Pub Date : 2024-09-06DOI: 10.1353/cdr.2024.a936316
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> In Memoriam<span>Clifford O. Davidson: 1932–2024</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <br/> Click for larger view<br/> View full resolution <p>In Memoriam</p> <p>Clifford O. Davidson</p> <p>(1932–2024)</p> <p></p> <p><strong>W</strong>hen Clifford Davidson retired from Western Michigan University in 2003, the Medieval Institute, where he held a joint appointment with English for nearly 40 years, printed a short volume of essays in his honor. If you read the introduction penned by Barbara Palmer, you learn about a person who was a prolific scholar, a persuasive editor, an intellectual trailblazer, and an energetic cheerleader. In retirement, Davidson remained close to the many institutions at the University that he played a leadership role in founding and nurturing, including this journal, still housed within the Department of English. Moreover, he left a global network of scholars who form, in part, his generous legacy of editorial and field leadership.</p> <p>Born October 29, 1932, Clifford Davidson attended one-room rural elementary schools near Faribault, Minnesota and later Brainerd (Minnesota) High School. He received his bachelor’s degree from St. Cloud State University and pursued graduate studies at the University of Minnesota, with interruptions during which he taught at the secondary <strong>[End Page 280]</strong> level and served in the U.S. Army, the latter as a post newspaper editor at the Granite City (Illinois) Engineer Depot. He moved to Michigan in 1959 to complete his graduate studies at Wayne State University, from which he received his Ph.D. and where he also was employed as an Instructor in English.</p> <p>Davidson received an appointment as Assistant Professor of English at Western Michigan University in 1965, and two years later helped to establish this journal, which he served as a co-editor for 32 years. As an active participant in the development of the Medieval Institute at the University, he saw it grow into an internationally recognized unit which would in time sponsor the largest annual medieval conference in the world. In 1976 he founded the Early Drama, Art, and Music research project and book series within the Medieval Institute and served as its director for a quarter of a century. He also assisted his wife, the musicologist and gifted soprano Audrey Ekdahl Davidson, as dramatic director of numerous medieval music-dramas presented by the Society for Old Music (now Early Music Michigan), of which she was the founder and director.</p> <p>His research, conducted in American and European libraries and archives, led to voluminous publications and an international reputation with his articles and reviews published on four continents. He was the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of more than forty books and monographs, among them such titles as <em>From Creation to Doom: The York Cycle of M
{"title":"In Memoriam: Clifford O. Davidson: 1932–2024","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a936316","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a936316","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> In Memoriam<span>Clifford O. Davidson: 1932–2024</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <br/> Click for larger view<br/> View full resolution <p>In Memoriam</p> <p>Clifford O. Davidson</p> <p>(1932–2024)</p> <p></p> <p><strong>W</strong>hen Clifford Davidson retired from Western Michigan University in 2003, the Medieval Institute, where he held a joint appointment with English for nearly 40 years, printed a short volume of essays in his honor. If you read the introduction penned by Barbara Palmer, you learn about a person who was a prolific scholar, a persuasive editor, an intellectual trailblazer, and an energetic cheerleader. In retirement, Davidson remained close to the many institutions at the University that he played a leadership role in founding and nurturing, including this journal, still housed within the Department of English. Moreover, he left a global network of scholars who form, in part, his generous legacy of editorial and field leadership.</p> <p>Born October 29, 1932, Clifford Davidson attended one-room rural elementary schools near Faribault, Minnesota and later Brainerd (Minnesota) High School. He received his bachelor’s degree from St. Cloud State University and pursued graduate studies at the University of Minnesota, with interruptions during which he taught at the secondary <strong>[End Page 280]</strong> level and served in the U.S. Army, the latter as a post newspaper editor at the Granite City (Illinois) Engineer Depot. He moved to Michigan in 1959 to complete his graduate studies at Wayne State University, from which he received his Ph.D. and where he also was employed as an Instructor in English.</p> <p>Davidson received an appointment as Assistant Professor of English at Western Michigan University in 1965, and two years later helped to establish this journal, which he served as a co-editor for 32 years. As an active participant in the development of the Medieval Institute at the University, he saw it grow into an internationally recognized unit which would in time sponsor the largest annual medieval conference in the world. In 1976 he founded the Early Drama, Art, and Music research project and book series within the Medieval Institute and served as its director for a quarter of a century. He also assisted his wife, the musicologist and gifted soprano Audrey Ekdahl Davidson, as dramatic director of numerous medieval music-dramas presented by the Society for Old Music (now Early Music Michigan), of which she was the founder and director.</p> <p>His research, conducted in American and European libraries and archives, led to voluminous publications and an international reputation with his articles and reviews published on four continents. He was the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of more than forty books and monographs, among them such titles as <em>From Creation to Doom: The York Cycle of M","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142142556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-06DOI: 10.1353/cdr.2024.a936319
Tom Rutter
