Theatrical Language Research Articles

American Lyric, American Surveillance, and Claudia Rankine’sCitizen

AbstractThis essay contends that Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) invites an overdue conversation between recent scholarship in lyric theory and writing on racial surveillance, including material on bias in artificial intelligence and disciplinary policing strategies. I argue that Citizen manipulates received structures of the lyric as both a racial and a carceral apparatus and compares those structures to contemporary forms of racial surveillance. Through the revelation of similarity in lyric and surveillance structures, Citizen illustrates a method of reading that exploits lyric history and form to suggest a reorientation of surveillance and a way of coping with its effects. I argue that this new American lyric is invested in participating in public life.

Towards a Universal Language of Theatre

AbstractThe ways of approaching, treating and interpreting the theatre underwent major changes in the second half of the twentieth century. As Peter Brook’s research contributes decisively to changing the perspective of understanding the nature and the meanings of theatre, the present paper aims to highlight and briefly analyze the most relevant stages of his research. His studies focused on identifying auniversal language of theatrereveal key concepts and notions such asthe empty space, the visible and the invisible, the holy and the rough in the immediate, the diversity, the homogeneous group, the storyteller with many headsin which still nowadays theatre scholars and practitioners are interested. At the same time, certain results of his research are exploited in his performances in which the emphasis is placed on the scenic presence of the actor, and which denote both a continuous experimentation of scenic forms and a personal way of speaking abouttruthin the theatre.

THE NEUTRALITY or the silence before the action

Abstract The actor’s imagination is formed and translated into images. The actor shows and embodies the dramatic character on stage with his body, voice and gestures. The actor’s body goes through a semiotic transformation during the show, it becomes the main vehicle of expression, the main channel of transmiting information, an extremely important function in theatrical artistic creation. The actor’s voice is in accordance to his body and psyche, and through its expressive qualities it becomes an essential component of theatrical language and stage communication. Our every day body is also a permanent transmitter of coded messages, voluntary or involuntary, of packets of information about the subject’s previous experiences, memories, sensations, perceptions, knowledge, attitudes, conceptions, relationships, social constraints etc. The human voice also becomes a sign for the social relationships, for the personal identity, the mood or the motivation of the speaker. Due to the state of neutrality, the actor will discover how an image, real or fictional, can transform his psychophysics, he will discover the psychophysical existence of each character with its external and internal world. The actor must put aside his self-image, learn to allow the presence of the mask / role take control of him, to breathe, to speak and to live with his own voice, face, body and mind. When the face is covered and there is silence, the actor has to communicate through his body and movements, when the movement is simple and economical, the mask /the role begins to live.

Remembering Michael Hoey's Work

Prof. Michael Hoey was one of Britain’s leading academic linguists and language theorists who made transformative contributions in the areas of text and discourse analysis, and in corpus-based lexicology and dictionary-building. Hoey’s body of academic work spanned five decades, during which linguistic theory underwent a sea-change. Hoey was one of scholars not only creating the change but also making it comprehensible to a worldwide audience. Hoey’s early work, in days when dealing with discourse above the level of the sentence was still a novelty, presents a fascinating picture of how relations among sections of texts can be categorised into a limited set of patterns, including Sequence (e.g. Time, Consequence) and Matching (e.g. Contrast, Exemplification) relations. Hoey viewed all discourse, including writing, as a dialogue of sorts, and his work on cohesion, which aims to aid receiver comprehension, shows how the majority of the physical signals of the semantic relations connecting the different parts of a text are lexical items of some sort, and reversed tradition notions of the frequency and significance of lexical cohesion in relation to grammatical. His later work on lexical priming demonstrated in meticulous detail how extremely complex the associative behaviour of all lexical items is. It presents a new theory of language, of how we internalise knowledge of this associative behaviour by exposure to language, reproduce it in our own speech and thus continue the cycle of lexical priming of others in our various language communities.

