Remaking the Comedia

Remaking the Comedia PDF Author: Harley Erdman
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1855662922
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Leading Golden Age theatre experts examine the ways that comedias have been adapted and reinvented, offering a broad performance history of the genre for scholars and practicioners alike.

Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain

Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain PDF Author: Susan L. Fischer
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 1644530171
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Although scholars often depict early modern Spanish women as victims, history and fiction of the period are filled with examples of women who defended their God-given right to make their own decisions and to define their own identities. The essays in Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain examine many such examples, demonstrating how women battled the status quo, defended certain causes, challenged authority, and broke barriers. Such women did not necessarily engage in masculine pursuits, but often used cultural production and engaged in social subversion to exercise resistance in the home, in the convent, on stage, or at their writing desks. Distributed for the University of Delaware Press

Staging and Stage Décor: Early Modern Spanish Theater

Staging and Stage Décor: Early Modern Spanish Theater PDF Author: Bárbara Mujica
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1648894356
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This is the first book on staging and stage décor to focus specifically on early modern Spanish theater, from the 16th to the early 20th centuries. The introduction provides an overview of Spanish theater design from the 16th century, with particular attention to the corral theater and Lope de Vega. The scope of the book is vast. Some of the articles deal with early modern stagings, while others deal with contemporary productions. The collection contains articles by an international array of specialists on topics such as scenography and costuming, lighting, and performance space. It also broaches little-studied areas such as the use of alternative performance spaces, most notably prisons. The book provides in-depth analyses of particular archetypes - the melancholiac, the queen, the astrologer - and how they were, and are, staged. The focus on performance and performance space, costuming, set design, lighting, and audience seating make this a truly unique volume. This book is designed for students of Spanish literature and theater, researchers interested in theater history and early modern Spain, as well as theater professionals.

Rural Revisions of Golden Age Drama

Rural Revisions of Golden Age Drama PDF Author: Elena García-Martín
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611488346
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This work focuses on rural community versions of Spanish Early Modern Theatre and deals with cultural heritage and the contemporary impact of Golden Age theatre on local rural communities. To this end, I examine the burgeoning of annual rural Golden Age theatre festivals that generate site-centered, non-professional productions of the plays, and revisit the conflict between tradition and innovation, between popular and high culture between authority of literary heritage and the people's right to the canon. The selection of Early Modern plays set in actual Spanish communities—Fuenteovejuna, El Alcalde de Zalamea, Numancia and Los tres blasones de España—renders an overview of the effect of these important works on their respective communities and focuses on the theatrical festivals as peripheral, subaltern, hybrid cultural phenomena. I take into consideration not only traditional and significant studies on these four renowned plays, but recent theories on staging, performance and popular reception and agency. The research involved crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries between literature, history, geography, and politics by centering on the appropriation and re-examination of a past that is continuously revised through contemporary performance, and which is adjusted to fit the needs and desires of the context in which it is interpreted. This diachronic approach allows for a new perspective on contemporary performances which question cultural politics, redefine tradition and transcend geo-political boundaries.

To Embody the Marvelous

To Embody the Marvelous PDF Author: Esther Fernández
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 0826501818
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
In its exploration of puppetry and animation as the performative media of choice for mastering the art of illusion, To Embody the Marvelous engages with early modern notions of wonder in religious, artistic, and social contexts. From jointed, wood-carved figures of Christ, saintly marionettes that performed hagiographical dramas, experimental puppets and automata in Cervantes' Don Quixote, and the mechanical sets around which playwright Calderón de la Barca devised secular magic shows to deconstruct superstitions, these historical and fictional artifacts reenvisioned religious, artistic, and social notions that led early modern society to critically wrestle with enchantment and disenchantment. The use of animated performance objects in Spanish theatrical contexts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became one of the most effective pedagogical means to engage with civil society. Regardless of social strata, readers and spectators alike were caught up in a paradigm shift wherein belief systems were increasingly governed by reason—even though the discursive primacy of supernatural doxa and Christian wonder remained firmly entrenched. Thanks to their potential for motion, religious and profane puppets, automata, and mechanical stage props deployed a rationalized sense of wonder that illustrates the relationship between faith and reason, reevaluates the boundaries of fiction in art and entertainment cultures, acknowledges the rise of science and technology, and questions normative authority.

