Twentieth-century Drama Research Articles

Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill

Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill

Spectral Characters: Genre and Materiality on the Modern Stage

Spectral Characters: Genre and Materiality on the Modern Stage

Tennessee Williams’s Misunderstood ‘memory play’: Re-Imagining Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie

Abstract Tennessee Williams famously called The Glass Menagerie a ‘memory play’. This remark has been consistently overlooked or misinterpreted by critics, unleashing a tradition of approaching the play in a rather confusing fashion concerning who the characters are and how the playwright uses them. This paper engages with the character of Amanda. First of all, I will trace major transformations in the conception of characters throughout twentieth-century drama, providing background for Williams’s attempt to redefine major aspects of a playwright’s craft such as what a ‘character’ is. Secondly, I will survey a critical tradition surrounding Tom Wingfield’s mother and consider major views concerning the character. Recurrent in them, as my analysis indicates, is the failure to acknowledge her as a tool for the ‘memory work’ Tom carries out. The character is subsequently posited as a fluid entity that helps Tom (and Williams) make sense of the past and explore how their families shaped who they were. As opposed to a realistic play, where so much is given at the start, a ‘memory play’, as Williams seems to have conceived it, remains a cry for the reader to join the playwright in a common search for meaning, one that utilizes, rather than just displays, characters in order to reach standpoints that are far from fixed and immutable.

Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot: Revolutionizing Conventional Theatre and Redefining Norms

Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot revolutionized the conventional theatre and redefined norms which shaped twentieth century drama. The play launched an absurdist style of writing on the landscape of drama which gave the life of performance to the intellectual existentialist ideals of Soren Aabaye Kierkegaard´s and Jean-Paul Sartre´s philosophy. This research paper analyses the elements of Existentialism with respect to supportive evidence from the play.

Symbolic Analysis of Waiting for Godot : A Critical Comparison Between the Bible and Quran Symbols in Waiting for Godot

Waiting for Godot (1952) is a conventional and remarkable play that is written by Irish author Samuel Beckett. The play Waiting for Godot is part of theater of absurd and it is written during modernism. This research is divided into three different sections and conclusion. Firstly the introduction for this research is given and the twentieth century drama, theater of the absurd, and the summary of the play. Also in an independent section we show other people’s work on the play Waiting for Godot . Later on we clarified the Biblical and Quranic symbols in Waiting for Godot and shows the comparison of the symbols in the holy books Quran and Bible in Waiting for Godot . Eventually, conclusion will be drawn as the final outcome of the study.

‘A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels’ by George North: A Newly Uncovered Manuscript Source for Shakespeare's Plays. By Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter

One surprising consequence of the digital revolution has been the expansion of early modern manuscript studies. As so many printed works in the English vernaculars have been made available through such resources as Early English Books Online, enterprising scholars of various sorts have sought to distinguish themselves by drawing attention to materials that cannot readily be read and/or word-searched by the common herd. The title under review, the most substantial portion of which comprises a facsimile and modernized transcription of George north's ‘A brief discourse of rebellion and Rebells’ (British Library Add. MS 70520), seems at first blush to be a case in point. However, to read the nearly 100 pages of introductory matter is quickly to disabuse oneself of this impression. The authors/editors are Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter. McCarthy is an independent scholar who in 2011 self-published North of Shakespeare: The True Story of the Secret Genius who Wrote the World's Greatest Body of Literature. Here he proposes that Sir Thomas North, the famous translator of Plutarch, was responsible for writing much of what we now think of as Shakespeare's corpus. Schlueter is a retired professor of English Literature who has published widely on twentieth-century drama and who has also produced a richly illustrated study of alba amicorum in ‘Shakespeare's London’.