Tension. Expressionist Artistic Style in Stage Design and Original Artworks of the First Half of the 20th Century

Despite turning professional in the first decade of the 20th century,the material and practical capabilities of Estonian theatres initiallyremained modest. This hindered the development of stage design– a field dependent on the creative ideas of artists as well as ontechnical resources. The stage designs that used stock scenery, werestylistically uneven and often not suitable for a play’s material,received criticism from viewers-critics who were familiar with themodern developments in European and Russian theatre, especiallyfrom the members of the group Young Estonia.While Estonian artists were already familiar with the avantgardetrends in the European, and specifically German culturallife prior to WWI, in Estonian theatres expressionism appearedin the 1920s, both in terms of ideas, ideals and stylistic methods.Larger theatres were able to refresh their theatrical language withthe expressionist, stylised acting methods and new visual andscenographical solutions. The stage designer for Estonia Theatre’sinnovative productions was Peet Aren, who had already establishedhimself as an expressionist artist by the 1920s. On the stage, he alsorealised his unique artistic style: by luxated perspectives, deformedshapes, excessive colourfulness and playfulness.The ideological plane of expressionism was central in MorningTheatre (Hommikteater), active in Tallinn in 1921–1924. MorningTheatre’s troupe of amateurs under the direction of the visionaryAugust Bachmann brought out three plays which were expressionistin their message and style. Although in theatre history the stagedesigns of Morning Theatre have been associated with Peet Aren,the study of original sketches in the archive of the Estonian Theatreand Music Museum confirms that the author of Morning Theatre’sstage designs was artist Aleksander Möldroo, a representative ofthe more powerful and robust style of expressionism. With MorningTheatre’s laconic, stylised scenography, Estonian stage design madean important developmental leap from commonplace stage designtowards a theatrically conditional and artistic stage décor.

EFEITOS PSICOTERAPÊUTICOS EM UM PARTICIPANTE DE UM ATO SOCIONÔMICO

This article aims to highlight the psychotherapeutic effects of public socionomic acts. A public psychodrama experience took place at the São Paulo Cultural Center in 2018. One of the participants in this act, which brought the protagonist theme in an intense way, was later individually attended to during four psychotherapeutic sessions. During individual consultations, it was possible to elaborate what was experienced in public psychodrama, reaffirming the effectiveness of the work. In the socionomic act in question, we used theatrical language, a fundamental part of the device created by the Gota D’Água group, as a guide for the work. Initially seen as a socio-educational intervention device, I defend, in this article, its psychotherapeutic potential given by the dramatic action.

Theatrical Pedagogy and Language Acquisition: A Methodological Analysis

The present study, conducted in a secondary school in Perugia (Italy), aimed to verify the benefits of the theatrical teaching methodology on the acquisition of a foreign language, in this case Spanish. The project, funded with the Three-year Plan of the Arts, took place for 20 hours over a school term, involving 23 students in the theatrical teaching group and 30 learners in the control group. The paper describes thoroughly the original experimental protocol in all its different phases, in order to encode it and make it replicable. It also provides the results obtained, measured quantitatively and statistically through the administration of a language pre-test, at the beginning of the project, and a final post-test.

A Cena Lusófona e a Promoção de Interculturalidade

This article intends to explore the role of the Portuguese association Cena Lusofona in the promotion of Lusophony and of interculturality among the peoples and the theatre agents of the Portuguese-speaking countries for more than twenty years. In this way, the article argues about the way training in theatre promotes the theatrical exchange, culminating in the production of theatre plays or of theatre festivals that, intheir hand, are a new theatrical language and originate a neoculture. As the major exponent of the intercultural experience and of exchange of knowledges and cultures, PStage is presented, whose last production, As Oracoes de Mansata by Abdulai Sila, hasthe characteristics that enable its classification as Lusophone theatre.

‘He did not go back to the army’: war, patriotism and desertion in Pavel Pryazhko’s The Soldier

ABSTRACT Over the past twenty years, a collection of theatre makers in Russia have staged suppressed and marginalised voices to engage with the political and social realities of contemporary Russia. The work of these innovative theatre practitioners has been collated under the idiom of New Drama (Novaya Drama). Previous studies of New Drama have placed an emphasis on the role of the text and the playwright’s dynamic use of contemporary language. While acknowledging that these are important features of the New Drama repertoire, this article provides an alternative approach by examining the work of Pavel Pryazhko. This article explores Pryazhko’s The Soldier (Soldat, 2011), in the context of the Second Chechen War and Vladimir Putin’s revivification of the military in the public sphere. Through a detailed study of The Soldier in performance, this article contends that the production’s content and form is vital in generating an oppositional discourse about the role of the military in contemporary Russian society. Pryazhko’s eschewal of traditional notions of theatrical language and dialogic interaction in The Soldier disrupts the audience’s expectations of what a theatre performance is, and subsequently facilitates a wider dialogue about the Kremlin’s privileging of the military in Russia.

