Drama Studies Research Articles

Preface

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

Getting Real about the E in STEAM

STEM and STEAM are in the news. Researchers and educators in my field (cognition, art, and creativity) argue reasons for adding the A to STEM. While I visit this below, my focus is elsewhere. In this brief essay, I want to explore the meaning and importance of the E appearing in both STEM and STEAM. What’s engineering doing in this mix? And what are some reasons for affirming the arts when the role of engineering is clarified? Author/Artist Bio Dr. James S. Catterall is Professor Emeritus and past Chair of the Faculty at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Dr. Catterall is an Affiliate Faculty member at the UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development. Dr. Catterall is also the Principal Investigator at the Centers for Research on Creativity, (CRoC), based in Los Angeles and London, UK. (www.croc-lab.org). Dr. Catterall is coauthor of “Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development,” Arts Education Partnership’s (AEP) 2002 landmark compilation, which provides summaries of numerous significant research studies in dance, drama, the multi-arts, music and visual arts as well as comprehensive summaries written by some of the most recognized names in arts research.

Le genre policier dans tous ses états: d’Arsène Lupin à Navarro by Marc Lits

of sentences over words; sentences as action; the importance of natural, spoken, musical speech, free of the constraints of traditional rhyme and meter; the superiority of prose over poetry; a canon that includes Rabelais, Pascal, Bossuet, Balzac, Chateaubriand, Michelet, Rimbaud, and Aragon, but vehemently excludes Racine, Voltaire, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry, and other representatives of “l’esprit français,” which Claudel equated with “sec, paillard, méchant, cynique, vaniteux, histrionique” (136). On first reading, the structure of this volume can be disconcerting: the narrative momentum of the first section is interrupted by a 300-page description of Claudel’s linguistic theories before Kaës reunites theory and practice in her analysis of the Soulier de Satin. For Claudel, as for all great writers, practice is more interesting than theory, and ironies abound in their juxtaposition . Ambassador Claudel, speaking in Japan in 1922, felt obliged to extol French clarté, even as he was quietly composing vitriolic parodies of that notion. In 1925 he railed against critics who prefaced their reviews with claims of incomprehension : “Je suis étonné qu’un critique ose écrire aux premières pages d’une longue étude: ‘Je ne comprends pas’. S’il ne comprend pas, il n’a qu’à se taire.” (21–22). Yet, thirty years later, this same Claudel, now a member of the French Academy, would come full circle, claiming not to understand younger poets and bemoaning their “désordre, obscurité et ‘mauvais français’” (10). Kaës guides us through the interwar period and shows how Claudel’s spirited combat against the perceived “bêtise,” “méchanceté,” “incomprehension,” and “mauvaise foi” (58) of his critics prompted him to elaborate a theory of language that is interesting in itself and even more as a code the writer could, and did, contravene at will. Princeton University (NJ) Carol Rigolot LITS, MARC. Le genre policier dans tous ses états: d’Arsène Lupin à Navarro. Limoges: PU de Limoges, 2011. ISBN 978-02-84287-531-2. Pp. 190. 22 a. We find in this collection fourteen of the author’s articles (or portions thereof ) originally published or presented between 1993 and 2007 but reworked somewhat around the theme expressed in the title. The main text is divided into three parts: 1) “Les limites du roman policier: un genre œdipien aux frontières du réel;” 2) “D’Arsène Lupin au polar rwandais: auteurs et détectives en quête de reconnaissance;” 3) “Le genre policier à l’écran: du roman au cinéma et à la télévision.” This last, which deals with the increasingly transsemiotic nature of the roman policier, will not be addressed here in any depth because, though it is engaging for anyone interested in studies in media, popular culture, translation (page to screen or fait divers to fiction), mystery, or police drama, it strays afield of French literary criticism proper. The three parts each contain several unnumbered chapters, each with subdivisions of its own. Lits’s thesis is that the genre policier, “un genre toujours méprisé” (14), is most often relegated to the status of paralittérature and constitutes a sort of “antichambre de la littérature, une espèce d’ébauche de ce que pourrait arriver à créer un écrivain dans sa maturité” (121). He uses the title of Baudelaire’s translation of Poe’s story Murder[s] in the Rue Morgue, considered by many the ‘nouvelle fondatrice’ of the genre, as a type of paradigm (or perhaps mnemonic) for defining the roman Reviews 1265 policier: Double (dualities: crime/investigation, hero/criminal, and a “doublure” of the hero) Assassinat (the “contenu thématique”) dans la rue (the “dimension sociologique ”) Morgue (“la part d’imaginaire”) (20–23). For Lits, “le genre se présente comme une forme narrative reprenant les principes de l’énigme et de la devinette [des] récits les plus anciens de l’humanit é. Il ne fait que reproduire une démarche inscrite au cœur de l’humanité” (23). The texte policier is but a palimpsest to be decoded, and so reading it becomes an essentially hermeneutic act (24). For the author, the genre is proteiform (28) and evolves for its survival. One such change involves publishers’ developing...

