Idea Of Play Research Articles

“A Terrible Art of Sharp-Shooting at the Audience”: Teaching the Shock of Modernist Drama via the Play of Ideas

“A Terrible Art of Sharp-Shooting at the Audience”: Teaching the Shock of Modernist Drama via the Play of Ideas

Utopianism, History, Freedom and Nature: Shaw’s Theory of “Creative Evolution” in Saint Joan

This paper aims to investigate some important elements of the thought of George Bernard Shaw, more commonly known as one of the most famous playwrights of the twentieth century. Shaw’s philosophy dwells on the relationship between man and nature and especially the concept of freedom. Among all his works, it was decided here to analyse Saint Joan. In re-imagining the historical Joan as a heroine in a play of ideas, Shaw made use of the known facts about Joan of Arc and Joan’s statements at her trial. Nonetheless, he made changes to emphasize her personal dignity and independence by contrast with the tyranny of institutions. Although he departed from the historical background, whitewashed her adversaries, and condensed episodes in Joan’s biography, he sought to be true to her confidence, courage, integrity, and common sense. His theatrical presentation is, in some respects, at odds with the Preface that accompanies the published play.

Moralism and Monarchism: Visions of Power in 18th-Century Russia

Moralism and MonarchismVisions of Power in 18th-Century Russia Konstantin D. Bugrov (bio) The time-honored tradition of writing the history of Russian political thought as the history of constitutionalism describes it as a sequence of reform projects, unsuccessfully trying to circumscribe autocratic power with the use of new theories and concepts exported from the West. Marc Raeff depicted modernization in Russia by emphasizing the contrasts between Anglo-Saxon liberal individualism and continental collectivist "state dirigisme," yet the attempts to construct an effective Polizeistaat were halted by the autocratic monopoly of personalized power.1 David Ransel has spoken of the "paradox of a would-be reformer" characteristic of the political culture of 18th-century Russia.2 Some researchers insist that the principal conflict within Russian political thought in the 18th century was between absolutist arbitrariness and legal, procedural limitation.3 If the history of Russian political thought revolves around the problem of the unlimited power of the autocrat, then its key problem is the juxtaposition of arbitrariness and law. As Elise Wirtschafter puts it, "in a society in which property rights carried no judicial or administrative authority beyond the family estate, the development of an educated populace capable of employing reason to make independent judgments produced an abstract philosophical form of politics, [End Page 267] concerned more with moral principles than with the routine functioning of institutions."4 Morals are here juxtaposed with politics. Yet "moral alienation" could also lead to "rebellion."5 Thus political processes in the Russian Empire were supposedly shaped by collisions over moral issues, in which the expectations of enlightened elites collided with the severe reality of an increasingly bureaucratizing machinery of power. In this article I seek to capitalize on Wirtschafter's concept of "moral monarchy," elaborated in The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater. I consider Wirtschafter's analysis of 18th-century Russian political culture convincing, and I might add that monarchist moralism existed in a variety of genres, enabling the Russian elite to discuss a broad range of issues. While Wirtschafter analyzed 18th-century dramatic pieces, I concentrate on a general study of political texts of the period, including panegyrics, odes, dramatic pieces, and administrative projects. This article does not attempt to describe the whole range of ideas and concepts of 18th-century Russian monarchism. Such a task is far beyond the scope of any journal article. What I am trying to do is provide a reflection on certain political lexicons (or, to use J. G. A. Pocock's expression, "conceptual vocabularies"), manners of speech that—I would argue—were used by the elites of 18th-century Russia to describe the empire's political order.6 These political lexicons overlapped, and the same author could borrow concepts and rhetorical figures from different manners of speech, while conceptual similarities of these vocabularies allowed them to fuse effectively. The second section of the article, however, aims to correct Wirtschafter's concept of moral monarchy to some degree. The tensions that led the Russian elite to "rebellion" were, in my mind, not hidden in the mechanism of moral monarchy, which constantly promoted reconciliation rather than revolution. Its praise of peace and desire to avoid conflicts (I mean, of course, the rhetoric of conflict, not the actual practice of social conflict) were the foundation of moralist monarchism. Thus a radical change in political culture was to be found in the development of alternative political lexicons that would emphasize conflict as a legitimate social regime. In the last section of this article I briefly investigate the example of such a lexicon: Machiavellian civic republicanism. [End Page 268] The Conceptual Lexicons of 18th-Century Russian Monarchism The first was the providential lexicon of church preachers and bishops. Religious legitimation was historically important. For example, Giovanni Maniscalco Basile, in studying the political ideology of 16th-century Russia, writes of an "elastic ideological structure," which established that "the ascendant justification of power (i.e., in the Zemskie Sobory between the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century) but also the descendant one (from God to the car´) mix, expanding the (absolute) power of a car´, whose authority derives directly or indirectly from God."7 The...

