Meaning Of Play Research Articles

Sustainable Canons: Gadamer's Hermeneutics and Theatre

This essay investigates Gadamer's hermeneutic theory and its application to theatre. Attention to Gadamer's views of theatre and performative interpretation provides a foundation to theorize a more sustainable canon. Classics that constitute a sustainable canon operate within a tradition through a community of interpretation that continually returns to interpret them anew. This structure also describes the theatrical repertoire. Several of Gadamer's central themes find easy analogues on stage: play, the history of effect (Wirkungsgeschichte), the participation of an audience in the fusion of horizons, and art's making present continuity the past. Gadamer provides a framework for understanding the work of interpretation of a dramatic text as a shared participatory event. In particular, Gadamer's hermeneutic theory can make sense of the how performance history makes discoveries that "sticks" to a script, particularly as when and how it enters and influences the canon. Gadamer's hermeneutics help to interpret how innovative performance choices and stage spectacle are part of a play's meaning; these interpretive interventions in drama's reception history are significant and not simply ornamentation to some "truth of the play" accessed only via the reenactment of the original compositional context. Occasional reparative interpretations of the canon, in turn, help to sustain the community.

“There would this monster make a man”: Colonial power in the 1993 RSC production of 'The Tempest'

Taking on assumptions about oppression, identity and representation as they are developed in contemporary postcolonial theory, this study proposes the analysis of the 1993 theatrical production of William Shakespeare's The Tempest by The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). It aims to discuss the role of Caliban's monstrosity in the production and how it pertains to issues such as power relations and spectacle. The main benefit of doing an analysis of a performance of a Shakespearean text seems to be the possibility of seeing the play's meaning as contingent, as a result of a series of elements (actor's body, visual clues, the theatrical institution, spectatorship) that release it from the burden of being considered as the work of a single, universal, non- contradictory mind that contemporary criticism has pointed out as the 'Shakespeare Myth'. I conclude that the 1993 RSC production presents a Tempest that, in many ways, reinforces traditional positions about the legitimacy of Prospero's dominion over the island.---Original in English.---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2018n47a1210

David Bevington. Murder Most Foul: “Hamlet” Through the Ages.

David Bevington. <i>Murder Most Foul: “Hamlet” Through the Ages</i>.

Trevor Griffiths' ‘Absolute Beginners’: Socialist Humanism and the Television Studio

This article examines how conventional studio production strategies were active in the construction of political meaning in the 1974 television play ‘Absolute Beginners’, written by Trevor Griffiths. Produced for the BBC anthology series Fall of Eagles, the play dramatises Lenin's involvement with the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP) and explores the contradictions between personal ethics and political necessity. Through close textual analysis and contextual discussion of other plays in the series, this piece demonstrates how shot patterns and spatial and performative devices in ‘Absolute Beginners’ supported the drama's socialist-humanist and feminist themes. Drawing on existing writing about the studio mode, it argues that the qualities of intimacy and presentational distance that it engendered were highly appropriate for the personal and the political dialectic in ‘Absolute Beginners’. While using authorship as a convenient category for referring to the coherence of Griffiths' thematic concerns and dramatic structure during this period, the article complicates notions of the television dramatist as author by arguing for the importance of visual style and showing how ‘ordinary’ studio form was operational in the play's political meanings.

Shakespearean Relocations: The Final Scene of John Madden's Shakespeare in Love

This essay focuses upon the conclusion to Shakespeare in Love (1998), in order to consider the significance of its echoes of, and borrowings from, The Tempest . Two interpretive paradigms are engaged in the film's conclusion: namely, that The Tempest is Shakespeare's play about the new world, and that it is his 'farewell to the stage'. These commonplace notions about the play's meaning discerned in the conclusion to the film serve to reinforce its consolidation of Hollywood's new-found confidence in the production of Shakespeare related cinema at the end of the millennium.

“The Tragedy of a Russian Woman”: Anna Karenina in the Moscow Art Theater, 1937

Staged at a peak of Stalinist terror and aggressively promoted by the state, Anna Karenina in the Moscow Art Theater is an unusual cultural and ideological event of the late 1930s. In its disturbing lack of obvious political or emotional relevance to the socialist experience, the grand spectacle of adultery and suicide on the country's main dramatic stage prompted a conflicted critical construction of the play's Soviet meaning and resonance. Situating Anna Karenina in contemporary political and cultural landscapes, this essay exposes and interprets the rupture between the production's mediated publicized image and immediate theatrical actuality, and brings to light the play's inherent logic and implications created through a uniquely theatrical exchange among the Stalinist state, stage, and audience.

