Heroic Drama Research Articles

NHK드라마 「요시쓰네(義經)」에 나타난 영웅 서사구조의 원형과 변용 -조셉 캠벨의 영웅서사를 중심으로-

영웅은 TV드라마의 오랜 소재이다. TV드라마 속에서의 역사적 영웅은 대중의 욕망에 대한 대리자이자 그것의 집약체로서 기능하는데, 특정 시기 드라마가 형상화 해내는 영웅의 모습과 그것을 환영하는 시청자간의 소통은 당대 대중의식을 가름할 수 있는 장치가 되기도 한다. 본 연구는 오늘날 각종 문화 영역에서 환영받고 있는 일본의 역사적 영웅 '요시쓰네'를 주인공으로 한 드라마를 영웅의 서사연구, 스토리 분석에 있어서 중요한 위치를 차지하고 있는 조셉 캠벨의 17가지 영웅 서사 단계를 토대로 분석하여 원형과 변용을 알아보았다. 드라마는 캠벨의 17단계 중 11가지 단계를 적용하고, 2가지단계의 생략과 4가지단계의 변형을 보여주며, 대중문화 콘텐츠로 재탄생하기 위해서는 일정한 선택과 변형이 필요하다는 것을 알 수 있었다. The hero is in the TV drama's long. TV drama Heroes historical blip on the public's desire to delegate to the body and its functions as an intensive, which have a specific period drama that soars like a hero's welcome and it is the communication between the viewer a sense of contemporary popular devices that can be separated. This study today, the various cultural areas which are becoming popular in Japan's historical hero 'Yoshitune' a heroic drama, the hero's narrative research stories In the analysis occupies an important place in the Joseph Campbell's 17 steps of heroic narrative, based on analysis achetype and adaptation. Campbell, 11 of the 17 stage dramas to apply different levels, and the omission of two steps, and shows a variation of the four stages, in order to relaunch the popular culture as the content selection and a constant strain was able to find out that you need.

Making Monkeys of Important Men: Performance Satire and Rochester's Alexander Bendo's Brochure

Room 7 of the National Portrait Gallery in London is titled II: The Restoration of the Monarchy. Seventeen portraits hang in this room, most of them typically sedate. For visitors in the know, however, a libertine energy fills the air. In Hawker's portrait of the king, Charles shows a lot of leg for an obviously older man. While dignified portraits of the queen and Charles's sister hang to side of him, to the other side of the king hang portraits of two royal mistresses. Verelst's rendition of Nell Gwyn shows the spunky actress displaying much bosom dressed loosely in her smock-sleeves and bodice. In Lely's painting, Barbara Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland, poses with her infant son, Charles Fitzroy (later Duke of Cleveland), of the king's many illegitimate offspring. As though such a painting is not audacious enough, the duchess has decided to appear in a portrait historie, that is, a portrait showing a recognizable sitter in the role of a figure from history or mythology. In this case, Charles's mistress and bastard pose as the Madonna and child.The libertine showstopper of Room 7, though, is the portrait of John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, pictured with his trusty monkey (John Wilmot). No matter how profound their touristic stupor, most museumgoers halt to ponder and comment on this unusual painting. Even after some 350 years, Rochester still looks down on visitors, wearing a condescending nearsmirk on his face, wryly commanding attention by performing and transgressing. If not exactly a portrait historie, Rochester offers certainly a portrait satirique, and that demands interpretation. For example, in the portrait, Rochester is dressed in the tunic of a Roman aristocrat, thus wearing symbols of authority, knowledge, and power.1 Could Rochester, then, be impersonating the king? Poetic comparisons of Charles to Augustus had been common since the wave of celebratory verse greeting his return at the Restoration. In particular, John Dryden, in both Astraea Redux (1660) and Annus Mirabilis (1667), had made it his special business to cast the restored Stuart reign as a new Augustan age. By adding the detail of an anachronistic tunic to his costume, perhaps Rochester comments wryly on such equivalences as well as the sycophancy that produces them.A plainer signal that Rochester might be mimicking Charles, of course, is the kingly performance he feigns by awarding the laurels, which is where the monkey comes into play. By holding a wreath of laurels over the head of the chattering and fawning little beast, while it eagerly tears and offers up pages from a book, is Rochester suggesting that the monkey is like John Dryden, Charles's poet laureate? Given the uneasy relationship between Rochester and Dryden, such a slap at the latter would be no surprise.2 When Dryden won the laureateship in 1668, he had produced marginal comedies, obsequious celebrations of Charles's regime (after having just as fervently praised Cromwell), and caterwauling heroic drama. Similar to the hopeful simian in the painting looking to please its master, Dryden seemed intent on wooing royal and popular favor by producing whatever was politically expedient or currently fashionable. Moreover, also hanging in Room 7 is Wright's portrait of Dryden that the poet had painted in celebration of his newly acquired laureateship. As whimsical and colorful as is Rochester's portrait, Dryden's is antithetically staid and somber. It is, in addition, wholly and characteristically self-promoting. In little else than shades of brown, Dryden surrounds himself with honorific wreaths of various leaves-oak, ivy, laurel, and olive-and a cartouche featuring short Latin quotations from six poets: Virgil, Horace, Martial, Juvenal, Ovid, and Silvius. The primary inscription is Par omnibus Unus, translatable as one [poet] a match for [them] all. Might Rochester's painting be a pointed response to such pompous careerism by Dryden? Far from transcending the ancients, is Dryden depicted, perhaps, in Rochester's monkey as merely a base imitator of the greats? …