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Rewriting Idolatry: <span>Doctor Faustus and Romeo and Juliet</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Tom Rutter (bio) </li> </ul> <blockquote> <p>FAUSTUS Her lips sucks forth my soul. See where it flies!</p> <p>Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.</p> Marlowe, <em>Doctor Faustus</em> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>ROMEO Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged!</p> <p>Give me my sin again.</p> Shakespeare, <em>Romeo and Juliet</em> <sup>1</sup> </blockquote> <p><strong>T</strong>he lines quoted above accompany what may be the two most famous kisses in Elizabethan drama: the one between Doctor Faustus and Helen of Troy in the penultimate scene of Marlowe’s play, just before the harrowing depiction of Faustus’s final terror in the face of damnation, and the one that occurs towards the end of act one of <em>Romeo and Juliet</em> during the first meeting of the lovers. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “the four most famous kisses,” since both of these speeches are delivered in between an initial kiss, which Faustus says sucks forth his soul and by which Romeo says his “sin is purged” (1.5.106), and a second that is imagined as restoring what has been taken away. The follow-up kisses are preceded by two very similar phrases: “Give me my soul again” from Faustus, “Give me my sin again” from Romeo. The combination of verbal and structural similarity is so striking as to suggest direct influence, all the more so given that in this scene Shakespeare departs from his principal source, <em>The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet</em> by Arthur Brooke. In the equivalent episode in Brooke’s poem, the lovers’ eye-beams are “ymingled,” and they hold hands and offer expressions of devotion, but no actual kiss takes place: what seems to the modern reader or theatregoer an inevitable and inextricable part of their first meeting appears only when the story transfers to the stage. <sup>2</sup> <strong>[End Page 341]</strong></p> <p>Some critics have noted the similarity between these two episodes. In his 2016 handbook <em>Doctor Faustus</em>, James N. Loehlin notes that “the line ‘give me my soul again’ . . . seems to have been remembered by Shakespeare in writing the first meeting of Romeo and Juliet,” while in a 2011 article on Shakespeare’s use of chiasmus Matthew Ramirez suggests that Faustus’s speech offered “some terms [that] Shakespeare later borrowed and reconfigured for a rather different dramatic situation.” <sup>3</sup> However, it is generally passed over in more substantial critical discussions of Marlowe’s influence on Shakespeare (surveyed later in this essay), while the editors of the Arden Second Series, Arden Third Series, Oxford World’s Classics and New Cambridge editions of <em>Romeo and Juliet</em>, who highlight numerous Marlovian parallels, omit this one. <sup>4</sup> It may be significant that both Loe
{"title":"Rewriting Idolatry: Doctor Faustus and Romeo and Juliet","authors":"Tom Rutter","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a936319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a936319","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Rewriting Idolatry: <span>Doctor Faustus and Romeo and Juliet</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Tom Rutter (bio) </li> </ul> <blockquote> <p>FAUSTUS Her lips sucks forth my soul. See where it flies!</p> <p>Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.</p> Marlowe, <em>Doctor Faustus</em> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>ROMEO Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged!</p> <p>Give me my sin again.</p> Shakespeare, <em>Romeo and Juliet</em> <sup>1</sup> </blockquote> <p><strong>T</strong>he lines quoted above accompany what may be the two most famous kisses in Elizabethan drama: the one between Doctor Faustus and Helen of Troy in the penultimate scene of Marlowe’s play, just before the harrowing depiction of Faustus’s final terror in the face of damnation, and the one that occurs towards the end of act one of <em>Romeo and Juliet</em> during the first meeting of the lovers. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “the four most famous kisses,” since both of these speeches are delivered in between an initial kiss, which Faustus says sucks forth his soul and by which Romeo says his “sin is purged” (1.5.106), and a second that is imagined as restoring what has been taken away. The follow-up kisses are preceded by two very similar phrases: “Give me my soul again” from Faustus, “Give me my sin again” from Romeo. The combination of verbal and structural similarity is so striking as to suggest direct influence, all the more so given that in this scene Shakespeare departs from his principal source, <em>The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet</em> by Arthur Brooke. In the equivalent episode in Brooke’s poem, the lovers’ eye-beams are “ymingled,” and they hold hands and offer expressions of devotion, but no actual kiss takes place: what seems to the modern reader or theatregoer an inevitable and inextricable part of their first meeting appears only when the story transfers to the stage. <sup>2</sup> <strong>[End Page 341]</strong></p> <p>Some critics have noted the similarity between these two episodes. In his 2016 handbook <em>Doctor Faustus</em>, James N. Loehlin notes that “the line ‘give me my soul again’ . . . seems to have been remembered by Shakespeare in writing the first meeting of Romeo and Juliet,” while in a 2011 article on Shakespeare’s use of chiasmus Matthew Ramirez suggests that Faustus’s speech offered “some terms [that] Shakespeare later borrowed and reconfigured for a rather different dramatic situation.” <sup>3</sup> However, it is generally passed over in more substantial critical discussions of Marlowe’s influence on Shakespeare (surveyed later in this essay), while the editors of the Arden Second Series, Arden Third Series, Oxford World’s Classics and New Cambridge editions of <em>Romeo and Juliet</em>, who highlight numerous Marlovian parallels, omit this one. <sup>4</sup> It may be significant that both Loe","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142142558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-06DOI: 10.1353/cdr.2024.a936321
Arthur F. Marotti
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England</em> by Holly Crawford Pickett <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Arthur F. Marotti (bio) </li> </ul> Holly Crawford Pickett. <em>The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England</em>. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024. Pp. x + 264 + 8 b/w illus. $65.00 hardcover, $65.00 eBook. <p>This study departs from the usual explanations of serial conversions as acts of opportunism, unreliable products of emotional experiences, or problematic public gestures meant to convince both authorities and general audiences of their authenticity. The author announces the aims of her study at the start: “I use the triad of conversion, theatricality, and natural philosophy to argue that multiple converts challenge and even change the scholarly view of early modern spirituality and do so in several critical ways” (17).</p> <p>Chapter 1 deals with the serial convert Anthony Tyrrell, who used the literary forms to which other converts resorted to convince others of the sincerity of their religious change: the “motives” tract, the recantation sermon, and autobiographical account. The problem is that, although Tyrrell insisted on his own sincerity, he was viewed as a hypocrite. His most dramatic moment was when, in supposedly delivering a sermon recanting his Catholic beliefs, he attacked the established church and, when dragged from the pulpit, scattered copies of his sermon, which found its way into print. John Nichols, another serial convert, converted to Catholicism in 1577, but on his return from Rome was imprisoned before renouncing his Catholicism, serving the English government as an informer. The religiously indeterminate play, Nathaniel Woodes’s <em>The Conflict of Conscience</em>, based on the life of Francis Spiera, who renounced his Protestantism under papal pressure, “questions whether reconversion after apostacy is even possible” (42). It has two endings: in the first “the protagonist dies unrepentant” (45) and is a reprobate; in the second he becomes a triple convert. This play, Pickett suggests, “might have unsettled both authorities and readers alike” (50).</p> <p>Chapter 2 concentrates on William Alabaster, the Protestant and Catholic uses of the example of St. Augustine, and the “motives” genre. Alabaster, the author claims, “reserves a place for the theatrical as well as the polemical, within the devotional” (52). She claims that both Augustine’s <em>Confessions</em> and Alabaster’s <em>Conversion</em> “narrate the act of reading in an uncommonly dramatic fashion, one that suggests an intimate connection among reading, performance, and conversion” (54). Like Augustine, who experienced a sudden conversion after reading an account of the life of St. Anthony, Alabaster had a surprising “flash of insight, the overwhelming sense
