French Comic Drama from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century PDF Download
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Author: Geoffrey Brereton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100057900X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
In tracing the course of French comedy from the Renaissance, through the age of Louis XIV and the eighteenth century, to the eve of the Revolution, originally published in 1977, Geoffrey Brereton shows how it evolved from the crude farces and experimental plays of the sixteenth century to become a rich and highly sophisticated dramatic genre. The main emphasis is on the work of the principal dramatists, notably Molière (whose plays and career are given a detailed and enlightening treatment), Corneille, Scarron, Marivaux and Beaumarchais, with some space devoted to the more neglected writers, such as the ‘cynical generation’ of Dancourt, Regnard, Lesage and others; and all the plays are seen in the context of the theatrical conventions that helped to shape them. Different types of comedy are analysed, including comedy of character and of manners, as well as the romantic, burlesque and bourgeois forms and the development of the opéra-comique. At the same time Dr Brereton examines the influences on French comedy – influences as varied as those of the farce, the Italian commedia dell’arte, the Spanish comedia and the eighteenth century drame – and the way in which these were absorbed and exploited by French comic dramatists. Since comedy, more than any other kind of drama, reflects the contemporary social scene, attention is drawn to social conditions and attitudes, and some of the more striking parallels with modern social preoccupations are pointed out. Written in a very lively and readable style, and containing much stimulating and original comment, as well as providing the basic facts, it gives a considerable insight into the nature of French comedy during its most formative and fruitful period. A substantial bibliography and other reference material increase the usefulness of this book to the student of French drama.
Author: Geoffrey Brereton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100057900X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
In tracing the course of French comedy from the Renaissance, through the age of Louis XIV and the eighteenth century, to the eve of the Revolution, originally published in 1977, Geoffrey Brereton shows how it evolved from the crude farces and experimental plays of the sixteenth century to become a rich and highly sophisticated dramatic genre. The main emphasis is on the work of the principal dramatists, notably Molière (whose plays and career are given a detailed and enlightening treatment), Corneille, Scarron, Marivaux and Beaumarchais, with some space devoted to the more neglected writers, such as the ‘cynical generation’ of Dancourt, Regnard, Lesage and others; and all the plays are seen in the context of the theatrical conventions that helped to shape them. Different types of comedy are analysed, including comedy of character and of manners, as well as the romantic, burlesque and bourgeois forms and the development of the opéra-comique. At the same time Dr Brereton examines the influences on French comedy – influences as varied as those of the farce, the Italian commedia dell’arte, the Spanish comedia and the eighteenth century drame – and the way in which these were absorbed and exploited by French comic dramatists. Since comedy, more than any other kind of drama, reflects the contemporary social scene, attention is drawn to social conditions and attitudes, and some of the more striking parallels with modern social preoccupations are pointed out. Written in a very lively and readable style, and containing much stimulating and original comment, as well as providing the basic facts, it gives a considerable insight into the nature of French comedy during its most formative and fruitful period. A substantial bibliography and other reference material increase the usefulness of this book to the student of French drama.
Author: Jeffrey S. Ravel
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501724622
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
In the playhouses of eighteenth-century France, clerks and students, soldiers and merchants, and the occasional aristocrat stood in the pit, while the majority of the elite sat in loges. These denizens of the parterre, who accounted for up to two-thirds of the audience, were given to disruptive behavior that culminated in full-scale riots in the last years before the Revolution. Offering a commoner's eye view of the drama offstage, this fascinating history of French theater audiences clearly demonstrates how problems in the parterre reflected tensions at the heart of the Old Regime.Jeffrey S. Ravel vividly depicts the scene in the parterre where the male spectators occupied themselves shoving one another, drinking, urinating, and confronting the actors with critiques of the performance. He traces the futile efforts of the Bourbon Court—and later its Enlightened opponents—to control parterre behavior by both persuasion and force. Ravel describes how the parterre came to represent a larger, more politicized notion of the public, one that exposed the inability of the government to accommodate the demands of French citizens. An important contribution to debates on the public sphere, Ravel's book is the first to explore the role of the parterre in the political culture of eighteenth-century France.