Dei Verbum and the Twentieth-Century Drama of Scripture's Literal Sense

Dei Verbum and the Twentieth-Century Drama of Scripture's Literal Sense Mark Reasoner The received narrative for Catholic Scripture exegesis since Pope Leo XIII has focused on the permission and encouragement directed toward Catholic exegetes to use modern methods of Scripture study. The narrative begins with the 1893 encyclical Providentissimus Deus, in which Leo XIII called for Catholic exegetes to learn the languages in which Scripture was originally written and apply scientific methods of biblical studies to the text of Scripture in order to identify the modernists' errors and show the truth of Scripture. The suspense in this narrative's plot first comes with Pope Pius X, whose 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis is viewed as an attempt to halt or dampen the Catholic use of modern methods of Scripture study because of his suspicions about those methods. Fifty years after Providentissimus Deus and thirty-six years after Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Pope Piux XII issued his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, which renewed the Church's call for Scripture scholars to use scientific methods for their exegesis. In the decades that have followed, the Church's exegetes have tested and functionally appropriated modern, scientific methods, such as the historical-critical method, form criticism, redaction criticism, source criticism, and feminist criticism when studying Scripture and passed on the fruits of their studies to the Church. While there has been a renewal of patristic studies in some quarters and a growing respect for patristic readings of Scripture, the dominant threads in this narrative remain the use, perceived benefits, and ongoing negotiation necessary to bring modern, scientific methods to the Church's [End Page 219] engagement with her Scriptures.1 This narrative is one that can still be told, since it is a useful description of the surface phenomena in Catholic scholars' exegesis of Scripture in the twentieth century. But this narrative is not connected—in neither its beginning nor its ending—to any longer or broader narrative of Scripture exegesis. In this article, I ask fellow students of Scripture and the history of its exegesis to consider an alternative narrative, a narrative that traces developments in the last 120 years of Catholic Scripture study in light of the ongoing narrative regarding the literal sense in the Christian interpretation of Scripture. This longer narrative begins at least with Origen's reflections on the literal and spiritual senses of Scripture.2 A segment of the broader narrative that will serve as a useful comparison, for our purposes, is the renewed emphasis on the literal sense that arose with Andrew of St. Victor (ca. 1110–1175), who was influenced by Jewish interpretation to follow the literal sense, an interpretive disposition continued by Nicholas of Lyra (1270–1349).3 Nicholas of Lyra's preoccupation with the literal sense of Scripture is well known. Its influence on Scripture reading in the West is caricatured in the following couplet: "Si Lyra non lyrasset, Lutherus non saltasset" ("If Lyra had not played the lyre, Luther would not have danced"). The point of this couplet is that the distinctive reading of Scripture promulgated by Luther, which eschewed the figurative exegesis open to multiple senses of Scripture found in the Church fathers, would not have gained a critical mass of exegetes in the sixteenth and following centuries if it had not been for the popularity of Lyra's Postillae. Beryl Smalley's rejection of this couplet seems based on emphases on the literal sense that antedated Nicholas, not on the connection between exegetes' emphasis on the literal sense and Luther's eventual quest for a singular sense of Scripture.4 And [End Page 220] to support Smalley's hesitation with the couplet, Franciscan focus on the literal sense in the thirteenth century, based on the works of the Hebraist scholar Robert Grosseteste and Franciscans Adam Marsh, William de la Mare, Roger Bacon, and Gerard de Huy, can be well documented.5 So I must admit that more people than Nicholas of Lyra caused the groundswell of medieval interest in the literal sense. One also needs to be aware that Nicholas of Lyra's literal sense is not always what we might expect the literal sense to be. For example, in...

An Annotated Translation of Zhang Jiqing’s Lecture on Playing Cui-Shi in Chimeng (The Mad Dream): A Sample Lecture from Kunqu baizhong, Dashi shuoxi (One Hundred Pieces of Kunqu , Master Performers Talk About Their Scenes)

