bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Tragical in Daily Life (1894)
Authors: Maeterlinck Maurice
Published: November 2023

The following essay by the playwright, poet, and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) was first published in Le Figaro in 1894. This manifesto, widely noted at the time and frequently quoted since, called for a new type of drama, a drama of stasis. The theory came on the heels of the success of Maeterlinck’s early plays—e.g. The Blind and The Intruder (both 1890)—which had death at the centre of the action, or rather inaction, and which had caused the young author to be hailed by one French critic as the ‘Belgian Shakespeare’. With their emphasis on stillness and inwardness, these plotless ‘death dramas’ were like motionless tableaux rather than dramatic events in the conventional sense. They set out to capture a timeless moment which would invite the spectators to contemplate ineffable mysteries in a meditative frame of mind. While the ‘soulful’, 1890-ish style of the essay may well strike the modern reader as dated; while Maeterlinck’s approach to dramatic structure was diametrically opposed to what, from Aristotle onwards, had always been regarded as the one essential ingredient of drama, viz.
The Theatre (1899)
Authors: Yeats William Butler
Published: November 2023

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, is very much better known and appreciated as a poet than as a playwright. However, he devoted much of his life to drama and in particular to the creation of an Irish theatre. The thematic and stylistic range of his plays was wide—from symbolist verse dramas, many of them concerned with the deeds of the mythical Irish hero Cuchulain, to prose plays situated in the present; but the underlying tone was consistently non-rhetorical and informed with an awareness of mystical powers. In their revulsion against the prosiness of naturalism, Yeats’s efforts had their visual correlative in Gordon Craig (see pp. 138-44), who designed special screens for the Abbey Theatre in 1911. But this Irish National Theatre, which Yeats helped to found, was never to become the powerhouse for a new poetic drama that he had dreamt it would. The two essays quoted below are from different periods of his work as a playwright and theorist of drama, but both reveal a persistent attitude: a preference for poetic otherworldliness, to be conveyed by actors skilled above all in verse-speaking.
On the Art of the Theatre: The First Dialogue (1905) An Expert and a Playgoer are Conversing (1911)
Authors: Craig Edward Gordon
Published: November 2023

The practical amount of stage work-as actor, director, and designer-that Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966) accomplished in a lifetime dedicated to the theatre was actually quite modest; the influence of his ideas, however, has been immense. He tirelessly argued that the theatre was more than just an interpretative enterprise and claimed for it the status of an autonomous art form in its own right. This was to be craft-based and integrated (as the music-drama had been in Wagner’s hands) by the dominant figure of the all-powerful stage-director. Craig spread his anti-naturalist message in the quarterly magazine, The Mask, which he edited virtually singlehanded from 1908 to 1929, as well as in his books, often lavishly illustrated by himself-notably in The Art of the Theatre (1905) and its revised version, On the Art of the Theatre (1911).
Organic Unity (1921)
Authors: Appia Adolphe
Published: November 2023

The life’s work of the Swiss stage designer and theorist Adolphe Appia (1862-1928) paralleled that of the other great theatrical innovator, Gordon Craig. Both Appia and Craig undermined the supremacy of the scenic theatre which had dominated Euro-pean staging methods since the Renaissance; their new thinking inevitably questioned conventional notions of drama as well. Like Craig, whom he knew but with whom he never collaborated, Appia called for the unifying artistic control of a director-designer. Like him, he felt that the illusionistic theatre-no matter whether romantic or naturalistic-had arrived at an artistic dead end. Like Craig, Appia sketched out a revolutionary approach to production but he, too-whether by reason of personality or unfavourable external circumstances-rarely had a chance to put his ideas into practice.
Preface to Methusalem, the Eternal Bourgeois (1922)
Authors: Goll Yvan
Published: November 2023

Aristophanes, Plautus, Molière had an easy time of it: they achieved their greatest impact by the simplest means in the world: by cudgelling or symbolical bastinados. We have lost that sort of naivety. The clown in the circus and Chaplin in the cinema still box people’s ears: but those are the moments when the audience laughs least. A basic naivety is lacking. Or is it due to our more refined sensibility? Surely it is; but what about that of the people? Even in army barracks, corporal punishment is now taboo: not so in Aristophanes’ and Moliere’s day. Anyway, modern man carries a stick much less often than a revolver. But a pistol-shot is not so funny as a blow with a stick.
On a New Type of Play (1920)
Authors: Witkiewicz Stanisław lgnacy
Published: November 2023

The widely travelled and eccentric Polish avant-garde artist Stanis ław lgnacy Witkiewicz (1885-1930) was not only a playwright, novelist, and painter but also a photographer, aesthetician, philosopher, and an expert on narcotics. Author of over thirty plays (many of them unpublished and unperformed during his lifetime), he called himself ‘Witkacy’ to avoid being confused with his better known father, like himself a writer and painter. Witkacy’s Theory of Pure Form in the Theatre was inspired as much by formalist innovations in painting and by post-Newtonian scientific concepts as by purely literary ideas.
The London Controversy: Tynan v. Ionesco (1958)
Authors: Ionesco Tynan V
Published: November 2023