Where Did Ibsen Come From? The Contribution of the Foreign Language Tours to the Emergence of Henrik Ibsen on the Romanian Stage

This article addresses the contribution of the foreign language theatre companies’ performances to Ibsen’s emergence in Romania until the middle of the twentieth century. The Romanian map of Ibsen ...

Genre Experiments: Thylias Moss’sSlave Mothand the Poetic Neo-Slave Narrative

AbstractAs histories of experimentation on the enslaved receive scholarly attention, so too are neo-slave narratives representing and commenting on this aspect of enslavement, in both their content and their form. This article examines Thylias Moss’s genre-troubling Slave Moth: A Narrative in Verse (2004), a neo-slave text that depicts an enslaved woman named Varl treated as an object of psychological experimentation. Varl develops a strong subjectivity through becoming a subject performing experiments: aesthetic experiments in how she chooses to represent her narrative in stitched cloths. The subtly experimental poetic devices through which Moss crafts this representation highlight that this protagonist possesses an alternate, generative epistemology that differs meaningfully from her master’s scientific worldview and thereby enables fugitive, temporary agency and freedom. By analyzing Slave Moth, I argue that the ethically problematic epistemology that generated experiments on the enslaved has certainly not dissipated and that it indirectly undergirds lyric theory’s failure to engage form in texts by nonwhite poets. Through contrasting close attention to formal devices by which Moss undermines teleological narrative, this essay postulates that “lyric time” enables fleeting, yet nevertheless generative, subversions of the formal expectations readers impose on texts representing enslavement. Reading Slave Moth through such a lens suggests potential middle-ground formal alternatives to wholly rejecting either narrative or lyric as genres and to thereby asymptotically approaching adequate representation of enslavement.

“Our eyes are sentinels unto our judgments”: Embodied Perception in The Changeling

This essay argues that Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling (1622) draws on debates about sense perception in the period to interrogate the effects of dramatic representation. After a brief overview of early modern perceptual theory, this essay demonstrates that the play's villain, De Flores, manipulates other characters’ perception through language. In fact, De Flores uses theatrical language to manipulate how other characters perceive their environment, indicating the theater's ability to manipulate audiences. By affecting how characters perceive, De Flores affects other characters’ ability to process and react to their environment, which impedes their judgment. The essay argues that much of The Changeling's dramatic action unfolds through a conflict between two models of perception—presentational and representational—that undergird much of the play's dramatic conflict. In the play, pervasive anxiety about judgment, particularly how perception affects judgment, is structured around the distinction between these two models of perception. Considering the play alongside representational and presentational models indicates how early modern dramatists engage with intellectual theories to consider how representation works and how spaces are experienced. In this way, the theater refracts and dramatizes theories about perception.

Comparative video annotation and visual literacy: performance analysis of Rina Yerushalmi’s theatre language

ABSTRACT The growing availability of video recordings of theatre performances, a phenomenon that has increased during Covid19 as theatres worldwide share videos online, affects the field of theatre and performance studies. Video recordings of theatre performances are archival documents and mediated ‘performance texts’ that enable new kinds of performance analysis and studying bodily practices. This paper addresses annotative methodologies as part of the research project, ‘The Art of Adaptation: The Theatre of Rina Yerushalmi and the Itim Ensemble.’ The project studies the video archive of the ensemble, which includes recordings of full productions and rehearsal processes. We discuss three kinds of digital comparative annotative methodologies to show how annotation can be used as a research tool for performance analysis: (1) Accumulative annotation: analysis of multi-layered theatrical sequences, revealing theatrical moments in their multiplicity. (2) Annotation of different scenes in a corpus of works: juxtaposing scenes from different productions enables the articulation of repetitive performative patterns, embodied practices, and visual images that construct a theatre language. (3) Annotation of the same scene at different phases: juxtaposing video recordings of the same scene at different moments of its development reveals nuanced sets of information about directorial choices, acting, movement, duration, and more.