Author: Henry Carrington Lancaster
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
Author: Mechele Leon
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587298910
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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Book Description
From 1680 until the French Revolution, when legislation abolished restrictions on theatrical enterprise, a single theatre held sole proprietorship of Molière’s works. After 1791, his plays were performed in new theatres all over Paris by new actors, before audiences new to his works. Both his plays and his image took on new dimensions. In Molière, the French Revolution, and the Theatrical Afterlife, Mechele Leon convincingly demonstrates how revolutionaries challenged the ties that bound this preeminent seventeenth-century comic playwright to the Old Regime and provided him with a place of honor in the nation’s new cultural memory. Leon begins by analyzing the performance of Molière’s plays during the Revolution, showing how his privileged position as royal servant was disrupted by the practical conditions of the revolutionary theatre. Next she explores Molière’s relationship to Louis XIV, Tartuffe, and the social function of his comedy, using Rousseau’s famous critique of Molière as well as appropriations of George Dandin in revolutionary iconography to discuss how Moliérean laughter was retooled to serve republican interests. After examining the profusion of plays dealing with his life in the latter years of the Revolution, she looks at the exhumation of his remains and their reentombment as the tangible manifestation of his passage from Ancien Régime favorite to new national icon. The great Molière is appreciated by theatre artists and audiences worldwide, but for the French people it is no exaggeration to say that the Father of French Comedy is part of their national soul. By showing how he was represented, reborn, and reburied in the new France—how the revolutionaries asserted his relevance for their tumultuous time in ways that were audacious, irreverent, imaginative, and extreme—Leon clarifies the important role of theatrical figures in preserving and portraying a nation’s history.
Author: A. Ross Curtis
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442637978
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 414
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Book Description
Raymond Poisson, a contemporary of Molière, was the leading comic actor with the troupe of the Hôtel de Bourgogne and later at the Comédie Française during the first five years of its existence. He popularized one of the French stage's best-loved stock characters, the impudent servant Crispin, while finding time to supply his troupe with short comedies in which he himself starred. This study is thoroughly documented and reflects the author's detailed knowledge of, and interest in, the period. It establishes Poisson's place in theatrical history, and illuminates a whole tradition in French theatre in the seventeenth century.
Author: Jessica Goodman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192516698
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 347
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Book Description
The thirty years Carlo Goldoni spent in Paris hold an ambiguous place in his career. The preface to his autobiography explicitly draws attention to France as the site of his authorial glory, but elsewhere he dismisses his work for the Parisian Comédie-Italienne as a failure, and this view has come to dominate modern readings of his French experience. This study sets out to explore this apparent contradiction. By reading Goldoni's own contemporary and subsequent accounts through the lens of his context as a dramatic author in 1760s Paris, Jessica Goodman sheds new light on both his experience and critical reactions to that experience. A key part of this contextualisation is an examination of contemporary Comédie-Italienne archives, resulting in the most comprehensive existing account of this oft-neglected theatre and its authorial relations in the period. When material and artistic conditions at the Comédie-Italienne thwarted the self-fashioning strategies Goldoni had developed in Italy, he turned his attention to other areas of French life; notably the court and the Comédie-Française. Yet despite relative success in this regard, his career as an eclectic homme de lettres was lost in translation to posterity. In his French Mémoires, he constructed the claim of Parisian glory according to an out-dated understanding of what it meant to succeed in the French literary field, focusing predominantly on the power of Comédie-Française success. Ultimately, this construction was a failure: in modern France, Goldoni is remembered as a famous foreigner, not the consecrated French littérateur he believed he had become.
Author: William Driver Howarth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521230131
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 764
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Book Description
This 1997 book covers the period which saw the establishment in France of a centralized official theatre - not only the Comédie-Française (the first 'national' theatre), but an Italian theatre and a state opera; the often subversive independent theatres are also discussed. Nearly 1,000 documents deal with censorship and other aspects of external control, company management, the acting profession, dramatic theory and criticism, theatre architecture, settings and costumes, audience composition and behaviour. Over 120 pictorial documents - architectural drawings, technical engravings, frontispieces, portraits, etc. - provide a visual dimension where relevant. A full linking narrative and a copious bibliography help to make this an important reference work and a valuable research tool.
Author: Edward Forman
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810874512
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
The term "French theater" evokes most immediately the glories of the classical period and the peculiarities of the Theater of the Absurd. It has given us the works of Corneille, Racine, and Moliere. In the Romantic era there was Alexander Dumas and surrealist works of Alfred Jarry, and then the Theater of the Absurd erupted in rationalistic France with Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The Historical Dictionary of French Theater relates the history of the French theater through a chronology, introduction, bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors, trends, genres, concepts, and literary and historical developments that played a central role in the evolution of French theater.
Author: Gregory S. Brown
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231503655
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 536
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Book Description
Gregory S. Brown's A Field of Honor: The Identities of Writers, Court Culture and Public Theater in the French Intellectual Field from Racine to the Revolution offers a multilevel study of the intellectual, social, and institutional contexts of dramatic authorship and the world of playwrights in 18th-century Paris. Brown deftly interweaves research in archival and printed materials, case studies of individual authorial strategies, the rich, often contentious historiography on the French Enlightenment and contemporary cultural theory and criticism. Drawing on a sophisticated array of recent studies, Brown positions his work against and between the grain of alternative approaches and interpretations. He combines scholarship on the history of the book with analyses of political culture and cultural identity, leaving the reader with a strong and revealing appreciation for the tensions and crosscurrents staged at the center of the 18th-century "republic of letters."
Author: Richard A. Brooks
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