"Image of that Horror": History, Prophecy, and Apocalypse in &lt;i&gt;King Lear&lt;/i&gt;

An innovative book that draws attention with force and clarity to the prophetic center and apocalyptic framework of King Lear. Wittreich demonstrates how Shakespeare mined scripture for analogies that pluralise the play's meaning and universalize its significance. In exploring the play's literary and cultural relations, this book addresses the larger question of King Lear's sources, genre, and Christian character.

Girls' Doll Play in Educational, Virtual, Ideological and Market Contexts: A Case Analysis of Controversy

The purpose of this study was to explore an example of girls' doll play in contemporary US culture, including its virtual, political, marketing, and other contextual meanings. The narrative that provoked the analysis was a brief news report about a controversial school function — a school fund-raiser fashion show featuring American Girl doll costumes. The show was cancelled when advocacy groups asserted connections between American Girl dolls and pro-abortion, pro-lesbian groups. The textual analysis of this case found complicated interconnections between the education and the culture and politics of doll play, Web support for that culture, the role of merchandizing related to doll play, assumptions about the relationship of play to schooling, morality, and Web communications that seem to enable communities with diverse perspectives on girls and their doll play. The evolution of play's meanings for child development appears to be complicated by connections to the Web, politics ascribed to toys and toy manufacturers, and the web of connections between toys and the larger economic context.

Meanings of All for Love , 1677-1813

ongoing emphasis in literary studies on work of literature as cultural artifact, or as one in a number of texts, literary and otherwise, that derive meaning only from their interdependence, has had surprisingly little impact on Restoration and eighteenth-century theater studies, particularly discussion of plays themselves. Since playwright's script is but one factor in any performance, concern for intertextuality should lead to exploration of mutability of any durable play's meaning, especially in a theater world that constantly evolves, as this one did. Yet, whether located in aesthetics, in political or social issues, or even in circumstances or personalities around which a is written, meaning or significance assigned to that is almost invariably a fixed one. This critical tendency neglects two remarkable features of drama in so-called long eighteenth century: extent to which audiences dictated content and mood of plays, and extent to which audiences, theaters, and new plays differed from each other. In prologue after prologue as well as in critical commentaries, playwrights and theater connoisseurs lament that tastes of audiences--on which a play's success depended--debase fare proffered. Such objections (and sheer number of them) point to subordination of playwright's aesthetic concerns to audience expectations about a play. (l) This raises interesting questions about those plays that had any longevity during this period but that do not have a readily apprehensible universality of kind generally attributed to, say, Shakespearian drama. If, as they did, audience demands kept pace with rapidly changing political and cultural milieus and theater personnel and atmospheres, then in order to appeal to these ever-changing demands durable plays of this period must be endowed with qualities that are incompatible with fixed meanings sought for them. An outstanding example of a with a critical history as remarkable as its endurance on eighteenth-century stage is one that in fact kept a Shakespearian from boards throughout entire period. John Dryden's All For (also known in its own time as Antony and Cleopatra) replaced Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra until 1813. (2) Howard Weinbrot long ago showed futility of looking to Shakespeare for key to All for Love, leaving critics still pondering reason for endurance of this starkly neoclassical play--one formal to a degree that even Dryden himself expressed nervousness about. (3) critical dilemma has been confounded by doggedly traditional approach, however: attention has focused not on those qualities that allowed it to survive chameleon stages and fickle audiences from Restoration to Regency, but on uncovering a particular moral, aesthetic, historical, or political meaning. (4) red herring was perhaps thrown out by Dryden himself: excellency of Moral promised in preface (10). Pursuit of this moral, or at least of some pinpointable meaning that makes sense of it, has led to titles like The Significance of All For Love (1970) and to assurances that the value system of play lies in a circumscribed historical context (2000). (5) result of such searches for a single encompassing meaning is that only consistency amongst criticism of All for is, as Harry Solomon notes, its inconsistency. (6) play's elusiveness is itself, however, key to its durability. In light of its stage history, All For clearly has an openness and flexibility that, even as they have remained resistant to critical analysis, allowed to adapt to quite different theaters and audience needs. It was able to please audiences of 1670s and 1680s who were directed in their responses by Charles II, his libertine courtiers, and political and philosophical issues that riveted Restoration. …

Théâtre et esprit public : les représentations du Mariage de Figaro à Paris (1784-1797)

