Comparative Drama articles from March 2002

Comparative Drama archives from March 2002

Laughter in medieval English drama: a critique of modernizing and historical analyses.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... Laughing, like weeping, is a spontaneous, involuntary expression of our emotions. (1) It is a "window" through which we can look inside our fellow humans and without which we would probably not be viable as social beings. What we observe...

Writing and revenge: John Marston's Histriomastix.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... Lampatho: Ile be reveng'd. Quadratus: How pree-thee? In a play? --What You Will At the turn of the seventeenth century, John Marston and Ben Jonson satirized each other's poetics and personalities in a series of revenge comedies...

Soft touch: on the Renaissance staging and meaning of the "Noli me tangere" icon.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... In a brief article called "Viola's `Do Not Embrace Me' as Icon" published in the December 1988 issue of Notes and Queries, I argue that Viola's admonition to her newly recovered twin Sebastian in act 5.1.251 of Twelfth Night alludes to the...

Tragedy and Timon of Athens.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... One of the most vexed terms in literary criticism is tragedy. As critics we often denounce the popular use of the term when the death of the family pet is called a "terrible tragedy" yet we would be hard put to give a precise explanation of a...

Sights unseen: withholding information in the plays of Thomas Bernhard.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... We have found to our cost, once for all, that the regions of fancy and the boards of Covent Garden are not the same thing. All that was fine in the play, was lost in the representation.... (1) Thus William Hazlitt in 1816 on a performance...

O'Neill and the Wobblies: the IWW as a model for failure in The Iceman Cometh.(Eugene O'Neill)(Industrial Workers of the World)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... "Wobblies? What de hell's dat?" --Yank in The Hairy Ape Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh and The Hairy Ape contain a number of allusions to the Industrial Workers of the World--the Wobblies. 1905 through 1917 were the heyday of the...

Maturation and political upheaval in Lloyd Fernando's Scorpion Orchid and Robert Yeo's The Singapore Trilogy.
March 22, 2002... Identification is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity. --Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 1969 In Singapore, the portrayal of...

The Arlecchino and three English tinkers.(Italian comedy and Shakespearean characters)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... In the certainty that he towered above his time, traditional criticism tends to deny that Shakespeare also was of his time, one in which Italian theater had been flourishing for nearly a century before London's first theaters were built. To the...

Rubin and Mercator: grotesque comedy in the German Easter Play.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... On the rather slim basis of the antiphon for Mark 16:1--"Dum transisset sabbatum Maria Magdalena et Maria Iacobi et Salome emerunt aromata" (When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdela, Mary the Mother of James, and Salome bought aromatic oils)--a...

Joel Berkowitz. Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage.(Book Review)
March 22, 2002... Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. Pp. xvi + 283, illustrations. $32.95. Yiddish, once my native language, is a language I still know to a degree. In fact, I consider it a principal source of my interest in English, which now...

Zdenek Stribrny. Shakespeare and Eastern Europe.(Book Review)
March 22, 2002... Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xix + 176.$55.00. The present volume, part of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series, offers a concise and valuable reminder of the Bard's importance for Eastern Europe and Russia but...

Alexander Shurbanov and Boika Sokolova. Painting Shakespeare Red: An East-European Appropriation.(Book Review)
March 22, 2002... Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Pp. 308, illustrated. $47.50. Shakespeare's efficacy as a cultural barometer is well established. Because his plays are the gold standard of dramatic literature, their varying fortunes on the...

Roger A. Hall. Performing the American Frontier, 1870-1906.(Book Review)
March 22, 2002... Cambridge Studies in American Theater and Drama 13. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 297. $55.00. In the spring and summer of 1876, an avid playgoer in Chicago may very well have found him- or herself at...

Gonda A. H. van Steen. Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece.(Book Review)
March 22, 2002... Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xvii + 284. $39.50. Venom in Verse discusses the revival and reception of Aristophanes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greece within a unique cultural and political context. Gonda van...

Bruce Stewart, ed. Beckett and Beyond.(Book Review)
March 22, 2002... Proceedings of the Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco, 17-20 May 1991. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1999. Pp. viii + 278. $65.00. Appearing some years after the conference that provided the forum for this eclectic gathering of essays,...

Sarah Beckwith. Signifying God: Social Relations and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays.(Book Review)
March 22, 2002... Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. 296, illustrated. $35.00. Sarah Beckwith's Signifying God: Social Relations and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays is an important, although in some ways frustrating, new book by a...

Nicholas Grene. Shakespeare's Serial History Plays.(Book Review)
March 22, 2002... Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvii + 278, illustrated. $60. Nicholas Grene skillfully accomplishes what he sets out to do: to reread Shakespeare's English histories in light of both their Elizabethan origins and later...

Kathleen Ashley and Wim Husken, eds. Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.(Book Review)
March 22, 2002... Ludus: Medieval and Early Renaissance Theatre and Drama, 5. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001. Pp. 257. $55.00. Only recently has scholarly attention been directed to processions as performance, and this is, I believe, a very healthy...

Helka Maniken, S. E. Wilmer, and W. B. Worthen, eds. Theatre, History, and National Identities.(Book Review)
March 22, 2002... Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2001. Pp. 331. $36.00 paperback. This is a superb collection of eleven essays which represents the work of faculty and graduate students in a series of seminars on theater and nationalism convened by...

Lois Potter and Arthur F. Kinney, eds. Shakespeare: Text and Theater. Essays in Honor of Jay L. Halio.(Book Review)
March 22, 2002... Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999. Pp. 346. $49.50. In their Preface and Acknowledgments to Shakespeare: Text and Theater: Essays in Honor of Jay L. Halio, editors Lois Potter and Arthur F. Kinney announce that they wanted their...