Tragic Performance Research Articles

“Come, Dark-eyed Sleep”: Michael Field and the Performance of the Lyric as a Radical Fantasy

This article seeks to illustrate how the Michael Fields articulate their Sapphic poetry in Long Ago (1889) not only in keeping with their own Shakespearean aspirations and with Robert Browning’s hybrid formula of dramatic lyrics, but also in connection with Jonathan Culler’s theory of the lyric as a performative genre. Much recent scholarship has broken ground in the rediscovery and reappraisal of the Fields’ literary stature, yet the general critical approach has been divisive in addressing their poetry and their verse dramas separately. Some critics have taken heed of how their lyrics in general exhibit an intrinsic dramatic temper, yet no systematic inquiry has discussed how this lyrical dramaticity is manifest in any particular instance. Thus, this article singles out Long Ago’s second poem for its powerful performative energy, offering a close reading of each line, and demonstrating that it amounts to a hybrid dramatic lyric, as well as a tragic and transgressive performance in which a new Sappho takes centre stage as a Dionysian apologist of radical erotic fantasies.

David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity by Leslie Ritchie

Reviewed by: David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity by Leslie Ritchie Emrys D. Jones Leslie Ritchie, David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 312; 11 b/w illus. and 3 tables. $99.99 cloth. The magnitude of David Garrick's fame is firmly established, trumpeted as it was from an early stage of the actor-manager's career and now accepted as something of a self-evident fact by historians of celebrity culture. It can be tempting, given the wide array of texts and artifacts attesting to Garrick's renown, to explain it either as the result of incredible natural ability, or—if one acknowledges his business acumen at all—as a fluke convergence of public taste and theatrical strategy. With singular focus and discussion of newly unearthed material, Leslie Ritchie's David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity argues that we should attend still more closely to Garrick's cultivation and protection of his own "brand." While not rejecting genuine talent as a possible factor in his reputation, she demonstrates that Garrick's manipulation of the wider media landscape and his management of negative publicity were just as crucial for his celebrity, and were in fact the elements distinguishing his peculiarly modern public profile from anything that had come before. Celebrity is, according to this analysis, not merely a more artificial or more immediate kind of fame, but "an iterative form of public recognition that is the product of repeated media exposures across multiple media platforms" (10). Ritchie's introduction makes this argument and contextualizes it within the fields of celebrity studies and Garrick studies, particularly demonstrating how even seminal works such as George Winchester Stone, Jr. and George M. Kahrl's David Garrick: A Critical Biography (1979) have underplayed the actor's media influence even as they overestimated the press's capacity for—or aspiration to—impartial judgement. These points are convincingly corroborated in the five chapters and coda that follow. Chapter One provides an overview of the media landscape, and more specifically the function and organization of newspapers, during Garrick's career, as well as reflecting on his own habits of informed newspaper reading. Chapter Two progresses to a detailed reconstruction of Garrick's ownership of newspaper shares, a situation which Ritchie describes using the modern business terminology of "vertical integration" (55). Such a framework (in which a business owns and controls its own supply chain) perhaps too readily casts the newspapers as subordinate to the demands of Garrick's theatrical projects, but it helps to explain the sheer extent of his media reach, the sense that his "name, writing and reputation were inescapable elements of eighteenth-century culture, even if one never attended the theatre" (60). Chapter Three elaborates on this by exploring the different avenues for theatrical advertisement available in Garrick's time, from the paid-for paragraphs that were subject to taxation to less easily identifiable (hence non-taxable) promotional verse and "puffery." From there, the chapter anatomizes some of the most notable facets of "Brand Garrick" consolidated through such channels: for instance, the popular fascination with his captivating eyes and his celebrated ability to excel in both tragic and comedic roles. As well as promoting these various aspects of his reputation, and above all capitalizing on variety itself as the basis of his popular appeal, Garrick was also skilled in his handling of negative publicity. Chapter Four of Ritchie's book finds the actor and his defenders both countering and pre-empting attacks upon him. It becomes clear that apparent physical deficiencies—his short stature and absences from the stage due to illness—were regularly manipulated to Garrick's benefit. In [End Page 743] works such as Garrick's own anonymously-published Essay on Acting (1744) and Tobias Smollett's "The Character of Mr. Garrick" (1742), shortness was reframed as "perfection of proportion" (118). Published apologies for bouts of sickness or exhaustion likewise ended up contributing to his brand rather than detracting from it, creating what Ritchie describes as a "culture of care" around him and assisting in the depiction of tragic performance as physically and emotionally demanding work (128). The Garrick presented in this chapter...