A Forum on Stevens and Lyric Theory Introduction

A Forum on Stevens and Lyric Theory Introduction Henry Weinfield “A MORE SEVERE, // More harassing master would extemporize / Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory / Of poetry is the theory of life,” wrote Wallace Stevens in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (CPP 415). Stevens is himself, of course, that more severe, more harassing master. There are other great twentieth-century poets who are also theorists of poetry, but what makes Stevens so distinctive is that his theory of poetry is not only contained and embodied in his poetry but articulated in it as well. T. S. Eliot (whom Stevens viewed as his main antagonist) was a great poet and a great theorist, but the two activities were separate for him, the one occurring in verse and the other in prose. William Carlos Williams (for whom Stevens had cordial feelings, but who is really his poetic antitype) made “No ideas but in things” his rallying cry (6–17), and one could even say that for him, by contrast, the theory of life is (or should be) the theory of poetry. Stevens, however, insisted that “It Must Be Abstract” (CPP 329). His imperative in both his poetry and his theory of poetry was to push the art of poetry as far as it could go, as far as he could make it go. Language—in its relation to both the heard and the seen—was his material; in this regard he was utterly concrete. He strove to arrive at “the still finer, more implacable chords” and to “make the visible a little hard // To see” (CPP 90, 275). For better or for worse, the theory of poetry was the theory of life for Stevens because what he says of his solitary singer in “The Idea of Order at Key West” was true for him as well: “there never was a world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made” (CPP 106). In recent years, after a hiatus in which the New Historicism held sway, there has been a good deal of renewed discussion of lyric theory, as manifested, for example, by the publication (only a year apart) of two anthologies and a work of theory: The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations, edited by Marion Thain (2013); The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, edited by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (2014), which takes a critical stance against viewing the lyric as a stable genre; and Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (2015), which is at once a work of theory in its own right and an attempt to delineate both the genre of lyric poetry and the various [End Page 195] controversies pertaining to and surrounding it.1 However we understand the category of lyric poetry, even if we take the view that it is meaningless as a category and stands in the way of understanding, it is clear that Stevens, unlike other major twentieth-century poets—unlike Pound and Eliot, for instance—is a poet for whom the theory of poetry is essentially the theory of lyric poetry. For that reason, viewing Stevens in relation to the lyric can serve both to anchor the theoretical discussion and to shed light on Stevens’s work itself. That, in any event, was the idea out of which this forum emerged. It began life as a roundtable at the 2018 MLA Convention in Chicago. The idea for the roundtable came not from me but from one of the Associate Editors of this journal, Natalie Gerber, who, because I had recently published a review essay on Culler’s book (see Weinfield, “A/The”), suggested that I organize the session and in fact helped me to do so. Let me take this opportunity to express my gratitude to her as well as to the participants. The essays gathered here, as well as deepening our understanding of Stevens’s poetry, interact with lyric theory in a variety of ways. Two of the contributors, David Ben-Merre and Zachary Tavlin, focus on what Stevens called, in the poem of that title, “The Creations of Sound.” Ben-Merre’s essay, “Xs and Os: Chiasmus, Apostrophe, and the Lyric Subject in Stevens,” is interested in the...

Teatralny ekwiwalent literackiej autonarracji – przypadek Kronosu Krzysztofa Garbaczewskiego

The main assumption of the article is the interpretation of Kronos based on Witold Gombrowicz’s private journal, directed by Krzysztof Garbaczewski in Teatr Polski in Wrocław (2013). The author also seeks forms of transmitting and receiving relations in Gombrowicz’s diarism, (both in his Dziennik and Kronos) which are significant for performing arts and used in Garbaczewski’s staging. The director treated the structure of the writer’s intimate diary as a kind of creative method, attempting to translate the idea of self-narration into the language of theatre. The structure of Garbaczewski’s performance reflects the heterogeneous composition of Gombrowicz’s Kronos, despite treating its content only as a pretext. Garbaczewski’s staging can also be called an anti-spectacle, in which the vivid boundary between reality and mimicry, truth and confabulation, aesthetics and obscenum, a phenomenal and semiotic body is blurred.

