The Contested Parterre

The Contested Parterre PDF 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.

The Contested Parterre

The Contested Parterre PDF 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.

Canonic Repertories and the French Musical Press

Canonic Repertories and the French Musical Press PDF Author: William Weber
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1648250165
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
A bold application of the concept of canonical works to the development of French operatic and concert life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Philippe Quinault, Dramatist

Philippe Quinault, Dramatist PDF Author: William Brooks
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039115334
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description
Much work has been done in recent years on Quinault's librettos, but no major study of his spoken plays has appeared since the monumental thesis by Etienne Gros, published in 1926. Moreover, he has never been the subject of a monograph in English. There is a need to re-assess the influence of his life on his plays, and to re-evaluate Gros's findings in the light of eighty years' research into seventeenth-century French theatre in general. This book rejects the deterministic approach that sees his plays as apprentice pieces for the greater achievement that is his corpus of librettos, as well as the implicit comparative approach that pigeon-holes his work, in passing, by borrowing from the pithy judgements of Boileau. To what extent does Quinault's steady move away from comedy and light tragi-comedy to tragedies that combine love and menace go hand in hand with his search for greater integrity, better characterisation, and ever more credible plotting? How did he come to create and retain a tremendously faithful audience that even the withering mockery of Boileau failed to discourage? And is there any purpose in retaining the time-worn comparison between the author of Andromaque and the author of Astrate?

Crispin Ier

Crispin Ier PDF 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.

The Would-be Commoner

The Would-be Commoner PDF Author: Jeffrey S. Ravel
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618197316
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
"The case became a cause celebre across France, an obsession among everyone from the peasantry to the courts, from the Comedie-Francaise to Louis XIV himself. It was finally left to a brilliant young jurist, Henri-Francois d'Aguesseau, to separate fact from fiction and set France on a path to a new and enlightened view of justice."--BOOK JACKET.

The Development of the Tragédie Nationale in France from 1552-1800

The Development of the Tragédie Nationale in France from 1552-1800 PDF Author: George Bernard Daniel
Publisher: Unc Department of Romance Studies
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This study treats the evolution of that branch of serious French drama whose themes were taken from the national history. The study also concerns dramatic groups, the staging of plays, and audiences.

Euripides: Children of Heracles

Euripides: Children of Heracles PDF Author: Florence Yoon
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350076775
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
This book is an accessible guide through the many twists and turns of Euripides' Children of Heracles, providing several frameworks through which to understand and appreciate the play. Children of Heracles follows the fortunes of Heracles' family after his death. Euripides confronts characters and audience alike with an extraordinary series of plot twists and ethical challenges as the persecuted family of refugees struggles to find asylum in Athens before taking revenge on its enemy Eurystheus. It is a fast-paced story that explores the nature of power and its abuse, focusing on the appropriate treatment and behaviour of the powerless and the obligations and limitations of asylum. The audience must continually re-evaluate the play's moral dimensions as the characters respond to complications that range from the fantastic to the frighteningly realistic. Yoon situates Children of Heracles in its literary context, showing how Euripides constructs a unique kind of tragic plot from a wide range of conventions. It also explores the centrality of the dead Heracles and the leading role given to the socially powerless and the dramatically marginal. Finally, it discusses the historical contexts of the play's original performance and its political resonance both then and now.

The theatre in history

The theatre in history PDF Author: George Riley Kernodle
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 9781610754217
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 936

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Book Description


The Triumph of Pleasure

The Triumph of Pleasure PDF Author: Georgia Cowart
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226116387
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
With a particular focus on the court ballet, comedy-ballet, opera, and opera-ballet, Georgia J. Cowart tells the long-neglected story of how the festive arts deployed an intricate network of subversive satire to undermine the rhetoric of sovereign authority.

Operatic Geographies

Operatic Geographies PDF Author: Suzanne Aspden
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022659601X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Since its origin, opera has been identified with the performance and negotiation of power. Once theaters specifically for opera were established, that connection was expressed in the design and situation of the buildings themselves, as much as through the content of operatic works. Yet the importance of the opera house’s physical situation, and the ways in which opera and the opera house have shaped each other, have seldom been treated as topics worthy of examination. Operatic Geographies invites us to reconsider the opera house’s spatial production. Looking at opera through the lens of cultural geography, this anthology rethinks the opera house’s landscape, not as a static backdrop, but as an expression of territoriality. The essays in this anthology consider moments across the history of the genre, and across a range of geographical contexts—from the urban to the suburban to the rural, and from the “Old” world to the “New.” One of the book’s most novel approaches is to consider interactions between opera and its environments—that is, both in the domain of the traditional opera house and in less visible, more peripheral spaces, from girls’ schools in late seventeenth-century England, to the temporary arrangements of touring operatic troupes in nineteenth-century Calcutta, to rural, open-air theaters in early twentieth-century France. The essays throughout Operatic Geographies powerfully illustrate how opera’s spatial production informs the historical development of its social, cultural, and political functions.