It seems appropriate to end this section with some quotations from an unusual literary event: an eloquent head-on clash between the arguments for objective, realistic drama and the counter-arguments against it. This controversy, fought out during the months of June and July 1958 in the pages of the British Sunday newspaper, the Observer, was triggered by a revival of Eugene Ionesco’s one-act plays, The Chairs and The Lesson, at the Royal Court Theatre, London.
The Programme of the Proletarian Theatre (1920)
Authors: Piscator Erwin
Published: November 2023

A comparison of Toiler’s explanation of the background of Masses and Man (see previous item) with the programme put forward by the director Erwin Piscator (1893-1966) as the policy for a newly established political theatre company clearly shows the wide differences between various forms of committed theatre, in Germany as elsewhere. The manifesto reproduced below was issued in 1920 on behalf of the Proletarian Theatre, a group recently founded under the auspices of several left-wing political parties as well as working-class and allied organizations; published in the special October 1920 issue of the magazine Der Gegner, this was later reproduced in Piscator’s book, Das Politische Theater (1929), in which he argued the case for a socially progressive theatre on the basis of his own, by then substantial, production record.
A Short Organum for the Theatre (1948)
Authors: Brecht Bertolt
Published: November 2023

This, the fullest exposition of Brecht’s theory of drama and theatre, was written in Switzerland in 1948, on his return to Europe from American exile. It represents a partial revision of his earlier doctrine (see the previous item, pp. 224-31) which had emphasized the social function of drama to the near-exclusion of aesthetic considerations. In the Short Organum for the Theatre Brecht allowed more ample room to aesthetics but did not repudiate the notion of theatre as a socially responsive and responsible instrument-which to him meant interpreting life from a socialist point of view. Drama qua text is linked here with all the aspects of stage production, and this includes the much discussed A-effect, particularly in relation to acting technique.
Psychic Polyphony (1986)
Authors: Carlson Marvin
Published: November 2023

The American scholar Marvin Albert Carlson (b. 1935), who has taught theatre and drama at Cornell and Indiana University, is perhaps best known for his authoritative contributions to the history of the French, German, and Italian theatre from the eighteenth century onwards. Professor Carlson’s interests have extended from theatre history into the field of theatre theory in general and theatre semiotics in particular. The following essay from his book on the latter subject highlights a hitherto insufficiently theorized aspect of performance.
Cinema and Wireless in Turn of the Century Popular Imagination
Authors: Boddy William
Published: November 2023

Historians Of Early cinema and electronic media have long operated in mutual isolation, drawing upon quite distinct historiographic assumptions, methods, and research materials. This isolation is remarkable, not only given the historical coincidence of the technological development of both cinema and the wireless at the end of the nineteenth century, but also in light of the ways in which popular responses to the anticipation and early experience of both media speak to a common set of cultural anxieties and ambitions.
Weather Porn and the Battle for Eyeballs: The Transition to Digital Broadcasting in the USA and UK
Authors: Boddy William
Published: November 2023

As Popular Press interest in the fanciful imaginative landscapes of virtual reality faded, the late 1990s marked the culmination of a long technological, policy-making, and marketing campaign waged by a diverse set of private interests to bring digital television into American and British homes. An examination of digital television’s distinct fortunes in the United States and Great Britain offers revealing insights into some of the most persistent and difficult issues in media historiography, including the roles of national culture, market structures, and ideological valence in setting the course of technological innovation.
Redefining the Home Screen: The Case of the Digital Video Recorder
Authors: Boddy William
Published: November 2023

One Way To Assess the significance of recent technological innova tions associated with the shift from analogue to digital television platforms in the United States is to chart their impact upon traditional assumptions about television and its audience, assumptions themselves informed by specific historical forces within and beyond the television industry. The turmoil which accompanied the medium’s transition to digital standards at the end of the 1990s threw into stark relief how far the industry had moved from the instrumental fantasies of reception, ontology, and national identity associated with the era of network television in the USA from the 1940s into the 1980s, with its apotheosis in the period of the early 1960s described in Chapter 3.
High Tech in a Falling Market: Interactivity and Advertising Form in Contemporary US Television
Authors: Boddy William
Published: November 2023

Despite a decade of both apocalyptic and utopian predictions about life in the ‘post-television era’, the effects of technological and industrial realignments upon actual viewing practices and the advertising and programme forms of American television are still quite uncertain. This chapter provides a context for understanding these contemporary disputes through two case studies: the long and unhappy commercial history of interactive television over the past thirty years, and the recent controversies over changing programme and advertising practices which are seen as one industry response to the challenge of a new, technologically empowered television viewer.
‘Too Easy, Too Cheap and Too Fast to Control’: Intellectual Property Battles in Digital Television
Authors: Boddy William
Published: November 2023

