Comparative Drama articles from March 2000

Comparative Drama archives from March 2000

Backbiter and the Rhetoric of Detraction.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2000... This essay will look at the development of one proto-Vice figure, Back-biter, as he appears in two East Anglian playtexts from the fifteenth century,(1) The Castle of Perseverance and the N-Town "Trial of Joseph and Mary" share this character,...

Marlowe's Travesty of Virgil: Dido and Elizabethan Dreams of Empire.(Christopher Marlowe)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2000... Several recent studies(1) of Christopher Marlowe's Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, have focused on its relation to the development of English imperialism. Since the play represents a female ruler from North Africa who is brought down by her...

Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Whitsun Plays.(Review)
March 22, 2000... David Mills. Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Whitsun Plays. Studies in Early English Drama 4. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Pp. xiii + 281. $55.00. In recent years research on dramatic and ceremonial...

Shakespeare's Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Constance Jordan. Shakespeare's Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Pp. x + 224. $35.00. In Shakespeare's Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances, Constance Jordan sets out to revise...

Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama.(Review)
March 22, 2000... David Mamet. Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama. The Columbia House Lectures on American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Pp. 96. $19.95. As one might expect from a book written by popular...

The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Jody Enders. The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. xvii + 268. $45.00. Jody Enders wisely begins her argument that the histories of torture, law, rhetoric, theater, and...

Race and the Yankee: Woodworth's The Forest Rose.(Samuel Woodworth)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2000... Samuel Woodworth's musical play, The Forest Rose (1825), was one of the most successful American dramas on stage before Uncle Tom's Cabin, and, according to Richard Moody, the country's first "hit."(1) For at least forty years, The Forest Rose...

Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Patrick Cheney. Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Pp. xii+402. $60.00. In a work of scrupulous scholarship, impressive documentation, and ingenious close...

Music in the English Courtly Masque, 1604-1640.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Peter Walls. Music in the English Courtly Masque, 1604-1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. xix + 372 + 8p. of plates. $70.00. The masques prepared for the English court during the first decades of the seventeenth century were...

How Music Matters: Some Songs of Robert Johnson in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2000... Musicke I say the most divine striker of the senses. --Sir Phillip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (1595) Music, according to Italian Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino, "by its nature, both spiritual and material... at once seizes...