Catastrophic Futures: Tragic Children in Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman

Abstract Through an analysis of Martin McDonagh’s play The Pillowman, this article explores the roles children play as avatars of futurity and tragic personages whose actions bid us to reflect on repetitive patterns of suffering. To this end, I suggest that we might productively engage with The Pillowman through the dramaturgical structures of tragedy, particularly insofar as tragedy revolves around catastrophic events in the family. While most previous scholarship on The Pillowman has focused on the protagonist, Katurian, and his social or moral obligations as an author, my work places the children of Katurian’s stories at the center of the play’s philosophical cruxes. Not yet fully socialized into societal paradigms that frame the replication of present circumstances, ideologies, and inequities as “progress,” the children of this play disrupt dominant tragic structures, offer catastrophic responses to abuse, and emphasize the absurdity of certain cultural narratives of justice and salvation. My readings are widely informed by the fields of tragic theory, childhood studies, critical posthumanism, and performance studies.

The Literary Relation to the Other in the Greek Tragic Text

ABSTRACT Following Charles Segal, I argue in this essay that there is an essential textual relation to the Other at the heart of Greek tragic drama. Instead of locating the origin of tragic performance in the being of the poet and poetic truth (á la Nietzsche or Heidegger), I argue that the use of scripts in Greek tragedy indicates an irreducible graphic element of dramatic performance, which I conceptualize in terms of Blanchot's conception of the Oeurve and the impossible relation of writer and reader. The Dionysian element of tragedy, I argue, has an irreducible graphic dimension in the use of scripts and masks. Following this theoretical and historical analysis, I offer several avenues for studying the textuality of Greek tragic drama and the ways that the Greek tragic text turns toward the essence of poetry itself.

The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater by Naomi A. Weiss

Reviewed by: The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater by Naomi A. Weiss Ava Shirazi The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater. By Naomi A. Weiss. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018; pp. 304. Song culture was integral to Greek tragic performance since its earliest conception, but sometime in the fifth to fourth centuries bce, there was a musical revolution of sorts both on and off the stage. This "New Music"—to use a terminus technicus coined by modern critics—was characterized by multifaceted experimentations with traditional musical styles (such as innovations on modulation, diction, and instrumentation) and was associated in particular with the dithyramb and kitharodic songs. Scholars generally regard Euripides as a key pioneer, among other poets and musicians, ushering in this "new" musical era. The Music of Tragedy, on the one hand, offers a "corrective" of the adjective "New," questioning whether innovation is as much a matter of "radical departure" (24), as it is a complex and creative engagement with culture and tradition. But the book is more than a rectification of terms and genealogies, unfolding a much broader conceptualization of what Greek mousikē (a term which encapsulates the triad of music, song, and dance) could and can do in a drama. In order to reveal what mousikē can do, Weiss first rejects what Aristotle says it does not do in the plays of Euripides: participate in the action (Poetics 1456a). Modern studies of Euripides and New Music have further strengthened Aristotle's designation of Euripidean choreia (choral song and dance) as "interludes" [End Page 523] (embolima [ibid.]), suggesting that the musical pieces are more a respite from the intensity of the action rather than an integral piece of the dramatic puzzle. Focusing on the intra-(versus extra)-dramatic (9) significance of the chorus, Weiss argues instead for an inextricable bond between mousikē and mythos (story/plot) in Euripidean tragedy. The connection between music and plot, moreover, is much more than a matter of integration: music, both performed and imagined, "intensifies, varies, extends, and at times even challenges the mythos" (235). The book reveals the link between music and mythos through its own narrative of metamusicality—a key term and method of analysis for Weiss that captures moments in the dramas where "references to song and dance engage with live performance" (8). Chapter 1 lays out an overview of the conventions of metamusicality in the choral performances of archaic lyric and the earlier tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Long before Euripides, Greek choruses drew attention to their own performances and performativity through a technique that Weiss identifies throughout the book as "imaginative suggestion." With the mention of animals, objects, or gestures (23), choruses frequently invited viewers to imagine external images and sounds so as to merge imagination with live performance. Here, Weiss introduces the dynamics of vision and visualization as well as the "multilayered sound pictures" (34) that were integral to Greek choral performance, and which Euripides evokes in his later tragedies. Overall, the chapter is a crucial contribution to the cultural history of choral performance, complicating the widely accepted trajectory of innovation by showing how Euripides' metamusicality (a self-referentiality often linked with New Music) is profoundly indebted to tradition. But Euripides is still doing something new, as Weiss reveals in case studies that comprise chapters 2–5, with each covering a play from the last fifteen years of the playwright's career: Electra, Trojan Women, Helen, and the posthumous Iphigenia in Aulis. What sets these plays apart is the intricacy of metamusicality within their choral songs. In other words, these four plays reveal a high level of self-awareness on the part of the chorus that they are, in fact, a chorus, one that is part of a much longer cultural tradition of both dramatic and nondramatic choruses. No summary can do justice to the meticulous and productive performance of close reading in these four chapters, which at the same time subtly engages with more contemporary performance theory (for example, Phelan, 1993; Roach, 1996; Batson, 2005; Foster, 2010). Throughout these chapters, the reader witnesses Euripides' intricate self-conscious engagement with mousikē that points to Weiss's claim that contrary...