‘Faming of the Shrews’: Medieval Drama and Feminist Approaches

This article examines the growth of gendered critical readings of medieval drama and looks at the changes that have occurred during the last decades. The journey moves from the placement of women in a position of obscurity towards the acceptance of the distinctive contribution made through their roles as audience members, back-stage helpers, and their representation on stage, albeit played by men. Given that women characters in medieval drama have often been interpreted as unruly, or shrewish, this article examines how the lens of feminism brought the role of women in medieval drama increased exposure: the shrews were placed in the limelight. Using the five phases of revisioning a feminist education developed in the 1980s by American educationalist, Peggy McIntosh, the article analyses how each stage of feminist scholarship is linked to a particular set of ideological blueprints and demonstrates how the feminist scholarship of medieval drama replicates McIntosh's five phases of revisioning. The article concludes by investigating why feminist revisionist studies of medieval drama occurred so late in the day, in comparison to contemporary scholarship being undertaken in other areas of performance studies.

Have you ever considered a career in total revolution? Drama and the corporate reform of UK higher education

ABSTRACTThis article examines the corporate reform of UK higher education and its implications for drama. The article first sets out the background to this reform and its ideological reference points. It then outlines the discourse surrounding the foundation of drama in British Universities and relates this to the discourse developed several decades later by performance studies. In mapping out these areas, the article draws attention to drama academics' professed emphasis on rejecting commodification in favour of multiple and/or wide-ranging practices, progressive and democratic principles and a concern with the complexity of human beings. The article argues that corporate discourse cuts at the joints of drama's identity as a discipline because what constitute many of the ‘professed’ principles and modes of practice within drama and performance studies are antithetical to the models of commodification promoted by corporate thinking. The article also engages with the ethical issues raised by corporate reform. As a wide range of critics point out, allowing corporate discourse and practices to dominate higher education is problematic because of the extent to which these practices do violence to the human and promote antidemocratic, antisocial, dehumanizing and alienating modes of governance. The article notes that, while drama's ‘old’ discourses may seem contradictory, problematic or even to collude with corporatism, they can nevertheless help us clarify our understanding of the institutional place of drama in contemporary higher education, as remembering the democratic and progressive in drama's past—as well as acknowledging where it has colluded with the corporate agenda—provides us with a means both to contextualize policy reform and engage critically with its implications.

Turn Management and Topic Control in True West: A Pragmatic Explanation

Drama studies in recent decades have greatly benefited from new linguistic areas known as discourse analysis and pragmatics. Drama as dialogue exhibits interpersonal exchanges between conversational participants. This interactional aspect of drama can be explained through examination of turn-taking system between characters. Vimala Herman demonstrates how in drama the analysis of turn-taking strategies and topic management used by characters relates to the reader/audience‗s interpre- tation of the character and situation. This article by applying her model to a scene taken from Sam Shepard‗s play True West attempts to indicate that discerning turn-taking patterns can help us distinguish the roles and functions of the characters in the play and explain the situations that are evoked by these characters.

:Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama

:<i>Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama</i>

Pilar Cuder-Domínguez. Stuart Women Playwrights, 1613–1713. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Pp. 158. $99.95 (cloth).

Pilar Cuder-Domínguez. Stuart Women Playwrights, 1613–1713. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Pp. 158. $99.95 (cloth).

Drama and the Succession to the Crown, 1561–1633. By Lisa Hopkins. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Burlington and Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. x + 178 + 1 illus. £55/$99.95 Hb. - Religion and Drama in Early Modern England. Edited by Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson. Burlington and Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. xiii + 281 + 4 illus.

Drama and the Succession to the Crown, 1561–1633. By Lisa Hopkins. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Burlington and Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. x + 178 + 1 illus. £55/$99.95 Hb. - Religion and Drama in Early Modern England. Edited by Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson. Burlington and Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. xiii + 281 + 4 illus.

Does a Food-themed TV Drama Affect Perceptions of National Image and Intention to Visit a Country? An Empirical Study of Korea TV Drama

ABSTRACT A Korean TV drama series (Daejanggeum), with a story line focusing on Korean food, was exported to over 50 countries resulting in a surprisingly popular mega-hit. The popularity of this TV drama, transcended across countries and cultural boundaries, has brought an enhancement to the national image of Korea or national brand, and led to a surge in sales of Korean industrial products, as well as an increased interest in Korean tourism resources. This study attempted to empirically investigate the effects of the TV drama series on the national image and intention to visit Korea as perceived by Chinese diners. Interestingly, the “peculiarity of Korean culture” was a main reason for preferring Korean cuisine, which positively affected the perception of the national image and the intention to visit Korea to partake in food tourism. Further, this study suggests that future studies are needed to compare the results of this research according to national, ethnic, regional, or religious boundaries. The comparison of other ethnic groups will be helpful for establishing different marketing strategies according to the different cohorts with different consumption patterns.

