bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Byron and the Stage
Authors: Storer Patrick A. 
Published: January 2009

The eight plays written by Lord Byron between 1816 and 1822 constitute one of the major areas of his development as an important literary figure. Yet, paradoxically, these works have been relatively neglected by twentieth century criticism. Byron may be said to be one of the best documented poets biographically and critically. As a playwright, however, no comprehensive and objective study of him has been published. A great deal of the criticism of Byron's plays is to be found in magazine articles and short, often highly prejudiced, chapters in longer works devoted to theatre history. The result of this spasmodic and patchy criticism has been confusion and contradiction. One question which confronts any critic of the plays is whether Byron intended these works for stage representation or whether he saw them as ‘closet dramas’, intended for the solitary reader only. Byron's own attitude was ambiguous. Of his second published play, Marino Faliero, he wrote to Murray, his publisher, in apparently unequivocal terms:I have never written but for the solitary reader, and require no experiments for applause beyond his silent approbation … I claim my right as an author to prevent what I have written from being turned into a stage play.
Thresholds of the Tragic: A Study of Space in Sophocles and Racine
Authors: Brault Pascale-Anne 
Published: January 2009

You have turned the page, and thus have already opened a door.A door to the text.A text about doors.Or, to be more precise, about the recurrence of doors and their function in Sophocles and Racine.Our purpose in focusing on plays in which the door or gate has a significant role for the individual and his being-in-the-world is to delineate the passageway which leads the tragic character to a boundary situation and, from there, to a possible transgression of that situation. That which is on each side of the door, the spaces created by the thresholds, will thus help locate the place of the tragic event. This spatialization of the tragic event as the transgressing of a boundary situation is emphasized by the way in which both Sophocles and Racine determine the parameters of the action as it is structured within a specific space.
Gründgens, Mann, and Mephisto
Authors: Kvam Wayne 
Published: January 2009

Klaus Mann, the eldest son of Thomas Mann, was among the first emigrants to leave Germany after the Nazi takeover in 1933. From the vantage point of his early exile in Amsterdam, he looked back disapprovingly at German artists and intellectuals who appeared to thrive under Hitler's regime. Especially galling to him was the success of actor/director Gustaf Gründgens (1899–1963), his former brother-in-law:I visualize my ex-brother-in-law as the traitor par excellence, the macabre embodiment of corruption and cynicism. So intense was the facination of his shameful glory that I decided to portray Mephisto-Gründgens in a satirical novel. I thought it pertinent, indeed, necessary to expose and analyse the abject type of the treacherous intellectual who prostitutes his talent for the sake of some tawdry fame and transitory wealth.
‘Enter Revenge’: Henry Burkhead and Cola's Furie
Authors: Coughlan Patricia 
Published: January 2009

There are very few texts written from the viewpoint of the Catholics in Ireland in the 1640s; among these, A Tragedy of Cold's Furie, OR, Lirenda's Miserie (Kilkenny, 1646), a five-act verse tragedy or tragicomedy, is striking in being a specifically literary, as well as a political, work.Almost nothing is known about Henry Burkhead, whose name appears in various forms and who has been mistakenly conflated with another similar-sounding writer. Anthony a Wood rather slightingly calls Burkhead ‘no Academian, only a Merchant of Bristol’, and Langbaine also notices Cola's Furie, repeating this description and saying the play was never performed. A search of the Bristol city archives has failed to discover any mention of him, which may indicate that he resided in Kilkenny and traded with Bristol; various forms of his surname do, however, occur there, and it seems to be an English, rather than an Irish or ‘Old English’ one. The authors of the three sets of fulsome commendatory verses printed with the play – William Smyth, Paul Aylward, and Daniel Breede – seem even more obscure than Burkhead himself; all that is clear biographically is Burkhead's strong support of the Catholic cause, inferred from the play itself. As for its printing, it is not known whether the Jesuit press which then existed in the city was used, or that run by the Supreme Council of the Catholic confederates; it is highly unusual in being a literary text amidst the political, religious and administrative documents, pamphlets and proclamations which make up the remainder of the output from Kilkenny.
New Lamps for Old: The Theatre of Tom Murphy
Authors: Maxwell Desmond 
Published: January 2009

