Morality Play Research Articles

The enslaved family as reflected in Post-colonial African Drama: Ngugi and Ngugi’s I Will Marry When I Want

In literary studies, critics demonstrate authors’ role to depict human life using characters and themes affecting them through various literary forms viz prose fiction, poetry and drama. The latter tells a story by engaging dialogue and conflicts among characters. Driven by the didactic literary theory, the researchers carry out a literary analysis of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ngugi wa Mirii’s morality play “I Will Marry When I Want”; and explore the situation of an enslaved family reflected in the impossible promise of the land grabber and exploiter targeting a one and half acres of land that the family was living on. Discussion centers on character victims in the story, leading to the conclusion that the play depicts the hypocrisy and power of the elite - haves at the expense of the poor in post-colonial Africa. The Kioi’s malice unbeknown to Kiguunda’s family is one of many cases of human bad manners that affect society members due to their poor life background rooted in the effects of exploitation and oppression; resulting in the victim’s wrong choice motivated by the stopgap altogether.

Hildegard of Bingen by Honey Meconi

Reviewed by: Hildegard of Bingen by Honey Meconi Michelle Urberg Hildegard of Bingen. By Honey Meconi. (Women Composers.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. [xiii, 157 p. ISBN 9780252033155 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9780252083679 (paperback), $21.95; ISBN 9780252050725 (e-book), price varies.] Figures, list of works, notes, bibliography, discography, index. I remember my introduction to Saint Hildegard (1098–1197) during an undergraduate class with Roy Hammerling at Concordia College. In addition to Hildegard of Bingen, class included readings on a number of other important female figures in the history of Western Christianity, including Saint Bridget (Birgitta) of Sweden, whose monastic order and music later became the focus of my dissertation. I distinctly remember that Hildegard was depicted as larger than life in her vita by the monks Gottfried and Theoderic (The Life of the Holy Hildegard, trans. James McGrath [Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995]), and her own writings described vibrant visionary experiences in detail, notable to me because music or instruments (trumpets especially) appeared in many places (Secrets of God: Writings of Hildegard of Bingen, trans. Sabina Flanagan [Boston: Shambhala, 1996]). Finally, Barbara Newman's influential volume on Hildegard, Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen [End Page 440] and Her World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), helped organize my impression of Hildegard's writings. Nevertheless, I wish this book had been available back then as a scholarly complement to the primary and secondary sources we read in that class. Hildegard of Bingen by Honey Meconi—part biography, part history of Hildegard's musical output, and part introduction to liturgical practice in medieval monasteries—appears in the Women Composers series, which aims to publish books that are readable and a convenient reference. Indeed, Hildegard of Bingen is readable for students and those meeting Hildegard for the first time, serves as a convenient reference for experienced scholars or performers, and effectively establishes Hildegard as the notable composer of her milieu. Meconi's biography of Hildegard is compact, comprising ten short chapters in 150 pages. The first six chapters chronicle Hildegard's life, with a careful look at how music was ever present for Hildegard during her life and in her writings. Chapter 7 examines how Hildegard's life and music were transcribed, printed, and disseminated following her death. Chapters 8 through 10 take a close look at the extant manuscripts that contain her music as well as the scope of her musical output. A list of Hildegard's works, endnotes, a short reference bibliography of works about Hildegard, and a brief list of key recordings of Hildegard's music follow the main chapters. While the bibliography, notes, and discography are not complete, they do admirably to introduce or to reintroduce Hildegard to readers. One of the great strengths of this volume is how it juxtaposes manuscript evidence that helps scholars build a biography and musical history of Hildegard's life with the historiographical circumstances that made it possible to write Hildegard's history. I genuinely enjoyed reading Meconi's music-infused biography of Hildegard in the first six chapters; chapter 7 then narrates a few key choices that made it possible for this Hildegard biography and others to take form. Meconi attributes much of the twentieth-century interest in Hildegard to the refounding of the monastery at Rupertsberg and the transcriptions of her Scivias (the allegorical visions and apocalyptic prophecies) and the Ordo Virtutum (the allegorical morality play) by the nuns of the Abtei St. Hildegard in Eibingen, Germany (pp. 79, 81). Furthermore, chapter 7 shows that the sequence of decisions made by printers, scholars, musicians, and monastics to keep Hildegard's visions and compositions circulating occurred gradually over centuries, and these decisions helped documents survive (pp. 77, 79). Soon after her death, for example, biographers and William of Auxerre championed her cause (p. 76). The printed word was instrumental in rejuvenating interest in Hildegard later in the sixteenth century when several printings of her mystical text the Scivias, her medical treatise Physica, and her letters appeared. These constituted the primary published works of Hildegard until the nineteenth century (p. 78), with the appearance of the first modern editions by Charles Daremberg and F. A. Reuss (S. Hildegardis Abbatissae...