Performance and Historicity in Racine's Mithridate: On the Dynamics of Temporal Order in the Seventeenth Century

This essay considers afresh the seventeenth-century ‘regime of historicity’ and thereby challenges a long critical tradition that has both identified in Racine's drama a systematically repetitive temporality and classified the so-called Grand Siècle as a century of stasis immobilised in a fantasy of eternity. The conflicting representations of time that subtend the dramaturgy of Racine's Mithridate enable a reflection on the historical nature of heroic models and political institutions. By closing with the spectacle of a bloody king dying amidst the admiration and tears of his relatives, Racine's play suggests that there is no better lieu de mémoire than a tragic performance. Dynastic transition becomes a ‘liminal’ turning point that combines the perpetuation of past practices with the incorporation of new affective qualities. Mithridate exemplifies the way in which theatre as a stage performing art complicates the theory of the king's two bodies, by temporalizing the frozen time of absolutist discourses. Within the overlapping contexts of the image-making of Louis XIV, the developing culture of galanterie, and the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, Mithridate promotes a new temporal paradigm in which the passage of time is not perceived as a deterioration but as an essential resource for the preservation and renewal of political and cultural values.

Ícaro vuela de nuevo: arte y ensayo en Claudio Rodríguez y Víctor Erice = Icarus flies again: art and essay in Claudio Rodríguez and Víctor Erice

“Ahí, dentro del templo / con el sol del membrillo, el de septiembre”. These lines connect one of the most famous poems by Claudio Rodriguez (“Incidente en los Jerónimos”) with one of the most celebrated films by Víctor Erice (El sol del membrillo). Under the influence of this treacherous sun, two aesthetic feats are represented. Although both the poem’s and the film’s characters fail to achieve their objectives, they demonstrate their courage in facing great challenges. As happens with Icarus rising, the poet-bird and the painter-filmmaker not only exhibit a tragic performance, but also rewrite an essay on the meaning of nature, the density of time and the function of art.

Tragedy and Temporality

For many commentators on tragic temporality, tragic time is the “now,” binding the characters—the actors of the catastrophe—in the anxiety and horror of a blinding present moment. As Northrop Frye observed in hisFools of Time, “The basis of the tragic vision is being in time, the sense of the one-directional quality of life, where everything happens once and for all, where every act brings unavoidable and fateful consequences, and where all experience vanishes, not simply into the past, but into nothingness, annihilation” (3). In performance, in particular, that presentness feels relentless: as Stanley Cavell writes, tragic performance “demands a continuous attention to what is happening at each here and now, as if everything of significance is happening at this moment, while each thing that happens turns a leaf of time” (93). This sense of the present mimics our everyday sense of how we live in this world: in David Kastan's words, “Tragic time is, then, the experiential time of human life—a time, that like life itself to which it is inextricably tied, is directional, irreversible, and finite” (80).