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Eero Laine, Assistant Professor This issue of the journal serves as a useful reminder of the impressively broad purview of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. The issue spans a number of ongoing and emerging theoretical and critical endeavors that further cultivate our understandings of theatre and performance. The articles take up examples that are contemporary and historical with an attention to theatrical production and dramatic texts, and I am particularly pleased with the ways the authors in this issue argue for dramatic theory that might find traction off the stage and outside the theatre. Even as the performances and artists under consideration are drawn from a wide variety of areas and eras, the issue as a whole reminds us that theatre works in, on, and through society and culture. Jeannine Murray-Román's article, "A Manifesto on Making Space in Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music," takes Mac's famous durational work as an occasion to explore performance as a social practice that is sustained through collective meaning-making and collaboration. Murray-Román thus examines queer pleasure as means of endurance and as a way of navigating and creating new forms of and identifications with time and space. The article impressively engages Mac's performance through first-person, narrative criticism that opens theoretical considerations of spectatorship, endurance, and political participation and solidarity. This work sits in dialogue with Amy Muse's article: "Sarah Ruhl's Woolfian Essay-Play vs. the Play of Ideas: Let's Talk about How to Transcend a Happy Marriage." The article addresses critical complaints that reassert the primary importance of plot and invites us to rather reflect on the significance of theatre that emphasizes what Muse refers to as "wandering, wondering, and idea-inebriated pleasure." Such material opens collective conversations, Muse argues, allowing us to think through and with each other in the theatre. We're quite pleased to offer another theatre artist interview in this issue, and we repeat our invitation for more contributions of this sort. Andrew Barker has offered up an excellent example of the ways that interviews or dialogues with theatre artists can contribute to the literature of dramatic theory and criticism. Barker's essay and interview, "Human Histories Onstage: A Conversation on Collaboration with Naomi Wallace & Marcus Rediker," explores history, Marxism, and abolitionist activism, centering on Wallace and Rediker's collaboratively written project, The Return of Benjamin Lay. Barker's introduction sets the stage for a conversation with Wallace and Rediker that spans the politics of representation, historical theatre-making, and the labor of collaboration. This issue also features a special section on theatrical intimacy, edited by Joy Brooke Fairfield. The section is timely and taps into vital concerns for anyone working in and thinking about theatre and performance. As Fairfield noted in her call for papers for the special section: "this moment urges serious reckoning with the past as well as the future. How have consent violations become normalized in our [End Page 7] field for centuries and what might it look like without them?" Indeed, the authors in this special section have taken up this call and theorized many practices that are emerging in the field, while critiquing those that have been maintained despite the ways they might forward racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, and capitalist agendas. The special section is an important development for the fields of theatre and performance studies, and Fairfield's work as editor has instrumentally moved these conversations toward crucial questions. This topic and these discussions, which necessarily involve both theatre and performance artists and scholars, must only continue, and JDTC very much welcomes contributions for future issues that respond to and advance our thinking and practices related to these matters. This is Jocelyn Buckner's last issue as Book Review Editor. The journal is incredibly grateful for her excellent work over the past years. She has used the section to highlight new and innovative work in theatre and performance studies, and we will miss her editorial vision and expertise in the role. We are excited to welcome Angela Ahlgren as the incoming Book Review Editor. Angela will assume the role with the next issue...

Outobiografie en herinnering as verset in Adam Small se The Orange Earth

The Orange Earth is discussed here as a fictionalised autobiographical account in which the Afrikaans poet and playwright, Adam Small, reflects on the impact of apartheid, creating a counternarrative of a marginalised life during that political system. In the play, presented essentially as a play of ideas, the Coloured main character Johnny Adams, the fictionalised alter ego of the author, plants a bomb that kills a white child and much of the action involves his rationalization of his deed of terror. The play references the cultural and linguistic relationship between Coloured and white Afrikaans-speaking people, and the former’s humiliation and exclusion under the apartheid policy. It is argued inter alia that Small’s choice of English as a language of literary expression could be interpreted as part of a counterdiscourse on cultural disaffection and political disillusion just as his option of urban violence as a solution to apartheid, his “cry for citizenship”, amounts to a desperate act rather than one of revolutionary violence. The article concludes with a discussion on the multiple meanings associated with the title that serves as a metaphor for the countermemory of Small’s narrative.