Many Of The Prevailing assumptions about the future of movingimage culture in the United States which emerged out of the consumer prosperity and booming capital markets of the 1990s were suddenly subjected to new scrutiny in the wake of economic recession and military mobilization at the end of 2001. This chapter examines some of the implications for media scholars and educators of the media landscape transformed by the precipitous declines in share prices, advertising expenditures, and consumer confidence. The first years of the new millennium were marked by additional disruptions in an already unsettled environment for technological innovation within moving-image industries in the United States.
The Knight’s Tale
Authors: Cooper Helen
Published: November 2023

The Knight’s Tale was originally written as a separate work, apparently before Chaucer conceived the idea of the Canterbury Tales. The evidence for this lies in the reference to it in both versions of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, where Alceste lists it among Chaucer’s works as ‘al the love of Palamon and Arcite|Of Thebes’ (F. 420-1, G. 408-9). The dates of the two versions of the Prologue are themselves uncertain, but the earlier was probably written about 1386.
The Reeve’s Tale
Authors: Cooper Helen
Published: November 2023

The Miller’s Tale is greeted by most of the pilgrims with laughter: Chaucer disarms potential moral objections by refusing to let it be taken too seriously. The only pilgrim who raises particular objections does so for entirely the wrong reasons. The Reeve, himself a carpenter, takes it as a personal insult, and determines to ‘quite’ the Miller in his own ‘cherles termes’ (3916-17). The relationship of the two tales is thus grounded in the dramatic quarrel of the tellers; but the quarrel itself makes a literary point, for it is itself a churlish way of behaving, and the distance of the fabliaux from any notions of courtesy or gentillesse is emphasized by that fact. Ill will motivates the telling of the Reeve’s Tale as later it inspires the Friar’s and Summoner’s; the goodwill of the gentils gives rise to the Franklin’s romance as a response to the Squire’s.
The Man of Law’s Tale
Authors: Cooper Helen
Published: November 2023

The Introduction covers two distinct sections, the Proem, or, as the Ellesmere manuscript calls it, ‘the wordes of the Hoost to the compaignye’, and the Man of Law’s rhyme royal Prologue to his tale. Together they raise a multitude of unanswered questions, and few lines are altogether unproblematic.
The Franklin’s Tale
Authors: Cooper Helen
Published: November 2023

In a number of manuscripts, including Hengwrt, the Merchant-Squire link is used as the Franklin’s Prologue, and the words that follow the unfinished Squire’s Tale are given, not to the Franklin, but to the Merchant, to introduce his tale. This is, for once, demonstrably wrong: both the awkward substitution of ‘quod the Merchaunt certeyn’ for ‘quod the Frankeleyn’ in 699, and the concern of both the link and the following tale with gentillesse, confirm that Chaucer wrote the lines for the Franklin. It is Chaucer’s standard practice to introduce a tale’s theme in its preceding link. The prologues to the cherles tales demonstrate churlishness; the link between the romances demonstrates courtesy and good will.
The Tale of Sir Thopas
Authors: Cooper Helen
Published: November 2023

The ‘miracle’, so defined in this link, leaves the pilgrims in a solemn mood, and so Harry Bailly calls for ‘a tale of myrthe’ from his next victim— Chaucer himself. He is undistinguished by any professional definition— ‘What man artow?’—but the Host has high hopes of his producing ‘som deyntee thyng’. Harry Bailly also, in passing, makes some comments on the pilgrim Chaucer’s portliness, his habit of staring at the ground, and his detachment from the company: the nearest thing we have to a portrait of Chaucer, if the Host (or the poet Chaucer) can be trusted. As with the Monk and Nun’s Priest later in the Fragment, his comments extend from appearance to some hazards as to his sex life.
The Monk’s Tale
Authors: Cooper Helen
Published: November 2023

The first thirty lines of the AL/i/w-Monk link look backwards to the treatise, as the Host gives a vivid account of his own home life that stands in alarming contrast to Melibee’s. His wife—Goodelief, if that is her name and not an epithet, ‘goode lief’—‘nys no thyng of swich patience’ as Prudence; instead of restraining him from vengeance, she encourages his violence to the point where he is afraid he will murder at her instigation (1917/3107). If Prudence adopted the male function of the dispassionate wise counsellor and governor, Goodelief invites a more domestic exchange of sexual roles:
Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres
Authors: Gurr Andrew , Ichikawa Mariko
Published: November 2023

Shakespeare and his fellow-playwrights wrote their scripts for stages and audiences that were very different from what we are used to now. As writers for those remote stages they saw their scripts not as words to be read on the page but to be spoken, delivered as a means of telling a story through dialogue and action. What they expected from the forms of’ action’ , the process of acting out the narrative, was embodied in the scripts they wrote for the playing companies. Whereas a modern audience at a cinema could expect a gesture to ‘ yonder mountain’ to be accompanied by a picture of the real thing, Elizabethans would see the speaker’ s gesture as an indication of where it was assumed to be, but would also know that the reference directed them to imagine some thing that was not there. Piecing out, as the Prologue to Henry V suggests, the deficiencies of the stage setting (‘ our imperfections’ )
Introduction
Authors: Stříbrný Zdeněk
Published: November 2023