A Comedian on Tragedy: Colley Cibber’s Apology and The Rival Queans

While eighteenth-century actor and theatre manager Colley Cibber is most frequently discussed within the context of sentimental comedy, this article addresses the comedian’s writing for and about the tragic stage. The neoclassical establishment consistently argued for the propriety of tragedy; however, actor and manager Cibber in his 1740 autobiography makes a case for the ludic qualities of successful tragic performance which, he insists, produces pleasure not tied to moral improvement. Moreover, Cibber embraces, rather than bemoans, the destabilization of social hierarchies that attends confessed generic hybridity. In an analysis of the comic burlesque The Rival Queans, a parody of Nathaniel Lee’s earlier tragedy The Rival Queens, I show how Cibber’s tragic stage was less concerned with categories of masculinity and femininity than in the sheer fluidity of gender. Experimenting with gender and genre in light of the period’s changing notions of sexual difference, the comedian revalues mixed genres and gender confusion as a site of illicit pleasure, providing an affective yet ephemeral other against which tragedy’s formidable narratives about gender and nation took shape.

A SOPHOCLEAN SLIP: MISTAKEN IDENTITY AND TRAGIC ALLUSION ON THE EXETER PELIKE

Abstract This article examines the fourth‐century ‘Exeter pelike’ (ARV2 1516.80) by the Jena Painter, situating it within the wider debate over the relationship between vase‐painting and tragic text and performance. The front side depicts the meeting of Orestes and Electra at Agamemnon's tomb, and is commonly interpreted as relating closely to Aeschylus’Choephori. However, a widely‐missed inscription ‘Ism[ene]’ must be an error on the part of the painter for ‘Chrysothemis’, a confusion caused by knowledge of Sophocles. The inclusion of ‘Chrysothemis’ on the Exeter pelike alludes to Sophocles' Electra, but the painting is not a straightforward representation of any one play. Indeed, in tragedy Electra's recognition of Orestes becomes highly allusive, since both Sophocles and Euripides mediate their treatments of this moment through the corresponding scene in Aeschylus. In the same way, the Exeter pelike engages with numerous pictorial and textual traditions to create a complex and allusive re‐telling.

Nietzsche's Tragic Performance: The Still-Living Mother and the Dionysian in Ecce Homo

In Ecce Homo , Nietzsche identifies himself with Dionysus. Yet Nietzsche's notorious treatment of his mother in this text reveals a complex relationship to the Dionysian. While many have used the Dionysian to interpret Nietzsche's relation to the maternal, I show that his treatment of his mother illuminates his relation to the Dionysian. Building on an insight in Stanley Cavell's work on love in Shakespeare's King Lear , I show that Nietzsche's attempt to give birth to himself in Ecce Homo imitates his description of the tragic hero in The Birth of Tragedy , making Ecce Homo his tragic performance.

Aristotle and the Tragic Theater in the Fourth Century b.c .: A Response to Jennifer Wise

In a recent article in Arethusa , J. Wise argues that the theory of tragedy put forth by Aristotle in the Poetics was one heavily distorted by his own experience of contemporary tragic performance. In this response, I argue that, although the Poetics does provide evidence of fourth-century dramatic practice, Aristotle was far more aware of the arc of Athenian theater history than Wise’s article presupposes. I also suggest that the problem of the “missing” polis in Aristotle’s Poetics can be largely explained by the fact that by Aristotle’s own time, Athenian tragedy was the city’s most successful cultural export, a circumstance that opened the genre to analysis independent of the festal and political contexts that had given birth to it.