“Men and Women o’the Time”: Allegory in Three 2015 Productions

This essay starts with a comment from a choric figure in Jonson’s The Staple of News (1626): that the Vice and other figures from the older moral drama now appear onstage “attired like men and women o'the time.” After a review of contemporary evidence, the focus is on three 2015 productions. First is a clearly allegorical script, Carol Ann Duffy’s adaptation of the best known moral play, Everyman , at the National Theatre where a relatively short early Tudor play, with its homily linked to the protagonist’s preparation for Death and a final reckoning, was transformed into a much longer polemic against today’s abuse of the environment. The other two items singled out are the RSC productions at the Swan of The Jew of Malta and Volpone , neither of which contains overt allegory yet both include sections that may have been understood then in near allegorical terms, whether to depict a sleeping Christianity in Marlowe’s Malta or an ejection of Conscience in Jonson’s Venice. The goal is to call attention to the possibility of new possibilities and meanings lurking behind a familiar episode or configuration so that theatre history, rather than being reductive, can display how the play of ideas in a scene or sequence could be both entertaining and meaningful in their theatrical terms and--perhaps--still translatable into ours.

Introduction: Something About the Way We Live Now

Introduction: Something About the Way We Live Now

The Union Strikes Back

The Union Strikes Back J. M. Opal (bio) David C. Hendrickson. Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International Relations, 1789–1941. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2009. 478 pp. Appendix, notes, and index. $34.95. With the exception of a book tracing speculative bubbles and fiscal regulations through American history, it is hard to imagine a more germane subject than the antecedents of United States foreign policy. The George W. Bush years blew the cover off its more aggressive dimensions; as an unnamed official in that administration famously surmised in 2004, “we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Did we ever. Historians and pundits alike have been scrambling to make sense of it all, inevitably betraying and sometimes avowing their own ideological chips in the not-so-great game. Neoconservatives such as Robert Kagan stress the longue durée of American expansion and assertion, which they see as nothing to be ashamed of or surprised by. Writers on the Left, for their part, follow a trail opened by William Appleman Williams and long associated with Noam Chomsky in order to unearth the “sorrows” of imperialism. Comparisons between the contemporary United States and the waning days of Rome have become commonplace in these circles. Barack Obama’s election has done little to change the diagnosis: overreach and decline.1 What is doubly refreshing about David Hendrickson’s new book is its frank declaration of an ideological home—“a blend or synthesis of constitutional realism and liberal internationalism”—along with its sincere devotion to history for its own sake, as opposed to history as handmaiden to either Right-wing hectoring or Leftist despair (p. xv). “While I have my sympathies and antipathies with the various protagonists we shall meet along the way,” he writes, “I have tried to write with a modicum of detachment.” His book centers on the “play of ideas,” or rather of paradigms, that American policymakers and theorists employed from the creation of the federal republic to the U.S. entry into World War II (p. xi). Broadly put, these paradigms were: Union, or the pursuit of a working peace between disparate states inhabiting a middle ground between anarchy and dominion; Nation, or the dedication to a cohesive, powerful state that could assert itself at home and abroad; and [End Page 48] Empire, or the belief in the right or duty of the United States to project its own version of freedom across the continent or globe, by force if necessary. The interaction of these sensibilities in public discussion forms the root and branch of Hendrickson’s forty-three (!) chapters. It is a delightful ride, and a deeply instructive one as well. In his early chapters, Hendrickson shines a new light on the familiar figures and canonical articulations of early American foreign policy. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson appear as two varieties of an internationalist viewpoint that was widely shared among eighteenth-century cosmopolitans. Both had a deep regard for the rule of law rather than force in domestic or global affairs, and both deployed a blend of persuasion and coercion on behalf of the new nation. They parted ways, however, when identifying the causes of war. While the Republicans emphasized the internal constitution of states—they shared Paine’s assessment that kings made war while people wanted peace—the Federalists pointed to the enduring facts of human nature and political geography. So long as nations lived apart from one another, they were certain, independent people would settle disputes by force of arms. To avoid that fate within North America was the singular challenge for statesmen during the sectional crises of 1798, 1809, 1815, 1819, 1833, 1850, and 1860. Before 1815, these broils concerned issues of foreign policy proper: whether to align with France or Britain or neither, and whether to press for neutral rights through war or embargo. But after the second Anglo-American war, the dynamic of sectional strife turned westward, revealing not only the irrepressible struggle over slavery but also the vexed issue of imperialism. “There are far more denunciations than defenses of empire and imperialism in the American tradition,” Hendrickson insists (p. 14). How, then, did...

The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater

This well-argued study examines the connection between ideas of society and works of theatre written during the reign of Catherine II. In so far as political theory was underdeveloped in Russia, it is in the large corpus of plays treating questions of individual behaviour, class values and benevolent despotism, that one finds responses to Catherine's rule. This book richly complements Cynthia Whittaker's work on Russian ideas of monarchy, and is particularly good on the ways in which drama registered the gentry's insecurity after 1785. With the founding of a university as well as other institutions of learning, and with the appearance of academies of science and of fine arts, the public spaces of metropolitan Russia bore a meaningful, albeit incomplete, resemblance to European cultures. By making effective use of recent work on notions of a pre-political public sphere in Russia, Wirtschafter sets the growth of a vibrant theatrical life in...

