Old Comedy in the French Renaissance, 1576-1620

Old Comedy in the French Renaissance, 1576-1620 PDF Author: Donald Perret
Publisher: Librairie Droz
ISBN: 9782600036900
Category : French drama
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description

Old Comedy in the French Renaissance, 1576-1620

Old Comedy in the French Renaissance, 1576-1620 PDF Author: Donald Perret
Publisher: Librairie Droz
ISBN: 9782600036900
Category : French drama
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description


A Primer in Theatre History

A Primer in Theatre History PDF Author: William Grange
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761860045
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
A Primer in Theatre History covers productions, personalities, theories, innovations, and plays from ancient Greece to the Spanish Golden Age. Grange discusses theatre from 534 BC in Athens to 1681 AD in Madrid. The book contains highly informative chapters on theatre culture in the ancient classical world, the medieval period, the Italian Renaissance, classical Asia, German-speaking Europe, France to 1658, and England to 1642. Following a wide-ranging introduction, chapters allow the uninitiated reader straightforward access to well-researched material, often presented in a humorous and approachable fashion. Descriptions of films augment discussions of theatre, while an extended bibliography and comprehensive index assist the reader in making further inquiries. Each chapter features illustrations by Mallory Prucha, a designer and graphic illustrator who has received several awards at theatre conferences around the US. A Primer in Theatre History does not read like a scholarly tome. Its whimsical wrinkles offer readers a more contemporaneous view of theatre than is customary. It employs, for example, frequent references to movies germane to topics and time periods under discussion. Such use of film promotes familiarity among younger readers, who can then appropriate analogies to theatre performance.

Nostalgia in the Early Modern World

Nostalgia in the Early Modern World PDF Author: Harriet Lyon
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783277696
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
How can the concept of nostalgia illuminate the culturally specific ways in which societies understand the contested relationship between the past, present, and future? The word nostalgia was invented in the late seventeenth century to describe the debilitating effects of homesickness. Now widely defined as a sense of longing for a lost past, initially it was more closely linked with dislocation in space. By exploring some of its many textual, visual and musical manifestations in the tumultuous period between c. 1350 and 1800, this volume resists the assumption that nostalgia is a distinctive by-product of modernity. It also forges a fruitful link between three lively areas of current scholarly enquiry: memory, temporality, and emotion. The contributors deploy nostalgia as a tool for investigating perceptions of the passage of time and historical change, unsettling experiences of migration and geographical displacement, and the connections between remembering and forgetting, affect and imagination. Ranging across Europe and the Atlantic world, they examine the moments, sites and communities in which it arose, alongside how it was used to express both criticism and regret about the religious, political, social and cultural upheavals that shaped the early modern world. They approach it as a complex mixed feeling that opens a new window into individual subjectivities and collective mentalities.

Ronsard and Du Bartas in Early Modern Europe

Ronsard and Du Bartas in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004438564
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
The French poets Ronsard and Du Bartas enjoyed a wide but varied reception throughout early modern Europe. This volume is the first book length monograph to study the transnational reception histories of both poets in conjunction with each other.

"Holy Deadlock" and Further Ribaldries

Author:
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812293592
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 553

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Book Description
Did you hear the one about the newlywed who rushes off for legal advice before the honeymoon is over? Or the husbands who arrange for an enormous tub in which to cure their sugary wives with a pinch of salt? How about a participatory processional toward marriage so sacrilegious that it puts Chaucer's pilgrimage to shame? And who could have imagined a medieval series of plays devoted to spouse-swapping? Jody Enders has heard and seen all this and more, and shares it in her second volume of performance-friendly translations of medieval French farces. Carefully culled from more than two hundred extant farces, and crafted with a wit and contemporary sensibility that make them playable half a millennium later, these dozen bawdy plays take on the hilariously depressing and depressingly hilarious state of holy wedlock. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century comedy, love and marriage do not exactly go together like a horse and carriage. What with all the arranged matches of child brides to doddering geezers, the frustration, fear, anxiety, jealousy, disappointment, and despair are matched only by the eagerness with which everybody sings, dances, and cavorts in the pursuit of deception, trickery, and adultery. Easily recognizable stock characters come vividly to life, struggling to negotiate the limits of power, class, and gender, each embodying the distinctive blend of wit, social critique, and breathless boisterousness that is farce. Whether the antics play out on the fifteenth-century stage or the twenty-first-century screen, Enders notes, comedy revels in shining its brightest spotlight on the social and legal questions of what makes a family. Her volume defines and redefines love and marriage with a message that no passage of time can tear asunder: social change finds its start where comedy itself begins—at home.

Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History

Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History PDF Author: Vicki K. Janik
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313033579
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 571

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Book Description
Jesters and fools have existed as important and consistent figures in nearly all cultures. Sometimes referred to as clowns, they are typological characters who have conventional roles in the arts, often using nonsense to subvert existing order. But fools are also a part of social and religious history, and they frequently play key roles in the rituals that support and shape a society's system of beliefs. This reference book includes alphabetically arranged entries for approximately 60 fools and jesters from a wide range of cultures. Included are entries for performers from American popular culture, such as Woody Allen, Mae West, Charlie Chaplin, and the Marx Brothers; literary characters, such as Shakespeare's Falstaff, Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Singer's Gimpel; and cultural and mythological figures, such as India's Birbal, the American circus clown, the Native American Coyote, Taishu Engeki of Japan, Hephaestus, Loki the Norse fool, schlimiels and schlimazels, and the drag queen. The entries, written by expert contributors, are critical as well as informative. Each begins with a biographical, artistic, religious, or historical background section, which places the subject within a larger cultural and historical context. A description and analysis follow. This section may include a discussion of the fool's appearance, gender role, ethical and moral roles, social function, and relationship to such themes as nature, time, and mortality. The entry then discusses the critical reception of the subject and concludes with an extensive bibliography of general works.

Aristophanes and Politics

Aristophanes and Politics PDF Author: Ralph M. Rosen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004424466
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
The essays in this volume explore the many aspects of the “political” in the plays of Greek comic dramatist Aristophanes (5th century BCE), posing a variety of questions and approaching them through diverse methodological lenses. They demonstrate that “politics” as reflected in Aristophanes’ plays remains a fertile, and even urgent, area of inquiry, as political developments in our own time distinctly color the ways in which we articulate questions about classical Athens. As this volume shows, the earlier scholarship on politics in (or “and”) Aristophanes, which tended to focus on determining Aristophanes’ “actual” political views, has by now given way to approaches far more sensitive to how comic literary texts work and more attentive to the complexities of Athenian political structures and social dynamics. All the studies in this volume grapple to varying degrees with such methodological tensions, and show, that the richer and more diverse our political readings of Aristophanes can become, the less stable and consistent, as befits a comic work, they appear to be.

A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages

A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Jody Enders
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350135313
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Historically and broadly defined as the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Renaissance, the Middle Ages encompass a millennium of cultural conflicts and developments. A large body of mystery, passion, miracle and morality plays cohabited with song, dance, farces and other public spectacles, frequently sharing ecclesiastical and secular inspiration. A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the cultural history of theatre between 500 and 1500, and imaginatively pieces together the puzzle of medieval theatre by foregrounding the study of performance. Each of the ten chapters of this richly illustrated volume takes a different theme as its focus: institutional frameworks; social functions; sexuality and gender; the environment of theatre; circulation; interpretations; communities of production; repertoire and genres; technologies of performance; and knowledge transmission.

The Grotesque Body in Early Christian Discourse

The Grotesque Body in Early Christian Discourse PDF Author: Istvan Czachesz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317544056
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Early Christian apocryphal and conical documents present us with grotesque images of the human body, often combining the playful and humorous with the repulsive, and fearful. First to third century Christian literature was shaped by the discourse around and imagery of the human body. This study analyses how the iconography of bodily cruelty and visceral morality was produced and refined from the very start of Christian history. The sources range across Greek comedy, Roman and Jewish demonology, and metamorphosis traditions. The study reveals how these images originated, were adopted, and were shaped to the service of a doctrinally and psychologically persuasive Christian message.

Aristophanes in Performance, 421 BC-AD 2007

Aristophanes in Performance, 421 BC-AD 2007 PDF Author: Edith Hall
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 1904350615
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
Flying to Heaven to demand an end to war, building Cloudcuckooland in the sky, descending to Hades to retrieve a dead tragedian - such were the cosmic missions on which Aristophanes, the father of comedy, sent his heroes of the classical Athenian stage. The wit, intellectual bravura, political clout and sheer imaginative power of Aristophanes' quest dramas have profoundly influenced humorous literature and satire, but this volume, which originated at an international conference held at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford University in 2004, is the first interdisciplinary study of their seminal contribution to the evolution of comic performance. Interdisciplinary essays by specialists in Classics, Theatre, and Modern Literatures trace the international performance history of Aristophanic comedy, and its implication in aesthetic and political controversies, from antiquity to the twenty-first century. The story encompasses Jonson's satire, Cromwell's Ireland, German classicism, British Imperial India, censorship scandals in France, Greece and South Africa, Brechtian experiments in East Berlin, and musical theatre from Gilbert and Sullivan to Stephen Sondheim.