The Theatricality of Greek Tragedy: Playing Space and Chorus by Graham Ley

BOOK REV1EWS/COMPTES RENDUS 163 an erection becomes paradoxically associated with female concerns of the body. It would be interesting to consider Nussbaum's conclusions in the context of Aristophanic comedy in general, since only Acharnians and Lysistrata are discussed here. In Aeschylus' Suppliants, the Danaids strive to avoid the transition from maidenhood to marriage, and Sheila Murnaghan (183-198) compares their position with that of other female choruses inGreek literature and culture, which often stress that a single individual must become separated from the group through marriage. Murnaghan suggests that Hypermestra follows this pattern of separation, by moving from a role as a member of the chorus in the Suppliants, to that of protagonist in the final play of the trilogy. In addition Murnaghan cites Aristotle's claim that tragedy was created when the leaders of the dithyramb stepped out of the chorus, and suggests that Aeschylus' trilogy replicates this movement from the centrality of a chorus to that of an individual protagonist. Froma Zeitlin (199-226) offers an excellent double readingofLphigeneia in Tauris both interms of psychological realities and as a textwith its own theatrical and literary history, arguing that Orestes and lphigeneia are simultaneously haunted and damaged personalities, and literary creations whose "past" is as textually based in the theatre, especially the Oresteia, as it is in the narrative details of their family's history. She also makes some perceptive observations on thecultaetiologiesat theend of theplay. In a discussionofIA 1148-56, John Gibert (227-250) argues, likeMurnaghan, that myth explores in a concentrated form the stresses of the everyday lives of women: here we see Clytemnestra's experience?yielding to male guardians, having interchangeable husbands and children?as a more extreme version of what ordinary Greek women must undergo. Karen Bassi (251-270) uses theories of tragic performance and of visual representation to discuss two scenes inAeschylus' Agamemnon, and argues that we cannot be sure, from what we have in our scripts, what the ancient audience themselves saw, and that, to a surprising degree, the reader is expected to visualise action beyond what happens on stage. Simon Goldhill (271-290) takes a thirteen-letter supplement of theNew Posidippus 58 and, in a meticulous unravelling, shows that it is unlikely to be correct, because it depends on many unexamined suppositions about hellenistic society. Finally, Page duBois (291-306) discusses the history of classical scholarship in the USA, and specifically how Segal and others rejected a Germanic model for classical studies in the USA in favour of the French school of Vernant and others. While much of this essay is fascinating, it assumes .a rather rigid polarity between German and French traditions whereby allegiance to German scholarship is equated with being conservative, racist, and sexist, and any criticisms of tendencies in French scholarship are summarily dismissed (301). This essay sets up an either/or model when talking about the two traditions inAmerican Classicism, which seems a pity for a volume honouring someone who preeminently melded philology and theory. University of North Carolina, Asheville Sophie J.V. Mills The Theatricality of Greek Tragedy: Playing Space and Chorus. By Graham Ley. Chicago: The UniversityofChicago Press. 2007. Pp. xix,226, 5 halftones,14 line drawings. Graham Ley, professor of drama and theory at the University of Exeter, is best known to classicists for his useful small handbook, A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater (Chicago 1991). His newest book arouses high expectations. It is aimed, as the 164 PHOENIX dustcover states, at "anyone interested in literature, theater, or classical studies" and, after the "Preface," is divided very simply, as the title forecasts, into two big chapters of about 100 pages each, "The Playing Space" and "The Chorus," with a brief "Conclusion" (plus "References" and "Index"). Each of the main chapters has multiple sections, and a list of their headings gives a good idea of the ground Ley wants to cover. For Chapter One, theyare: "The Scriptsand thePlayingSpace," "The Surviving Tragedies of Aeschylus and Early Tragic Performance," "Choros, Actors/Characters, and Playing Space in the Earlier Tragedies of Aeschylus," "Composition for the Playing Space in Aeschylus's Oresteia," "Realizing theTragic Playing Space after Aeschylus," "AltarsandTombs in thePlaying Space after Aeschylus," "Performers and...

A Companion to Greek Tragedy (review)