以下是内容的简要摘录，以代替摘要：评论者 霍利-克劳福德-皮克特（Holly Crawford Pickett）著的《现代早期英格兰的连环皈依剧》（The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England by Holly Crawford Pickett Arthur F. Marotti (bio) Holly Crawford Pickett.The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England.宾夕法尼亚州费城：宾夕法尼亚州费城：宾夕法尼亚大学出版社，2024 年。页码 x + 264 + 8 幅黑白插图。精装版 65.00 美元，电子书 65.00 美元。本研究有别于通常将连续皈依解释为机会主义行为、不可靠的情感体验产物或有问题的公开姿态，其目的是让当局和普通受众相信他们的真实性。作者一开始就宣布了她的研究目的："我使用皈依、戏剧性和自然哲学这三要素来论证多重皈依者挑战甚至改变了学术界对早期现代精神信仰的看法，并以几种关键的方式做到了这一点"(17)。第 1 章论述了连续皈依者安东尼-泰瑞尔，他采用了其他皈依者所采用的文学形式来说服他人相信其宗教改变的诚意："动机 "小册子、悔改布道和自传。问题是，尽管泰瑞尔坚持自己的真诚，但他被视为伪君子。他最戏剧性的时刻是，在一次据说是放弃天主教信仰的布道中，他攻击了已建立的教会，并在被拖下讲坛时，散落了他的布道稿，这些布道稿被印刷出来。约翰-尼科尔斯（John Nichols）是另一位连环皈依者，他于 1577 年皈依天主教，但从罗马回来后，在放弃天主教信仰之前就被关进了监狱，作为一名告密者为英国政府服务。纳撒尼尔-伍兹（Nathaniel Woodes）的《良知的冲突》（The Conflict of Conscience）根据弗朗西斯-斯皮耶拉（Francis Spiera）的生平改编，他在教皇的压力下放弃了新教，"质疑叛教后重新皈依是否可能"（42）。该剧有两个结局：在第一个结局中，"主人公死不悔改"（45），成为一个弃儿；在第二个结局中，他成为一个三重皈依者。皮克特认为，这部剧 "可能会让当局和读者都感到不安"（50）。第 2 章主要介绍威廉-阿拉巴斯特、新教和天主教对圣奥古斯丁例子的使用以及 "动机 "类型。作者称，阿拉巴斯特 "在虔诚的作品中为戏剧性和论辩性保留了一席之地"（52）。她认为，奥古斯丁的《忏悔录》和阿拉巴斯特的《皈依》都 "以一种非同寻常的戏剧性方式叙述了阅读行为，暗示了阅读、表演和皈依之间的密切联系"（54）。就像奥古斯丁在阅读圣安东尼的生平后突然皈依一样，阿拉巴斯特在阅读一本书--威廉-雷诺德为《新约圣经》的天主教译本辩护的书--时，也有了令人惊讶的 "灵光一现的洞察力，压倒性的觉悟和转变"（77）。这种变化是否令读者信服，还有待商榷。第 3 章是关于伊丽莎白-凯里和威廉-奇灵渥斯（在她女儿为她所写的传记中，奇灵渥斯是个大坏蛋）的内容，涉及两位作者的诚意问题。前者坚持自己经历的真实性，而后者则遵循圣保罗的建议，说自己 "对所有人都无所不包"，并接受了伪装的必要性。在《玛丽亚姆的悲剧》中，卡里二十年来一直在忏悔和顺从，她拒绝接受不诚实的指控，并像她的女儿一样，"不遗余力地将主人公描绘成坚定不移、毫无虚伪的人"（79）。皮克特暗指火药阴谋和效忠宣誓争议之后的社会政治形势，这导致许多天主教徒实行 "尼古德主义"，利用偶尔去教堂来保护自己并证明自己的忠诚，她将对女性不坚定的偏见与连续皈依者的 "多变性和两面性"（82）联系起来。凯里的座右铭 "Be and be seen "意在证明她对天主教的宗教承诺的真实性。在卡洛琳时代的英格兰，有很多人皈依天主教，比如白金汉公爵的母亲，因此，对于凯里和她的女儿来说，确保皈依宗教的真实性非常重要。皮克特对待奇灵渥斯的有趣之处在于，她发现了奇灵渥斯身上的 "普世潜能"（100），尤其是在《新教徒的宗教》中，他接受了通融和异化的需要。在 "特权...
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Pub Date : 2024-09-06DOI: 10.1353/cdr.2024.a936323
Christopher Crosbie
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Macbeth</em> by William Shakespeare <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Christopher Crosbie (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Macbeth</em>, by William Shakespeare, directed by Simon Godwin, The Shakespeare Company, Washington, D.C. (April 9 – May 5, 2024) <p>The penultimate figure in Jacques’ “seven ages of man” soliloquy brilliantly conveys the vulnerabilities of old age, presenting us with a person living in “a world too wide for his shrunk shank” (2.7.160-1). As the body weakens for this figure, the surrounding world seems larger and more unsettling, perhaps dangerous. This rhetorical move is spatial but the effect cinematic. We can almost feel the distortions happening within and around the isolated individual, exposed in a world where agency itself seems to diminish.</p> <p>It may seem unnatural to bring the forest of Arden marching toward Scotland, yet this dialectic of shrinking figures and a world of overwhelming scope informs so much of Simon Godwin’s compelling production of <em>Macbeth</em>, adapted by Emily Burns and starring Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC. The production presents a world of immense, unstoppable violence, a place where tsunamis of human brutality relentlessly sweep across everything in their path; at the same time, it gives us, in the very best ways, a claustrophobic world where shattered individuals, more often than not, only serve to make matters worse. Rather than worrying whether Shakespeare offers us a national or personal tragedy, this <em>Macbeth</em> effectively marshals its interest in both the play’s broad scope and its sense of intimate collapse to yield a tale as much about fatigue and despair as about sound and fury.</p> <p>Performed in a warehouse away from the STC’s usual venue, Godwin’s <em>Macbeth</em> immediately announces its status as a different kind of theatrical event, immersive virtually from the outset. The warehouse’s outer section houses concessions, ad hoc restrooms, modest seating, and a curiously large sculpture of the letter “M,” a somewhat odd accent choice, but one that doesn’t quite detract from the general atmosphere. Mist descends from above, filtering through hanging lighting, which guides the audience past a curtained border into a cavernous space designed to look like a section of a city ravaged by war. Three trees, inexplicably preserved from the destruction, stand spaced apart, overlooking a scene of otherwise complete desolation. Here, the audience encounters a detailed wasteland strewn with rubble, the scorched remnants of civilization half buried throughout, as two paths snake their way toward the main theater space, not yet fully visible itself. Whether intentional or not, the artifacts still legible amid the rubble point their way toward the play that will follow. A <strong>[End Page 399
{"title":"Macbeth by William Shakespeare (review)","authors":"Christopher Crosbie","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a936323","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a936323","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Macbeth</em> by William Shakespeare <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Christopher Crosbie (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Macbeth</em>, by William Shakespeare, directed by Simon Godwin, The Shakespeare Company, Washington, D.C. (April 9 – May 5, 2024) <p>The penultimate figure in Jacques’ “seven ages of man” soliloquy brilliantly conveys the vulnerabilities of old age, presenting us with a person living in “a world too wide for his shrunk shank” (2.7.160-1). As the body weakens for this figure, the surrounding world seems larger and more unsettling, perhaps dangerous. This rhetorical move is spatial but the effect cinematic. We can almost feel the distortions happening within and around the isolated individual, exposed in a world where agency itself seems to diminish.