Michelle M. Dowd and Natasha Korda. Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. 310. $119.95 (cloth).

Michelle M. Dowd and Natasha Korda. Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. 310. $119.95 (cloth). - Volume 51 Issue 2

The James Madison Carpenter Collection of British Folk Plays

In this, the last of my series of papers on collectors of British folk plays, I come to a man who has a direct personal interest for me. Thomas Fairman Ordish (1855–1924) whom I spoke about in my f...

Masked States and the “Screen” Between Security and Disability

I open with a typical poster from a hospital emergency room that advises on contingent measures taken to prevent spread of H1N1, showing calm, gently smiling eyes behind a biological secured around a blue surgical cap (fig. l). The poster reassures us - acknowledging that sight of a could be frightening - that masks, benevolently, not threateningly (you may see others ... it does not mean that someone has swine flu), protect everyone. Such evocation of all possible parties does not at first seem a standard security apparatus, but in fact its language mimics all-embracing appeal of your slogans found today in many security genres, from extraordinary extensions of airport search techniques to digital passcode access. This mask, when worn in health or medical contexts, is urged as necessary protection from transmission of disease, while other masks are coded as threat - for instance, facial coverings that occlude individual features potentially thwart facial-recognition surveillance software. Masks can, in these versions, render face unmappable to security operations of vulnerable state. In light of heightened contagion scares in contemporary United States, we might consider medicalized as a newer prosthetic form in light of concurrence of modern public health conventions, increasing potential for rapid transnational communicability of disease, and significant incidence of breathable pollution for common citizenry. But before drawing such a conclusion, we might ask: what counts, and doesn't count, as a mask; and what is, and isn't, disability? Mask forms and figurations are multiple and complex and deserve a closer look; value of disability is similarly mobile, attachable variously to human bodies, notions, and abstract entities. From a broad viewpoint, facial masks certainly symbolize more than illness or its possibility. They also suggest (and have historically been used to symbolize) horror of disfigurement, use of ritual, protection of self and other. Indeed, much work has been done in drama studies and anthropology on theatrical and ritual effects of masks. In today's political environment, how does role of masks in obscuring face work within a national public? And, observing that masks can incite complex emotions from various perspectives, how does visage itself enable, disable, or compound affect? For purposes of this experimental essay, the is considered quite openly. Visiting an array of citations (public announcements, journalistic photos, artistic re-creations, television series), I discuss questions of security and sensitivity before turning to a consideration of Levinasian facial ethics as well as Deleuze and Guattari's articulation of masks. I propose that masks could be understood as roving, material instances of a screen, one that bars access to visage while functioning as a device of projection for others. In specific sites, such a screen functions epistemologically to translate for or against face, where face is understood as a prioritized site of human engagement. To clarify, this essay intends to undo any singularly assured mask visual trope by running among diverse exemplars (with all their anthropological, horroristic, and ethnic trappings) to map their sensible geographies, and to ask what their often polarized and racialized valences might tell about investments of nationalistic self- imagining. Ultimately, my hope is that masks appear less as concrete objects per se than as screens with affective resonance. Thinking through Deleuze and Guattari and others, such screens are what I will claim most stably undergird projects of securitized, nondisabled whiteness. I discuss how this screen today might bear ever greater affective intensities, since it occupies a primary symbolic position within overlapping discourses of security. …

Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama

Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama

Entertaining Children: an Exploration of the Business and Politics of Childhood

This article explores the conflict between the constructions of childhood and their political/legal implications in the context of the entertainment business, as related to the demands imposed upon children by parents and theatre managers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Once children could move freely both within and between countries, these conflicts and concerns assumed a global dimension. Through a number of case studies, the authors offer some fresh observations about how legal and social imperatives affected the transmission of values about children employed as entertainers between Britain and Australasia during the period from 1870 to the start of the First World War – from the Education Acts of the 1870s to the legislation of 1910–1913 restricting the export of child entertainers. Gillian Arrighi is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She has recently published articles in Theatre Journal (Dec 2008), Australasian Drama Studies (April 2009 and Oct 2010), and in Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s–1960s (Sydney, 2008). She is associate editor of the e-journal Popular Entertainment Studies. Victor Emeljanow is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and General Editor of the e-journal Popular Entertainment Studies. He has published widely on subjects ranging from the reception of Chekhov in Britain and the career of Theodore Kommisarjevsky, to Victorian popular dramatists. He co-wrote with Jim Davis the award-winning Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing 1840–1880 in 2001, and his chapter on staging the pirate in the nineteenth century was included in Swashbucklers and Swindlers: Pirates and Mutineers in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, edited by Grace Moore (2011).