Reviewed by: A Companion to Greek Tragedy C.W. Marshall Justina Gregory, ed. A Companion to Greek Tragedy. Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World. Maldon, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Pp. xviii + 552. $186.99. ISBN 978-1-4051-0770-9 (cloth). The thirty-one papers in this collection form the richest single-volume introduction to an aspect of the ancient world that I have read. The range of contributions is immense, and each paper could be used as a starting-point for further study of Athenian tragedy (each chapter possesses a bibliography of “further reading”). The book is divided into four parts—“Contexts,” “Elements,” “Approaches,” and “Reception”—and it is helpful to consider the papers within these groups. The wide-ranging nature of the volume—and the limitations of the academic review—means that only superficial comment is possible for most contributions. The first part, “Contexts,” consists of seven chapters. Three represent generalist summaries of the author’s previously published views. Scott Scullion (23–37) provides a well-argued account that is honest [End Page 253] about the marginality of the perspective expressed but rigorous in its clear articulation of key aspects of the origin of tragedy. Jocelyn Penny Small (103–118) offers a skeptical view on the relationship between vase illustrations and tragic performance, arguing against the views of Taplin and Green. While additional context from the so-called phlyax vases would, I think, offer helpful counter-evidence, this is a very useful summary. I remain unconvinced, however, by Neil Croally’s defense of tragedy’s didacticism (55–70): he shifts between two senses of “teaching” (as a function of the genre, and as a choice by the playwright), so that the point becomes trivial; everything teaches in this sense. Much stronger is William Allen (71–82) on the philosophical tradition, which (with Halliwell; see below) covers much of the same ground as Croally. Christopher Pelling’s discussion of the role of rhetoric (83–102) demonstrates how performance culture blurs tragedy into the lawcourts, and vice-versa. These two papers are both excellent summaries. Other papers are less compelling. Paula Debnar (3–22) opens the volume with a historical overview of fifth-century Athens, placing selected tragedies in this context, though general readers will be misled by several claims, including the certainty with which the opening paragraph affirms Euphorion’s production of Prometheus in (specifically) 431 (a play treated as Aeschylean at 105, 216, and 326, and inauthentic at 3, 199, and 254). Bernd Seidensticker (38–54) gives a general account of satyr drama, but the description of dithyramb, important for understanding tragic choruses, is minimal. The core of the second part, “Elements,” consists of four discussions on structural aspects of Greek tragedy. Deborah H. Roberts on beginnings and endings (136–148) discusses how the content of tragedy is bounded. For her, the play is the unit of interpretation, and one misses a sense of how the satyr play provides its own kind of ending to the dramatic experience. Michael R. Halleran’s paper on episodes (167–182) describes specific types of scenes and is attuned to the implications for performance. Peter Wilson’s solid, short, provocative discussion of music (183–193) rightly emphasizes the performative implications and the foreignness of Greek music. After carefully defining his vocabulary and terms, Luigi Battezzato (149–166) summarizes the function of lyric and challenges conventional (Aristotelian) views. All four papers are excellent, and together provide a kind of Bauformen der griechischen Tragödie “lite” that will be incredibly useful to English-speaking undergraduates. Less successful is Michael J. Anderson on myth (121–135), which is a bit flat since it does not engage with larger and often misunderstood issues of what myth is. The final paper in this section, John Davidson on performance (194–211), is in the awkward position of having to cover too much ground within a single chapter; as a result, the [End Page 254] discussion is compressed at key points, and alternative possibilities remain under-explored. While many of the papers more than touch on issues of performance, there is too much here to provide a consolidated view, and issues such as the theatre space itself are not...

Le Mémoire de Mahelot

Édition critique établie et commentée par Pierre Pasquier. Paris, Champion, 2005. 377 pp. Hb €70.00. The so-called Mémoire de Mahelot is a crucial document for the study of seventeenth-century theatre, the notebook of scenic designers at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the miraculous survival of which offers unique insights into on-stage performance conditions. This is the first edition since that of Lancaster of 1920, and its 200 pages of introduction now offer the best available account of seventeenth-century French scenography pertaining to the performance of spoken drama. The manuscript, really several different manuscripts, in different hands, privileges the early 1630s and the 1670s. For most of the plays listed in the earlier period there is both a verbal description of the set requirements and a drawing; for the later plays, there is only a summary verbal description. Accordingly, Pasquier devotes most of his attention to the earlier material, although a strength of his presentation is to conjure up both as clear as possible a vision of the two different scenographic practices in force in the earlier and later parts of the century and an evolution between them. In the 1630s, the dominant scenography used five concurrent sets disposed around the stage, some of them flat, some practicable with doors and windows, some containing visible interiors in which actors could perform; Pasquier refines the traditionally sanctioned concept of simultaneity of decor into one of relative simultaneity, as the occasional use of small curtains (painted to represent yet another set) to hide and then reveal the sets rests on the opposite principle of successivity. By the 1670s, the dominant scenography used one single set, representing either outside or inside, but not allowing the on-stage transition from one to the other that the earlier scenography allowed. Pasquier suggests how the different components of the multiple sets became gradually unified in the late 1630s and early 1640s (for instance, the five components increasingly representing parts of the same town or palace). His discussion is informed not only by his knowledge of a vast number of plays, but also by his sensitivity to the traditions of medieval performance, Italian sets for comic and tragic performance in the sixteenth century, evolving practices in the staging of ballets de cour, and the elaborately spectacular staging of Italian opera in mid-century Paris. He shines the cold light of evidence and patient analysis on a number of idées reçues. One will suffice by way of illustration. It is now dogma that actors came to the front of the stage to perform. Pasquier shows that there is no evidence to support this view, but a considerable amount of evidence to show that they performed just about everywhere else. This work constitutes a major revision of many time-honoured claims in Scherer's La Dramaturgie classique.