An Annotated Translation of Zhang Jiqing’s Lecture on Playing Cui-Shi in Chimeng(The Mad Dream): A Sample Lecture from Kunqu baizhong, Dashi shuoxi(One Hundred Pieces of Kunqu, Master Performers Talk About Their Scenes) Josh Stenberg (bio) Part 1. Click to view video Part 2. Click to view video Part 3. Click to view video Josh Stenberg University of British Columbia, Canada Josh Stenberg Josh Stenberg is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Theatre and Film at The University of British Columbia. He works on and with xiqutroupes in Jiangsu, Fujian, and in the Chinese diaspora. Correspondence to: Josh Stenberg, University of British Columbia, 3883 W. 23rd Ave, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6S 1K8. Email: josh_stenberg@yahoo.ca. Footnotes Supplemental Material The full lecture video is available in three parts at on Project MUSE. 1. In Dashi shuoxiand in Kunqudiscourse generally, the term zhezi xi折 子 戲 or zhezi折子 refers to short scenes that were typically developed from chuanqiscripts and which form the basic unit of a typical Kunquperformance event. Narratively unrelated zhezi xiare most often performed separately as part of a single-evening or -afternoon program of zhezi xi, though zhezi xifrom the same narrative can also be performed in sequence to make a standalone show, which in that case is referred to by actors as daxi大戲 or quanben xi全本戲. In practice, in Dashi shuoxiand elsewhere, zhezi xican also be used to refer to short scenes with no such relationship to a longer script, but they make up a small minority. In the lectures in Dashi shuoxi, and in xiqudiscourse in general, zhezi xican be referred to just as xi戲, as can standalone adaptations. Since they are neither exactly “plays” nor “scenes,” when Zhang is referring to a zhezi xi, I will use that term instead of “play” or “scene.” 2. “One hundred” should be understood as a round rather than a precise number. See Kim Hunter Gordon’s review of this project in this issue of this journal. 3. The set of DVDs and their introductory booklet as well as the set of five volumes of written versions of the lectures all share the same title and the same publishers and publication date: Hunan dianzi yinxiang and Yuelu shushe of Changsha, 2014. The video of the lecture translated below can be found on the second of 110 DVDs and its written version can be found on pages 15–25 of the first volume of written versions. The original printing of Dashi shuoxiwas not large and only brief clips from eight of the lectures are available online. The project’s dedicated website gives an English title for the project: Masters’ Lectures on 109 Excerpts: The Performing Art of Kunqu. See http://www.dashishuoxi.com/ for that title and http://www.dashishuoxi.com/dashishuoxi_list_video.php?dii=436 for the clips; accessed August 26, 2016. The written version and the video of this lecture will be available as supplemental material on the websites for CHINOPERL and this journal. 4. For a translation of the relevant parts of this biography of Zhu Maichen, see Josh Stenberg, “Staging Female-Initiated Divorce: The Zhu Maichen Story in Twentieth-Century Drama from Opprobrium through Approbation,” NAN NÜ16.2 (2014): 308–40, 312. The biography itself can be found in the Zhonghua shuju edition (1962), pp. 62A.2791–93. 5. Fu Jin 傅謹, “Ruhe rang Zhu Maichen gushi you jiaoyu yiyi” 如何讓朱買臣故事有教育意義 (How to imbue the story of Zhu Maichen with educational meaning), Bolan qunshu博覽群書 (Wide reading in multitudes of books) 2006.3: 49...

Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature: Ethics and the Reconstitution of Subjectivity

Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature: Ethics and the Reconstitution of Subjectivity

Il fantastico nella drammaturgia italiana del primo Novecento

The article offers a concise outline of the presence of fantastic in Italian early twentieth-century drama, with the intention to demonstrate that it was not only through narrative, but also through dramatic composition that Italian fantasy made a place for itself in the last century. The analysis focuses in particular on four moments in this theatrical trend: a play of Enrico Annibale Butti strongly influenced by Poe; the occult side of futurist «teatro sintetico» (synthetic theatre); the group of «grotesque» playwrights, with a particular attention to Luigi Antonelli’s work; and the presence of “magical realism” in Massimo Bontempelli’s plays.

Staging Female-initiated Divorce: The Zhu Maichen Story in Twentieth-Century Drama from Opprobrium through Approbation

Traditional theatre narratives in China have altered to accommodate changing gender attitudes over the last century. One such narrative, the Zhu Maichen story, revolves around a female-initiated divorce. Though traditionally a reviled figure, in recent and contemporary theatre Zhu’s story is reoriented to make the transgressive woman either more of a victim of feudal society, or blameworthy for reasons unrelated to the divorce. What is called ‘traditional theatre’ and thought of as conservative performance of heritage scenes is nevertheless highly responsive to social shifts.