AXIOLOGICAL FUNDAMENTS OF RELATIONS BETWEEN ETHICS AND POLITICS

The subject of this article is the axiological basis of relations between morality and politics. The author shows anthropological and metaphysical origins of the idea of common good in social life. What role does morality play in political activity and where are moral foundations of a democratic state to be found? How to ensure the presence of moral values in public life (education, participation, common good, open society). The most important questions include: Who is responsible for ideas of democracy? Can democracy survive without a footing in pre–democratic values?

An English Poetic Rhapsodic Vision of The Spanish Civil War: An Intertextual Analysis of Roy Campbell’s Poetic Oeuvre

This article revisits and re-examines Roy Campbell’s poems inspired by the Spanish Civil War: Flowering Rifle, Talking Bronco and “A Letter from the San Mateo Front”. The studies carried out by Esteban Pujals (1959), Stephen Spender (1980) and Bernd Dietz (1985) reflect the scarcity of research about Campbell’s warlike poems. The methodology used in this article aims to develop a better understanding of Campbell’s war images and literary references to the Spanish conflict, by analysing them in the light of the poet’s own political ideology. Campbell presents a paean to the ‘Nationalist’ leadership and this exaggerated idealising of the rebels and their deeds contrasts with the way he denigrates those in favour of the Republic. The article concludes that this exaggerated feat transforms most of these poetic works into quasi-Manichaean pamphlets resembling more a morality play than a work of modern literature.

Obrazowość jako cecha stylistyczna szesnastowiecznego pamfletu politycznego Uwagi o Acrostichis własnego wyobrażenia Kniaża Wielkiego Moskiewskiego Walentego Neothebela

The main subject of the study is to point out the language and text exponents of picturesqueness as a style feature of historical pamphlet of XVI th. century. The observations were made on the example of the work Acrostichis własnego wyobrażenia Kniaża Wielkiego Moskiewskiego by Walenty Neothebel. One can indicate a few determinants of picturesqueness, they are: discontinuous words structures, proverbs and idioms, comparisons, enumerations and large and extensive description contexts. In general distinguished devices are not imaginative or exquisite, frequently being allied to simple, even colloquial language. In that the analyzed text is clearly vivid and evocative. The applied devices serve pragmatic effectiveness of the work, wich is its most important component. In the analyzed piece of work one can distinguish the features of more than one literary genre, e.g. pamphlet, morality play or dialogue, but the pragmatic aspect leads primarily to critical texts of political subject which are close right to the pamphlet. Furthermore, one can mark that Walenty Neothebel due to negative picture of tsar Ivan the Terrible presented in Acrostichis preserved the negative stereotype of Russians in Polish language and culture.

Employing Enviropreneurial Marketing Strategies to Gain Legitimacy

Within the current global landscape, internationalizing organizations are increasingly seeking ways to gain legitimacy, or social acceptance, within the foreign markets they exist in. This current article proposes that enviropreneurial marketing strategies can be placed in the arsenal of tools firms may employ to gain organizational legitimacy. Across two studies, this article hypothesizes and empirically tests the mediating roles that pragmatic and moral legitimacy play in the relationships between enviropreneurial marketing and outcomes on firm constituents such as consumers and employees. The results show that while pragmatic legitimacy is a significant mediator of such relationships, moral legitimacy is not.

Does moral play equilibrate?