Myth as a mobilizing force in Attic warrior society

This paper focuses on the mobilizing role of symbols and specifically on the workings of mythical theatre. Attic theatre is understood as a symbolic performance in which the comic and the tragic genres represented processes of ‘over-distancing’ and ‘under-distancing’, respectively. Instead of conceiving of tragedy as just an aesthetic or critical medium, the tragic genre is viewed as part of a complex cultural and social process that serves as a mobilizing force around the fundamental values of the polis, e.g. the warrior and his hebe. A number of cult practices are discussed in order to demonstrate the importance of warrior symbolism in Attic society. Furthermore, it is argued that the tragic performance does not present a positive and ideal image, but a violation of the social order (‘the warrior’). The Children of Herakles and other tragedies are analysed in order to illustrate the argument.

Tragic Re-Presentation and the Semantics of Space in Plautus' Casina

AbstractThis article examines motivations for tragic parody in Plautus' Casina, 621 ff. It details how the Casina, and Pardalisca's parodic scene in particular, treat themes common to Greek tragedy—the spatial opposition between male and female worlds, the on-stage struggle for power between men and women, and female madness—and also explores Plautus' comic manipulation of Aristotle's tragic theory. Through her tragic performance, Pardalisca provides a very different perspective on the absent Casina from the one provided thus far in the play and believably represents Casina's possible actions and state of mind. Pardalisca transgresses the conventional boundaries between male/outside and female/inside established early in the play, and she uses the public space outside of the house to externalize and legitimize the private concerns of women inside the house, and to rupture the physical and emotional constraints on women through her paratragic scene. The final 'wedding' scene then comically mirrors Pardalisca's tragic scene and provides a glimpse of the sexual violence Casina might have been compelled to endure had she been forced to comply with Lysidamus' plan, yet neatly turns male violence back on male characters and makes them the comic victims, not just of the women characters, but of themselves.

Milton and the “stage‐work” of Charles I

The recently observed three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Charles I's execution affords an opportunity to revisit the contested site to which this social drama was transferred: the politicized/theatricalized arena of print. In examining the significance of Charles's tragic performance, this article focuses in the role of the king's book in England's political history and in the material culture of the period. Commissioned to champion Parliament's cause, John Milton unsheathes his pen to demystify the king's “Stage‐work” and thereby disenchant the consumers of Eikon Basilike and its numerous incarnations. The battle between political opponents of the time is ultimately a battle both over the control of the press, which now “acts” in the “silence of the Stage,” and over the politics of reading through which the terms of authority are established and challenged

Tragedy, Gender, Performance: Women as Tragic Heroes on the Nineteenth-Century Stage

