Theatres of popular entertainment, 1850-1970 Case studies: Blacking up on the U.S. stage Interpretive approach Reification and utopia in popular culture British pantomime: How bad theatre remains popular Interpretive approach Phenomenology and history 8. Theatres of the avant-garde and their legacy, 1880-1970 Case studies: Psychological and sociological training for the actor Interpretive approach Cognitive psychology Discoursing on desire: Desire Under the Elms in the 1920s Interpretive approach Discourse theory 9. Modernism in drama and performance, 1890-1970 Case studies: Ibsen's A Doll House: If Nora were a material girl Interpretive approach Cultural materialism Modernism in Chekhov, Pirandello, and Beckett Interpretive approach Comparative analysis 10. Theatres for reform and revolution, 1880-1970 Case studies: Social drama in Kerala, India: Staging the revolution Interpretive approach Politics, ideology, history, and performance Brecht directs Mother Courage Interpretive approach Semiotics Part IV: Theatre and performance in the age of global communications, 1950 to the present 11. Rich and poor theatres of globalization Case studies: The vortex of Times Square Interpretive approach Vortices of behaviour Athol Fugard: Theatre of witnessing in South Africa Interpretive approach Social justice and the artist 12. Director, text, and performance in the postmodern world Case studies: The crisis of representation and the authenticity of performance: Antonin Artaud and Jacques Derrida Interpretive approach Deconstruction Global Shakespeare Interpretive approach Postcolonial criticism 13. Interculturalism, hybridity, tourism: The performing world on new terms Case studies: Whose Mahabharata is it anyway? The ethics and aesthetics of intercultural performance Interpretive approach The historian between two views of intercultural performance Imagining contemporary China: Gao Xingjian's Wild Man in post-Cultural Revolution China Interpretive approach Theories of national identity Backstage/frontstage: Ethnic tourist performances and identity in America's Little Switzerland Interpretive approach Sociological theories of tourism and everyday performance Glossary Index

Towards a History of Operatic Psychoanalysis

This paper examines the history of the trope of psychoanalytic therapy in musical dramas, from Richard Wagner to Kurt Weill, concluding that psychoanalysis and the musical drama are, in some ways, companions and take cues from each other, beginning in the mid-19th century. In Wagner's music dramas, psychoanalytic themes and situations - specifically concerning the meaning and analysis of dreams - are presaged. In early modernist music dramas by Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg (contemporaries of Freud), tacit representations of the drama of hysteria, its aetiology and "treatment" comprise key elements of the plot and resonate with dissonant musical soundscapes. By the middle of the 20th century, Kurt Weill places the relationship between analyst and patient in the foreground of his musical "Lady in the Dark," thereby making manifest what is latent in a century-spanning chain of musical works whose meaning centres, in part, around representations of psychoanalysis.

The Federal Republic at Sixty: Popular Myths, Actual Accomplishments and Competing Interpretations

Perhaps two generations after the modest beginning, the FRG's successes and failures have become amenable to a more balanced evaluation. From the vantage point of the "Berlin Republic," the key question has shifted from whether the second German democracy would survive at all, to the reasons for its relatively positive course and to the extent of its lingering problems. This chapter first delves into the emergence of popular myths that characterized the Federal Republic's difficult search for identity. Secondly, it takes a look at some of the West's actual accomplishments in problem-solving, because such a comparison helps explain the eventual collapse of the East. Finally, it scrutinizes several of the competing explanations so as to reveal their political agendas and discuss their analytical limitations. Instead of presenting a simple success story, this reflection therefore strives for a critical appreciation. The paper concludes that at sixty, the FRG has entered a comfortable middle age, leaving be hind some of its earlier drama, but exuding a sense of competent normalcy. The mythical challenges of postwar reconstruction and recovery of international respectability have receded, followed instead by everyday concerns that are much less exhilarating. There are still plenty of problems, ranging from an aging population to a lack of full-day childcare, but they are shared by other advanced industrial societies. Moreover, after a century of first arrogant and then dejected difference, the German Sonderweg has finally come to an end. As a result of the meltdown of the Anglo-American version of unrestrained capitalism, the German model of a socially responsive market economy has even regained some of its prior luster. Hence, the postwar record of cautious incrementalism inspires some confidence that the Germans will also manage to meet the unforeseen political and economic challenges of the future.