In Eastern Europe, more than anywhere else, Shakespeare’s plays have recently been appropriated for political interpretations, as will be shown in the latter parts of this book. Although such a topical approach to Shakespeare may be of special interest to the Western reader, I shall also try and explain how major East European poets, dramatists, novelists, translators, and critics, as well as actors, directors, designers, film-makers, composers, and other artists, have contributed to a better knowledge and appreciation of his work. The earliest example is the Prague engraver Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-77), whose drawings and etchings of seventeenth-century London have become an indispensable visual source for the modern reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe, opened on the Bankside in Southwark in 19961. My intention is to give Eastern Europe its due and thus contribute to a fuller survey of Shakespeare’s impact on the whole of Europe.
History
Authors: Danson Lawrence
Published: November 2023

BETWEEN comedy and tragedy in the Shakespeare Folio of 1623 comes history. It is a suggestive arrangement but, like the individual plays within the category, capable of suggesting competing possibilities. Does history bridge the distance between comedy and tragedy, drawing on the conventions of both? Or is history what separates comedy from tragedy, the intrusive world of’ real’ events which turns comedy’s dream of renewal into tragedy’s anxious recognition of limitation ? Or does the placement of history signify nothing more than the editors’ knowledge that most of Shakespeare’s tragedies were written later than most of his histories?
4 November 1816, Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) on Edmund Kean as Timon of Athens at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, from The Examiner, reprinted in Leigh Hunt’s Dramatic Criticism I8o8-I8JI, ed. L. H. and C. W. Houtchens (New York, 1949), pp. 134-9.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

Ames Henry Leigh Hunt, essayist, cnt1c, and poet, is described by his editors, William Archer and Robert W. Lowe, as ‘the first English dramatic critic’ in the sense that he was ‘the first writer of any note who made it his business to see and report upon all the principal theatrical events of the day’. He wrote theatre criticism for The News from May 1805 till the end of 1807, for his own paper, The Examiner, from January 1808 till February 1813, and for The Tatler from September 1830 till February 1832. His reviews for The News appeared as Critical Essays on the Peiformers of the London Theatres in 1807.
[1856], Theodor Fontane (1819-98) on Charles Kean’s production of The Winter’s Tale at the Princess’s Theatre, London, translated by Russell Jackson from Fontane’s pamphlet Die Londoner Theater, mit besondere Rii.cksicht au/ Shakespeare (1858), reprinted in his collected Causerien uber Theater, vols. 22-3, pp. 7-n7, ed. Edgar Gross and Rainer Bachmann, in collaboration with Kurt Schreinert. The appended diary entry is from vol. 17 of the same edition, pp. 556-7-
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

Charles Kean (18n-68), Eton-educated, respectable, earnest, scholarly-he became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1857-was in many ways the antithesis of his disreputable genius of a father, Edmund. Along with his wife, the actress formerly known as Ellen Tree (1805-80), he managed the Princess’s Theatre, London, from 1850 to 1859, putting on with great popular success elaborate productions of eighteen Shakespeare plays along with spectacular historical dramas that have not maintained their place in the repertoire.
24 April 1858, Charles Kean’s production of (and performance in) King Lear, anonymous review from The Illustrated London News, reprinted in Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare, edited by Ga.mini Salgado (1975), pp. 28190.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

The revival of the ‘Lear,’ as we had previously announced, took place on Saturday evening at this theatre, and fully justified the expectations that had been formed: we may add, more than justified them, and in ways that had not been previously imagined. There is always danger in scenic illustration, pictorially carried out and archaeologically conducted, that the spectacular will overlay the dramatic, and thus the poetic and histrionic suffer from too violent a contrast with the stage appointments. In this case nothing of the kind happens.
[c.1850-c.1860], Henry Austin Clapp (1841-1904), on Charlotte Cushman (1816-76) as een Katharine in Henry VIII, from his Reminiscences of a Dramatic Critic (Boston and New York, 1902), pp. 86-92.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

Clapp was theatre critic for the Boston Daily Advertiser from 1868 to 1902, and for the Boston Herald from 1902 to 1904-He had a high reputation for fairness and incorruptibility. The American Charlotte Cushman began her career as an opera singer, unsuccessfully playing the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro in her nineteenth year; the following year she acted Lady Macbeth, and she went on to become the leading American actress of her time, often playing with Mac¬ ready. She made her London debut at the Princess’s Theatre with Edwin Forrest in 1845. She frequently played men, and was especially fine as Romeo. Her first performance as Qgeen Katharine was in 1839; in 1857 she added Cardinal Wolsey, in the same play, to her list of roles.
30 May 1903, Max Beerbohm on Much Ado About Nothing at the Imperial Theatre, London, with Ellen Terry as Beatrice and designs by Gordon Craig, from The Saturday Review, reprinted in his More Theatres (1969), pp. 573-6.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