“High and Aloof”: Verse, Violence, and the Audience in Djuna Barnes’sThe Antiphon

ABSTRACT:Djuna Barnes’s last play, The Antiphon, has been subject to a variety of readings that emphasize its autobiographical resonances, its unperformability, or the incoherence that resulted from the editorial interference of T.S. Eliot. There has been no major staging of this play in English since its publication in 1958, and this, along with the archaic language and verse form that Barnes uses, pose the biggest challenge to understanding the dynamics of the play. The article argues that Barnes stages revenge, abuse, violence, and theatricality in her play in negotiation with traditions of Renaissance and modern theatre and with an acute sense of the tensions between literary and popular entertainment. In this way, the article demonstrates how Barnes’s play interrogates the role and culpability of the audience as witness and demonstrates the importance of recovering The Antiphon for the canon of twentieth-century drama.

Desire beyond the Château d'If

Desire beyond the Château d'If

"The Farce of the Fart" and Other Ribaldries: Twelve Medieval French Plays in Modern English by Jody Enders (review)

Enders, Jody. Farce of and Other Ribaldries: Twelve Medieval French Plays in Modern English. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pp. xv + 477. $49.95 cloth, $29.95 paper, $29.95 eBook. It is a little-known fact that medieval French farce played a major role in making of modern drama. In striving to break with neoclassical aesthetic canons, avant-garde playwrights often drew inspiration from medieval genres that their predecessors had considered crude, seditious, and immoral, with farce being most obvious offender against bienseance. Dario Fo's link to farceurs (and other jesters who defame and insult) is well established, largely because Fo himself has so often emphasized deep historical roots of the tricks of trade. But how many people will realize, or bother to recall, that J. M. Synge's The Well of Saints (1905) is loosely based on Andrieu de La Vigne's L'aveugle et le boiteux (1496); that delirious nonsense speech in Eugene Ionesco's La cantatrice chauve (1950) and La lemon (1951) is indebted to fantaisie verbale of medieval tricksters and fools; that in 1969 San Francisco Mime Troupe toured a production of mid-fifteenth-century farce Maistre Pierre Pathelin and, in one instance, was able to perform it only thanks to ACLU lawsuit and anticensorship demonstration; or that Zulu Sofola's The Wizard of Law (1975) rewrites Pathelin to depict corruption of contemporary Nigerian society and capacity of poor to resist economic inequality using farcical antics (wizardry)? Indeed, one has only to scratch surface to discover that many of aesthetic innovations and political strategies that characterize twentieth-century drama are either directly or indirectly tied to medieval French stage, and are therefore deeply beholden to scholars like Louis Petit de Julleville and Gustave Cohen, who brought to light hundreds of French plays that had been forgotten in archives, as well as to thespians like Cohen and his troupe Theophiliens, who performed some of those plays, usually for first time in centuries. Expressly written with stage and classroom in mind, and now available in affordable paperback and eBook formats, Jody Enders's The Farce of Fart and Other Ribaldries aims to make a similar contribution to modern theater practice and performance studies by offering access to twelve of most ingenious and spirited medieval farces to English-speaking scholars, students, playwrights, directors, actors, and spectators. With Jelle Koopmans's recent rediscovery and publication of Recueil de Florence, a collection of fifty-three medieval plays that mysteriously went missing in 1920s, French scholars can no longer complain of a lack of reliable critical editions. But, to quote Enders, What about all English speakers out there? We weren't going to leave all fun to French were we? (xi). With thirty years' experience in field and apparently irrepressible comic flair, Enders allows her readers to take [farce's] humor seriously but without for a second allowing intellectual concerns to suck humor right out of thing (xii, xiii). In her breezy but incisive prefatory material, production notes, and endnotes, she attends to many of vulgar, provocative, and gut-busting ways in which farce satirizes social life, with her twelve plays exploring themes ranging [f]rom politics and religion, to learning and litigiousness, to marriage and social class, to theology and sexuality (xii). Enders has wisely chosen route of adapted rather than literal (33) translations, preserving farce's characteristic exuberance by inserting, where appropriate, an extra line, extra term, extra mimed scene, extra nonspeaking character, extra possible musical number, or extra name (especially for many unnamed female characters) (35). …

The Farceur as Modernist: Fernand Crommelynck, The Magnanimous Cuckold , and Twentieth-Century Western Drama