“By force or fraud / Weening to prosper”: Milton's Satanic and Messianic Modes of Heroism

“By force or fraud / Weening to prosper”: Milton's Satanic and Messianic Modes of Heroism

Lessons from the History of Medicine

What is the point of teaching the history of medicine? Many historians and clinicians find it regrettable that some medical students today will graduate knowing almost nothing of such “greats” of the past as Hippocrates, Galen, Vesalius, Harvey, Lister, and Pasteur. But does this really matter? After all, traditional history of medicine curricula tended to distort medicine's past, omitting the countless errors, wrong turns, fads, blunders, and abuses, in order to tell the sanitized stories of a few scientific superheroes. Modern scholarship has seriously challenged most of these heroic dramas; few of our heroes were as farsighted, noble, or obviously correct as once thought. Joseph Lister, for example, turns out to have had filthy wards, whereas William Harvey was devoted to the Aristotelianism he was long said to have overthrown []. But as the history of medicine has become less romanticized, it has also become much more relevant, for it promises to impart useful lessons in the vital importance of scientific scepticism.

Love, Honour, and Duty in James Thomson's "Tancred and Sigismunda" (1745)

James Thomson's Tancred and Sigismunda juxtaposes notions of heroic drama with the mid-eighteenth-century sentimentalism of individuality and self-determination. The tragedy centres on the conflict between Siffredi, the late King's adviser, and Tancred, the heir to the throne, who are guided by differing notions of love, honour, and duty. The catastrophe unfolds as Tancred defends his choice of a lover, and it culminates in the death of Sigismunda, Siffredi's daughter, who is torn between filial duty and her love for Tancred. This article aims to contextualize the divergent public and private notions of love, honour, and duty against the background of an emerging bourgeois sense of individuality, on the one hand, and attempts at preserving outdated modes of aristocratic domination on the other.

The Cambridge companion to English Renaissance drama

List of plates List of contributors Preface A note on dates, references and quotations Abbreviations 1. Playhouses and players R. A. Foakes 2. The arts of the dramatist A. R. Braunmuller 3. Drama and society Michael Hattaway 4. Private and occasional drama Martin Butler 5. Political drama Margot Heinemann 6. Romance and the heroic play Brian Gibbons 7. Pastiche, burlesque, tragicomedy Lee Bliss 8. Comedy Jill Levenson 9. Tragedy Robert Watson 10. Caroline drama James Bulman Biographies and selected bibliography A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway Chronological table Index.

The Heroic Drama's Legend of Good Women

Charles II's return to England in 1660 breathed new life into the traditional monarchical notions of the body politic and the king's two bodies.1 In the first few years of the Restoration, Charles advertised his own vigorously overflow ing, bastard-producing sexuality as a sign of England's reviving commercial, political, and social health—of the body politic's post-Cromwellian vigor and fruitfulness.2 But such a stance invited close scrutiny of his body natural and left Charles wide open to criticism for adulteries that continued long after he married in 1662.3 A series of natural and military disasters at mid-decade— plague, fire, and war—were seen by many as divine punishment for the King's and the Court's luxury and debauchery.4 Some, like Marvell in Last Instructions to a Painter, charged that the King's mistresses had unmanned him by exercis ing influence in important policy decisions. These masculine wives trans gressing Nature's law seemingly threatened both the King and the English body politic.5 This essay reads an exotic but popular genre as a creative re sponse to the body politic in crisis, to the body politic reduced to little more than the body natural. In a series of so-called heroic dramas culminating in Tyrannick Love (1669) and The Conquest of Granada (1670-71), Dryden articu lated and managed these anxieties over women's influence by downplaying women's threat to the (male) body politic. Rather than emasculating their blustering, overblown heroes, Dryden's heroines tame their passions and thus help to heal divisions within and between states. The heroic drama thereby attempts to defuse and dispel anxieties over the sexual threat posed by both women and the King.