Some finite and symmetric two-player games have no (pure or mixed) symmetric Nash equilibrium when played by partly morally motivated players.The reason is that the “right thing to do” may be not to randomize. We analyze this issue both under complete information between equally moral players and under incomplete information between players of arbitrary degrees of morality. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of equilibrium and illustrate the results with examples and counter examples.

Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play by Julie Paulson

Reviewed by: Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play by Julie Paulson Matthew Sergi Julie Paulson. Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Pp. x, 229. $100.00 cloth; $45.00 paper. While morality plays "are regularly described as didactic or instructional dramas that dispatch easily discerned moral truths using 'flat' abstract types and predictable stories of temptation," Julie Paulson's excellent Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play argues, convincingly, that "the opposite is true" (2). The engine of that argument is Paulson's application to the morality plays of Wittgenstein's work on language and consciousness: "there appears to be little exploration in the morality play of the interior life or mental processes of its characters" (33), not because the playmakers failed to understand the inner workings of human consciousness, but rather because "[h]uman subjects have no a priori identity that exists outside human exchange" in the first place (123). The medieval morality plays, Paulson writes, "imagine a self that is first and foremost performed: constructed, articulated, and known through communal performances" (6, emphasis hers), which are central to and instrumental to the very "formation of Christian subjects" (7, 86). For Paulson, the definitive communal performance, a ritual through which the self takes form (rather than only being revealed or discovered), is penance: "the plays illustrate how penance provides penitents with a particular kind of training that shapes their understanding of the meanings of moral and ethical words central to a conception of a Christian self" (33). Starting from a user-friendly primer on Wittgenstein, interwoven with premodern writing about the soul and being (20–33), Theater of the Word demonstrates that morality play characters emerge gradually, through "sensible and communal processes of generating meaning" (66) in which "words are redefined through human interactions" (139), into the fullness of what they allegorize. Paulson's Wittgensteinian interpretation not only fuels the book's major theses, but also produces some gorgeous close readings along the way, notably of Caro in The Castle of Perseverance (48–49), Anima in Wisdom (which "stages the processes through which its protagonist learns the meaning of her own name" [65–66, 79–85]), Mercy in Mankind (throughout Chapter 3, articulated especially well at 111–12), Goods and Good Deeds in Everyman (126–29, 132–35), and Adulation in Respublica (138–39). [End Page 434] Chapter 1 finds in Castle "a case for the essential role of penance … in defining what it means to be 'humankind' … a version of human selfhood produced by, and utterly dependent upon, the institutions and social performances in which it participates" (40). For Paulson, Castle's version of penance deflects Lollard heterodoxy, both by asserting the necessity of the sacrament and by "decentraliz[ing] the priest's role" (47) in its communal ritual: "repentance is both an interior and a social process" (52, emphasis hers). She points out that Shrift's priestly absolution of Humankind, as pivotal as it is in Castle, still fails—"Shrift's warning does not hold" (60)—without social and experiential learning. Andrea Louise Young's Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama: A Study of "The Castle of Perseverance" (2015) might be read productively alongside this chapter, particularly where Paulson discusses physical space and audience interactions. Similarly, Chapter 2's interpretation of Wisdom, which touches often on medieval contemplation and participation, might be read as a complement to Eleanor Johnson's Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama (2018). In this chapter, Paulson establishes a strong foundation for her broader thesis that moralities demonstrate "the role of penitential ritual in shaping [the] interior" of the medieval self "and the impossibility of splitting the interior from the exterior practices that define it" (71). In Wisdom, "in the same moment penance reforms the soul to God's image, the soul learns what a soul is" (86): the play is thus "less an attempt to demonstrate that the soul is defiled through sin and purified through penitential ritual than an attempt to reveal how the formation of the Christian soul takes place through … visible ritual practices...