Beyond Spain's Borders

Beyond Spain's Borders PDF Author: Anne J. Cruz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131543878X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
The prolific theatrical activity that abounded on the stages of early modern Europe demonstrates that drama was a genre that transcended national borders. The transnational character of early modern theater reflects the rich admixture of various dramatic traditions, such as Spain’s comedia and Italy’s commedia dell’arte, but also the transformations across cultures of Spanish novellas to French plays and English interludes. Of particular import to this study is the role that women and gender played in this cross-pollination of theatrical sources and practices. Contributors to the volume not only investigate the gendered effect of Spanish texts and literary types on English and French drama, they address the actual journeys of Spanish actresses to French theaters and of Italian actresses to the Spanish stage, while several emphasize the movement of royal women to various courts and their impact on theatrical activity in Spain and abroad. In their innovative focus on women’s participation and influence, the chapters in this volume illustrate the frequent yet little studied transnational and transcultural points of contact between Spanish theater and the national theaters of England, France, Austria, and Italy.

El Muerto Disimulado

El Muerto Disimulado PDF Author: Angela de Azevedo
Publisher: Aris and Phillips Hispanic Cla
ISBN: 178694071X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
"The book contains a comprehensive introduction that describes Spanish theater in its Golden Age, what is known of the author’s life and times, contemporary stagings, and an extensive analysis of the text. The story unfolds as a cross between a jilted-lover scenario and a whodunit murder mystery. A woman laments her departed lover, a sister cross-dresses to avenge her murdered brother, a man duels with his cousin over lost honor, and before long, the dead man turns up as a ghost, or a bar maid, or a female peddler. Questions about identity abound in the witty El muerto disimulado / Presumed Dead. The transnational nature of this clever comedy complicates meanings, often producing bilingual wordplay that underscores the self-conscious, gender-bending, ludic character of the play and of theater in general."--

Tirso de Molina

Tirso de Molina PDF Author: Esther Fernández
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1855663716
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
The first comprehensive study of Tirso de Molina and his work in English Tirso de Molina (c.1583-c.1648) may not have written El Burlador de Sevilla, but the works of this prolific author, one of the three pillars of Golden Age Spanish theatre, are notable for their erudition, complex characters, and wit. Informed by a multidisciplinary critical perspective, this volume sets Tirso's plays and prose in their social, historical, literary, and cultural contexts. Contributors from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Spain offer a state of the art in current scholarship, considering such topics as gender, identity, spatiality, material culture, and creative performativity, among others. The first volume in English to provide a richly detailed overview of Tirso's life and work, Tirso de Molina: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from the Twenty-First Century grounds the reader in canonical theories while suggesting new approaches, attuned to contemporary interests, to his legacy.

Theorizing Adaptation

Theorizing Adaptation PDF Author: Kamilla Elliott
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197511198
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
From film and television theory to intertextuality, poststructuralism to queer theory, postcolonialism to meme theory, a host of contemporary theories in the humanities have engaged with adaptation studies. Yet theorizing adaptation has been deemed problematic in the humanities' theoretical and disciplinary wars, been charged with political incorrectness by both conservative and radical scholars, and declared outdated and painfully behind the times compared to other disciplines. And even separate from these problems of theorization is adaptation's subject matter - with many film adaptations of literature widely and simply declared "bad." In this thorough and groundbreaking study, author Kamilla Elliott works to detail and redress the problem of theorizing adaptation. She offers the first cross-disciplinary history of theorizing adaptation in the humanities, extending back in time to the sixteenth century - revealing that before the late eighteenth century, adaptation was valued and even celebrated for its contributions to cultural progress before its eventual - and ongoing - marginalization. Elliott also presents a discussion of humanities theorization as a process, arguing the need to rethink how theorization functions within humanities disciplines and configure a new relationship between theorization and adaptation, and then examines how rhetoric may work to repair this difficult relationship. Ultimately, Theorizing Adaptation seeks to find shared ground upon which adaptation scholars can dialogue and debate productively across disciplinary, cultural, and theoretical borders, without requiring theoretical assent or uniformity.

Inside Comedy

Inside Comedy PDF Author: David Steinberg
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813197570
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
David Steinberg's name has been synonymous with comedy for decades. The Canadian-born comedian, producer, writer, director, and author has been called "a comic institution himself" by the New York Times. He appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson 140 times (second only to Bob Hope), and directed episodes of popular television sitcoms, including Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld, Friends, Mad About You, The Golden Girls, and Designing Women. From 2012–2015, Steinberg hosted the comedy documentary series Inside Comedy, which featured such comedy greats as Billy Crystal, Chris Rock, and Gary Shandling. In this entertaining history of comedy, Steinberg shares insightful memories of his journey through his career and takes the reader behind the curtain of the comedy scene of the last half-century. Steinberg shares amusing and often hilarious stories and anecdotes from some of the most legendary comedians in the industry—from Groucho Marx, Carol Burnett, Mel Brooks, and Richard Pryor to Lily Tomlin, Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Tina Fey. Inside Comedy presents in-depth portraits of some of the most talented and revered comedians in the world of comedy today.