News for Theatergoers

News for Theatergoers Reviewed by Heidi J. Holder Ronald Bryden. Shaw and His Contemporaries: Theatre Essays. Edited by Denis Johnston. Niagara-on-the-Lake: Mosaic Press/Shaw Festival, 2002. xiv + 214 pp. $17.00. This collection of essays by the late Ronald Bryden offers a unique record of and perspective on the production of Shaw's plays. Most of the text is given over to the reprinting of Bryden's program notes for stagings of the works of GBS and his contemporary dramatists at Ontario's Shaw Festival. Such notes usually languish in the vast and largely neglected piles of theatrical ephemera—and often deservedly so. The program note is a tricky form: its author must illuminate the play in a very short space, focusing the audience member on the key ideas of the work and on the significance of its origins and historical context. Veteran theatergoers have experienced the badly written note: one whose author tries to cram a scholarly essay into the program or one written by someone with only a superficial understanding of the play, its creator, and its time. Bryden writes a good note: fluid in style, pithy in its reading of the play's ideas, effortless in its presentation of context. Such qualities obviously benefit theatergoers who, in their seats, read the note before or after the play, or during intermission. What can be gained, therefore, from collecting and printing these items? They do not, after all, function as records of performance as do reviews. What they can bring to the reader is a kind of snapshot of a particular moment or place associated with the creation and meaning of the play—they offer a way into the individual Shavian drama. Take, for example, Bryden's note for the Shaw Festival's 1997 production of Mrs Warren's Profession. He devotes much of it to examining the significance of Shaw's London address at Fitzroy Square (bordered on the north side by Warren Street); he teases out the neighborhood's bohemian associations as "a kind of northern annex to Soho" (5), recalling such scandalous events as the Cleveland Street affair of the late 1880s, with its riveting accusations that upper-class men purchased sex from telegraph boys. Shaw's anti-sensational and domestic drama about prostitution owed a great deal, Bryden [End Page 242] asserts, to location: Shaw's "personal slant," he suggests, "came from living at 29 Fitzroy Square" (6). Bryden's reading points us toward the manner in which Shaw's plays always keep one eye on theatrical convention and another on the everyday world. Bryden's obviously extensive knowledge of the theater and, more particularly, of Shaw's life and works allows him to conjure up useful points on each play, especially for those less accessible and more rarely produced (the essays on Captain Brassbound's Conversion and The Millionairess are noteworthy here). His note for The Apple Cart (Shaw Festival 2000) reads the play as the product of a moment when Shaw's politics were undergoing a shift as the influence of the Fabians weakened and Shaw was reading his plays instead to the likes of the Astors and their guests. Shaw's works for Barry Jackson's Malvern Festival, written at a time when he was passing through "the great world of celebrity and international affairs," all display "elements of that archetype of courtly entertainments, the masque" (45). This sharp focus on one moment, one path into the plays, makes the notes eminently useful to the theatergoer, and provocative for the scholar, who may find in them suggestions for further research into the plays. While the heart of the book is the collection of notes on Shaw, two other sections make this a book-length work: essays on Shaw's contemporaries and a catch-all section entitled "Critic at Large." In his handling of Shaw's peers Bryden exhibits the same affection and deep consideration given to GBS. One finds here both the familiar (The Cherry...

The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater

The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater

The Cranes Are Flying by Josephine s> Woll Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw by Josephine s> Woll (review)