Greece as a cautionary tale, not a morality play

Greece as a cautionary tale, not a morality play

McCarthyism in the Suburbs: Quakers, Communists, and the Children’s Librarian by Allison Hepler

Reviewed by: McCarthyism in the Suburbs: Quakers, Communists, and the Children’s Librarian by Allison Hepler Richard P. Mulcahy McCarthyism in the Suburbs: Quakers, Communists, and the Children’s Librarian. By Allison Hepler. (New York: Lexington Books, 2018. 193 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. Hardback, $90; ebook, $38.) McCarthyism was bullying combined with a demand for conformity. The stated concern about national security, while important, was not essential. Far more basic was people’s willingness to surrender their individual agency for the good of the nation. This meant signing loyalty oaths, denouncing proscribed organizations, and naming names as proof of devotion to flag, God, and country. This is the context of Allison Hepler’s excellent new study McCarthyism in the Suburbs: Quakers, Communists, and the Children’s Librarian. At the story’s center is Mary Knowles, a popular children’s librarian. She joined the Communist Party in 1943 after her husband, Clive, a communist and former Protestant minister, left for service in World War II. No ideologue, Mary Knowles supported racial and gender equality and opposed classism. In addition, as a young mother, the party provided her with a support system. Unfortunately, such fine distinctions were not possible in the overheated anticommunist hysteria that gripped the nation immediately after World War II ended. With the period’s hearings and informers, a web of intrigue emerged. Knowles was first caught in this web when former FBI informant Herbert Philbrick named her as a communist in testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security in May of 1953. Knowles had been hired in 1948 by the Morrill Memorial library, and despite the outstanding work she did for the library, Philbrick’s testimony resulted in her dismissal. Unemployed, Knowles took a position as children’s librarian with the William Jeanes Memorial Library in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia. Unlike the Morrill Library, William Jeanes was a Quaker-affiliated private institution, thereby affording Knowles the opportunity to restart her life. However, Philbrick, by then a national figure due to his book, I Led Three Lives, named her at another congressional hearing, which led to a new controversy. Moreover, Knowles refused to sign a loyalty oath, since she regarded such statements as counter-productive to good citizenship. The ensuing drama featured not only mendacity and professional jealousy but also fortitude and generosity, with the library under great pressure to fire Knowles. Yet she remained in place because of the Quaker tradition of “coming to unity” on a decision rather than following a strict majority rule. Allison Hepler’s narrative is well-documented and engaging. While she maintains scholarly detachment, the text reads as a modern morality play, with Knowles’s individual rights hanging in the balance. Hepler’s only weakness is her failure to address the FBI’s attitude concerning Philbrick. Clearly, he benefited from his association with the bureau. A comparable situation unfolded in Pittsburgh with Matt Cvetic, who capitalized on his former status as a confidential informant and whom the FBI regarded with contempt as a result. It would be [End Page 239] interesting to know if the bureau felt the same way about Philbrick. That, however, is a small matter compared to the contribution this book makes to the scholarship about the McCarthy era. It is highly recommended for both specialist and general readers. Richard P. Mulcahy University of Pittsburgh at Titusville Copyright © 2020 Historical Society of Pennsylvania

The Macro Manuscripts and the Making of the Morality Play

The Macro Manuscripts and the Making of the Morality Play

Modernist Medievalism and the Expressionist Morality Play: Georg Kaiser’sFrom Morning to Midnight

AbstractThis article examines the modernist medievalism of Georg Kaiser’sFrom Morning to Midnight(Von morgens bis mitternachts), discussing the influence of the morality play genre on its form. The characterization and action in Kaiser’s play mirrors and evokes that of morality plays influenced by and including the late-medieval Dutch playElckerlijcand its English translation asEveryman, in particular Hugo von Hofmannsthal’sJedermann, first produced in Berlin in 1911. The medievalism of Kaiser’s play is particularly evident when it is compared to Karl Heinz Martin’s film version of the text, produced in 1920. The play’s allegory and message, though contemporary, are less specifically historically contextual than the film’s, while its central protagonist is more representative of generic capitalist subjectivity. The detective film shapes Martin’s adaptation, obscuring the morality play conventions and therefore medievalism of Kaiser’s earlier text.