Beatrice was one of Ellen Terry’s finest roles; she played it from 1880, frequently with Irving at the Lyceum, and finally, in 1916, for a charity matinee at the Middle Temple. The performance reviewed by Beerbohm was given during a season which she put on at the Imperial Theatre mainly as a showcase for the talents as a designer of her son, (Edward) Gordon Craig (1872-1968). Beerbohm was exceptional in his understanding and appreciation of Craig’s avant-garde methods, which have had a profound influence on twentieth¬ century theatre. The garden setting is illustrated in Pl. 7.
30 August 1925, Hubert Griffith (1896-1953) on Hamlet directed by Barry Jackson (1879-1961) at the Kingsway Theatre, London, from The Observer, reprinted in Specimens of English Dramatic Criticism, ed. A. C. Ward (1945), pp. 301 n
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

Do you know what it is when some scheme, thought of its nature to be beyond attainment, is suddenly, to use a phrase eternally current It is, I assure you, a highly exhilarating feeling. There must always have been among those who feel any curiosity about Hamlet at all, a curiosity to be able to judge Hamlet as though, by some inconceivable flight of burning genius, a modern playwright, say Tchekhov,1 had written it. All the idea needed, as it happens, was a few dress suits and a few Court uniforms. But no one before Sir Barry Jackson happened to think of it, and now Sir Barry Jackson and his company have done it.
17 October 1935, James Agate on John Gielgud’s production of
Romeo and Juliet
at the New Theatre, London, with John Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft (1907-91), Laurence Olivier (190189) and Edith Evans (1888-1976), from
The Sunday Times,
reprinted in his
Brief Chronicles: A Survey of the Plays of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans in actual performance
(1943), pp. 208-12.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

Thursday evening was all that an evening in the theatre should be-exciting, moving, provocative. Here in conjunction were the flower of Shakespeare’s young genius and the best of young English acting talent. The producer was our leading Shakespearean actor, and the scenery and costumes were by the artists who had attained fame through the productions of Richard of Bordeaux and Hamlet. In other words, Mr. Gielgud had once more invested him in his Motley” and given these young ladies leave to speak his mind. Let me begin with a word or two about the production, normally tucked away at the end.
[1947], Kenneth Tynan on Donald Wolfit and Frederick Valk (1895-1956) in Othello at the Savoy Theatre, London, in his He that Plays the King pp. 84-8.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

To be present, to assist at the spinning out of events which will surely plume up and refurbish the tapestry of Western culture— is not this a pleasant thing? Had it not been fine to have snapped up and savoured the first copy of The Rape of the Loe# as it came, cool and acid and fair, from the press? To have seen and shaken at the face of Swift2 as he penned the last cruel, grimy pages of Gulliver? To have sat by and quivered at the embarrassed wriggles of some poor questioner, swallowed up in the terrific finality of a Johnsonian3 ‘No, sir ? My point, when at last it comes wheeling round to us, is that I have seen a public event of constellated magnitude and radiance.
[1950], Richard David (1912-93) on
Measure far Measure
directed by Peter Brook (born 1925) at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, with John Gielgud and Barbara Jefford, from
Shakespeare Survey 4
(1951), pp. 135-8.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

The simplicity of the text of Measure far Measure, as compared with that of Love’s Labour’s Lost, is a function of its more serious mood. It is a play of ideas rather than of impressions and is concerned more with lines of conduct followed out to their logical conclusions than with the confusions and compromises of real life. There is still controversy as to how far these ideas form a coherent argument, and Shakespeare Survey’ has already given space to notable pleadings on either side. The one maintains that Measure far Measure is Shakespeare’s considered opinion on the apparent conflict in Renaissance theory between the Christian duty of the Ruler to secure Justice, and that of the individual to be merciful.
[1978], Roger Warren on
Love’s Labour’s Lost
directed by John Barton at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon; from
Shakespeare Survey 32
(1979), pp. 208-9.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

In his 1965 production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, John Barton sought to ‘explore the relationships of the characters beneath the highly jewelled surface’: the 1978 version took this process further, and paid even less attention to surface glitter. True, Ralph Koltai’s’ set was exquisitely beautiful and appropriate, enormous boughs of cascading autumnal leaves entirely enclosing a raked wooden forestage, behind which seats and a leaf-strewn floor suggested distant parkland. But there was no external glamour about the two courts, which seemed humbler, less formal, than usual: the lords took their oaths with little ceremony on a rustic seat; Rosaline cleaned the Princess’s travelling boots and the travel stained hem of her skirt in their first scene, and swept up autumn leaves with a broom in the last; the King and the Princess, especially, were very unelaborate, untidy even, in appearance, ordinary human beings rather than heads of state, especially when they first met, a rather endearingly unimpressive, bespectacled pair: a long silence indicated sudden (to them embarrassing) mutual attraction.
[March 1985], Nicholas Shrimpton (born 1948) on a production of the First Quarto version of Hamlet at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, Surrey, in Shakespeare Survey 39 (1987), pp. 193-7.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