</p> <p>It may seem unnatural to bring the forest of Arden marching toward Scotland, yet this dialectic of shrinking figures and a world of overwhelming scope informs so much of Simon Godwin’s compelling production of <em>Macbeth</em>, adapted by Emily Burns and starring Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC. The production presents a world of immense, unstoppable violence, a place where tsunamis of human brutality relentlessly sweep across everything in their path; at the same time, it gives us, in the very best ways, a claustrophobic world where shattered individuals, more often than not, only serve to make matters worse. Rather than worrying whether Shakespeare offers us a national or personal tragedy, this <em>Macbeth</em> effectively marshals its interest in both the play’s broad scope and its sense of intimate collapse to yield a tale as much about fatigue and despair as about sound and fury.</p> <p>Performed in a warehouse away from the STC’s usual venue, Godwin’s <em>Macbeth</em> immediately announces its status as a different kind of theatrical event, immersive virtually from the outset. The warehouse’s outer section houses concessions, ad hoc restrooms, modest seating, and a curiously large sculpture of the letter “M,” a somewhat odd accent choice, but one that doesn’t quite detract from the general atmosphere. Mist descends from above, filtering through hanging lighting, which guides the audience past a curtained border into a cavernous space designed to look like a section of a city ravaged by war. Three trees, inexplicably preserved from the destruction, stand spaced apart, overlooking a scene of otherwise complete desolation. Here, the audience encounters a detailed wasteland strewn with rubble, the scorched remnants of civilization half buried throughout, as two paths snake their way toward the main theater space, not yet fully visible itself. Whether intentional or not, the artifacts still legible amid the rubble point their way toward the play that will follow. A <strong>[End Page 399","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"44 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142142567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-06DOI: 10.1353/cdr.2024.a936322
Yann Robert
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Theater, War, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Empire</em> by Logan J. Connors <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Yann Robert (bio) </li> </ul> Logan J. Connors. <em>Theater, War, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Empire</em>. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2024. Pp. x + 255 + 9 b/w illus. $110.00 hardback, $110.00 eBook. <p>Logan J. Connors gives a telling title, “Total Theater for Total War,” to his monograph’s penultimate chapter, the culmination, in many ways, of the book’s narrative arc. Drawing from David Bell and others, Connors underscores the unprecedented attributes that made wars of the late eighteenth century “total,” from their global span to their reliance on mass conscription and all available national resources. Among these resources was a groundbreaking “total theater,” characterized by “documentary-based dramaturgy, technological innovations, onstage military formations and battles, dramatic characters and actors who were actual soldiers, patriotic song breaks, the use of various military practices and customs in drama, and more” (148). Such strategies of reenactment, liveliness, and intimacy were designed to foster a more intense, unmediated engagement of French spectators in the plays as in the war effort. Totality thus serves as a crucial throughline in Connors’s book (indeed, “total,” “totality,” and “totalizing” appear 99 times). One might argue that it also perfectly captures what makes it such a unique and rewarding read, a veritable “Total Book on Total Theater for Total War.” Total in the remarkable variety of its methodological approaches: literary close-reading, performance studies, cultural military history, gender studies, and architectural analysis, to name a few. And total as well in its topics of interest, so many that it is best to let Connors list them: “plays depicting soldiers, performances in navy theaters and in other military venues, policies to compel soldiers to attend the theater, repertories of public theaters in provincial and colonial cities with significant military populations, the evolving relationship between theatrical diplomacy and armed conflict in colonial and occupied zones, soldier-actors and soldier-writers, the role of both theater and the military as ‘civilizing’ and ‘urbanizing’ forces, dramatic depictions of gender roles in battle and on the home front, public performances of coloniality and military rule, and theater as a tool for teaching combat skills, nationalism, sexuality, xenophobia, and more” (3).</p> <p>Totality need not mean exhaustivity, however, and throughout his monograph Connors identifies topics and areas awaiting further studies. Far from a weakness, this strikes me as a strength, a reflection of the work’s seminal status. Indeed, Connors has accomplished the rare feat of un
以下是内容的简要摘录，以代替摘要：评论者 十八世纪法国及其帝国的戏剧、战争与革命》，作者 Logan J. Connors Yann Robert (bio) Logan J. Connors。十八世纪法国及其帝国的戏剧、战争与革命》。英国剑桥：剑桥大学出版社，2024 年。x + 255 + 9 幅黑白插图。精装本 110.00 美元，电子书 110.00 美元。洛根-J-康纳斯（Logan J. Connors）为其专著的倒数第二章起了一个很有说服力的标题--"全面战争的全面剧场"，从很多方面来说，这一章是全书叙事弧线的顶点。康纳斯借鉴戴维-贝尔等人的观点，强调了使 18 世纪晚期的战争成为 "全面战争 "的史无前例的特性，包括战争的全球跨度、对大规模征兵的依赖以及所有可用的国家资源。在这些资源中，有一种开创性的 "全面戏剧"，其特点是 "以纪录片为基础的戏剧创作、技术创新、舞台上的军事阵型和战斗、由真实士兵扮演的戏剧人物和演员、爱国歌曲插曲、在戏剧中使用各种军事实践和习俗等等"（148）。这种重现、生动和亲密的策略旨在促进法国观众更强烈、更直接地参与到戏剧中，就像参与到战争中一样。因此，"总体性 "是康纳斯著作中的一条重要线索（事实上，"总体"、"总体性 "和 "总体化 "出现了 99 次）。也许有人会说，这也完美地抓住了本书的独特之处，使其成为一本名副其实的 "全面战争的全面战区之书"。全面性体现在其方法论的非凡多样性：文学细读、表演研究、文化军事史、性别研究和建筑分析等等。其关注的主题也很全面，多到最好让康纳斯一一列举："描写士兵的戏剧、海军剧院和其他军事场所的演出、强迫士兵观看戏剧的政策、拥有大量军人的省级和殖民地城市的公共剧院剧目、殖民地和占领区戏剧外交与武装冲突之间不断演变的关系、士兵演员和士兵作家，戏剧和军队作为'文明化'和'城市化'力量的作用，戏剧对战斗中和后方性别角色的描述，殖民地和军事统治的公开表演，以及戏剧作为传授战斗技能、民族主义、性、仇外心理等的工具"(3)。然而，全面并不意味着详尽，康纳斯在其专著中指出了有待进一步研究的主题和领域。在我看来，这不仅不是缺点，反而是优点，体现了该著作的开创性地位。事实上，康纳斯完成了一项罕见的壮举，即发现并挖掘了一个完全被忽视的课题。在过去的几十年中，有许多研究探讨了十八世纪戏剧与通常以表演术语理解的其他领域（政治、司法、宗教等）之间的互动关系。这些研究[第395页完]中的许多都列在第147页的脚注中，它们的吸引力很大程度上来自于其双边方法，追溯了一个双向影响的网络：不仅政治、司法和宗教影响了革命的戏剧，正如人们所预料的那样，而且18世纪晚期出现的新的表演和观赏形式也改变了政治、法律和宗教实践。康纳斯在《十八世纪法国及其帝国的戏剧、战争和革命》中采用了同样的方法，但涉及的是戏剧和军事。他揭示了法国军队通过创造戏剧表演的新形式和新体验改变法国戏剧的多种方式，同时令人信服地表明，戏剧作为法国人重新想象战争、军队以及士兵与平民关系的空间，对军事规范和实践产生了持久的影响。第一章和第二章主要是对革命前时期的戏剧进行细读。第一章的重点是《加莱岛之战》（Le Siège de Calais），该剧是为应对法国在七年战争中的失败而创作的，被作者誉为法国的第一部民族悲剧。这部获得巨大成功的戏剧掀起了战争剧的浪潮，共同塑造并普及了爱国主义的新定义以及法国观众与军队之间的新关系。第 2 章研究了士兵剧中的另一个亚类型，迄今为止，该亚类型还未在法国的戏剧舞台上出现过。