Образы мстителей в Безотцовщине А. П. Чехова. Герой в ситуации возмездия

The aim of this article is to analyze the images of the two heroes of Chekhov`s early drama – the horse-thief Osip and Sophia Voynitseva, as characters that are similar to Commander, one of the heroes of the Don Juan story. A rtesponse to the Commander in Fatherlessness allows us to interpret Chekhov`s play in an ironic way and contributes to new value of this drama.

Meditations in Time of Civil War: &lt;i&gt;Back to Methuselah&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;Saint Joan&lt;/i&gt; in Production, 1919–1924

Meditations in Time of Civil War: Back to Methuselah and Saint Joan in Production, 1919–1924 James Moran (bio) Hang out your brightest colors. —Bernard Shaw to Joanna Collins, sister of Michael Collins, August 1922 In 1923, G.B.S. made his final visit to Ireland, never again returning to his homeland in the twenty-seven remaining years of his life. He apparently felt that the country was blighted by a regressive and backward-looking kind of patriotism, and in 1930 he wrote that any cultured Irishman “felt that his first business was to get out of Ireland.”1 Indeed, in response to those who exhorted Shaw to participate in Irish affairs during the latter part of his life, he prepared a stock reply that he intended to have printed on postcards, curtly informing his correspondents, “Mr Bernard Shaw takes no sides in Irish party politics.”2 After all, in John Bull’s Other Island (1904), he had scorned the trite imagery that characterized much Irish patriotic discourse, lamenting that if anybody wanted to interest an Irishman in national affairs, “you’ve got to call the unfortunate island Kathleen ni Hoolihan and pretend she’s a little old woman.”3 As a result, his writings do not generally lend themselves to being incorporated into republican balladry. Nevertheless, the folk singer Brian Moore—who has recorded a number of patriotic songs such as “Croppies who will not lie down” and “Soldiers of Cumann na mBan”—has performed a track called “Michael Collins,” with the chorus: Hang out your brightest colors, His memory now recall. [End Page 147] Oh each one wants a part of him: No-one wants it all.4 These lyrics derive from a letter that Shaw wrote to the sister of the Irish revolutionary hero, Michael Collins, in the week after her brother had died. Shaw and his wife had dined with the thirty-one-year-old Michael Collins only hours before the shoot-out in West Cork that fatally injured Collins in August 1922. And, after hearing about the killing, Shaw wrote to Collins’s sister: “tear up your mourning and hang up your brightest colours in his honour; and let us all praise God that he had not to die in a snuffy bed of a trumpery cough, weakened by age, and saddened by the disappointments that would have attended his work had he lived.”5 Shaw’s affinity with the revolutionary leader, as well as the sting in the tail provided by describing those “disappointments” that an older Collins would inevitably have experienced, indicate how, in 1922, Shaw’s feelings for Ireland remained as complicated and paradoxical as when he had written his earlier dramas that deal explicitly with the country, John Bull’s Other Island and O’Flaherty V.C. (the latter written in 1915). Yet there is a kind of appropriateness in Irish balladry appropriating Shaw’s words about Collins, as, for all the playwright’s exasperation with Ireland’s patriots, Shaw felt irritated by those who had long attempted to stifle any Irish attempts at self-government. As Peter Gahan has recently pointed out, “The standard biographies give little indication that during the years 1918–21 . . . Bernard Shaw’s attention to his native country’s politics was at its most persistent.”6 As I will argue in this article, Shaw’s playwriting repeatedly engaged with Ireland during the Anglo-Irish War and the Irish Civil War, with the confusing and fluctuating political situation that existed between 1919 and 1924 affecting the composition and staging of the two significant dramatic works that he wrote during this time, Back to Methuselah and Saint Joan. Back to Methuselah By the closing years of World War I, Shaw had long supported the idea that Ireland ought to achieve a kind of Home Rule, an arrangement that would grant Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales their own parliaments, but would also maintain a joint council to coordinate matters of mutual interest across the islands. Shaw despaired at the flourishing of divisive and mutually conflicting sectarian identities, and he endorsed instead the idea that Ireland and England ought to be natural allies. [End Page 148] When the Anglo-Irish...