(i) A vision and a sense of placeTom Murphy has responded with some incredulity to an interviewer's suggestion that he has written plays ‘about emigration’. The subject figures in some of the plays; Michael, returned from the exile his tales embroider (Conversations on a Homecoming);, the Carneys, immigrants in Coventry, making a precarious sanctuary of violence (A Whistle in the Dark); John Joe's unsettling meditations on departure from and attachment to his small town (The Fooleen, revised as A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant). These are, on the face of it, situations familiar enough in the Irish dramatic tradition, from Padraic Colum's The Land (1905) and T. C. Murray's Birthright (1910). Murphy is not, however – nor, indeed, were Colum and Murray – evoking distresses measurable by newspaper editorials or the documentation of government reports. The literal emigrations are made to paraphrase emigrations of the self, interior journeys arrivine: at a goal or losing their way.
Trial as Theatre in the Russian Revolution
Authors: Stites Richard 
Published: January 2009

In an extraordinary passage ofThe Mind and Face of Bolshevism, the Hungarian journalist and philosopher, René Fueloep-Miller, made this observation in the 1920s on the innate theatricality of the Russian people:If a Russian recounts an incident in company, in his political club, or even in the street, he does not for long confine himself to verbal description. Suddenly, he sends a gesture into space, like an arrow from a bow, at the same time giving a cue to another in the circle, who immediately becomes an actor in the drama. Though at first the whole thing looks like a very excited discussion, soon many emphatic gestures and words creep in and an increasing number of bystanders begin to take part in the scene. Suddenly the recital takes living form: chairs and tables are shifted with a few touches, and soon stand in a particular relation to each other and to the events being enacted. Men and things are now subject to new and different laws. Those taking no part look on in astonishment and soon become an audience, just as the story, which was at first merely related, becomes reality and attains complete actuality in the people acting and the improvised scenery … This lasts as long as the anecdote enacted, then the company at once returns to ordinary life … and the members of the circle sit smoking and talking again in their former quiet tones as if nothing had happened.
Actor-authors of the Commedia dell'arte: The Dramatic Writings of Flaminio Scala and Giambattista Andreini
Authors: Molinari Cesare 
Published: January 2009

In 1880, the first modern editor to publish a collection of commedia dell'arte scenarios noted, not without surprise, that ‘the earliest professional actors were almost all writers as well’. ‘Almost all’ is perhaps an exaggeration. Yet the literary production of comic players, and particularly that of the second and third generation of actors, is impressive for its quantity as well as its variety. It ranges from Giovan Paolo Fabbri's Capitoli alla Carlona and Adriano Valerini's historically important essay on the beauties of Verona, to the Rime of Isabella Andreini, in which she established a dialectic connection between the art of writing and that of the theatre:If you will read one daymy neglected verses, don't be taken in bythese feigned ardoursI am used to playing in dramatic love sceneswith such insincere passionswith lying and mock expressions.I unfold the Muses' high furoressometimes weeping in false sorrowsometimes singing with false pleasure.
Foreword
Authors: Bouvier Hélène 
Published: January 2009

On stage, in the wings, in the audience and outside: these are the spaces ethnologists and anthropologists traverse in the practice of fieldwork and writing—metaphorically, as participant-observers within a given community, or literally, if they study theatre forms.Immersion in another community or society (with the consequent blurring of exoticism), purposeful distancing in time and space (rivalling with empathy generated by field presence), systematic investigation of selected themes, and constant striving to have theory inform data and perceptions of the objects of study—all these aspects of the anthropological method can be applied, in a given society, just as effectively to theatre as to those institutions (matrimonial, political, economic or religious, among others) usually studied by ethnologists. A circumscribed object, but one with complex implications for individuals and groups, theatre is a sophisticated, often useful means of access to understanding society, or at least a key to reading the combinatory diversity of a community's functioning, its history, its material production and technology, its cognitive orientations. Building on the necessary contextual analyses revealing the social, political and economic underpinnings of theatre forms, developing the concept of an expressive or aesthetic system in which theatre is but one element interacting with other artistic productions or practices within a given society, and testing the concept through intercultural comparison, the horizons for theatre anthropology are broad enough.Attempting a more modest beginning, this special issue seeks to portray a special moment, a meeting between anthropology and theatre in a fertile, though underdeveloped field of study, with contributions from both anthropologists and theatre scholars.
Ludruk Revisited: An Epistolary Interview with James L. Peacock
Authors: Peacock James L. , Bouvier Héléne 
Published: January 2009