{"title":"Theater, War, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Empire by Logan J. Connors (review)","authors":"Yann Robert","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a936322","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a936322","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Theater, War, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Empire</em> by Logan J. Connors <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Yann Robert (bio) </li> </ul> Logan J. Connors. <em>Theater, War, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Empire</em>. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2024. Pp. x + 255 + 9 b/w illus. $110.00 hardback, $110.00 eBook. <p>Logan J. Connors gives a telling title, “Total Theater for Total War,” to his monograph’s penultimate chapter, the culmination, in many ways, of the book’s narrative arc. Drawing from David Bell and others, Connors underscores the unprecedented attributes that made wars of the late eighteenth century “total,” from their global span to their reliance on mass conscription and all available national resources. Among these resources was a groundbreaking “total theater,” characterized by “documentary-based dramaturgy, technological innovations, onstage military formations and battles, dramatic characters and actors who were actual soldiers, patriotic song breaks, the use of various military practices and customs in drama, and more” (148). Such strategies of reenactment, liveliness, and intimacy were designed to foster a more intense, unmediated engagement of French spectators in the plays as in the war effort. Totality thus serves as a crucial throughline in Connors’s book (indeed, “total,” “totality,” and “totalizing” appear 99 times). One might argue that it also perfectly captures what makes it such a unique and rewarding read, a veritable “Total Book on Total Theater for Total War.” Total in the remarkable variety of its methodological approaches: literary close-reading, performance studies, cultural military history, gender studies, and architectural analysis, to name a few. And total as well in its topics of interest, so many that it is best to let Connors list them: “plays depicting soldiers, performances in navy theaters and in other military venues, policies to compel soldiers to attend the theater, repertories of public theaters in provincial and colonial cities with significant military populations, the evolving relationship between theatrical diplomacy and armed conflict in colonial and occupied zones, soldier-actors and soldier-writers, the role of both theater and the military as ‘civilizing’ and ‘urbanizing’ forces, dramatic depictions of gender roles in battle and on the home front, public performances of coloniality and military rule, and theater as a tool for teaching combat skills, nationalism, sexuality, xenophobia, and more” (3).</p> <p>Totality need not mean exhaustivity, however, and throughout his monograph Connors identifies topics and areas awaiting further studies. Far from a weakness, this strikes me as a strength, a reflection of the work’s seminal status. Indeed, Connors has accomplished the rare feat of un","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142142566","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-06DOI: 10.1353/cdr.2024.a936318
Shelley Orr
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> ”Simply Sitting in a Chair”: Questioning Representational Practice and Dramatic Convention in Marguerite Duras’s <em>L’Amante anglaise</em> and <em>The Viaducts of Seine-et-Oise</em> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Shelley Orr (bio) </li> </ul> <blockquote> <p>One doesn’t know in life when things are there. They escape you . . . You want to know what it would take for it to be so. For me to be on stage saying nothing, <em>to let myself see</em>, without especially thinking about something. That’s right.</p> Marguerite Duras, <em>La Vie matérielle</em>, translated by Carol Barko (1987) </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>It is difficult to create a believable, sympathetic character while simply sitting in a chair answering questions for an hour, but Ms. Zabriskie pulls it off. As the actress stares off into space, wrings her hands in her lap, or clutches the hem of her skirt, <em>we see</em> the bleakness of Claire’s life as clearly as if she had been a neighbor.</p> Wilborn Hampton, review of Duras’s <em>English Mint/L’Amante Anglaise</em> (1988) </blockquote> <p><strong>F</strong>or both French novelist Marguerite Duras and American theatre critic Wilborn Hampton, the theatre is a place to see, an understanding in line with the Greek <em>théatron</em> (the seeing place, “a place for ‘looking at’ something”), from which the theatre takes its name. <sup>1</sup> However, what one sees in the theatre and how one sees it are quite different for writer and critic. Hampton expects to see characters and dramatic action in accordance with the conventions of mimetic realism and, in the case of the production of Duras’s 1968 work <em>L’Amante Anglaise</em> that he reviewed, <strong>[End Page 312]</strong> in accordance with the more specific conventions of the crime drama or <em>drame policier</em>. In her play, however, Duras questions the former and only appears to adhere to the latter as she challenges what is among the oldest of theatrical forms: the murder mystery. Ever since Sophocles’ <em>Oedipus Rex</em> laid a foundation for the genre (thanks in part to framing provided by Aristotle’s <em>Poetics</em>), with its cause-and-effect, linear plotline, in which each clue builds the emotional intensity until the climax reveals all, the murder mystery has been a favorite of playwrights and novelists. In her <em>L’Amante anglaise</em>, however, Duras mimics the form to question and undermine theatrical realism’s ability to engage in a project of uncovering the truth.</p> <p>We can get a sense of Duras’s project of mimicry, subversion, and critique in <em>L’Amante Anglaise</em>—as well as Hampton’s inability or unwillingness to understand it—in Hampton’s review of Stages Trilingual Theater’s English-language production of the play, which was performed in 1988 at New York’s Cherry Lane Theater under the title <em>English Mint/L’Amante anglaise<
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Pub Date : 2024-09-06DOI: 10.1353/cdr.2024.a936320
David J. Amelang
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Measuring Protagonism in Early Modern European Theatre: <span>A Distant Reading of the Character of Sophonisba</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> David J. Amelang (bio) </li> </ul> <h2>Introduction</h2> <p><strong>A</strong>ny person taking their first steps into the wide and complex world of early modern comparative theatre history immediately confronts one basic fact: that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe was divided into territories that allowed women to act professionally and territories that banned them from doing so. In the commercial theatres of Shakespeare’s England, most famously, adolescent boys were charged with performing all female roles, whereas at exactly the same time in countries such as Italy, France, and Spain actresses were considered the stars of their industries. This division was not sculpted in stone, with some nations wavering back and forth on how to handle what authorities broadly perceived as a choice between the lesser of two evils: having either women or young cross-dressed men commanding attention on the nation’s public stages. Needless to say, depending on which laws and customs were in effect, dramatists had to adapt and adjust the way they wrote plays to the realities—and limitations—of their cultures of performance. It stands to reason that it would have been quite different to create a role for a young boy who was just getting started in the business of playing than for an established celebrity actress who was broadly seen as the main attraction in the eyes of the theatregoing public. <strong>[End Page 367]</strong></p> <p>Unable to shake this thought, I quickly became fixated with trying to identify and trace the different factors that influenced the prominence of female roles in the plays of early modern Europe. Fall 2021 saw the online release of <em>Rolecall</em> (http://www.rolecall.eu), an open-access database which I developed as a way of charting the plays and characters of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European theatre. Its original purpose was to encourage scholars and students of Renaissance and Baroque theatre comparatively to explore the constellations of characters in early modern Europe’s dramatic corpora, with a particular focus on their gender dynamics. Did the presence or absence of actresses in one or another country affect the type of female characters their dramatic traditions ended up featuring? Did plays written by female playwrights feature lengthier female roles than those of their male counterparts? Is there a considerable difference between the number of female leads in the plays written for the Globe-like amphitheatres of suburban London, in which all female playgoers had to be accompanied by a male chaperone, as opposed to the elite indoor playhouses of the City that allowed for more women in the audience? These are the initial ques