The first version of Hamlet to be printed is the quarto of 1603, known as the “bad’ quarto because it appears to derive from an unauthorized text, perhaps compiled from memory by actors who had taken part in performances by Shakespeare’s company. In literary quality it is far inferior to the ‘good’ quarto of 1604 and to the version printed in the Folio of 1623; nevertheless, it has interesting differences, especially in structure, from those texts; it may incorporate revisions made for performances by Shakespeare’s company, and it provides information about early performances of the play, whether authorized or not.
[1992], Peter Holland (born 1951) on
Richard III
produced by Barrie Rutter for Northern Broadsides on tour, from
Shakespeare Survey 47
(1994), pp. 185-7.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

No one could accuse Barrie Rutter’s production of Richard III of taking its time. Spoken at high speed, the text whistled by, concentrating attention on the thrill of the unfolding narrative, the vitality of the characters’ relationships and the verve of the actors, much more than on the possible virtues of individual line-readings. Only rarely so fast as to be breathless, the lines had an easiness and immediacy, almost a contemporaneity, by the way they seemed to fit the actors’ tongues so naturally.
Shakespeare from the Margins
Authors: Taylor Michael
Published: November 2023

Politics in the widest sense of the word has always been a factor in the annals of literary criticism. If literature is what gets taught, as Roland Barthes believed, then what gets taught does not appear on the n twentieth-century curriculum by some kind of magical process but as the result of complicated, sometimes obscure, cultural movements. How what gets taught is similarly inflected politically. What was once a dominant method of reading Shakespeare may now be banished to the critical hinterland while something more responsive to the temper of our times takes its place, perhaps rescued from a dusty corner of the past or brought in spanking new from Yale or Paris. Sometimes a dominant method of reading Shakespeare fades into marginality then gets a new lease of life and shifts back to the centre again for a while. This is what has happened to reading Shakespeare as though his characters had inferable identities, though what is now inferred about them at the end of the twentieth century may well be very different from what A. C. Bradley found worthy of inferring about them at the beginning. More often than not, as we have seen in the course of this book, semi-defunct methodologies retain a vestigial Ricker of relevance or get transformed into something along similar but more fashionable lines. Hence the diffusion, for instance, of Christian criticism at the end of the century into an undenominational and undoctrinal spirituality. What was once central becomes marginal; what was once on the outside looking in is now the latest orthodoxy.
Introduction
Authors: Smith Bruce R
Published: November 2023

About a quarter of the way through The Tragedy of King Lear there comes a moment in which Lear, in a phrase widely understood today, ‘loses it’. What he loses is not just his self-control but his masculinity. The Fool has been taunting Lear with Goneril and Regan’s ingrati tude, when Lear exclaims: The precise terms in which Lear expresses his passion are gendered: ‘this mother’ he calls it and visualizes it as a womb inside his body. Hystera is the Greek word for womb, which in Galenic medicine was imagined to have no fixed place but to wander about the entire body cavity, producing ‘hysterical’ behaviour.
Introduction
Authors: Jones Anny Brooksbank , Davies Catherine
Published: November 2023

The common root of crisis and criticism in a moment of decision is by now familiar. However, the juxtaposition of crisis and theory in our title invokes a more telling and timely relation, and a more decisive way of looking at both. It acknowledges theory’s central but contested place in contemporary academic writing and it recognizes that in Latin American studies these tensions are compounded when theory declares itself feminist.
Literary Constructions and Gender Performance in the Novels of Norah Lange
Authors: DomίNguez Nora
Published: November 2023

Few Argentinian women have written more compellingly on the family than has Norah Lange. Her narrative reveals precisely how the modern family imaginary is constructed, and its crucial role in the definition of a writing project. Each of her novels registers the strength and resilience of the family model. They also demonstrate its complexity and diversity, and the process by which family and narrative articulate, condense, and manipulate material from the socio-political and subjective spheres. From Cuadernos de infancia (1937) onwards, Lange reworks these concerns until, with Los dosretratos (1956), the model breaks down. Each reformulation supports and inflects the family model, enabling Lange to create a very personal articulation of literature and gender.
Blood and Mirrors Imagery of Violence in the Writings of Alejandra Pizarnik
Authors: Bassnett Susan
Published: November 2023

IN his reflections on Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation, Derrida questions Foucault’s premiss that the history of madness is an archaeology of silence and asks whether there can even be such an enterprise as a history of silence.
Cross-Cultural Homebodies 1n Cuba The Poetry of Excilia Saldaña
Authors: Davies Catherine
Published: November 2023

Studies of Caribbean writing consistently draw attention to the polyphony, incompleteness, and ambivalence of its discourse. Similarly, they point to the precarious stance of Caribbean authors who are positioned at the crossroads of multiply interacting and hierarchically structured cultures and ethnicities. The resulting ‘creative schizophrenia’ is said to give rise to the split writer who bears the ‘wounds of fragmentation’ of the dissociated, alienated self (Gilkes 1986: 1). The situation is inevitably compounded when the author is a woman, when the problematic involves not only class lived through race but race and economics lived through gender. In this essay I suggest that W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, or the double-voiced, ‘two-toned’ text referred to in African-American criticism (Gates 1984: 3), is inadequate to account for the fine shades of gendered ontological presence and hermeneutical practice in the work of Caribbean women writers, specifically black women writers in post-revolutionary Cuba. To engage with a feminist aesthetics of pluralism in a Caribbean context, a more subtle critical approach than that proposed by black essentialism and a more politically grounded approach than black deconstruction is needed.
Sources and Influences
Authors: Harding Phillip
Published: November 2023