‘Le goût du jeu (a taste for the game):’ pedagogical play, competition, and resistance to neoliberal capitalism in Nathalie Kuperman’s Nous étions des êtres vivants

ABSTRACT This paper proposes to contribute to existing scholarship examining the contemporary French workplace novel by offering a critical reading of Nathalie Kuperman’s 2010 novel Nous étions des êtres vivants. In my article, I respond to prior articles addressing the novel as a dissection of political discourse and an entry within the growing corpus of French ‘sociological’ fiction on work by analysing the novel’s metaphors of ‘jeu(x) and jouer’ (‘play(s)’ and ‘gambling’). I argue that the novel accomplishes its axiological task of opposition to neoliberalism and reactionary discourses on work by deploying a leitmotiv of ‘jeux’/‘jouer’ as a rhetorical strategy. By juxtaposing the novel’s representation of work, play, competition, and the ‘game of corporate business’ in the neoliberal workforce with the radical political philosophies of work and play as avenues for emancipation that were popular in France’s past revolts, I bring into relief the historical and ideological criticisms that this ‘morality play’ set in the metonymic space of a corporate office suggests. In doing so, I show how Kuperman’s work invokes radical psychological, pedagogical, and philosophical theories of liberation by representing work and/as play, and more crucially, play at work.

Empathy with the Devil: Movement, Kinesthesia, and Affect inThe Castle of Perseverance

In 1997 Claire Sponsler argued that, contrary to conventional interpretations, the anarchic, disruptive bodies of sin in medieval morality plays do not “unproblematically and unilaterally lead to the ratification of virtue over vice.” Instead, “the memory of the pleasures of misbehavior, of the satisfactions that come from unruly bodies allowed free rein” lingered with spectators to the extent that any “attempts made by these plays to bring misbehavior to a halt look highly unsatisfactory and incomplete.” For Sponsler, the powerful allure of vice performed was such that morality plays would have been unable fully “to negate the charms of misgovernance” they enacted. In this article, however, I want to argue against Sponsler's assumption and investigate how one English morality play,The Castle of Perseverance, understood very well the allure of performed sin and actively cultivated it as part of its dramaturgical and didactic strategies. All morality plays, as Sponsler observes, use representations of “disorderly behavior grounded in the misuse of bodies and commodities,” investing these figures of sin “with remarkable energy, interest, and vitality, so much so that the vices are … very seductive.”The Castleis no exception, and the vast majority of its roughly three thousand lines are spoken by the Three Enemies of Man and their affiliated Sins. In addition, the playtext also provides unusually rich, detailed descriptions of how these spiritual enemies and sins should move around the performance space. Drawing on the theory of kinesthetic empathy, I examine the kinesic dimension of these “unruly bodies” and argue, contrary to Sponsler, that it is their presence, and the audience's own embodied responses to them, that deepens and enhances, rather than detracts from, the play's moral message.

Mankind and the Masculine Pleasures of Penance

ABSTRACTThrough a close examination of the fifteenth-century morality play, Mankind, this article argues that scholarship should expand its current theoretical understandings of medieval penance. Mankind is a dramatization of and reflection on the three stages of sacramental penance (contrition, confession, and satisfaction) and its focus is decidedly gendered: it is a play performed by, for, and about men. Mankind shows how the penitential process enables men to achieve redemption through acknowledging not only their own individual failings but also the failure of contemporary definitions of masculinity. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, this article demonstrates that Mankind invites its audience to recognize sin and penance as a compulsive cycle; the play asks its audience to experience a sort of pleasure in recognizing that every Christian man participates in an endless cycle of sin and penance, a cycle that necessarily undermines a masculine identity based on self-sufficiency. Through its scatological and obscene humor — specifically the play’s association of the anus with both materiality and sin — Mankind presents penance as an opportunity for men to recognize and celebrate the contingent and socially dependent nature of masculine identity.

Disbelief in Othello


 
 
 
 Belief and disbelief play an important role in Othello: between the figures and between the action and the audience. The focus here is on audience reactions. They are notoriously difficult to determine as they are poorly documented. Two general factors apart from historical evidence are used here to sketch them: the difference between reading and attending a performance, and the generic frames suggested by the play: comedy, tragedy and, in Shakespeare’s own time, the morality play. Audiences would easily get confused. It may be surprising, then, that Othello is the Shakespeare play where the most violent audience reactions are documented. It may be the very confusion produced by it that is responsible for them.
 