{"title":"Measuring Protagonism in Early Modern European Theatre: A Distant Reading of the Character of Sophonisba","authors":"David J. Amelang","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a936320","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a936320","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Measuring Protagonism in Early Modern European Theatre: <span>A Distant Reading of the Character of Sophonisba</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> David J. Amelang (bio) </li> </ul> <h2>Introduction</h2> <p><strong>A</strong>ny person taking their first steps into the wide and complex world of early modern comparative theatre history immediately confronts one basic fact: that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe was divided into territories that allowed women to act professionally and territories that banned them from doing so. In the commercial theatres of Shakespeare’s England, most famously, adolescent boys were charged with performing all female roles, whereas at exactly the same time in countries such as Italy, France, and Spain actresses were considered the stars of their industries. This division was not sculpted in stone, with some nations wavering back and forth on how to handle what authorities broadly perceived as a choice between the lesser of two evils: having either women or young cross-dressed men commanding attention on the nation’s public stages. Needless to say, depending on which laws and customs were in effect, dramatists had to adapt and adjust the way they wrote plays to the realities—and limitations—of their cultures of performance. It stands to reason that it would have been quite different to create a role for a young boy who was just getting started in the business of playing than for an established celebrity actress who was broadly seen as the main attraction in the eyes of the theatregoing public. <strong>[End Page 367]</strong></p> <p>Unable to shake this thought, I quickly became fixated with trying to identify and trace the different factors that influenced the prominence of female roles in the plays of early modern Europe. Fall 2021 saw the online release of <em>Rolecall</em> (http://www.rolecall.eu), an open-access database which I developed as a way of charting the plays and characters of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European theatre. Its original purpose was to encourage scholars and students of Renaissance and Baroque theatre comparatively to explore the constellations of characters in early modern Europe’s dramatic corpora, with a particular focus on their gender dynamics. Did the presence or absence of actresses in one or another country affect the type of female characters their dramatic traditions ended up featuring? Did plays written by female playwrights feature lengthier female roles than those of their male counterparts? Is there a considerable difference between the number of female leads in the plays written for the Globe-like amphitheatres of suburban London, in which all female playgoers had to be accompanied by a male chaperone, as opposed to the elite indoor playhouses of the City that allowed for more women in the audience? These are the initial ques","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142142563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-06DOI: 10.1353/cdr.2024.a920789
Richard Gilbert
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Keeping the Violence Out of Sight:<span>Representing Systems of Oppression with Offstage Violence</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Richard Gilbert (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Sometimes what we don't see with our own eyes can hit harder than what we do, and for those who create theatre that challenges the potent imbedded systems of violence by which our society oppresses so many of its people, hitting hard is crucial. Contemporary theatremakers are often deeply interested in telling stories that thematize institutional or systemic violence. Many contemporary plays thematize the violent structures under which we live in an attempt to come to terms with them, while many older plays are re-imagined by directors and producers in ways that inject the theme of systemic violence where it might have been only latent in or even absent from the source text. In drama, it is hard to directly represent mass violence. Generally a play will focus on a few characters, some of whom will represent systems of oppression by enacting violence on others who represent the oppressed. When violence is represented mimetically on stage in this way, there is always the danger that the audience will receive it as specific violence against a specific character rather than as part of a broader societal issue.<sup>1</sup></p> <p>Anyone involved in public discourse, whether on social media or in the mainstream news, will be sadly familiar with the experience of trying to talk about a system but inevitably ending up in a discussion of the specific. All too often, for example, discussions of police violence get derailed by interlocutors treating every example as a singular event rather than as evidence of a systemic problem that needs solving. The problem is that focus on a specific incident obfuscates the systemic issue and can end up being misread as an argument that the problem itself is specific <strong>[End Page 131]</strong> rather than systemic. That is, no matter how many examples there are of police murder, some people will insist on referring to each as "one bad apple." Representing systemic violence onstage through direct mimetic illusions of specific acts of violence (so, for example, showing a cop killing a person of color or a homophobe brutalizing a queer character) can generate a similar cognitive challenge for an audience because we are used to identifying with individual characters. The shock of violence can exacerbate the problem as it tends to increase our empathic response, making it harder for even a critically engaged audience to focus out to the systemic issues at play.</p> <p>Offstage violence can be a potent solution to the problem of representing systemic and institutional violence. I will argue that there are three primary qualities of offstage violence that make it so effective in this regard. The first is that there are metaphorical