The Restoration English History Plays of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery

The two English history plays written by Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery, during the first decade of the Restoration, The History of Henry the Fifth and The Black Prince, were instrumental in reviving the genre in the late seventeenth century. Although Boyle's Restoration plays have commonly been understood as inaugurating English heroic drama, this article situates them instead in an enduring tradition of seventeenth-century English history plays. Both complimentary and critical of court policy, these plays respond to the experience of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, from the early enthusiasm for war to the later disappointment with its disastrous outcome. The article aims to demonstrate how later seventeenth-century history plays, like their Elizabethan counterparts, continued to serve as vehicles for political critique and an important forum for the debate of pressing topical issues.

Dryden and the World of Neoclassicism ed. by Wolfgang Görtschacher and Holger Klein

70 just one of the conditions in the novel that indirectly promote order, life and meaning . At first digressions contribute to the development of more nonlinearity, more chaos, which is iterated, reread, by the reader; then meaning can emerge out of chaos though [sic]self-organization.’’Put in less chaologistic jargon, literature is often a combination of randomness and design, although the more we read, the more randomness seems to turn into design —a not unpredictable phenomenon. I believe it is called reading—both good and bad reading. Melvyn New University of Florida Dryden and the World of Neoclassicism, ed. Wolfgang Görtschacher and Holger Klein. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2001. Pp. 299. £45.50. In 1999, the University of Salzburg hosted a Dryden tercentenaryconference, starting what was to be a string of conferences , and a steady supply of tercentenary volumes: John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (2000), ‘‘Enchanted Ground’’: Reimagining John Dryden, edited by Jayne Lewis and MaximillianNovak (forthcoming), and John Dryden: A TercentenaryMiscellany,editedbySusan Green and Steven N. Zwicker (2001). In contrast to these collections solicited from leading scholars, the Salzburg conference , which led to this anthology, seems to have been open to any interested party. The results are, predictably, uneven . Of the twenty-two papers in this anthology , several are ‘‘discovery essays,’’ intelligent accounts of Dryden by people who are newcomers to Dryden. Thus, Wolfgang Görtschacher compares Dryden ’s Troilus and Cressida to the Shakespearean original, scene by scene, character by character, and Rama Kundu does something similar with All for Love and Antony and Cleopatra; this is the sort of thing editors did fifty years ago. Dimiter Daphinoff, in ‘‘Heroic Bodies–Feeble Minds? An Aspect of Dryden’s Drama,’’ surveys several of Dryden’s heroic plays, distinguishing between earlier and later heroes, but he basically repeats what Derek Hughes argued back in 1981. Two essays on Dryden’snotionsofkingship,one by Rolf Lessenich, the other by Annette Pankratz, sensibly summarize the well known; Mr. Lessenich’s, in particular, reads like headnote material to Absalom and Achitophel from an undergraduate anthology. James Hogg’s account of the literary controversy between Shadwell and Dryden quotes thevariousthrustsand parries of both, but nothing is here that is not already noted in the Longman edition of Dryden. Some essays rely on outdated scholarship: one author engages in a spirited debate with Louis Bredvold (1934) and Hoyt Trowbridge (1946), another uses Walter Scott’s 1808 edition for his Dryden texts, and so forth. About a third of the essays fall well below this level and thud. I will not discuss all the contenders for bathos, but it would be a shame not to mention Albert Poyet’s account of The Medall, which seamlessly blends forced readings with an analysis of irrelevant technical details, such as anaphora, anacoluthon, antonomasia , epanalepsis, and antimetabole, or Simon Edwards’s paper on ‘‘The Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady,’’ which combines enthusiastic over-reading with breathless over-writing, for instance, ‘‘the rich pattern of repeated consonants floats hauntingly above the sequence of long and open vowels. . . .’’ This should not be encouraged. Luckily, five essays sail hauntingly 71 above the rest. Yvonne Noble, for example , traces Dryden’s use of bee imagery in Annus Mirabilis (1667), expanding on the Virgilian motif of bees, both suggesting renewal and prefiguring the building of the Roman empire from swarms of wandering Trojans. While these are familiar ideas, duly noted in the California Dryden, and while a few of Ms. Noble’s supposed allusions seem to me a bit far-fetched, she provides context and explanation, and she adds intriguing information about beekeepers and naturalists , none of whom seemed capable of writing about bees without ‘‘being overwhelmed with political consciousness.’’ Derek Hughes returns to Dryden’s heroic dramas with a fine reading of The Indian Emperour, beginning with an exploration of exchange systems in classical culture , and then studying the patterns of exchange in the play, the giving, receiving , offering, granting, denying, taking, seizing, avenging, and so on. Mr. Hughes shows how Dryden uses such patterns to distinguish between the apparently advanced European economy and ‘‘precommercial man,’’ yet also to reveal that both cultures ‘‘reach the same consummation...