REVIEWS 955 been directed to Harold Segel's useful two-volume 7The Literature ofEighteenthCentuyRussia (New York, I967), not least because it includes, in English translation, some of the plays referred to here. The specialist, on the other hand, might have benefited from knowing that, despite the fact that 'L. N Starikova'swork on Volkov is not extensive' (note 44, p. 207), there exists Mark Liubomudrov's full-length study of the so-called 'Father of Russian Theatre'. The final impression is that, as a work of historical scholarship, this is a remarkablebook by any standards.However, the 'play of ideas' in the title seems too rigidlyexclusive of its punning resonances, suppressingthe sense of intellectualplaywhich might have yielded more stimulatinginsightsinto ways in which eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian drama might be read. London NICK WORRALL Woll, Josephine. 7he Cranes areFlying.KINOfiles Film Companion, 7. I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2003. iX+ II 2 pp. Illustrations.Notes. Furtherreading. k(I 2.99 (paperback). Woll,Josephine. RealImages: SovietCinema andtheThaw.I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2000. XVi+ 267 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Filmography. Bibliography.Index. ?39 95; /I4.95. JOSEPHINE WOLL treatedMikhailKalatozov's 1957 film 7The Cranes areFlying in her book Real Images:SovietCinema and the 7Thaw, and already there it was evident that the author had more to saybut no scope to do so in that context. She has now written this KINOfiles volume about the film and, although inevitablythere is some overlapbetween the materialin the two, anyone with an interest in one should also read the other, as together they provide complementary and contrastingwide angle and close up views of cinema in the Thaw period. RealImages is an extremely interestingbook and one which has been very thoroughly researched, annotated and thoughtfully written. It features a wonderful still on the cover, although the surroundinggraphics do not do it justice. As the titleindicates,it is an examination of the 'thaw'period in Soviet cinema, covering the years 1953-67. The period is divided into the years I953-56, 1957-59,i60-64, i964-65 and I965-67, each of which forms a section which is, in turn, split into several chapters. The book contains a wealth of informationon a greatmany filmswhich enables it to be easilyused as a quickreferencebook, asmuch asreadin itsentirety(andI would certainly recommend such a reading). RealImages provides a solid political, historicaland culturalbackgroundto the films and period in question; it can be usefully read by those with an interest in the thaw and in cinema but with no knowledge of the Russian language, yet it also provides a few key terms in transliterationwhich are welcome to Russian speakers. Woll writes about individual films in some detail, yet manages to draw general conclusions from specific cases in a clear way. 956 SEER, 82, 4, 2004 Woll'sdiscussionsencompass world famousfilmssuch as the Cannes prizewinning Balladofa Soldier, or the 'firstindisputablemasterpiece of post-Stalin cinema' TheCranes areFlying(p. 7I), as well as the obscure and bizarrescience fiction film TheAmphibious Man.She gives merely briefplot outlineswhere this is sufficientto make her point, and analysesone film and its fate over several pageswhere such an approachismore appropriate,aswith MarlenKhutsiev's Ilich'sGate.This section is one of the book's strongest,revealing the plethora of problems faced by an innovative director.As well as analysingmore deepseated issueswhich provokedcontroversyover the film and caused it to be reedited , Woll gives examples of some truly absurdcriticismsmade against the film such as its inclusion of a candle-litdance scene:the directorwas forced to cut thisforfearthat 'peoplewill copy it and startfires'(p. 150). As an example of the book's coherence, it is worth pointing out here that six chapters later Woll draws attention to Khutsiev's ironic reference in his I967 film ulYto Ilich'sGate(made in I96I but not releaseduntil I965). Such detail contributes to the reader'soverallunderstandingof the filmsand individualsdiscussed,as well as of theirtimes, and makesthe book rewardingto read. It is usefulto explain, as Woll does, the general differencein significanceof the use of black-and-whitefilmin the mid-I96os (lyrically)and itsuse a decade previously (to suggest reality, reliability). There are welcome, but few, references to the cinema of other countries, such as the information...

The play of ideas in Russian Enlightenment theater

How did educated 18th-century Russians view society? And how did they reconcile their professed ideals of equality with the monarchical political structures in which they lived? In this study, historian Elise Wirtschafter turns to literary plays to reconstruct the social thinking of the past and to discover how Russians of the Enlightenment understood themselves. The book opens with a discussion of the development and social meaning of theatre in 18th-century Russia. Examining more than 260 plays written during the last half of the century, Wirtschafter shows how drama for the stage represented and debated key questions - the identification of civil society and the common good, the patriarchal household, the duty of monarchs and the role of the individual in society. Highlighting problems of social consciousness, the author asks what Enlightenment Russians thought about social experience, and how their thoughts related to actual social relationships in a society organized around serfdom and absolute monarchy. In the process, she portrays Russian Enlightenment culture on its own terms and sheds light on broader problems of social order and political authority.

The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theatre (review)