The balance of language and speech in the Uzbek theater

The article deals with language and speech issues in Uzbek theater scenes. In the course of researching and listening to historical performances recorded on video and audio cassettes, we can see the dynamism and expressiveness of the word “art” in the images of historical figures created by great actors, a peculiar subtlety of the Uzbek language, the harmony of poetic and prosaic forms of speech and speech in a staged ensemble.

Battle in the mind fields by John A. Goldsmith and Bernard Laks

Reviewed by: Battle in the mind fields by John A. Goldsmith and Bernard Laks Randy Harris Battle in the mind fields. By John A. Goldsmith and Bernard Laks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. xix, 725. ISBN 9780226550800. $45 (Hb). Kenneth Burke, the great rhetorician, literary critic, sociologist, grammatologist, and one of the very few major theorists of language in the period they cover who doesn't appear in this brilliant new intellectual chronicle by John Goldsmith and Bernard Laks, has an evocative parable of human existence. He calls life an 'unending conversation' at the historical moment we are born. It's like a cocktail party, he says, for which we are all, each and every one of us, unavoidably late: When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending on the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (Burke 1941:110–11) G&L give us an allegorical party, too, vibrant concentrations of conversational gravity swirling through the room, merging with, spinning away from, or sweeping past one another. Conversations rupture. Conversations continue. New voices come. Old voices go. But some of the old voices also endure, leaving their concepts and perspectives behind, some in little slivers of terminology, some in grand ideational skeins fanning out across the room, carried aloft by the new voices. Some old voices, too, have a special trick. They leave robots behind to repeat their utterances verbatim, robots called books. In G&L's version, the party happens on a hotel patio. They man the concierge desk, an invaluable service. We are all coming late, remember, and the conversations are going full throttle when we get there. G&L meet us with a vast schematic chart of the past conversations. No one can retrace all that has gone on before we arrived, but guides like these two can plot out some of the bigger and more consequential conversations in enough detail to give us a much better sense of where we have been, and therefore a much better idea of what we are talking about when we talk about linguistics. You can see a tiny corner of their schematic in Figure 1. We are in that allegorical party now, you know. This journal is one of the more important conversational hubs—'near the beer', as G&L's schematic tells us (576). We have mingled our way through the swirl of theoretical terms and along the philosophical currents that make up linguistics to get here. Let me tell you a bit more about this book before you move along. We should acknowledge, first, that G&L's patio is a decidedly Euro-American patio. There are no samosas or suya at the snack table, no saki at the bar. G&L adopt a thoroughly conventional and unchallenged notion of linguistics, as the scientific, item-and-arrangement study of the natural human products known as languages. This view sees linguistics as growing directly out of nineteenth-century European philology, in the special hands of a few giants. At this point you might be inclined—or if not you, some other gentle reader—to ease away and avoid this book as one more tired entry in the Monumental White Men History of Ideas genre. That would be a mistake. I certainly would not claim that the Euro-American trajectory of linguistics is flawlessly correct, nor that it cannot be enriched and corrected by many of the...