Authorship, Metatheatre, and Antitheatre in the Restoration

Restoration theatre theory, polemic, and practice are closely concerned with questions of value, although they have received little attention in recent criticism that considers the formation of the English canon up to and during the eighteenth century. The main issue addressed concerns the legitimacy of dramatic form, which dominates the metatheatre of 1668–75, but also appears unexpectedly in the political drama (especially the comedy) of the early 1660s and the antitheatrical rhetoric of the 1690s. In all these instances, the complexity, integrity, and completeness of drama-in-performance are seen to determine the value of plays as well as playwriting. While the attack on heroic drama in metatheatrical plays such as Shadwell's The Sullen Lovers (1668) and Buckingham's The Rehearsal (1671) is directed by authors of one persuasion against another, Thomas Duffett's burlesque attack on the theatre of spectacle in the 1670s paradoxically is reinforced by the self-criticism of his targets. Moreover, Jeremy Collier's antitheatrical offensive in the late 1690s shows an atypical concern with specific dramatic content, especially in comedy, suggesting that both metatheatre and antitheatre in the Restoration focus their oppositional energies on the particulars of genre.

Captains and Slaves: Aphra Behn and the Rhetoric of Republicanism

When one considers the extraordinary amount of criticism published about Aphra Behn's Oroonoko in the last few years, it is surprising how little critical consensus there is about how that work treats the institution of slavery - whether it is pro-slavery, anti-slavery, thinks slavery is generally acceptable except when those who are enslaved happen to be heroes or kings, or, indeed, whether it simply treats slavery as a convenient metaphor. My own contribution to this debate takes its origin from the use in Oroonoko of language and arguments associated with classical republicanism, in some ways surprising for an author like Aphra Behn, known in her lifetime to be a staunch Tory.Oroonoko's speech inciting his fellow slaves to revolt, in which he eloquently points out 'the miseries and ignominies of slavery', and his bitter remarks after the defeat of the rebellion, on the folly of 'endeavouring to make those free, who were by nature slaves', echo the rhetoric and the concerns of seventeenth-century republicans who regarded 'brutish Servitude' as an affront to human dignity.1 Milton in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) had presented the natural birthright of freedom, extending to all mankind, as a self-evident axiom:No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were borne free, being the image and resemblance of God himself.Consistently, Milton also argued that the strenuous defence of liberty against powerful, entrenched forces of oppression entailed a burden of responsibility few were willing to undertake, choosing instead to 'give up thir understanding to a double tyrannie, of Custom from without, and blind affections within':But being slaves within doors, no wonder that they strive so much to have the public State conformably govern'd to the inward vitious rule, by which they govern themselves. For indeed none can love freedom heartilie, but good men.2Like many writers in the republican tradition, Milton combined an impassioned advocacy of liberty, as a principle universally operative, with a bitter, contemptuous dismissal of those who preferred to 'renounce thir own freedom' and live in servitude - 'worthie indeed themselves, whatsoever they be, to be for ever slaves'.3Slave revolts, as Robin Blackburn has shown, were relatively common in the late seventeenth century in the colony of Surinam, where much of the action of Oroonoko takes place, because the geography of that colony, situated on the South American continent, permitted escaped slaves to live at some distance from the coast, free from possible recapture.4 But it is unlikely that any rebellious slave, even if he had been 'entertained with the lives of the Romans, and great men', ever addressed his troops in quite the terms used by Oroonoko. The 'harangue' of this 'great captain', aimed at motivating the hitherto passive body of slaves to heroic resistance, could be cited as an instance of Hobbes's claim that 'the reading of the books of policy, and histories of the ancient Greeks and Romans' had encouraged impressionable young men, eager to perform 'great exploits of war', to rebel against those ruling over them:5Caesar, having singled out these men from the women and children, made an harangue to 'em, of the miseries and ignominies of slavery; counting up all their toils and sufferings, under such loads, burdens and drudgeries, as were fitter for beasts than men; senseless brutes, than human souls. He told 'em, it was not for days, months or year, but for eternity; there was no end to be of their misfortunes: they suffer'd not like men, who might find a glory and fortitude in oppression; but like dogs, that lov'd the whip and bell, and fawn'd the more they were beaten; that they had lost the divine quality of men, and were becoming insensible asses, fit only to bear. (Oroonoko and other stories, pp. 69, 82-3)There is of course no more intrinsic improbability in the classicizing eloquence of Oroonoko (including a reference to 'one Hannibal, a great captain', as role-model) than in his physical description in conformity with Western ideas of beauty ('his nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat') or the emphasis on his status as 'great man', akin to the exotic warrior princes of Restoration heroic drama and romance: Behn is addressing a popular audience in Restoration England, and using the conventions at her disposal. …