Hélène Bouvier (HB): How did you first become interested in theatre?James L. Peacock (JLP): Most interesting to me, though perhaps less interesting to anyone else, is the question, ‘Why should I, the son of an engineer (one feature shared with Victor Turner whose mother, however, was an actress), study theatre?’ I had no background in it, and I had hardly even seen a play before I went to Java. I think I know a source. It is during World War II, my father is preparing to invade Normandy, while my mother, my sister and I have moved in with her widowed mother in rural Alabama. My mother's sister, a concert pianist, and her sister's son had also moved in because the sister's husband, also a pianist, was also overseas. This boy and my sister play act. I don't. I make things. Every morning I put on my shorts (nothing else, no shoes, no shirt) at the crack of dawn and go outside to play in the yard, especially the ‘sand pile’ where I construct forts and tunnels. (The one dream I remember is of finding a soldier I lost in the sand: my absent father, perhaps?) While my cousin and sister play, sometimes I watch. We grow up. He goes to New York and becomes an actor and musician. I become an anthropologist.I have never acted in a play (except a pornographic skit in my college fraternity, in which I was a great success among the ‘brothers'), but I have always stared at people (today, women, but when I was growing up, men), and I would draw them, not while looking at them but later, alone—as teenager cartoon fantasies, like the Phantom or Superman, except more human.
Talking About Pornography, Talking About Theatre: Ethnography, Critical Pedagogy, and the Production of ‘Educated’ Audiences ofEtta Jenksin Madison
Authors: Wolf Stacy 
Published: January 2009

Theatre studies and anthropology have much to say to each other. Both are disciplines which describe a culture's practices through its performances, whether on stage or in everday life. Both seek to explain the significance of performative choices in their reflection, refraction, and revision of cultural values. This essay participates in the conversations between theatre and anthropology through critical pedagogical theory. It looks at a theatrical performance—a production ofEtta Jenksat the University Theatre at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in February 1992—in anthropological terms, to consider the relationships between theatre, the university, and the production of politicized, educated, emancipated spectators.My first assumption is methodological—that theatre studies can greatly benefit from a consideration of anthropological tools like ethnography, and from anthropological habits like a vigilant articulation of the participant-observer stance which theatre criticism masks. My second assumption is theoretical—that theatre spectators are active producers of meaning, and that reception studies offers a significant and rich area for theatre studies. An anthropological perspective enables me to choose a local site—a university theatre—which theatre studies tends to relegate to a dismissable amateurism, and to work with the perceptions of introductory level students—which scholarly theatre studies all but ignores. My third assumption is pedagogical—that critical literacy must now move beyond print literacy.1James Clifford reminds us that all ethnographic accounts are created by ‘powerful “lies” of exclusion and rhetoric'.2In my attempt, here, to fashion a persuasive text which invites the reader in, I knowingly rewrite the students’ responses toEtta Jenksin my analysis of their reception.
Dramatized Spaces Between History and Anthropology
Authors: Konigson Elie 
Published: January 2009

The starting point for this brief study (which is a summary of several others) is simple: it is not so much in the location of the theatrical site as in the whole of the constructed spaces in which it is situated, that we glean what few insights there are into the evolution of theatrical space.In Greece, in Rome, then in the Western world of the late Middle Ages, the primary dramatic site has always been an urban one, so that we could assert, paradoxically, that the question of the origins of the theatrical space is less a matter for theatre studies than an aspect of town planning!Thus if we are to analyse the theatre we must analyse the town. In any case, the two poles between which the destiny of dramatized spaces is played out can be seen in the morphological unit which dominates the history both of the forms of the urban environment and the individual habitat and of the evolution of the theatrical space itself. In effect there exists an original space, a sort of matrix at the heart of the lived space of the urban/residential area, within which human enterprise includes, from the outset, activity which is generally dramatic: the hall-courtyaid-square,1 a complex of spaces which are identical in morphological, functional and symbolic terms and which is differentiated only by the built environment within which it is inscribed, provides a framework within which are carried out all the collective activities connected with the habitat and the urban area.
A Note on La Champmeslé and Mlle Desmares
Authors: Brooks William , Yarrow P. J. 
Published: January 2009

In our article ‘Neglected evidence about the actor Michel Baron (1653–1729)’, which appeared in Theatre Research International, 18, 3 (1993), 173–76, we quoted a letter from Madame to Baron Von Hading (foot of p. 174). Madame refers to the actress Mlle Desmares, a prominent member of the French company in the early eighteenth century. The first part of the quotation was as follows:He did not think of it after the death of the king, but la Desmares [an actress of the Comédie-Française], perceiving that no one was going to see them any more, came to the conclusion that they would fare better if Baron were back in the company, and she persuaded him.The king died in 1715, and the incident described occurred in, or shortly before, 1720.After the proofs were corrected and returned, an error crept in which dismayed us greatly. Our parenthesis, ‘an actress of the Comedie-Française’ was replaced by another: ‘better known as la Champmesle’. We did not sanction this amendment, and it is wrong. So much so, in fact, that it looks like carelessness and ignorance on our part, the apprehension of which may tell against acceptance of our findings and objective critical appreciation of our conclusions. We are therefore most grateful to the Editor for allowing us to insert this correction, which we believe to be important.The actress known as La Champmeslé, Marie Desmares, died in 1698. She was the wife of the actor Champmeslé, whose name she took, and she was probably the greatest actress of her generation; she was also the celebrated mistress of Racine.
Foreword
Authors: Bryant-Bertail Sarah 
Published: January 2009