1 COMPABATIVE i ama Volume 30Summer 1996Number 2 Tragedy, Gender, Performance: Women as Tragic Heroes on the Nineteenth-Century Stage Anne Russell From the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, a remarkably high number of English and American women performed tragic male Shakespearean roles on the professional stage. Although there was a thriving stage tradition of crossdressing in comedy, melodrama, Italian opera, and dance,1 not since the early 1660's, when women replaced the boy actors who had previously played women's roles on the English stage, had the conventions of tragic performance in English professional theater included crossing gender boundaries. The most popular Shakespearean roles for women in the tragic repertoire were Romeo and Hamlet, but women also played Macbeth, Cardinal Wolsey, Shylock, Richard III, and lago as well as heroes of nineteenth -century works such as Thomas Noon Talfourd's tragedy Ion and Edward Bulwer Lytton's melodrama The Lady ofLyons? Women's performances of tragic heroes broke long-established conventions of dramatic representation in the British theater and 135 136Comparative Drama in the process interrogated many assumptions about character, gender, genre, and performance. Although a considerable number of reviewers criticized crossdressed tragic performances as immoral and lacking in taste, enough audiences and reviewers were receptive to crossdressed performances that a significant minority of actresses3 chose or were assigned serious male roles. Actresses have left very few records documenting why and how they performed tragic male roles, but reviews in newspapers and literary magazines often included detailed accounts of performances that describe sets, costumes, acting style, and stage business. Some reviewers outlined how a character had been played in the past, or how the writer thought the character ought to have been played, as a prelude to a description or critique of the performance. Reviews sometimes included the reviewer's impressions of audience reception or a gossipy discussion of the personal or professional circumstances of the starring performers. Nearly all critical accounts of crossdressed performances attempted to establish the degree of "masculinity" or "femininity" of both character and performer, though few reviewers were explicit about how they made these distinctions. Yet discussions of the femininity and masculinity of crossdressed performers tended to be oblique, full of gaps and silences. If women who performed the roles of tragic heroes represented femininity and masculinity as performative roles rather than essential states, critical accounts persistently avoided acknowledging this possibility. Although significant numbers of reviewers disapproved of crossdressing because it mixed or confused masculine and feminine, the many nineteenth-century critics who treated crossdressing sympathetically did not suggest that dramatic crossdressing exposed the contingency of gender. If nineteenth-century women performers of tragic heroes were exploring the boundaries dividing behavior considered masculine and feminine, they were also reinforcing conventional ideas by elevating the figure of the tragic hero. While demonstrating that women could represent the "nobility" of a character such as Hamlet, nineteenth-century actresses of Hamlet also recuperated the character from critical charges of weakness. Crossdressed performances were simultaneously oppositional and conventional as the subversive potential of crossdressing was undercut by conventional staging, cuts, and costuming . As we shall see, nineteenth-century accounts of women's performances of tragic heroes illuminate some of the ways in which an apparently radical practice such as crossdressing could be made reassuringly unthreatening. Anne Russell137 Nineteenth-century audiences may well have been receptive to women's performances of tragic heroes because of the ubiquity of crossdressing in comedy and pantomime,4 genres in which many actresses gained extensive experience playing cross-gender roles, particularly early in their careers. In Shakespeare, not only did women performers play characters such as Ganymede, Cesario, and Fidèle in comedies with disguised heroines, but they also played juveniles (such as young princes in histories) and fairies (Oberon, Ariel, Puck). Women and girls, as a matter of course, played young boys in all genres. (In the popular stage adaptation of Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby, for example, Smike was played by a woman.) Some understanding of the assumptions operating when women were chosen to play male parts can be discerned from William Macready's account of his decision to cast Patricia Horton as the Fool in his...

Secular growth trends in Brazil over three decades.

This study describes secular trends in physical growth in Brazil over a period of three decades. The study is based on two comparable national surveys undertaken in the mid-seventies and late eighties. Mean heights at ages 7 and 22 are estimated for three cohorts of males and females born around 1952, 1967 and 1982, respectively. Positive secular trends are found both between 1952 and 1967 and between 1967 and 1982. Modest height gains of around 1.0 cm per decade comparable to those described in developed countries during the second half of the 19th century are observed in the first period (1952-67). Outstanding height increments of around 2.4 cm per decade and comparable only to those described for Japanese children after 1950 are detected in the second period (1967-82). Height increments tending to higher values in the second period are seen for both sexes in the five Brazilian macroregions and in different economic strata. Even so, a large gap still separates the physical growth as observed in the north and northeast regions (and, generally speaking, among the poorest third of the Brazilian population) from the normal growth pattern expected when living conditions are adequate. Substantial income improvements over the seventies plus the continuous progress in the availability of sanitation, health and education services during the seventies and eighties are consistent with the exceptional height gains observed between the cohorts of 1967 and 1982. On the other hand, the tragic performance of the Brazilian economy during recent years plus the evidence that infant mortality rates did not decline in the eighties as they had done in the seventies may suggest a reduction in the speed of the positive trends in growth. If this hypothesis is true, the full development of the genetic growth potential of a large part of the Brazilian population will be postponed to a very remote future.