{"title":"Keeping the Violence Out of Sight: Representing Systems of Oppression with Offstage Violence","authors":"Richard Gilbert","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a920789","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a920789","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Keeping the Violence Out of Sight:<span>Representing Systems of Oppression with Offstage Violence</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Richard Gilbert (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Sometimes what we don't see with our own eyes can hit harder than what we do, and for those who create theatre that challenges the potent imbedded systems of violence by which our society oppresses so many of its people, hitting hard is crucial. Contemporary theatremakers are often deeply interested in telling stories that thematize institutional or systemic violence. Many contemporary plays thematize the violent structures under which we live in an attempt to come to terms with them, while many older plays are re-imagined by directors and producers in ways that inject the theme of systemic violence where it might have been only latent in or even absent from the source text. In drama, it is hard to directly represent mass violence. Generally a play will focus on a few characters, some of whom will represent systems of oppression by enacting violence on others who represent the oppressed. When violence is represented mimetically on stage in this way, there is always the danger that the audience will receive it as specific violence against a specific character rather than as part of a broader societal issue.<sup>1</sup></p> <p>Anyone involved in public discourse, whether on social media or in the mainstream news, will be sadly familiar with the experience of trying to talk about a system but inevitably ending up in a discussion of the specific. All too often, for example, discussions of police violence get derailed by interlocutors treating every example as a singular event rather than as evidence of a systemic problem that needs solving. The problem is that focus on a specific incident obfuscates the systemic issue and can end up being misread as an argument that the problem itself is specific <strong>[End Page 131]</strong> rather than systemic. That is, no matter how many examples there are of police murder, some people will insist on referring to each as \"one bad apple.\" Representing systemic violence onstage through direct mimetic illusions of specific acts of violence (so, for example, showing a cop killing a person of color or a homophobe brutalizing a queer character) can generate a similar cognitive challenge for an audience because we are used to identifying with individual characters. The shock of violence can exacerbate the problem as it tends to increase our empathic response, making it harder for even a critically engaged audience to focus out to the systemic issues at play.</p> <p>Offstage violence can be a potent solution to the problem of representing systemic and institutional violence. I will argue that there are three primary qualities of offstage violence that make it so effective in this regard. The first is that there are metaphorical ","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"47 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140043724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-06DOI: 10.1353/cdr.2024.a920788
Araceli González Crespán
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Institutionalized Violence and Oppression:<span>Ambiguity, Complicity and Resistance in <em>El Campo</em> and <em>The Conduct of Life</em></span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Araceli González Crespán (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Argentinian playwright Griselda Gambaro's <em>El Campo</em>, written in 1967 and first performed in 1968, is a play that portrays institutionalized violence through ambiguity, double meanings, duplicity, lies, and lack of reference.<sup>1</sup> Upon his arrival to what he presumes to be a new job as an accountant, the main character Martín will slowly realize that, instead, he is a prisoner in a concentration camp. What happens on stage and what the victims experience is never explicit, so both the protagonist and the audience are confronted with the visible, physical consequences of such violence combined with the psychological terror induced by lack of definition, vagueness, and ignorance. Oppression deprives the victims and the audience of any sense of comprehension and renders them powerless.</p> <p><em>The Conduct of Life</em> premiered almost twenty years later, in 1985. Cuban American Maria Irene Fornes set the scene in "<em>A Latin American country. The present</em>."<sup>2</sup> The general, diffuse reference to place and time does not incorporate more specific details other than the performance space: the house of Orlando, an army lieutenant that will soon be a commander. He participates in tortures and abuse not only as part of his professional duties but also privately, at home, where he keeps Nena, a twelve-year-old destitute girl he has kidnapped. Here, the victimizer sadistically replicates the institutional abuse in the personal domain. Other characters in the household, namely his wife Leticia, are at first unaware of the existence of Nena although her complicity plays a role in the sustained abuse of the victim.</p> <p>The arrival of the new millennium seemed to bring with it the illusion that military regimes were a thing of the past and that democracy was the <strong>[End Page 109]</strong> destiny, if not reality, across America. In the continent, threats to political stability seemed to come from afar, with Islamic terrorism identified as the external enemy; however, in the second decade of the century, we have already witnessed the surge of anti-democratic reactions based on demagogy and populism from within the system. For example, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Donald Trump in the United States, both became presidents by virtue of democratic elections but have pushed the limits of what democracy means by questioning the voting process. Prior to the 2022 election, President Bolsonaro—who openly defended Brazil's military dictatorship—uttered constant baseless accusations of fraud in the electoral system, attacked freedom of speech, and repeatedly threatened the Supreme Court.<sup>3</sup