An investigation and evaluation of the sources of a fragmentary work like the Atthis is much more complex than that of a fully preserved narrative. It is very rarely, if ever, possible to define the source(s) of the brief and often cryptic citations we have. All too often, then, source-criticism of the Atthidographers is more a matter of establishing what sources they could have used than whether they did, in fact, use them. The situation is further complicated by the great expanse of time covered by the Atthis, during which source material would have varied greatly. It would be crude to divide the subject-matter of the Atthis into mythical (the royal period down to the first archon, 683/2), pre-contemporary-historical (for the period 683/2 to c.500), and contemporary-historical, since these are arbitrary divisions and imprecise, especially in the case of the last, which will shift downwards with the date of each Atthidographer.
Intention and Interpretation
Authors: MacDowell Douglas M
Published: November 2023

Is it possible for us to understand an ancient comedy? The obstacles are formidable. This is not just because our copies are derived from manuscripts containing scribal errors, written in an ancient language which we know imperfectly; those are difficulties in any classical Greek text, but modern scholarship has done much to correct the errors of transmission and to improve our knowledge of the language. But a play was more than a text.
The Audience and its Expectations
Authors: MacDowell Douglas M
Published: November 2023

For the Athenians, a play was a special occasion. Now we are accustomed to seeing plays at any time, but in the fifth century BC plays were performed within the town’ of Athens at only two periods of the year. Both were festivals of Dionysos: the town Dionysia, which took six days in the month Elaphebolion (which roughly corresponded to our month of March), and the Lenaia, lasting four days in Gamelion (approximately January).’ These festivals were celebrations in honour of the god, and they included religious ceremonies, processions, and choral performances as well as plays. There were plays also at local festivals (the rural Dionysia), for example at Peiraieus and Eleusis, but little is known about those. It is possible that new plays were always performed first in the town, and the rural Dionysia saw only revivals.
Horsemen
Authors: MacDowell Douglas M
Published: November 2023

The title of Aristophanes’ play performed at the Lenaia of 424 BC has usually been translated into English as Knights. That is a misleading name. In modern Britain a knight is a gentleman, usually over fifty years of age, who has been rewarded with the appellation ‘Sir’ in recognition of his services to administration, business, the arts, or some other field of public endeavour. Most knights have probably never ridden a horse in their lives. The title of Aristophanes’ play, by contrast, refers to the men, probably all young, who rode horses for their service in the Athenian army. Cavalry might be a suitable translation, but even that is not entirely satisfactory, since cavalry now generally use motor vehicles rather than horses. It is better, following the example of Bugh’s book The Horsemen of Athens, to use the name Horsemen, which translates the Greek word more literally and less misleadingly.
Clouds
Authors: MacDowell Douglas M
Published: November 2023

In Clouds Aristophanes moves away from the political topics of Akharnians and Horsemen to a theme much closer to that of his first play, Banqueters: the education offered by sophists, especially in rhetoric. As in Banqueters, he uses a father-son relationship to dramatize it, but this time in a subtler way. Whereas Banqueters, as far as we can tell from the fragments, simply presented an old-fashioned father with two sons, of whom one learned the new rhetoric and the other did not, in Clouds the father urges his only son to take lessons from the sophists; when the son refuses, the father tries to take lessons instead, and then, when the father has failed, the son learns rhetoric in the end. This makes a more complex and varied plot.’ Except in one scene near the end, the play does not present a conflict between an old man representing what is old and a young man representing what is new, and modern interpretations in terms of ‘the generation gap” are wide of the mark.
Lysistrata
Authors: MacDowell Douglas M
Published: November 2023

The title of the play is a woman’s name, and women predominate in the cast and in the action. We do not know how much of an innovation this was. There had been many tragedies about women; perhaps there had been comedies about women too. But if so, they are lost; the only women in surviving earlier comedies are minor characters.’ For us, comedy about women begins with Lysistrata.
From the French Revolution to Napoleon
Authors: Grab Alexander
Published: November 2023

‘In the beginning was Napoleon. His influence upon the history of the German people, their lives and experiences was overwhelming’. This statement by Thomas Nipperdey on Germany applies also to Italy. The Napoleonic invasion into northern Italy in 1796 laid the foundations of the modern Italian state and society and launched the long march toward the peninsula’s unification. No other country except Germany was so affected by Napoleonic rule. Before 1796, Italy was divided into ten states: the Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont); the Duchy of Milan, belonging to the Habsburg Empire; the republics of Venice, Genoa, and Lucca; the Papal State; the Duchies of Modena and Parma; the Grand Duchy of Tuscany; and the Kingdom of Naples, which included Sicily.
Religion and society, 1789–1892
Authors: Kertzer David I
Published: November 2023