 
 

La tragedia delle ambizioni. Julius Caesar di Shakespeare

Abstract – In Die fr o hliche Wissenschaft Nietzsche states that to Brutus “Shakespeare consecrated his best tragedy – it is at present still called by a wrong name,–” (aphorism 98). On the contrary, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar proves to be an extremely appropriate title to let ambition stand out as the protagonist of the play. It thus becomes clear why, after the words “speak hands for me! […] – Then fall Caesar”, the noble Brutus can declare with his bloody hands “Ambition’s debt is paid”: such words are uttered in the same scene where Cassius predicts “How many ages hence/ Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,/ In states unborn, and accents yet unknown?”. Thus, Shakespeare entrusts Brutus with the task of revealing the very essence of the tragedy – “How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport,/ That now on Pompey’s basis lies along,/ No worthier than the dust?” –, as if the Bard wanted ambition to act as a protagonist, not to be ascribed to any of the characters. In this way, the origin of Julius Caesar , rooted in the Morality Play, shows through. The Roman play in the Elizabethan version performed by fifteen actors, where Medieval allegorical themes and Renaissance themes merge and blur, is devoted to a theme not to a hero. Julius Caesar deals with ambition, not with Julius Caesar as such. The Renaissance Bard, detaching himself from his Plutarchean source, made all actors the protagonists of a tragedy that was rich – maybe excessively – in material. In the 1599 play, there are a lot of elements – even too many –, exactly those ingredients which would have returned, properly balanced, in the later great tragedies: Hamlet , Othello , King Lear , Macbeth , Antony and Cleopatra , are Renaissance heroes indebted to Julius Caesar .

A Validation Study of the Family Resilience Scale for Families with Children with Disabilities

This study suggests applying Storytelling Theater as a pedagogical approach for college-level drama classroom in English Literature Department. While minimizing out-of-class activities to lessen the burden students might have felt about drama classes, but still encouraging them to understand and experience the performative imagination or directorial intention embedded in dramatic scripts, we propose to utilize Storytelling Theater as an initial step to introduce the plays that are considered “too difficult” or “too distant” for the contemporary college students. Converging Paul Sill’s Story Theater, Physical Theater developed in America and newly emerged Storytelling tradition in England, we designed a class module incorporating narration play, choral speak and storytelling theater. To experiment its effectiveness for English major students, we chose a medieval morality play, Everyman, as a specimen text and conducted a Storytelling Theater workshop to check how it promoted students’ understanding of the play’s theme, technique and purpose. The participants demonstrated a better understanding of the role of Medieval ‘educational theater,’ experienced actual practice with the concept of allegory, and picked up the crucial themes that could be improved for more sophisticated discussion. Storytelling theater might not be the best or the only pedagogical solution to improve current drama classes taught in English department, but instructors might want to consider its strengths and loopholes to keep the balance between literary and theatrical education while teaching dramatic literature for English majors.

英国道徳劇における「良心」の役割の変遷 : 英国ルネサンス悲劇の生成との関連において

英国道徳劇における「良心」の役割の変遷 : 英国ルネサンス悲劇の生成との関連において

Courtroom contrition: how do judges know?

ABSTRACTIn most common-law jurisdictions world-wide, an offender’s remorse is a well-settled mitigating factor in sentencing, with judges obliged to take it into account when formulating an offender’s sentence. However, the importance of remorse in sentencing is matched by its mystery. Given remorse’s central role in the moral drama of the criminal justice process, it is crucial to investigate how remorse is evaluated, and also to understand the limitations of those evaluations. The present article seeks to contribute to that effort by exploring what is involved in judges coming to know — and claiming to know — that ‘this offender is remorseful’. Drawing on in-depth original interviews with 20 magistrates and judges in New South Wales, Australia, we explore how judges themselves understand their own ways of knowing about remorse. We then look at two basic scenes of offender remorse: remorse in the courtroom and remorse outside the courtroom. Many judges want to see remorse in the courtroom, and are often confident that they know it when they see it. But, at the same time, as we shall see, many judges also want evidence of the offender’s remorse outside the courtroom.