Although Beaumarchais played a considerable role in the war of American independence and in the diffusion of its principles in France, in particular through the Courrier de l'Europe which published the first French translation of the United States' Declaration of Independence on August 20th 1776, the 'Voltigeur des Lumières3 (Enlightenment Acrobat) hardly used the concept of public spirit. However, an analysis of performances of the Mariage de Figaro in Paris between 1784 and 1797 makes it possible to apprehend the evolution of the concept during the Revolution from two points of view. Firstly that of the theatre as a space in which an authority emanating from an assembled audience can be exercised. Secondly, that of the resistance of the assembled audience's spirit which is unlike public opinion and the written press that tend to imply an audience which is scattered or confined to private spaces, with regard to its formation, direction or manipulation. The specificity of this cultural practise, based on the three poles of the actor, the audience and the author, turns the audience and actors into co-authors and the playwright himself can help to modify the show's meaning through performance by adding or suppressing parts. A play's meaning is elaborated by the author but also by the actors and the audience who interact in a given socio-political context.

Drama, Performance, and Polity in Pre-Cromzvellian Ireland by Alan J. Fletcher, and: Drama and the Performing Arts in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland: A Repertory of Sources and Documents from the Earliest Times until c.1642 by Alan J. Fletcher (review)

MLRy 98.1, 2003 177 tolerant?tolerant, that is, by the standards of his day rather than ours. That Middleton propounds a theological view of sodomy is not obvious. Heller's difficultand challengeable project requires that he is able to identifyparticular characters who have committed the act, and to determine their spiritual destiny. Sodomy as an act could not be presented on the stage, and could be mentioned only elliptically. Middleton insinuates without necessary commitment to narrative specificity,daring the auditor to imagine while accepting the condition of unrepresentability. In these provocatively teasing circumstances, a fixed moral authorial intention is hard to ascertain. Grace shares with sodomy in that it too was invisible on the early modern stage. Acts of grace can be manifested only as events that most immediately are something else, and might be no more than that something else. To consolidate these acts in the mind as concretely specific events marking out the gist of a play's purpose and mean? ing can scarcely avoid detracting from both the immediacy and the ambivalence of the theatrical moment. The plays will in some sense accommodate the kind of reading that Heller advocates. Whether they require his specific interpretative horizon and demand the specific reading he advances is another matter. Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham John Jowett Drama, Performance, and Polity in Pre-Cromzvellian Ireland. By Alan J. Fletcher. Cork: Cork University Press. 2000. xvi + 52opp. ?45. ISBN 1-85918-245-3. Drama and the Performing Arts in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland: A Repertory of Sources and Documents from theEarliest Times until c.1642. By Alan J. Fletcher. Cam? bridge: Brewer. 2001. xiii + 624pp. ?90; $160. ISBN 0-85991-573-5. Ben Jonson's The Alchemist famously starts with a fart,a sort of alchemy in reverse, but that unsubtle, in-your-face opening stands as the prologue to an entertainment. In early modern Ireland, however, as Alan Fletcher demonstrates with tremendous wit and verve, not to mention formidable scholarship, the fart is an art in itself, and not just an opening gambit or untimely intervention. Indeed, breaking wind is the peculiar forte of an itinerant company of 'braigetori' (Gaelic Irish for 'farters'). To? gether with face-contortionists (muggers in the theatrical sense of the word), gambler s, harpers, acrobats, tricksters,jesters, jugglers, and hummers?no, not mummers, but hummers?the farters of Gaelic Ireland contribute to a varied and vibrant culture of performance art. Modern Irish drama is the envy of us all, but it is often portrayed as a colonial legacy, English in origin, though Irish in verbal energy. Fletcher's aim is to establish Ireland as a fulcrum of dramatic activity, steeped in traditions, local and vocal, prior to the Restoration, challenging English colonial representations of the country as a cultural vacuum. Ireland has excited a great deal of interest among Renaissance scholars over the past two decades, ever since Stephen Greenblatt's decisive intervention on Edmund Spenser and Ireland in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), an essay which drew on important work by Irish historians such as Brendan Bradshaw, Ciaran Brady, Nicholas Canny, and D. B. Quinn. A constant complaint from historians of early modern Ireland, and from those engaged in re? search on Irish language and literature in the period, has been that the preoccupation with English literary representations of Ireland and the Irish implies that England had a culture which it wished to impose on a country without one. This goes against the grain of Spenser's own perspective, since he argued in^4 View ofthe Present State of Ireland (1596) that the Irish had letters before the English, that the work of Irish poets was worthy of attention (and translation), and that itwas but the other day since England grew civil. In other words, one of the earliest and most canonical of English 178 Reviews colonists and commentators was prepared to concede that Ireland had a rich literary culture that pre-dated that of England. Yet the image ofthe 'wild Irish' promulgated by other planters has persisted. These two major new works offerample evidence of Ireland's complex cultural context from the seventh to the seventeenth century. The critical volume...

Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Theatre

In his richly detailed, beautifully illustrated history of Shakespeare's most popular play - the first comprehensive study of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the theatre - Gary Jay Williams covers four hundred years of landmark productions in Europe, the United States, and Canada as well as important opera, dance, and film adaptations. Williams shows how the visual and musical vocabularies of production can be read as cultural texts and how these mediative texts determine this play's available meanings from generation to generation. His account, then, is the story of our imaginative and astonishing uses of Shakespeare's play. Williams offers detailed theatrical and cultural analyses of the productions of David Garrick, Ludwig Tieck, Elizabeth Vestris, Charles Kean, Harley Granville-Barker, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Max Reinhardt, Peter Brook, Liviu Ciulei, and other artists. His engaging, intelligent study will be invaluable to scholars and teachers of Shakespeare and theatre history and to professional directors, designers, critics, and actors.

Our moonlight revels: A midsummer night's dream in the theatre

In his richly detailed, beautifully illustrated history of Shakespeare's most popular play - the first comprehensive study of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the theatre - Gary Jay Williams covers four hundred years of landmark productions in Europe, the United States, and Canada as well as important opera, dance, and film adaptations. Williams shows how the visual and musical vocabularies of production can be read as cultural texts and how these mediative texts determine this play's available meanings from generation to generation. His account, then, is the story of our imaginative and astonishing uses of Shakespeare's play. Williams offers detailed theatrical and cultural analyses of the productions of David Garrick, Ludwig Tieck, Elizabeth Vestris, Charles Kean, Harley Granville-Barker, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Max Reinhardt, Peter Brook, Liviu Ciulei, and other artists. His engaging, intelligent study will be invaluable to scholars and teachers of Shakespeare and theatre history and to professional directors, designers, critics, and actors.

Foreword

As we all know, the idea of theatre is undergoing significant revision: ideas of cultural performance, gender construction, ethnic, personal and national expression, postcolonial performance, and performativity (both cultural and linguistic) are joining more traditional definitions of the play text as sites of analysis. Just as historiography urges a contextual reading of the important documents of Canada's stage, poststructural criticisms urge study of theatrical performance in a plurality of contexts and from various (often previously ignored) perspectives. Studies of a particular play can approach the source material from many vantages, each imbricating the other to create a lattice of analysis which more fully reveals the play's meanings. And, by showing a variety of ways of seeing, such studies also deny the transcendence of any one means of investigation; indeed, they demonstrate that all readings are provisional and contingent upon the subject-position of the spectator.

Accounting for the Audience in Historical Reconstruction: Martin Jones's Production of Langston Hughes'sMulatto

Although Langston Hughes'sMulattoholds the record as the second longest Broadway production of a play by an African American playwright (surpassed only by Lorraine Hansberry'sA Raisin in the Sun), the reasons behind its commercial success have been virtually ignored. This oversight in part reflects a tendency among theatre scholars to treat the dramatic text as the primary (if not the only) source of a play's meaning. In the case ofMulatto, academic critics have debated its literary merit according to questions of form and genre. Webster Smalley, in his introduction to the collected plays of Langston Hughes, for instance, defendsMulattoas a tragedy, arguing that the play avoids the tendency of social dramas of the 1930s “to oversimplify moral issues as in melodrama” because of the recognition of Bert's “tragic situation” (he must kill himself or be killed by an angry lynch mob). For those critics who insist thatMulattois melodramatic, Smalley advises, “let [them] look to the racial situation in the deep South as it is even today [i.e., 1963]: it is melodramatic.” Smalley presupposes a dichotomous relationship between fiction and reality, advancing a mimetic theory in which representation directly corresponds to the real. Rather than answering specific charges, he defines contemporary race relations as melodrama, implying thatMulatto, even if melodramatic, is “natural” and “accurate.”

The Weyward Sisters: towards a Feminist Staging of ‘Macbeth’

Shakespeare's plays have long been subject to deconstruction and reconstruction – some would argue, since the moment the words left his pen and entered the arena of theatrical intervention; some, more conservatively, dating the process to the attempts during the Restoration to rewrite him according to new tastes and old ‘rules’. More recently, of course, the long search for an almost platonic ideal of ‘authority’ has been giving way not only before new ideas of what this constitutes in theatrical terms, but through conscious attempts to subvert a play's meaning – not necessarily as ‘intended’ by Shakespeare, but as received in the prevailing culture. Feminist directors and critics have of course been prominent in this process – but the following study of the role of the witches inMacbethis distinctive not so much for applying twentieth-century ideologies to Renaisssance plays, but for its exploration of the ‘problem’ of the witches in the light of conventions which, still current in Shakespeare's times, are hard to recover in the practical theatre of our own. The author, Lorraine Helms, is currently Mellon Fellow in Theatre Arts at Cornell University. She has published several articles on renaissance drama, and is working on studies of gender and performance in both contemporary and historical interpretations of Shakespeare.