238Comparative Drama The book has been superbly edited. I noted only two proofreading errors. The endnotes are profuse with information and ideas. (Unaccountably the page numbers have been omitted from several articles and chapters.) The index is precise and thorough. Altogether, this is a remarkable achievement. Denis Salter McGiIl University Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter. The Play ofIdeas in Russian Enlightenment Theatre. DeKaIb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003. Pp. 296. $40.00 casebound. Elise Wirtschafter offers an intelligent reading of some 260 largely forgotten plays. She suggests the lapse of memory is unjust, not so much in the light of aesthetic standards but because the texts shed considerable light on the formation of Russian society in the eighteenth century. The overriding and convincing argument ofthe book is that theater both reflects and shapes Russian social history at a crucial moment of its transition into the modern era. Since the plays at issue illuminate Enlightenment principals that have recenüybeen looked at with considerable nostalgia and some hope ofcontemporary revival, the exercise is not narrowly academic but engaging for our own time. After a redundant but thankfully briefhistory using long-available studies on the formation ofpublic theater after Peter I,Wirtschafter demonstrates why the typical dismissal of eighteenth-century plays for their excessive optimism and stereotypical characters is unjust. Beyond the stereotypes and happy endings , Russian playwrights most often imitating Western texts explored fairly complex and compelling dilemmas: the conflicts oflove and duty, passion and economic stability, service to society and personal moral obligations, female agency and the prevalent patriarchy. The last, the Russian condition reminds us, is a particularly challenging topic that should not be reduced to a simplistic interpretation of male-female relations. Eighteenth-century Russian society to all appearances might appear to offer a perfectly conventional model of patriarchic despotism, male domination, and female subjugation to unjust social norms, if it were not for the four women who ruled the country from 1725 to 1796. Wirtschafter bravely salvages some material for feminist critique by differentiating between a dominant patriarchal despotism and a limited female agency, yet the historical evidence reflected in the plays she explores clearly subverts the narrow gender-based view in favor of a broader appreciation of Reviews239 issues troubling both sexes. Two undervalued writers, Catherine II and Princess E. Dashkova, cases in point, demonstrate through their works that the patriarchal order allowed not only women who were "legitimate bearers of independent authority" (66) but talented female playwrights involved in the pressing social topics of the day. Wirtschafter is an honest historian without agendas to impose, hence the chapter entitled "The Patriarchal Household" can transcend reductive explications to reveal important values and ideas played out onstage concerning emotions , loyalty, and family duty. It is true that women onstage and off were expected to perform "extraordinary feats of faithfulness" to fulfill their Alcestis roles of loyal wife (adapted by Sumarokov from Euripides in 1759), and that men were not assigned equally high standards in matter of carnal love. But such ideas ofmoral virtue were notjustifications for the baser urges or drive to power; men were expected to learn as much as women from Alcestis and her numerous spin-offs.A distant ancestor ofthis reviewer,A.A. Rzhevsky, demonstrated in his tragedy The False Smerdis (1769) some ofthe important lessons at issue by creating a dichotomy of heroic woman and base male. Smerdis, a "typical tyrant ofthe 18lh century Russian stage" as Wirtschafter puts it, is all patriarchal and monarchial authority originating in vile impulses of revenge and bloodshed, while his wife, the noble Fedima, committed by her sense of duty to a monstrous marriage, fulfills the audience's highest expectations of human decency, loyalty, and devotion. In a number of cases, the plays explored by Wirtschafter are particularly appealing because they show a high degree ofself-reflection in questioning the sacred tenets of the Enlightenment. Ya. Kniazhin's comedy, The Unsuccessful Peace-Maker, or Without Dinner IAm Going Home (1787), for example, shows dry logic to be inadequate in the face of complicated family relationships. In another play, based third-hand on Shakespeare and Nicholas-Thomas Barthe's transformation ofTheMerry Wives ofWindsorinto Les Fausses Infidelities (1768), the human passions...

In a dark wood: dwelling as spatial practice

In architecture the link between life and art can be so strong that one can see them as fused, as Heidegger did. We encounter buildings in connection with the life that inhabits them, but the relationship between building and life is not that of cause and effect. The building is a tool, for which a variety of uses might be found. Gilles Deleuze saw ideas as tools, and valued ‘nomadism’ – moving between sets of ideas. He deployed a rhetoric of mobility and invention that encourages the free play of ideas, while effectively resisting the lure of Heideggerís ‘blood and soil’ nostalgia.

Wisdom! Light! Beauty! A Thematic Analysis of Ibsen's Emperor and Galilean

Hernik Ibsen's Emperor and Galilean is a huge play in which the playwright wrestles with fundamental ideological systems of world-shaking significance. The spiritual agonies of one man, Julian the apostate and emperor, spill out to engulf the entire fourth-century Roman world, with implications for all future generations. Ibsen asserted, "My play deals with a struggle between two irreconcilable powers in the life of the world — a struggle which will always repeat itself. Because of this universality, I call the book 'a world-historic drama.’” He chose a mammoth dramatic canvas because "Only entire nations ... can join in great intellectual movements. A change of front in our conception of life and of the world is no parochial matter." "Inter-national" in size and scope — in political, social, moral, philosophical, and religious terms — Emperor and Galilean is fundamentally a play of ideas. At its thematic core are found the clash of universal ideologies, their predicated synthesis into a new belief system...

The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw ed. by Christopher Innes