From Jerusalem to Athens by Nurit Yaari

Reviewed by: From Jerusalem to Athens by Nurit Yaari Shiraz Biggie FROM JERUSALEM TO ATHENS. By Nurit Yaari. Oxford University Press. 2018. 480 pp. Hardcover and ebook, $140.00. Discussions of Israeli theatre, and Jewish theatre in general, often begin with the Talmudic prohibition against the theatre sparked by the encounter and rejection of Hellenism. Nurit Yaari’s book, From Jerusalem to Athens, is no exception, but builds from the idea that the Jewish rabbinical tradition (Jerusalem) and the classical tradition (Athens) are critical and often intertwined influences on Israel’s modern theatre. Yaari argues the contemporary encounter with classical Greek theatre has influenced Israeli artists to address questions of identity and “engage in an intellectual, artistic, and political dialogue with both Jewish culture (the particular) and classical Greek drama (the universal)” (p. 7). From the very beginning, Yaari establishes the role of Greek theatre as a “universal” to be reckoned with through a specific production. In her introduction, she situates the origins of Hebrew theatre with efforts dating back to the Italian Renaissance and Enlightenment periods that combined classical Greek drama elements with the Hebrew language. After establishing this precedent, the book focuses on productions staged either just before or within the modern State of Israel. Yaari’s work is expansive, looking at three types of productions: first, those directly following and using the Greek texts in translation; second, those created by theatrical artists across other traditions that are in dialogue with Greek drama (Anouilh, etc.); and, finally and critically, those native Israeli-written dramas inspired by Greek texts. The book is most exciting and illuminating in discussing the latter, offering significant new insights and approaches to the works in question. The book’s chapter organization is based on particular points of inquiry, such as chapters that explore a theatrical company, a specific Greek or Israeli playwright, conflict, or directorial approaches. Her book traces and frames the theatre of Israel in relation to “Athens” and how this interchange allowed for rich experimentation for Israeli theatre makers. Underlying her book is the broad question of theatre history—why this particular play here and now? Thus, many of the individual chapters are directly related to wars and conflicts in which Israel has played a part and seek to make arguments beyond not only the theatre itself, but on a changing Israeli society. Her book’s strength and weakness lie in this comprehensive mapping of “Athens” onto the “Jerusalem” of Israeli theatre. Yaari looks at 70 years of Israeli theatre (1945–2015), covering 22 Greek plays and touching on approximately 86 productions. Periodically, this [End Page 604] expansiveness obscures an overall through-line to the manuscript in favor of specific chapter arguments. The book occasionally places different productions in conjunction with contemporary Israeli events; the author does not always provide enough context on these events for the reader who is less familiar with Israeli society. As a contribution to the study of Israeli theatre, using the argument that the encounter between “Athens” and “Jerusalem” has been fruitful, the book offers a new way of viewing Israeli drama and its significant figures and adds to the growing English-language scholarship that aims to take Israeli theatre beyond its diasporic origins. One of Yaari’s methodological strengths, which allows her to intertwine a production’s reception with its cultural context, focuses on staging rather than only the play texts. She includes not only the play’s translation but a comprehensive discussion of all the elements of theatrical language, using production photos, designs, interviews, and reviews to piece together a picture of the theatrical event. She also draws on her own vast experience with and reception of many of the productions included. This multifaceted approach helps establish for the readera strong impression oftheactualproductions that are importantto her overall analysis. This approach also helps clarify the line between critical and audience response that marks not only the individual productions, but also the theatre culture of Israel more generally. The first two chapters approach two of Israel’s most well-known theatres, Habima (Israel’s National Theatre) and the Cameri (Tel Aviv’s municipal theatre), looking at their first attempts at classical drama in the mid-1940s...