Judeo-Christian Apocalyptic Literature and John Crowne's The Destruction of Jerusalem

John Crowne followed his first comedy, Countrey Wit (1676), with the two parts of Destruction of Jerusalem, arguably two of his finest works. first part premiered on 12 January 1677 and the second part one week later. (1) Neither play has received much critical attention, and those critics who have offered commentary have either condemned it out of hand simply for being a rhymed heroic drama or have been content with discussing Crowne's sources. Capwell, who first noted this tendency to criticize the genre rather than the work, (2) chose to respond by limiting his discussion to Crowne's departures from his sources without ever engaging directly with the implications of the play itself. White demonstrates beyond doubt that Crowne combined elements drawn from Racine's Berenice, Josephus's Wars of the Jews, and Suetonius's account of the relationship between Titus and Berenice. Capwell criticizes White for simply listing these sources and then attempts to explain Crowne's alterations. However, he seems to regard the romantic plots to be the chief focus of the play: The historical material, however, primarily supplies merely background for the love stories, and Crowne's skill in weaving the fortunes of Phraartes and Clarona and Titus and Berenice into the historical material is notable. (3) While these plots and characters are significant and can certainly provide insight into characters Crowne subsequently created, the center of the play (4) is, as the title suggests, the destruction of the city of Jerusalem. A cursory reading of Racine's play or of Otway's Titus and Berenice, (5) which is much closer to the French original than Crowne's work, reveals them to be works nearly devoid of dramatic action. Indeed, Berenice has been held up as an exemplar of the tendency of seventeenth-century French drama to employ simple plots. Racine himself noted that he wished to follow the simplicite d'action qui a ete si fort du gout des anciens. (6) Crowne's spectacular stage effects and supernatural events could not be more different. prologue to the first part of Destruction of Jerusalem announces that the purpose of the play (or, at least, the purpose of the damned playwright) is to reveal hid treasure (a literal [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), offering the first hint that we should recognize the strong element of apocalyptic literature within the drama. Although it seems unusual that Crowne's earlier critics chose not to comment on this element, perhaps it is simply the reemergence of apocalyptic themes in the last days of the twentieth century that make them stand out so clearly now. As we enter the new millennium and have become accustomed to apocalyptic themes in virtually every area of popular culture, it seems appropriate to look at an apocalypse from an earlier period that was also known for its political and religious schisms and excesses. Given this cultural preoccupation with the ending of the second millennium, it is not surprising that scholars have recently turned their attention to the question as well. Most of these scholars have been theologians, but literary critics have also been among their number, often attempting to apply the findings of the theologians to their own discipline. Bernard McGinn is one such scholar. In his historiographical survey of the origins and current state of the scholarship of apocalypse and apocalypticism, he offers this method of approaching the question of genre: I would suggest the following five questions as a useful introductory tool for this task: who reveals? to whom? how, or under what circumstances? what? and for what purpose? (7) Likewise, Brian Stiegler's examination of Cervantes' La Numancia (8) uses the definition of apocalyptic vision set out by the theologian Klaus Koch. These elements are as follows: 1. Urgent expectation of the overthrow of all earthly things in the immediate future 2. end a vast cosmic catastrophe 3. …