ESC 26, 2000 prose, studded with jargon, obscurities (“hypercathectic”), and neologisms (“actants,” “facticity”), only to see the author ar­ rive at conclusions ranging from the disappointingly trite to the stunningly obvious. Neither the opacity of the language, nor the invocation of scores of scholarly authorities, can wholly camouflage these shortcomings. Documenting the prevalence in the ILN of bourgeois moralizing, chauvinism, racism, xenopho­ bia, and “a fundamental imperative [... ] to sell newspapers in an increasingly competitive, early Victorian market” (204) will strike most readers as small reward for the theoretical exertions by which the author, much like a taxidermist, has stretched and mounted the pelt of the IL N . There are elements of a worth­ while study here, albeit struggling unsuccessfully to escape from a suffocating overburden of once-trendy critical theory, stilted jargon, and tortured prose. As the author himself concludes, much scholarly work still remains to be done on the Illustrated London News. MERRILL DISTAD / University of Alberta Christopher Innes, ed. The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xxxii, 343. Illustrations. $28.05 paper. The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw is a wel­ come addition to an already prestigious series. Its scope is pri­ marily restricted to Shaw’s theatre with pertinent references to his wider output wherever relevant. The contributors are out­ standing Shavian scholars from England, Scotland, the United States, and Canada. With so much learning presented, the read­ ing is highly informative and the arguments convincingly axrayed , and never dull. Readers may find the book delightful, as several authors seem to reflect the subject’s own brilliant and skipping versatility. Part 1, “The social and cultural context,” consists of Sally Peters’s writing on Shaw’s feminism, obsession with health, and views on marriage. This is followed by Katherine E. Kelly on his dealings with publishers: “In taking play publication seri­ ously, Shaw proved a shrewd forecaster of a growing interest 510 REVIEWS in drama as a literary genre” (50). Charles A. Berst writes on Shaw’s “crusade for a New Drama to transcend [... ] trivial­ ities” (68) carried on in his theatre criticism and defense of Ibsen. Kerry Powell contributes a thorough analysis of Shaw’s “New Women.” Part 2, “Shaw the dramatist,” starts with Frederick J. Mark­ er’s penetrating study of the early plays. A delightful chapter by David J. Gordon examines the differences between Shaw and Wilde in spite of their apparent affinities: “Wildean and Sha­ vian comedy both seem to be initiated by satire but before long they slide into something else” (131). “Structure and philoso­ phy in Man and Superman and Major B a r b a r a a challenging chapter by Fredric Berg, follows. As parables of human develop­ ment these plays convey Shaw’s theories of the Life Force and human evolution tightly sealed in “triangular structures” into which the debates are cast. Although the roles of the disputants are already present in the earliest plays, Man and Superman is the first play where the character (Superman) and the philoso­ phy (Life Force) “first clearly converged.” It is “the first great play of the twentieth century” (145). Christopher Innes discusses Shaw’s unique dramatic form, the Discussion Play, or, as he called it, the “play of ideas,” used to attack various social abuses. Ronald Bryden sheds new light on Shaw’s difficulties in composing Heartbreak House, originally projected as a comedy in Aristophanic style. It anticipates The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles. Matthew H. Wikander treats the reader to a witty exposition of Shaw’s “reinvention of the history play” (197) in Caesar and Cleopatra, Saint Joan, and In Good King Charles’s Golden Days. Tracy C. Davis writes a thorough study of the parallels between imperialistic and mari­ tal exploitation in six plays ranging from Candida to The Sim­ pleton. Her discussion of the latter play is exceptionally astute. A chapter on “The later Shaw” deals with the plays from 1928 to 1947, generally deemed to be lesser works but redeemed by T. F. Evans’s perceptive analyses that emphasize Shaw’s origi­ nality and “ability to move with the times” (252). Part 3, “Theatre work and influence,” brings the volume to...

The uses of culture: canon formation, postcolonial literature and the multicultural project

This essay directly challenges the easy opposition of the canon to non‐Western and Third World literature and the curricular project of content addition and replacement that now guides mainstream multicultural frameworks. The authors argue that this opposition is illegitimate and that, further, it is not empirically based. Instead, they insist that even a cursory glance at the literature of the Hispanic, African American and Caribbean writers reveals a picture of a free play of ideas and a vigorous dialogue with Western literature over themes of authority, privilege, freedom and culture. In this study of the intertextual relationship between key Western and post‐colonial literary texts, the authors problematize the line of demarcation between ‘West’ and ‘non‐West’ currently being drawn down in curricular debates opposing the West to multiculturalism. In so doing, the authors make the case for a curricular reform that foregrounds the heterogeneous basis of school knowledge, nurtures the autonomy of student inquiry, and links the parochial reality of educational life in the United States to broader political and cultural forces operating ‐within the global setting. For those who really made the breakthrough, it was T. S. Eliot's voice — or rather his recorded voice, property of the British Council — reading ‘Preludes’, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, The Waste Land and the Four Quartets — not the texts — which turned us on. In that dry, deadpan delivery, the ’riddims’of St Louis (though we didn't know the source then) were stark and clear for those of us who, at the same time, were listening to the dedications of Bird, Dizzyand Klook. And it is interesting that the whole establishment couldn't stand Eliot's voice — far less jazz (Edward Braithwaite, The History of the VoiceNew Beacon, London, 1984, pp. 313‐314). To ‘establish his own identity, Caliban, after three centuries, must himself pioneer into regions Caesar never knew...’ (James 1983: xix). In Latin America , ‘epic events (terrible and wonderful) are commonplace’ (Alejo Carpentier, “The Latin American Novel’, New Left Review Vol. 154, p. 163).