Some Current Publications

Some Current Publications Garth Libhart ________ ANNE FINCH, COUNTESS OF WINCHILSEA Chan, Chris. “Anne Finch’s ‘Contemn’d Retreat’ and the Politics of Lyric.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 53, no. 3, Spring 2020, 463–80 pp. Chan analyzes Finch’s poem “Upon the Hurricane” (1713) in order to question two prevailing models for understanding the development of English lyric poetry: the romantic model, which emphasizes a turn from public to private and a retreat into nature that began in the eighteenth century, and what Chan calls the “transhistorical” approach, which understands lyric poetry as a cohesive form across time that is grounded in the expression of interiority. The critical reception of Finch’s poetry, Chan suggests, has exemplified the romantic model, stressing its introspective focus and disentanglement from public and political life. Such an approach, according to Chan, ignores the material conditions surrounding Finch’s poetic production, particularly the poet’s forced exile. After discussing how William Wordsworth’s celebration of Finch’s originality set the stage for later critics to see her work as removed from the political concerns of her day, Chan demonstrates how Finch’s “Upon the Hurricane” complicates this view: for example, the poem uses politically charged images like the oak tree to symbolize Stuart strength against an onslaught of political challenges, such as the Popish Plot and the 1688 Revolution. What is more, the poem avoids using the first-person pronoun, which Chan sees as characteristic of Finch’s “impersonal lyricism,” a strategy she deploys as a Stuart sympathizer writing in tumultuous times (473). At the same time, the poem references its speaker’s “contemn’d retreat,” signaling Finch’s bitterness over her exile and reasserting her authorial presence. Chan concludes that Finch’s poem requires a rethinking of lyric theory, for it shows that even poems with speakers who present themselves as exiles nevertheless maintain the ability to engage with the sociopolitical circumstances of their day. Kairoff, Claudia and Keith, Jennifer, editors. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea: Later Collections, Print and Manuscript, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. This volume of Anne Finch’s writing, edited by Claudia Kairoff and Jennifer Keith, follows the 2019 publication of Volume 1. Together, the two volumes form the first complete critical edition of Finch’s works, the culmination of a 17-year undertaking that brings together Finch’s writing in one set. Whereas Volume 1 concentrates on Finch’s early manuscript texts, such as Poems on Several Subjects Written by Ardelia (pub. 1713), Volume II covers later works from both print and manuscript, including the Wellesley Manuscript, additional poems, and correspondence. The volume also contains introductions to Finch’s life and work by Kairoff and Keith, as well as several essays that provide an account of Finch’s textual life and afterlife: for instance, R. Carter Hailey offers an analysis of textual variants in Finch’s authorized publication, and Rachel Bowman contributes an account of the reception and transmission of Finch’s work from the eighteenth to early twentieth century. See also ARTS & VISUAL CULTURE (Erwin) ANNE KILLIGREW See ARTS & VISUAL CULTURE (Erwin) MARY BEATRICE OF MODENA See ARTS & VISUAL CULTURE (Erwin) APHRA BEHN Bowditch, Claire and Elaine Hobby. “Aphra Behn at Her 350th Anniversary.” Women’s Writing, vol. 27, no. 3, 2020, pp. 265–74. Bowditch and Hobby’s essay is the introduction to a special number of Women’s Writing marking the 350th anniversary of the staging of Behn’s first play, The Forc’d Marriage (1670, published 1671). In this essay, Bowditch and Hobby reassess the circumstances surrounding the play’s theatrical run(s) by analyzing the questionable aspects of John Downes’ account. Downes, the prompter of the Duke’s Company, writes in his memoirs that the poet Thomas Otway acted as the King in the play during its initial six-day run. However, Bowditch and Hobby note that Otway still would have been a student at Oxford in 1670, making it unlikely that he acted the part at a later date than Downes claims. The essay goes on to consider additional developments in theater history and Behn studies to conclude that, while scholars can...

Grotesque in the direction of E. Vakhtangov, A. Granovsky, Les Kurbas, Vs. Meyerhold

The purpose of the article is to highlight the formative principles of the grotesque in the practice of innovative directors E. Vakhtangov, A. Granovsky, Les Kurbas, Vs. Meyerhold. The methodology of the study is based on analytical, historical, comparative, and comparative typological methods. These methods were useful in understanding the specifics of stage grotesque, the analysis of socio-political processes of the first third of the twentieth century, and to identify the key trends in the directing and acting of the 1920-1930s. The scientific novelty is determined by the fact that the grotesque is the basic tool of figurative theatrical language, and its fundamental principles of contrast and struggle of opposites allow us to find new metaphorical meanings in the stage work in accordance with the demands of time. As a result, the authors of the article note that the grotesque stylistics in the 1920s-1930s, which is inherent in the work of the leading directors of the USSR and Europe, caused a certain tendency to search for the actual grotesque “key”, such as the example with artists N. Altman and G. Gross, influenced the formation of many actors' performing style. Conclusions. In the creative work of directors E. Vakhtangov, A. Granovsky, Les Kurbas, Vs. Meyerhold's grotesque stylistics emphasized the author's vision of both the post-revolutionary reality and the overall picture of the world. In addition, the grotesque as a principle of constructing stage imagery was an indicator of their aesthetic, artistic, and formative pursuits. With the help of stage grotesque it was possible to bring actual social problems to the point of absurdity, that is, to either dilute the atmosphere around this or that phenomenon or vice versa – to exacerbate it to the limit. In this way, the theater was able to diagnose the “diseases” of society and perform prognostic functions.