Dryden, Milton, and Lucretius

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)'The Poet an Atheist exceeding Lucretius', scribbled one irate reader on his copy of Absalom and Achitophel (1681).1 It is no surprise to find Lucretius invoked here as the epitome of unbelief, nor to find Dryden associated with the poet of Epicureanism. One does not have to look far in the theological and moralistic treatises of the Restoration to find Lucretius taken to exemplify the ultimate threat to Christian orthodoxy, or to find Epicureanism considered synonymous with libertinism.2 Of course, those who had looked at the classical sources with any care knew that for Epicurus 'pleasure' ... signified mental tranquillity rather than bodily indulgence: 'pleasure' is the absence of pain, especially the pain caused by fear and desire. As one of Dryden's contemporaries remarked: 'Those, who will take the pains accurately to consider and weigh his Writings and narrowly search into his thoughts, may observe that he had no other intention, when he spake so to the advantage of Pleasure, then to make his wise man happy, to loose his body from griefs and troubles, to fill up his mind with delight, and to render them both equally satisfied. Those who have thought otherwise, have scandalized his innocence.'3 But the reputation of Epicurus continued to be contested, and the two views of him are exemplified rather neatly in Paradise Regain'd, when Satan suggests to Jesus that Epicurean and Stoic philosophy 'will render thee a King compleat / Within thy self ', while Jesus scornfully replies that Epicurus was concerned only with 'corporal pleasure and careless ease'.4 I have argued elsewhere that Dryden was one of the period's most thoughtful students of the Epicurean philosophy as set out by Lucretius.5 In plays from the late 1660s and 1670s he turned to Lucretius to articulate a philosophy of disengagement from the cares of the world, defining that state of ... which Epicurus advocated - freedom from disturbance. He was particularly interested in distinguishing true Epicurean philosophy from the distorted libertine version of it which was current in Restoration literature: in his heroic dramas he presents us with characters who give voice to a crude form of Epicureanism, a hedonistic ethos, while in the prefaces to those plays he seeks for himself the tranquillity and peace of mind which retirement from public life would bring. This is particularly exemplified in Aureng-Zebe (1676), and its accompanying Dedication to the Earl of Mulgrave. Then in Sylvae (1685) he published his eloquent translations of extracts from De Rerum Natura, passages which highlight the two forms of disturbance which most commonly work against our peace of mind - sexual desire, and the fear of death. This reading of Dryden's engagement with Lucretius stresses the attractions which the Roman poet held for him philosophically, though this is not to claim that Dryden simply espoused Epicureanism as his personal creed: rather, the Epicurean philosophy (particularly as mediated by Lucretius) was one of the stances towards the world which Dryden was interested in trying - in the double sense of 'adopting' and 'testing'. (His nondramatic poetry is frequently characterized by a play of different voices: internally within a single poem, as in The Hind and the Panther; in his translations as a dialogue between Dryden and his original; and often between different poems in the same collection, such as Sylvae or Fables.) And we should also recognize that Lucretius' picture of the world as a collection of atoms in motion appealed strongly to Dryden's poetic imagination, to his vision of the universe as chaotic, and of order as precarious and temporary. Indeed, the starting point for his celebration of harmony in 'A Song for St Cecilia's Day, 1687' is the Lucretian chaos when 'Nature underneath a heap / Of jarring Atomes lay' (ll. 3-4).In this essay I propose to explore the ways in which Dryden's response to Lucretius was interwoven with his response to Milton. …

Davenant's The Siege ofRhodes and the New Attitude Towards the Orient

With the first production of The Siege of Rhodes in 1656 came the birth of a new dramatic form in England, a heroic play which, more or less, has all the ingredients of the genre. Davenant dramatised a memorable historical event involving the Orient, an event which no one had attempted to represent on the stage before (and probably never afterwards). In fact, the historical battle for Rhodes with all the exotic Oriental details in Davenant's plot allowed him to introduce and explore vividly various theatrical techniques, such as the use of spectacular settings and of multiple and changeable scenery. Davenant revised the first version of his play, producing a second part in 1661; the two parts together were published in one edition in 1663. The play, which also has claims to being the first Opera on the English stage, marked the resumption of theatrical activity after the long closure of the theatres. 1he piay is, therefore, situated at a crucial turning point in the history ofEnglish drama. IV!oreover, The SiP.(JP nt Rhodes inaugurated a new attitude J - towards the Orient in Engiish dramatic tradition. Davenant's adaptation of a historical Oriental subject, i.e. the Turkish siege and conquest of Christian Rhodes, and of a heroic, romantic atmosphere, has attracted sorri'e critical commentary. In this paper, I am interested in Davenant's handling of the Oriental material available to him. I seek to throw light on his original and complex representation of the Orient in this first Restoration drama representing such an important historical event for both Christians and Turks. .