Play: The handmaiden of work

AbstractThe natural habitat of geomorphologists is at play in the fields of the Lord. Picnics, not the work ethic, often motivate the most productive. As in the field, so too in the mind, creative insights derive from the play of ideas. As in much of science today, Earth scientists are called upon to ‘solve’ immediate problems, but problems whose solutions lie at the cutting edge of the research frontier. The impact of anthropogenic activities in the context of natural processes, the playground where many geomorphologists work, requires continuous reciprocal exchange between research and application. Apologies are not needed for choices of orientation, but only for destructive separation.

Ibsen: The Open Vision by John S. Chamberlain (review)

Book Reviews JOHN S. CHAMBERLAIN. Ibsen: The Open Vision. London: Athlone Press 1982; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press 1982. Pp. ix, 223. $31.50. Inga-Stina Ewbank suggested a few years ago that the reason Ibsen caught on so slowly in England was that his "vertical" ethic - the hero rising and falling on a scale of metaphysics - was incompatible with the "horizontal" ethic ofEnglish empiricism - the hero's fate determined by his social relationships. This is no longer a dichotomy in English Ibsen criticism. Ibsen: The Open Vision, by a Canadianprofessor, is another in a growing number of recent and respectful books that take in both dimensions of Ibsen's moral world. Chamberlain's argument is unassailable. Ibsen is a "multidimensional" dramatist of "deeply felt ambivalences," who rarely "endorses ... the ideas and attitudes expressed in his plays," and who tempers their heroics with mock-heroics, their tragic themes with "ironic appraisal." Their "characteristic spirit ... arises from a dramatic exploitation of unresolved ... thematic tensions" ("Prefatory Note" [n.p.], pp. i-ii). This was Ibsen's own view, of course, when he tried to protect his plays from misreadings by ardent Ibsenites and anti-Ibsenites alike, and it is pretty much the current view. But Chamberlain pursues it more single-mindedly than other recent proponents. (He handsomely acknowledges his indebtedness to Northam, McFarlane, Guthke, and others in his first introductory chapter.) He supports it in chapters on Peer Gynt, Ghosts, The WildDuck, and The Master Builder. He chose these plays because they represent the four major phases in Ibsen's mature drama - romantic expressionism, play of ideas, "naturalistic tragicomedy," and heroics "in the light of" metaphysics - and because together they "illustrate clearly the principal features of Ibsen's tragicomic world" (p. 20). Chamberlain is an informed and alert reader of Ibsen, with a reading knowledge of Norwegian. (His few misreadings are not important. For example, that the name "Engstrand" means "meadow beach" and not "narrow beach" [po 90] does not affect his point about its ironic import.) He has written a book rich in viewpoints and illuminating critical specifics. But it does not do full justice to his argument. It is not discriminating or conceptually rigorous enough. Book Reviews 571 The introductory chapter sets up an analytical scheme based on certain "constants" and "variants" among Ibsen's themes and techniques (pp. I7-20). But the scheme is only sporadically on view in the chapters that follow. The Peer Gynt chapter is almost all serial annotation ala Logeman - helpful commentary, but not dynamic discourse. In the other chapters, where there is less sustained exegesis, it is harder to say what the principle of organization is. The book never becomes a systematic, cumulating inquiry. There are many examples of ambivalence, but different kinds of ambivalence are not distinguished, nor the dramaturgical means that achieve the different kinds and to what ends. Patterns do not emerge. Precepts crowd out concepts. Without a context of fully formulated theory, crucial terms do not define and judgments do not cohere. Chamberlain uses "tragicomedy" and "ambivalence" as virtual synonyms, as if the semantically valid proposition "All tragicomedy is ambivalent" were reversible. If his premise is that any disharmony or incongruity of souls is intrinsically comical, he does not argue it, and the premise would be false. Were it true, Oedipus and Othello and Phaedra would be tragicomic characters, but they are ironic characters, which is not the same thing. Chamberlain sees Mrs. Alving as both a truth-seeking heroine of "stoical courage" and a frustrated, possessive, vindictive, and "almost literally murderous matriarch" (pp. 98, 101), but he does not say why her ambivalence makes her tragicomical. Is it because she is "muddleheaded" for failing to recognize atheism and agnosticism in the books she reads? (It is arguable that she does.) And why are morally ambivalent characters an intellectual and artistic liability in Ghosts (an "untidy" play) but an asset in the other plays? Sometimes Chamberlain's dislike of Ghosts seems just idiosyncratic. "If there is a joke here," he says about a passage that may slyly allude to Brandes, "it is a literary joke and not a dramatic one, because it is obscure and barely hinted at" (p...