The Farceur as Modernist: Fernand Crommelynck, The Magnanimous Cuckold, and Twentieth-Century Western Drama Bert Cardullo (bio) Retraction: The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism retracts “The Farceur as Modernist: Fernand Crommely, The Magnanimous Cuckold and Twentieth Century Western Drama,” by Bert Cardullo, published in JDTC, (Fall of 2013). The author did not cite sections taken from two previous publications that bear his name: (a) The Theatre of Fernand Crommelynk: Eight Plays, and (b) The Crommelynk Mystery: the Life and Work of a Belgian Playwright, a volume the author co-edited with Alain Piette. The international reputation of Fernand Crommelynck (1886–1970) was established in 1922 when Meyerhold directed his most important—and subsequently most popular—play, The Magnanimous Cuckold (Le Cocu magnifique), in Moscow. Though Crommelynck’s reputation has mysteriously suffered since then (one finds only brief mention of him in standard theatre texts, with nothing but a photograph of the set design from the 1922 production), this Belgian author’s other major plays include The Merchant of Regrets (Le Marchand de regrets), The Sculptor of Masks (Le Sculpteur des masques), The Childish Lovers (Les Amants puérils), Golden Guts (Tripes d’or), Carine, or the Young Woman Who Was Crazy about Her Soul (Carine ou la Jeune fille folle de son âme), A Small-Hearted Woman (Une Femme qu’a le cœur trop petit), and Hot and Cold, or Mr. Dom’s Idea (Chaud et Froid ou L’idée de Monsieur Dom), all written and published between around 1910 and the mid-1930s. Torn between the extremes of laughter and sorrow, frequently violent and visionary, Crommelynck’s work is typically Flemish (though written in French), not least in its preoccupation with sin. Pain is always present in his plays, The pain felt by characters living in a world where happiness, often a reality at the outset, is quickly destroyed by irrationalism, self-deception, and obsession. As in the works of his compatriot Michel de Ghelderode, the process of destruction may be farcical but the outcome never is. Crommelynck’s plays humorously show us how human behavior can be dominated and even determined to a catastrophic end by extreme expressions of emotion or desire. The mixture of buffoonery and tragedy characteristic of Crommelynck’s theatre extends to his prose style, which presents the most outrageous or gross situations in a language of beautifully sensuous imagery. Farce with tragic overtones and drama depicting human folly, then, typify the oeuvre of Fernand Crommelynck. He encountered early twentieth-century drama through his father and uncle, both actors, and disapproved. Crommelynck felt that the characters he saw on the stage spoke endlessly, and he set out to create plays in which dramatic action would supersede exposition, where characterization and [End Page 23] situation would go beyond the limitations of realism, and where speech and silence would be of equal value. In Crommelynck’s theatre, humor and a poetic command of language prevail over all other dramatic techniques to create a fusion of the serious and the comic so appropriate to his—and our own—tortured, confused, relativistic age. Although Crommelynck himself calls some of his plays farces, others dramas, and still others simply plays, these distinctions are in the end arbitrary. Indeed, in the case of The Magnanimous Cuckold (1920), the author specifically declared that the work may be done as either a farce or a tragedy. The ambiguity of Crommelynck’s theatre is probably traceable to the ambivalence of his artistic roots. While he early displayed a strong predilection for the heavy, almost plodding type of farce usually associated with the Flemish stage, as a young man he was also influenced by the fashionable literary movement of the time, symbolism, with all its tragic undercurrents. Influences of expressionism1 as well as symbolism2 have been noted in Crommelynck’s work, but in his major plays he is a fascinatingly fierce dramatic poet who defies classification. From the repertoire of Crommelynck’s plays the following six have attracted the greatest amount of attention and analysis: The Sculptor of Masks (1908), where the life and work of a maritally unfaithful but uniquely gifted artist are not tolerated by the general community...