Poetic Plate-Fleets and Universal Monarchy: The Heroic Plays and Empire in the Restoration

n fullest recent study of Caroline heroic play, Nancy Klein Maguire argues that tragicomedies produced by Davenant, Orrery, and Dryden between 1658 and 1671 repetitively enacted a drama of rebellion against, usurpation of, and restoration of royal power in an attempt to negotiate and perhaps exorcise traumas of recent political history.' The insight is a familiar one, if never so comprehensibly and convincingly documented: my purpose here is to address another crucial dimension of plays' cultural function, one that is occluded by an exclusive emphasis on heroic dramas' paralleling of regicide and restoration. As critics have noted earlier, these plays are about empire as well as domestic sovereignty and subjecthood. Anne Barbeau Gardiner argued in 1970 that Dryden's heroic plays encoded a theory of history that celebrated gradual triumph of Christianity, an account developed by John Loftis, who suggested that representations of conflicts between Europeans and American Indians and Moors illustrated the historical process as conceived to embody a widening territorial expansion of Christendom.2 More recently, David Kramer has analyzed Dryden's construction of an literary persona in context of Restoration literary and military rivalry with France.3 None of these critics, however, attempted to relate their analysis of imperial theme in heroic drama to Restoration debates over empire, or extended their account beyond Dryden's texts to encompass genre as a whole. Yet much of heroic plays' significance in two decades of genre's emergence turns on their role in representing theatrically imperial expansion and decline, translatio imperii-the westward transfer of empire-and clash between Christian European and pagan non-European societies, all of which were central topics in

'No Party favour'd, no Designs in view' : Female Rakes and Heroes, Politics and Power in Delarivier Manley's Heroic Drama

'No Party favour'd, no Designs in view' : Female Rakes and Heroes, Politics and Power in Delarivier Manley's Heroic Drama. Un article de la revue Lumen (Material Productions & Cultural Construction) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Introduction: A Tercentenary Tribute

T hree hundred years after Dryden's death nothing could be more obvious than the breadth and authority of his career. He is the most important poet of the late seventeenth century. He perfected the heroic couplet and deployed the idioms of literary mockery with unprecedented skill and originality; he fashioned masterful pindarics and commemorative verse; he wrote the greatest political satire in the language, and he absorbed and translated the idioms of Latin poetry over an entire lifetime, creating an English Virgil that for some, even now, has no rival. If we add Dryden's work as playwright and literary theorist to his accomplishments as poet and translator, we might wonder if there is, in the early modern period, another career so rich and various. Dryden invented, perhaps not quite from whole cloth, the heroic drama; together with Purcell he fashioned an English opera; after Sidney's Defence, the Essay of Dramatic Poesy is the defining text of the early modern literary imagination. And no one-not Milton or Marvell, not Burton or Browne, perhaps not even Clarendon-could touch the subtlety and mastery of Dryden's prose. The essays and reviews gathered here are intended as a tribute to this remarkable career. Individually, these pieces help us to rethink Dryden's encounter with the full range of political and cultural issues of his age: with the intricacies of court alliance, the temptations and dangers of empire, the dynamics of patronage and literary polemic, the frustrations ofloyalism, and the twilight world of Roman Catholic recusancy he entered near the close of his century. Collectively these essays also urge us to reflect on the breadth and varied circumstances of Dryden's work and thereby on the chronology and character of early modernity, a category that often elides the Restoration and obscures its art. Dryden grew up in a Caroline culture, he began to write in a republic, he served two Stuart courts, and he lived through a revolution that changed the structure not only of politics but also of the life of letters. Dryden inhabited the world of Virgil and Horace, but as well that of Rochester, Buckingham, and Congreve; he was at his ease in the exercises of commonplacing and translation, but he also knew how to negotiate publishing contracts and literary fees. Dryden wrote as a

The just and the lively: the literary criticism of John Dryden

Part I Themes and variations: the ends of criticism from theory to pratice (1664). Part II First principles: a French play (1665-1668) the new imbalance (1667-1668) a charter of freedom (1668-1670) varieties of comic experience (1671) the heroic play (1672) the heroic play (concluded) sweeping of the stakes (1672). Part III New directions: the classical moment (1673-1679) the great tradition (1680-1700) the battle of the books (1680-1700) a critic and scholar (1680-1700) the modern temper (1693-1700). Part IV A summing up: evaluations.