A winter's snake: dramatic form in the tragedies of John Webster

John Webster's reputation as a dramatist stems mainly from his two great revenge tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. Webster's dramas have attracted critical controversy, as some commentators find his plays incoherent, tangled and chaotic, fitfully illuminated by brilliant scenes and speeches. In A Winter's Snake, Christina Luckyj dissects the structure of Webster's two most revived plays to reveal a unity of form and clarity of vision. Luckyj analyzes the devices that Webster used and that help to rank him as a principal playwright: juxtaposition of stage analogues for opening a play; large-scale repetition for intensification in mid-play; final act subplots for recapitulation in his plays; and concentric form for clarification of a play's overall shape and meaning. Analyzing trends in criticism of Webster and Renaissance drama, this book presents a new view of Webster, not as an eccentric or morally confused artist but as a careful craftsman who used repetition and other devices to convey a complex moral vision that emerges chiefly in performance.

How to Read a Comedia : Branching Points in the Script of Lope's La discreta enamorada

As readers of comedias we must train ourselves to animate the texts by staging the play in our minds. An analysis of Lope's La discreta enamorada —the Spanish text, the English translation by Vern Williamsen, and the 1986 Chamizal performance—shows that our attention to the script's branching points, those moments when an interpretation can go in one of several equally valid directions, enables us to perceive the variety of interpretations (or performance texts) inherent in the play's written script. We realize how the director, actors, and production crew, as well as the critic/translator, by their choices narrow (or even sometimes expand) a play's meaning. For one example, in some scenes the script of La discreta enamorada allows Lucindo to be played as either sincere or callow, or Fenisa to be naive, calculating, or wholeheartedly in love. Thus the responsible critic, avoiding monolithic interpretation, will instead map for us the meanings encompassed by the artistic event.

Pelopid History and the Plot ofIphigenia in Tauris

The plot ofIphigenia in Taurisis usually thought to be Euripides' own invention. Its basic assumption can be found in Proclus' summary of theCypria, viz. that a deer was substituted for Iphigenia during the sacrifice at Aulis and that she herself was removed to the land of the Tauri. Her later rescue by Orestes and Pylades, however, cannot be traced with probability to any work of art or literature earlier than Euripides' play. In this play, in which Orestes recognizes and then saves the sister whom he had long thought dead, it is assumed that her replacement by a deer went unseen by those present at the sacrifice. The sequel which this assumption allowed Euripides to invent (if it was he who invented it) is original only in a limited sense, since it bears the imprint of several familiar story types. These types include the following: (1) the murder of a kinsman is narrowly averted by a recognition; (2) a reunion is followed by an intrigue; and (3) a maiden is rescued. Each is used elsewhere by Euripides. The first two, for example, are found inCresphontes, the second inElectra, and the third inAndromeda. Correspondences of this sort, based on plot patterns, will naturally gain in interest if it can be shown that they throw light on a play's meaning or on the process that led to its creation. The student of dramatic plots, however, soon discovers that analogies between them are easy to draw and can be quickly multiplied.

Structural analysis of drama: Practical and theoretical implications

This paper describes the process of transforming into a computer analysis a hand procedure used to study three plays produced in Quebec in the 1970s, during the height of the nationalist sentiment there. The elements of one of the plays, Les Belles-Soeurs by Michael Tremblay, have been encoded and a retrieval system, written in Fortran for the VAX 11/780 at McMaster University, has been developed. Results of the initial computer study are now being analyzed from the points of view of Quebec theatre and of literary criticism itself. Considerable time is being spent on the refinement of the basic critical model. Future plans include the encoding of the lines of information on verbal exchanges previously analyzed and the setting up of a corresponding data base on Les Belles-Soeurs. This will be followed by the encoding of information and the setting up of a corresponding database on the verbal exchanges at the stage elements of the other two plays. A final phase will comprise the creation of a new program whereby new information can be added to the database and new plays analyzed. The main purpose of the analysis is to grasp the author's viewpoint and the attempt to control reader/ audience response and understanding of the play's overall meaning and socio-political ideology. This is done with the help of an analytical grid which allows the critic to note, summarize and categorize the interpretation. As the aim of these grids and their subsequent use is the interpretation of the author's meaning as interpreted by a critic and not with the meaning of the text in the literal, linguistic or stylistic sense, this study should not in any way be confused with