Shaw, Plato, and Euripides: Classical Currents in “Major Barbara.” (review)

Reviewed by: Shaw, Plato, and Euripides: Classical Currents in “Major Barbara.” David Kornhaber (bio) Sidney P. Albert. Shaw, Plato, and Euripides: Classical Currents in “Major Barbara.” The Florida Bernard Shaw Series. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012. Pp. xvii + 304. $74.95. Perhaps no prior work of criticism has pursued George Bernard Shaw’s debt to classical philosophy and tragedy in such great depth as Sidney P. Albert’s meticulous and comprehensive Shaw, Plato, and Euripides: Classical Currents in “Major Barbara.” Albert’s monograph is that rare specimen in scholarship on twentieth-century drama: a book-length study of a single play. Yet for a volume that is so tightly focused on one work, its perspective is surprisingly—and satisfyingly—expansive. Albert does not so much offer an extended close reading of Shaw’s masterwork as he posits a series of overlapping interpretations. The book is purposefully designed as a palimpsest: it returns multiple times to key sections of the play, in each instance bringing new aspects of Shaw’s classical sources to light and generating readings that are uniformly rich but not always entirely in concord. At no point does Albert present a unified theory of the play; rather, he demonstrates a mode of reading Shaw’s drama, a perspective on the depth of the playwright’s achievement measured by the breadth of its various resonances. In a sense, this is both a continuation and a culmination of work that Albert has been pursuing throughout his career. Aged ninety-seven at the time of this book’s publication, Albert has been one of the foremost interpreters of Shaw’s philosophical influences for more than half a century. His article “Bernard Shaw: The Artist as Philosopher,” first published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in 1950 and included as an appendix, is still one of the most cogent accounts of the various philosophical lineages from which Shaw drew throughout his career. Plato received special attention in that essay, and Albert returns to and expands on the connection. Yet at the same time he also moves beyond stories of straightforward philosophical transmission. The connection to The Bacchae sets Shaw’s work in a context more theological than philosophical: Albert’s Shaw is an artist grappling with elemental forces that go far beyond the kinds of political and economic issues with which he is most associated. The book is divided into two sections devoted to Plato and Euripides respectively, both grounded in an introduction that sets out the merits of a classical perspective on Shaw and a history of previous attempts to draw linkages between Shaw and the Greeks. Part 1 of the book comprises an extended chapter on the play’s connection to The Republic, which Shaw parodically references near the climax of the play: “Plato says, my friend, that society cannot be saved until either the Professors of Greek take to making gun-powder, or else the makers of [End Page 569] gunpowder become Professors of Greek” (38). Albert’s concerns in this chapter are as much formal as thematic. He takes Plato’s philosophical dialogue as a model for Shaw’s dramatic form, even explicitly reading Andrew Undershaft as Socratic interlocutor during several key exchanges. But Albert also observes that the conclusions to which Shaw’s characters are drawn over the course of the drama bear a significant debt of origin to Plato’s theory of the philosopher king. He offers a tripartite reading of Shaw’s main characters drawn from Plato’s vision of the tripartite soul divided among reason, will, and emotion, with the rationalist Adolphus Cusins ultimately emerging as the first among equals. Albert offers reasonable ground to support Shaw’s frustrated claims that the outsized Undershaft was not in fact his model of the superman ideal as so many critics took him to be. If Undershaft’s model factory town of Perivale St. Andrews is in any sense a version of Shaw’s Republic, as Albert terms it, it is so only when it comes under the control of Cusins, the philosopher king. Yet if Undershaft is dethroned by Cusins in the book’s first section, he reemerges in the second half as...

The Agony of Deceit, Self-deception, and Pretense: A Comparative Study of Selected Twentieth-Century American Drama of Deceit

This study sheds light on the fake shelters that masters of deceit and pretense in modern and contemporary American drama take refuge into flee the harsh realities they are entrapped in and the agonies they suffer as a result of being deceitful. The study discerns four types of deceit that pervade the entire modern American dramatic canon: familial, political, aesthetic, and economic deception. Though these masters of deceit resort to using different forms of deceit, they all seem to unconsciously use self-deception or pretense as a psychological coping mechanism. The theoretical background of the study is based on the contemporary poetics of deceit stated in Loyal Rue’s Bythe Grace of Guile, Anthony Abbot’s The Vital Lie and Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death.

Mendel's Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama. By Tamsen Wolff. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; pp. x + 280, 8 illus. $90 cloth.

Mendel's Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama. By Tamsen Wolff. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; pp. x + 280, 8 illus. $90 cloth.