'To allure vnto their loue': Iconoclasm and Striptease in Lewis Wager's The Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene

‘To allure vnto their loue’: Iconoclasm and Striptease in Lewis Wager’s The Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene Patricia Badir* (bio) Lewis Wager’s Reformation play The Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene purports to be a “godlie, learned and fruitefull” play designed to teach and extol Protestant virtue. 1 From the outset, this Edwardian morality play assumes that the agendas of Protestantism and of the theatre are not necessarily incompatible, as the heroic drama of the Reformation is staged by means of the vita of Mary Magdalen. 2 Never acquiescing to the scourge of the antitheatricalist pen that apparently marked the play as “spitefully despised,” the play’s Prologue insists that the work encourages [End Page 1] manly virtue, praises God with unyielding vehemence and teaches true, stalwart devotion to the King. “[T]here was neuer thyng inuented,” one is informed, “[m]ore worth, for mans solace to be frequented” (ll. 12, 36–37). 3 Making its robust Calvinism absolutely clear, Life and Repentaunce assures that the Magdalen’s exquisitely dressed, pre-penitent body reflects not only the dangerous entrapments of femininity but also the pitfalls of perverse piety and, by extension, the decadent and degenerate Catholic Church. At the point of her conversion, the stone tablets of God’s Law are presented to Mary by a personified looking-glass in whom she finds “knowledge of sinne.” The figure of Lawe announces: Wherefore as I sayd to a glasse compared I may be, Wherin clerely as in the sunne lyght, The weakenesse and sinne of him self he may se, Yea and his owne damnation as it is ryght. [ll. 1137–40] Mary is hereafter re-fashioned into a Protestant exemplar: “sadly apparelled,” supine and pious in her contrite posture. The play closes with long, sobering speeches from grave characters such as Justification and Love and the spectator witnesses the conversion of an immoderate, Catholic image into an appropriately fortified Protestant exemplar of the Word. A mirror is, however, at once the vehicle of the plain and simple truth and a tool for vainglorious deception. Wager’s play, this essay will argue, is a similarly paradoxical glass. Mary’s return to the stage in decent dress is conceived of as analogous to the stripping of the altars as the spectator’s idolatrous gaze is redirected to the naked truth of the scriptures. But, as in the presentation of the modern striptease, the divestment of Mary does not reveal the truth as promised. The magical and seductive trappings of the Magdalen’s sumptuous past, like the stripper’s exotic costume and props, go on pervading the saint’s figure even once they have been cast aside. The metaphorically naked Mary invokes Roland Barthes’ semantic of the striptease as she is re-dressed in “the enveloping memory of a luxurious shell.” 4 The spectacular allure of the old faith permeates her body enacting “the dialectic between iconophilia and iconophobia” now recognized as integral to the propagation of Protestant culture. 5 Life and Repentaunce beguiles and deceives by means of the very scenography it condemns as degenerate. [End Page 2] The allegorical representation of Mary Magdalen as the prototypical parishioner is not Wager’s invention. Magdalen’s medieval biography begins with the conflation of at least three New Testament figures: Mary Magdalen from whom Christ expels seven devils and who attends the sepulcher, Mary of Bethany who anoints Christ with her precious oils and Luke’s unnamed sinner who bathes Christ’s feet in the home of Simon the Pharisee. 6 By the thirteenth century, exegetical commentary and popular legend had further transformed this composite figure into the ex-prostitute whose exemplary penance rendered her the patron saint of all sinners. 7 Though initially the embodiment of material worldliness, Mary denies the temptations of luxury and the pleasures of the flesh and becomes the most sober and chaste of Christ’s devotees. Katherine Jansen has argued that this “masterful stroke of endowing the concept of penance with corporeal existence” helped to diffuse the cult of penance in the late middle ages. 8 The degree to which Wager was familiar with the medieval Magdalen, represented in the English canon by the surviving...

To Make Reason and the Will of God Prevail: The Heroic Dramas of Barrie Stavis

To Make Reason and the Will of God Prevail: The Heroic Dramas of Barrie Stavis