{"title":"Institutionalized Violence and Oppression: Ambiguity, Complicity and Resistance in El Campo and The Conduct of Life","authors":"Araceli González Crespán","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a920788","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a920788","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Institutionalized Violence and Oppression:<span>Ambiguity, Complicity and Resistance in <em>El Campo</em> and <em>The Conduct of Life</em></span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Araceli González Crespán (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Argentinian playwright Griselda Gambaro's <em>El Campo</em>, written in 1967 and first performed in 1968, is a play that portrays institutionalized violence through ambiguity, double meanings, duplicity, lies, and lack of reference.<sup>1</sup> Upon his arrival to what he presumes to be a new job as an accountant, the main character Martín will slowly realize that, instead, he is a prisoner in a concentration camp. What happens on stage and what the victims experience is never explicit, so both the protagonist and the audience are confronted with the visible, physical consequences of such violence combined with the psychological terror induced by lack of definition, vagueness, and ignorance. Oppression deprives the victims and the audience of any sense of comprehension and renders them powerless.</p> <p><em>The Conduct of Life</em> premiered almost twenty years later, in 1985. Cuban American Maria Irene Fornes set the scene in \"<em>A Latin American country. The present</em>.\"<sup>2</sup> The general, diffuse reference to place and time does not incorporate more specific details other than the performance space: the house of Orlando, an army lieutenant that will soon be a commander. He participates in tortures and abuse not only as part of his professional duties but also privately, at home, where he keeps Nena, a twelve-year-old destitute girl he has kidnapped. Here, the victimizer sadistically replicates the institutional abuse in the personal domain. Other characters in the household, namely his wife Leticia, are at first unaware of the existence of Nena although her complicity plays a role in the sustained abuse of the victim.</p> <p>The arrival of the new millennium seemed to bring with it the illusion that military regimes were a thing of the past and that democracy was the <strong>[End Page 109]</strong> destiny, if not reality, across America. In the continent, threats to political stability seemed to come from afar, with Islamic terrorism identified as the external enemy; however, in the second decade of the century, we have already witnessed the surge of anti-democratic reactions based on demagogy and populism from within the system. For example, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Donald Trump in the United States, both became presidents by virtue of democratic elections but have pushed the limits of what democracy means by questioning the voting process. Prior to the 2022 election, President Bolsonaro—who openly defended Brazil's military dictatorship—uttered constant baseless accusations of fraud in the electoral system, attacked freedom of speech, and repeatedly threatened the Supreme Court.<sup>3</sup","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140043797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-06DOI: 10.1353/cdr.2024.a920784
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> "Only Write the Good Parts":<span>Playwright Lucas Hnath in Conversation with Jay Malarcher</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <p><em>The keynote address at the 2023 Comparative Drama Conference was a conversation with playwright Lucas Hnath. His plays, known for their striking intellectual-tennis match-style dialogue, include</em> Death Tax <em>(2012)</em>, A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney <em>(2013)</em>, Red Speedo <em>(2013)</em>, Isaac's Eye <em>(2014)</em>, The Christians <em>(2015)</em>, Hillary and Clinton <em>(2016)</em>, Dana H. <em>(2019)</em>, The Thin Place <em>(2019), and, most famously</em>, A Doll's House, Part 2 <em>(2017), which received eight 2017 Tony Award nominations, including for Best Play. The recipient of awards that include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Steinberg Playwright award, the Windham-Campbell Literary Prize, and the Obie Award for Playwriting for</em> The Christians, <em>Hnath teaches playwriting and is Head of Performance for the Dramatic Writing program at NYU. In this wide-ranging conversation with scholar Jay Malarcher (West Virginia University), Hnath shares his processes for generating ideas, researching, and teaching playwriting; the origins of several of his plays; and his use of ellipses as percussive beats</em>.</p> <p><em>Hnath was introduced by Comparative Drama Conference director William C. Boles (Rollins College)</em>.</p> William C. Boles: <p>In Lucas Hnath's note to actors and directors on the nature of the pacing of his play <em>Isaac's Eye</em>, he writes, "keep it moving"—and my aim is to follow this instruction with this introduction. Perhaps it's apt to begin by noting Lucas's meticulous attention to the way his lines should be delivered. In most of the editions of his plays you will find him urging his actors and directors not to dawdle with his language. In <em>Death Tax</em> he instructs to let the play move swiftly, and I'm really badly <strong>[End Page 9]</strong> paraphrasing this, but essentially, he wrote that if the play runs longer than eighty-five minutes, the director really screwed up.</p> <p>Perhaps this fascination with the continuous flowing nature of his characters' dialogue can be traced to a fascination from his childhood. Anyone here know what city Lucas went to school in? Orlando! What are we famous for? Disney amusement parks, right. Growing up, Lucas had a fascination with amusement park rides, and he wanted to design his own ride, and by becoming a playwright, he essentially has fulfilled this childhood goal. Eschewing intermissions, he locks the audience into the theatre, much like we are strapped into Space Mountain, or Tron, or one of those annoying Star Wars rides. And then, as he says about each of his plays, the thing doesn't stop until it stops.</p> <p>While his best-known play revisits Nora
以下是内容的简要摘录，以代替摘要： "只写好的部分"：剧作家卢卡斯-赫纳特与杰伊-马拉彻的对话 2023 年比较戏剧大会的主题演讲是与剧作家卢卡斯-赫纳特的对话。他的剧本以其引人注目的智力网球比赛式对话而闻名，包括《死亡税》（2012 年）、《关于沃尔特-迪斯尼之死的未制作剧本的公开朗读》（2013 年）、《红色极速服》（2013 年）、《以撒的眼睛》（2014 年）、《基督徒》（2015 年）、《希拉里与克林顿》（2016 年）、《丹娜-H.》（2019 年）、《薄处》（2019 年），以及最著名的《玩偶之家》第二部（2017 年），该剧获得了 2017 年托尼奖的八项提名，其中包括最佳剧本奖。赫纳特曾获得古根海姆奖学金、斯坦伯格剧作家奖、温德汉姆-坎贝尔文学奖以及奥比剧作奖（凭借《基督徒》获得奥比剧作奖）等奖项，他在纽约大学教授剧本创作，并担任戏剧写作项目表演负责人。在与学者杰伊-马拉彻（Jay Malarcher）（西弗吉尼亚大学）的广泛对话中，赫纳特分享了他产生想法、进行研究和教授剧本创作的过程；他的几部剧本的起源；以及他使用省略号作为打击节拍。比较戏剧会议总监 William C. Boles（罗林斯学院）介绍了 Hnath。威廉-C-博尔斯卢卡斯-赫纳特（Lucas Hnath）在给演员和导演的关于他的戏剧《以撒的眼睛》（Isaac's Eye）的节奏性质的说明中写道："让它动起来"--我的目的是通过这次介绍遵循这一指示。也许我们应该首先注意到卢卡斯对台词表达方式的一丝不苟。在他的大多数剧本版本中，你都会发现他敦促演员和导演不要在语言上磨蹭。在《死亡税金》中，他指示让戏剧迅速发展，我真的很[第9页完]不擅长转述这句话，但从根本上说，他写道，如果戏剧的时间超过85分钟，导演就真的搞砸了。也许，卢卡斯对人物对话的连续性的迷恋可以追溯到他童年时代的一种迷恋。有人知道卢卡斯在哪个城市上学吗？奥兰多我们因什么而闻名？迪士尼游乐园，对吧。在成长过程中，卢卡斯对游乐园的游乐设施非常着迷，他想设计自己的游乐设施，而成为剧作家后，他基本上实现了这个童年目标。他摒弃了中场休息，把观众锁在剧场里，就像我们被绑在太空山、创战纪或那些恼人的星球大战游乐设施里一样。然后，正如他在谈到自己的每部剧时所说的那样，"事情不会停止，直到它停止"。他最著名的剧目是《玩偶之家》中的诺拉-海尔默，而他的许多其他剧目则以知名人物为主角--安娜-妮可-史密斯、艾萨克-牛顿、希拉里和比尔-克林顿、巴拉克-奥巴马、沃尔特和罗伊-迪斯尼--挑战了剧院通常的工作方式。丹娜-H.》是一部关于他母亲被绑架的戏剧，靠演员与卢卡斯母亲的自言自语进行唇语同步。在《关于沃尔特-迪斯尼之死的未制作剧本的公开朗读》中，整部作品就是剧本的桌面朗读。他把我们带到了舞台上少见的场景：一座教堂，我们就是教堂里的会众，里面有一个完整的唱诗班--"越大越好"；另一个宇宙，希拉里、比尔和奥巴马的命运各不相同；一个游泳馆，剧终时在泳池里发生了一场大战；还有艾萨克-牛顿的家，在那里进行了一次科学实验，将一根针插入某人的眼睛。他在接受工作室剧院文学总监阿德里安-爱丽丝-汉塞尔的采访时承认："我喜欢写那些尽可能接近不可能演出的戏剧。纽约客》上的一篇文章形容赫纳特 "是苏格拉底式对话的大师，是华莱士-肖恩（Wallace Shawn）的弟子"。查尔斯-伊舍伍德（Charles Isherwood）将他的写作比作 "超咖啡因的大卫-马梅特"。然而，尽管有这么多的比较，他还是承认，他在写作中更多地感受到了希腊人的亲和力。关于他过去十年的高产，赫纳特告诉 D. T. 马克斯："写作......
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