&lt;i&gt;The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre Claire Sponsler The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre. Edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher. 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xxii + 400; 38 illustrations. $90 (cloth); $29.99 (paper). A glance at the Index to the second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatrehighlights some of the changes that have taken place in the field of early English drama studies since 1994, the year in which the original edition was published. Newly added entries covering such topics as animals in plays, audience, Boy Bishop, church ales, Clerkenwell, Lord of Misrule, suppression and decay of plays, transvestism, traveling companies, and Yiimimimangaliso—The Mysteries, chart a broadened field that includes more paratheatrical material, a wider geographic scope, and new areas of scholarly inquiry. These changes extend to other parts of the volume as well. The revised edition still contains twelve chapters, but there is an additional editor (Alan Fletcher, joining Richard Beadle), three new authors, one topic dropped and another added, several changed titles that reflect currently preferred terminology in the field, and updated and expanded discussions and bibliographies. Fresh content is provided for the introduction; a chapter on the Cornish drama has disappeared, replaced by one on "The Cultural Work of Early Drama"; and chapters on "The York Cycle," "The Towneley Cycle," and "Saints' Plays" are now renamed "The York Corpus Christi Play," "The Towneley Pageants," and "Saints and Miracles." The volume also includes a number of new illustrations, especially of modern productions, and a map of East Anglia showing places mentioned in the text. The bibliography and notes to individual chapters have been brought up-to-date, while new subheadings have been added throughout for easier reading. These deletions, additions, and expansions mirror recent work on medieval English theatre. The scholarly activity of the past decade and a half has led to a rethinking of the kinds of performances the extant dramatic texts represent (hence the change from "The Towneley Cycle" to "The Towneley Pageants"), has pushed beyond the well-known scripts of the Biblical plays to embrace texts that today look non-dramatic but may well have been performed, and has discovered performances for which no play-texts survive. At the same time, inquiry has shifted away from the two critical modes that dominated medieval drama studies in the 1990s—archival research and modern reenactments—and toward cultural studies approaches that are attuned to the complex relations linking past and present. Like its predecessor, this revised edition presents itself as a standard guide to [End Page 234]the field of English drama from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Its chapters cover the major kinds of plays in the period—especially Biblical cycles and pageants, moralities, and saints' plays—while providing an introduction to key interpretive issues, extensive discussion of modern performances or medieval plays, and a guide to criticism. As we might expect from a volume that envisions itself as an authoritative handbook of the field, there is little that's cutting edge in this revised edition, but the material has been updated and accurately reflects current scholarship. Thus the wealth of new material that has been discovered about early theatrical conditions is for the most part adequately represented in this revised volume. The reediting of many texts of early English plays, work that has yielded important bibliographic information about the textual corpus, is frequently noted. Also making an appearance are results from the archival evidence that continues to be published (particularly under the auspices of the Records of Early English Drama [REED] project) and interpreted, as well as findings about original performance occasions that have been gleaned from modern revivals of early plays. To accommodate this fresh material, individual chapters from the first edition have been revised, some more extensively than others. These include "The Theatricality of Medieval English Plays" (Meg Twycross), "The York Corpus Christi Play" (Richard Beadle), "The Chester Cycle" (David Mills), "The Towneley Pageants" (Peter Meredith), "The N-Town Plays" (Alan Fletcher), "The Non-Cycle Plays and the East Anglian Tradition" (John Coldewey), "Morality Plays" (Pamela King), "Saints and Miracles" (Darryll Grantley), and "A Guide to Criticism...

Libidinous Laureates and Lyrical Maenads: Michael Field, Swinburne and Erotic Hellenism