The articles in this issue are concerned with the analysis and theory of theatre performance. Little more than a generation ago, theatrical performance scholarship was an oxymoron and theatre history was concerned only with the description and chronology of performance rather than its theory or analysis. Theories of performance by directors and other artists occupied a nebulous territory between the aesthetics of genre and the anecdotal. Meanwhile books on theatre craft existed alongside theatre histories and anthologies of ‘drama’, with each treated as if it were an independent realm. Anthologies introduced plays as literary texts to be interpreted and contextualized, and the printed play alone was recognized as a legitimate object of inquiry. Performance was too ephemeral to be a proper artefact, much less a proper text. Yet for traditional literary scholars, even the printed play was not a truly primary text; instead, the source of the play was always located elsewhere, in a more authoritative and more academically institutionalized discourse. The play was only an example or concretization of another discourse: biographical, philosophical, theological, psychological, or historical. To be sure, performance descriptions were sometimes given in anthologies, and in the case of canonized writers like Shakespeare or Ibsen, even performance histories could be found. But performance analysis and theory only appeared if the playwright had also published it, as did Strindberg or Brecht, or if a recognized movement had claimed the playwright as one of its own, as with naturalism, expressionism or Theatre of the Absurd.This situation was understandable considering that theatre studies had once been housed within departments of literature.
Préface
Authors: Bryant-Bertail Sarah 
Published: January 2009

Les articles dans ce numéro sont consacrés à l'analyse et la théorie de la représentation théâtrale. Jusqu'à ces dernières années la notion d'études théâtrales était un oxymore et, dans le meilleur des cas, l'histoire du théâtre se contentait de décrire et d'établir la chronologie des représentations. La théorie de la mise en scène occupait une place incertaine entre le discours esthétique et l'anecdote. Les études sur l'art du théâtre côtoyaient livres d'histoire et anthologies de théâtre sur les rayons des bibliothèques, sans qu'il y ait dialogue entre eux. Les anthologies présentaient les pièces de théâtre comme des textes littéraires à interpréter et à replacer dans leur contexte historico-littéraire; et seule l'œuvre imprimée était considérée digne d'étude. On considérait que la représentation théâtrale était trop éphémère pour constituer une véritable œuvre d'art, encore moins un texte authentique. Même la pièce imprimée ne constituait pas le véritable texte primaire, le discours académique en situant toujours la source ailleurs. Une pièce n'était en définitive qu'une illustration ou une concrétisation d'un autre discours: biographique, philosophique, théologique, psychologique ou historique. Il y avait bien des descriptions de représentations dans certaines anthologies et, pour des auteurs canonisés tels Shakespeare ou Ibsen, il existait même une histoire des représentations les plus importantes. Mais, en général, il n'y avait théorie ou analyse de la représentation que si l'auteur en avait publié une, tels Strindberg ou Brecht, ou si le dramaturge faisait partie d'un mouvement esthétique tel que le naturalisme, l'expressionisme, le Théâtre de l'Absurde, etc…Cet état de fait s'explique aisément puisque les Etudes Universitaires Théâtrales furent longtemps rattachées aux départements de littérature.
Topography of Representation
Authors: Kobialka Michal 
Published: January 2009

Representation carries a promise of a performative act. As Mark Taylor observes, in contrast to the so-called constative utterances which describe facts, a promise realizes ‘a state of affairs that did not exist prior to the language event’ or, as is the case here, prior to the events unfolding in a theatrical or any other space. Such an act signifies that the ‘I’ or ‘we’ making a promise understands or knows the problem or the text, plays the part of the agent authorized by a convention or its systems to execute a promise, and the act requires that representation assumes the function of reality maker that produces the real by simulating verisimilitude. For this process to be complete, the mode of operation needs to be clearly delineated by cultural or social practices and institutional structures that safeguard the promise, its execution, and its use.Even though the general tenets are still dominant in everyday practice, the concept of representation has been championed and problematized ever since the fragmentation and the split within the subject became evident in the twentieth century. The ‘I’ and ‘we’ ceased to be valued as universally defined nouns. As a corollary, the promise of representation was no longer able to express the subject's desire to impose linear transfer and ideological order upon both human beings and the objects of their creation (theatre and drama). Once the subject was undone, the order of representation disseminated into pieces scattered throughout space. It became dispersed in contradictory meanings, which now could be assigned to objects that had been kept outside of its boundaries.