Joanne Rochester. Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010. ix + 172 pp. $99.95. ISBN: 978–0–7546–3080–7.

Joanne Rochester. Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010. ix + 172 pp. $99.95. ISBN: 978–0–7546–3080–7. - Volume 65 Issue 3

Yael Manes. Motherhood and Patriarchal Masculinities in Sixteenth-Century Italian Comedy. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011. ix + 148 pp. $89.95. ISBN: 978–1–4094–3440–5.

Yael Manes. Motherhood and Patriarchal Masculinities in Sixteenth-Century Italian Comedy. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011. ix + 148 pp. $89.95. ISBN: 978–1–4094–3440–5. - Volume 65 Issue 3

Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin, eds. Locating the Queen's Men, 1583–1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. 284. $99.95 (cloth).

Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin, eds. Locating the Queen's Men, 1583–1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. 284. $99.95 (cloth). - Volume 51 Issue 1

Peter Hyland. Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011. 170 pp. $99.95. ISBN: 978–0–7546–4152–0.

Peter Hyland. Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011. 170 pp. $99.95. ISBN: 978–0–7546–4152–0. - Volume 65 Issue 2

The Politics of a Theatrical Event: The 1509 Performance of Ariosto's I suppositi

The Politics of a Theatrical Event:The 1509 Performance of Ariosto's I suppositi Sergio Costola Ludovico Ariosto is traditionally considered the founder of new vernacular comedy, but this title has in some ways been detrimental to a full understanding of Ariosto's plays.1 In general, sixteenth-century Italian comedy has enjoyed few critical accolades from the seventeenth century down to our own, and is often faulted for being "formulaic, immoral, socially pointless, stereotypical, and repetitive."2 Although Ariosto's comedies are rich in interpretative possibilities, studies generally have not taken into account the plays' proper context, which links Ariosto's work to a theatrical practice rather than only to literary genres and traditions.3 These plays were not primarily conceived of as literature, and their principal destination was not the printed text. In fact, Ariosto's La cassaria and I suppositi were published in Florence, without the author's approval, only after they had been performed.4 Since the nature of these plays was not strictly literary, they require consideration as elements of a more complex and composite event. Graham Holderness has claimed that drama has too often been treated—in literary and cultural analysis—as written text; he argues for the need to reconfigure critical analysis with a different conception of Renaissance drama, as theater: "as dramatic materials that were devised specifically for performance . . . as 'texts' that have a performance history often separable from their history as written texts," and "as cultural products that are designed for mobilization in theatrical rather than literary-critical ways."5 If this is so, how can one do justice to texts that were designed for mobilization in theatrical ways? How is it possible that texts or events that were relevant for their coeval audiences have become "socially pointless" when historians understand them as a series of writings? To put it another way, how can one recover those synchronic factors that once made these texts so relevant?6 As Thomas Postlewait [End Page 195] has recently pointed out, theater studies today too often fail to give adequate consideration to the ways in which political factors, values, and forces are at work in the theater.7 In the study of theater and drama, he argues, the idea of the political has been too simply defined and dealt with in two ways: We can investigate the political topics, themes, issues, viewpoints, and agendas that get expressed in plays, productions, theatre groups, and artistic movements. Or, by shifting the focus, we can describe the political conditions within the historical matrix that shape dramatic literature, the theatrical arts, performance events, and cultural practices . . . In the first case, we usually locate the politics in the dramatic text . . . or the theatrical event . . . In the second case, we situate the politics within the shaping environment or culture which the work or event supposedly reflects, embodies, expresses, realizes, fulfills, resists, or subverts.8 Both cases set up a familiar polarity between text (or event) versus context: one defines the relationship as an opposition, and the other implies some kind of correspondence through mimesis or representation. Thus, an artist of the Renaissance such as Ariosto, usually operating in and writing for a court, is seen either as a "royal apologist" or a "crypto-subversive" critic.9 So, again, how can one do justice to these plays critically? How can one move beyond the basic polarity between event and context? In order to illustrate the ways in which courtly theatrical performances are related to structures of power and resistance, it will be useful to explore them by taking into consideration a specific event. The event I consider here is the performance of Ludovico Ariosto's I -suppositi that took place in the Ducal Palace of the Este court during the 1509 carnival celebrations. Following Thomas Postlewait's suggestion that "the idea of location [of politics] needs to be multiple,"10 I will investigate four possible critical perspectives for this theatrical event. First, I will investigate the frame. The word theater, during the early modern period, designated two simultaneous and distinct actions, seeing and being seen; thus, any critical understanding of the "visions" of this notion of theater must first articulate the structure...