Whether looked at from the viewpoint of culture or politics, the Roman Catholic Church looms large in the history of Italy in the nineteenth century. Not only was Italy an overwhelmingly Catholic land, but, as the home of the Holy See-with the pope and his curia-it lay at the centre of Roman Catholicism worldwide. Developments affecting the Church thus had implications far beyond Italy’s borders, implications that in turn affected life in Italy in major ways. Moreover, in a large swath cutting across the centre of the Italian peninsula, that of the Papal States, the pope was not only a religious leader but the political leader as well, head of the government.
Culture and society, 1796–1896
Authors: Grew Raymond
Published: November 2023

Concern for culture held a central place in Italian intellectual life. In the eighteenth century, the elites of Sicily and Naples were connected to those of Lombardy, the Veneto, and Piedmont by cultural ties more than by political or economic interests. Learned treatises on the subjects of the day and individual artists and intellectuals moved from city to city more easily than any commerce in material goods. Educated Italians took delight in their common culture: the Latin classics; Dante, and all the Italian poets after him; five centuries of paintings and sculptures recognized as Italian, and music that was admired and imitated across Europe. Culture ranked with geography-Italy’s distinctive shape, clear boundaries, and picturesque terrain-as a marker of Italian identity.
France in the l930s
Authors: Larkin Maurice
Published: November 2023

FRANCE in the 1930s was geographically the most varied country in Western Europe, stretching from the wind-swept agricultural plains of the north to the sun-baked scrubland of the Mediterranean. Its lateral sweep was no less chequered, ranging from the vineyards and sandy forests of the Atlantic seaboard to Europe’s highest mountain range in the east. If its mineral deposits were poor, its diversity of crops was prodigious, extending from potatoes and beet in the north to rice and olives in the south. Its wild animals included the seals of the Somme Estuary and the bears of the Pyrenees; there were wild boar within thirty miles of Paris, and scorpions in the gardens of Nice. And all this within a country that lay between narrower latitudes than the British Isles. Its variety of life and spectacle was such that even half a century later the great majority of its people chose to spend their holidays in France.
‘La République des Députés’ Politics in the 1930s
Authors: Larkin Maurice
Published: November 2023

To foreign observers, French politics and government seemed impossibly quarrelsome, unstable, and plagued with a multiplicity of parties. Forty years later, the President of the Republic was still lamenting that ‘it is as though political debate was not a competition between two points of view, but the confrontation of two rival and mutually exclusive truths ... Its style is that of a war of religion’. And in the 1930s the debate was rarely between less than six points of view. Indeed, Elliot Paul was driven to comment: ‘political parties, in the interests of clarity, should not have names but numbers, like football players on the field’. The impossibility of finding stable majorities on which to rest an effective government was the source of innumerable weary jokes: ‘American tourists go to London to see the changing of the guard, and then on to Paris to see the changing of the government’, etc., etc.
The Popular Front Legend and Legacy
Authors: Larkin Maurice
Published: November 2023

France was traditionally a country of challenge and frustration for socialists. It had Europe’s longest record of universal male suffrage, and had provided socialism with a large proportion of its leading thinkers in the nineteenth century. Moreover, the Paris Commune of 1871 had created the myth of Europe’s first socialist government, a victory of international brotherhood destroyed by the self-interest of the possessing classes with the connivance of German militarism. Initially a figment of French conservative propaganda, this myth had been developed by the Left in a variety of conflicting forms, each suited to the polemical needs of the particular sect that propagated it. And yet France was to offer little again in the way of precept or example.
The Road to Compiègne Diplomacy and War, 1936-1940
Authors: Larkin Maurice
Published: November 2023

DEFEAT at the hands of Germany was no new experience for France in 1940. The German six-week sweep to victory of May-June had its parallel in the Prussian campaign of July-September 1870. It nearly happened again in May June 1918, after Russia’s withdrawal from the war, and was only averted by the belated arrival of the Americans in force. In 1940, however, France had to wait another four years before the Americans came again.

In a celebrated broadcast to the nation just before the armistice, Marshal Petain explained the French defeat in these terms:
The Occupation
Authors: Larkin Maurice
Published: November 2023

IT is not easy to compare the Occupation years with other sombre periods in French history. The Allied occupation that followed the defeat of Napoleon was brief and made little impact on the daily lives of the bulk of the population. The same might be said of the German occupation of 1871-3-despite the Paris Commune and the change of regime. More comparable with the 1940s was the German take-over of north-eastern France in the First World War; but the close proximity of continuous fighting on a horrendous scale, in which an un defeated France was managing to hold the line, gave the occupation a more unsettled character off ear mingled with hope. The 1940s, by contrast, saw not only the complete defeat and occupation of the nation, but the degradation of its government and people to being the spectators, when not the active accomplices, of Nazi policies. The refusal of a small minority to accept this situation only served to underline the humiliation of the rest.