bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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.