Expressing Possession in Spanish: The Use of Possessive Datives and Possessive Adjectives in Twentieth-Century Spanish-Language Drama

The present investigation comprises a statistical analysis of the use in Spanish of the possessive dative versus the use of possessive adjectives, with nouns that have the grammatical role of subject, direct object, or copula predicate. The corpus analysed here consists of dialogue taken from four Spanish-language plays dating from the second half of the twentieth century. The results of the analysis provide statistically significant support for the claim that there is a relationship in Spanish between the choice of possessor encoding and the noun class of the possessum and the class of verb. The dative encoding reflects the affected state of the possessor, casting the possessor as a participant in the event. These results follow from Hopper and Thompson's (1980) Transitivity Hypothesis and from the conceptual proximity that obtains between possessor and possessum (Maldonado 2002).

Plays of Expectations: Intertextual Relations in Russian Twentieth-Century Drama by Andrew Baruch Wachtel (review)

reviews 117 points out, is actually consistent with his disdain of the type ofWesternized culture the Imperial Theatres were promoting. The opening up of theatre to private ventures, therefore, can be seen as part of Alexander's conservative agenda rather than as a liberalization of the art form. The net result, over time, though,was that control of theatre in the capitals was wrested from the state and handed toRussia's 'fledgling civil society' (p. 106). With the abolition of the monopoly, Moscow and St Petersburg were filledwith entrepreneurs, impresarios and theatrical innovators, all ofwhom 'contributed to thewider social trend thatwas gradually challenging the state as the curator of artistic culture and the arbiter of identity' (p. 108). By the last decade of the century, though, intellectuals were becoming disappointed with commercial theatre, which they believed had failed in itsmission of developing citizenship. Although it is difficult to judge the role that theatre played in transforming social mores among the masses, Frame convincingly demonstrates that by the turn of the century, theatrical associations like the Russian Theatrical Society were teaching theatre people professional modes of conduct and a wider sense of theirrights and obligations as citizens. While contributing to debates on civil society in Imperial Russia, Frame's work cannot be said to transform scholarly conceptions of the subject; his discussions of civil society, based primarily upon thewritings of Ernest Gellner, do not fully take into account the enormous scholarship on the topic that has emerged in recent years. His focus on Moscow and St Petersburg, albeit with occasional reference to the provinces, also limits the extent to which his arguments can be applied to the vast Russian Empire as a whole. That being said, the book makes a significant contribution to our understand ing of the role of theatre inRussia and the broader changes taking place in Russian society over the course of the long nineteenth century. Department of History Jeffrey Veidlinger Indiana University, Bloomington Wachtel, Andrew Baruch. Plays of Expectations: Intertextual Relations in Russian Twentieth-Century Drama. Donald W. Treadgold Studies on Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia. Herbert J. Ellison Center forRussia, East European, and Central Asian Studies, University of Washington, Seattle, WA and London, 2006. vii + 163 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. ?i3-99 (paperback). In his thought-provoking study, Andrew Baruch Wachtel examines how dramatists play with the expectations of audience members by using refer ences to other literary texts and traditions to create intertextual dialogues. These dialogues both informan audience's interpretation of a work and invite audience members to make assumptions about what will unfold on stage ? assumptions which may then be fulfilledor confounded. Noting that poetic (and, to a lesser extent, prose) works are a more usual subject of intertextual inquiry,Wachtel argues that in drama, intertextual practice gives rise to a number of additional complexities. When the author Il8 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 2009 of a poem quotes from or makes reference to material from another literary source, its effectdepends primarily on the individual reader's own reading experience ? whether or not he or she recognizes the citation, and what impact thishas on his or her interpretation of the poem. When suchmaterial appears in a novel, the reader must also consider from whose perspective the quotation comes ? if from the narrator, are the characters aware of the intertextual play; if from a character, are the other characters aware of it, and is themeaning for each character (and the reader) the same? In performance, Wachtel argues, these questions are further complicated by the communal nature of the audience; by the fact that the text is filtered through actors and directors; and by theuse of non-verbal intertexts. Thus an individual spectator who does not recognize an intertextual play may become aware that some thing is going on by the reaction of other audience members; or a director may ask an actor to mimic a gesture made in another well-known production, which is familiar to audience members, (but not to the characters in the play ? who presumably do not share the same 'theatrical memory' as their audience). Wachtel's list could also include the 'real time' nature of perfor mance: readers of poetry...