In 1889 Field--the pseudonymous identity of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper--published Long Ago, a volume of lyric poetry based on the extant Sapphic fragments. In deference to the poet whom they called the guardian of the lyrics, Bradley and Cooper sent a copy of Long Ago to Algernon Swinburne, together with a short letter: With flaming sword you have kept guard over the Lesbian lyrics; I have passed by you & touched the sacred things, & though I know my rifling to have been sad & mad & bad, it has been to me sweet that, unrepentant as I recross the barrier, I lay my spoil in your hands. Fiery vengeance take if you will, Poet of Anactoria. I shall not strive but remain as before Yours in sincere admiration, Michael Field (1) This brief note is illuminating in a number of respects, not least because Michael Field reveal that they were devotees of the work of Swinburne. In fact Bradley and Cooper considered Swinburne to be the best poet in England and a worthy successor to the Poet Laureate. Sharing Swinburne's love of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, the women were avid readers of Swinburne's critical writing and they were interested in the same kind of dramatic models. In a number of cases, Michael Field treated the same dramatic subjects as Swinburne, including Mary Stuart, Sappho, and Tristan de Leonois. Inspired by Swinburne's poetics and aesthetic creed, I suggest that Bradley and Cooper were moved to emulate and to refashion the work of their poetic precursor. As we shall see, many of the central characters of Michael Field's early dramas suffer their desires. In most cases, these classical characters suffer not because their desires are shockingly aberrant, but because of the intensity of eros. This seemingly paradoxical combination of pleasure and pain, heavily reminiscent of Swinburne's poetry, can be seen to form the basis of Michael Field's Hellenic aesthetic. If Swinburne was, as John Morley memorably described him, the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs, I suggest that Bradley and Cooper can be seen as complementary lyrical maenads. (2) As Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper forged one of the most fascinating and productive literary collaborations of the nineteenth century. (3) Together, aunt and niece produced eight volumes of poetry, twenty-seven plays, and thirty-six foolscap volumes of their joint journal. Their career lasted for over thirty years and they enjoyed the company and respect of some of the most famous artists and writers of the late nineteenth century. In recent years Michael Field, much like Swinburne, has been rediscovered as an important voice within late Victorian movements such as Aestheticism and Decadence. (4) In the following pages I intend to emphasize Bradley and Cooper's contributions to Victorian Hellenism, and in so doing highlight the relationship between Michael Field's poetry and Swinburne's influential Hellenic poetics. Like many of their male contemporaries, Michael Field employed Hellenism as an authoritative and scholarly discourse through which they could subversively celebrate (same-sex) sexual pleasure. Aside from the transgressive potential of ancient Greek literature and myth, Hellenism presented Bradley and Cooper with a philosophical and spiritual resource through which they could explore such subjects as religion, power, identity, sexuality, and gender. In the Greek drama Callirrhoe. (1884), for example, Bradley and Cooper incorporate such themes as the anguish of religious conversion, the pains and pleasures of forbidden love, the prevalence of sexual violence, and the virtues of sensual passion. At once life-affirming and utterly tragic, Callirrhoe represents the paradoxes of passion. Almost twenty years earlier, Swinburne had similarly employed Hellenic subjects in his dramatic poem Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and in his first, now notorious, volume of poetry, Poems and Ballads (1866). …

Just 'Farewell Performances'? Curiosity in Eighteenth-Century German Literature and its Role in the Creation of a Specific Genre of Political Theatre

This article focuses on curiosity's career in eighteenth-century German literature, thus counteracting the commonly held view that curiosity left the centre stage in cultural and literary debates quickly after 1700. Examining texts ranging from the anonymous Centi-Folium Stultorum to works of manifold genres, types, and backgrounds by authors such as Lang, Schnabel, Gellert, Loen, Belach, Frederick II, Haller, Vulpius, Seume, Breitinger, Grosser, Keilhacker and Borkenstein, it shows that curiosity's role after 1700 was far from being reduced to just a brief 'farewell performance'. In fact, its position within eighteenth-century culture remains highly complex; while early modern debates about curiosity were unforgotten and continued to be reflected in literary works, 'practices' of curiosity spread, Neugier was hailed as a key element in securing literature's success as one of the Artes populares, and it played a pivotal part in creating a particular and innovative type of early Enlightenment political drama that has (wrongfully) received hardly any attention as of yet although it dared to stage the rationale and strategies behind contemporary European politics of war.

Performing Gender at the Beginning of Modern Chinese Theatre

In the early twentieth century, female impersonators in Japan's first Western-style theatre, shinpa (new school drama), employed gender performance conventions based on kabuki onnagata and European melodramatic techniques. Shinpa performers influenced the performance of gender in early Chinese spoken drama. Chinese student actors emulated shinpa conventions in Tokyo and popularized them in Shanghai in the 1910s, where they were accepted as being accurate enactments of modern women.

Remembering Doomsday: memoria in late medieval English drama and iconography*

Much critical attention has been devoted in recent years to the analysis of the medieval artes memorativae. The concern with the arts of memory, as exemplified by the recently collected translation...