Comparative Drama articles from September 2002

Comparative Drama archives from September 2002

Lessons in "hopping": the Dance of Death and the Chester mystery cycle.
September 22, 2002... The plays in the Chester mystery cycle may paint a vivid picture of religious belief on the eve of the Reformation, but they also contain many echoes of contemporary social customs as well as borrowings from other sources, both textual and...

Performing marriage with a difference: wooing, wedding, and bedding in The Taming of the Shrew.
September 22, 2002... Even before the recent burgeoning of performance theory, The Taming of the Shrew was of great interest to critics interested in role-playing, identity, and theatricality. And because Kate's "taming" and her performative speech both take place...

The Islamization of Spain in William Rowley and Mary Pix: the politics of nation and gender.
September 22, 2002... The sustained Muslim presence in Spain between 711 and 1492 provides a fascinating example of intercultural dynamics that has never ceased to engage the imagination of many authors. One episode in particular, the Islamic invasion and conquest...

Lydgate's mummings and the aristocratic resistance to drama.
September 22, 2002... In an article in PMLA in October 1998, W. B. Worthen declared "a conceptual crisis in drama studies." (1) Over the last two decades, the field of performance studies has coalesced around assertions of the primacy of temporal performance over...

Ad imaginem suam: regional chant variants and the origins of the Jeu d'Adam.
September 22, 2002... The earliest surviving dramatic work in the French vernacular is a semiliturgical play now known as the Jeu d'Adam. This singular work is preserved in only one manuscript copy, Tours, Bibliotheque municipale, 927--a book copied in southern...

Cancer and the common woman in Margaret Edson's W;t.
September 22, 2002... This essay is an exercise in the bringing together of apparently disparate roles. I am an assistant professor of Renaissance literature, and I am a cancer patient. These two identities rarely overlap, since cancer has not proved a popular...

Political allegory in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean "Turk" plays: Lust's Dominion and The Turke.
September 22, 2002... Recent work on representations of Turks in early modern literature and culture has shown the often complex and contradictory ways in which the English understood Muslim peoples at this time. (1) As Nabil Matar observes, "Muslims were seen to be...

William Tydeman, ed. The Medieval European Stage: 500-1550.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. lxii + 720. $140.00. This invaluable book belongs to a series of collections of primary source materials intended to provide reference documents for teachers and scholars in theater studies,...

Derek Hughes, The Theatre of Aphra Behn.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... New York: Palgrave, 2001. Pp. viii + 230. $65.00. Serious re-evaluation of the works of Aphra Behn has virtually exploded in the past decade. Approximately two-thirds of all Behn criticism listed in the MLA database has appeared in the last...

Wendy Wall. Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii + 220. $60.00. Wendy Wall is very much a practitioner of "the new new historicism," as outlined in Renaissance Culture and the...

Mary Ann Frese Witt. The Search for Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 259. $45.00. The dust jacket informs us that in this study, Mary Ann Frese Witt "explores the work of a group of European writers and artists who came to fascism by way of aesthetics." That...

Roger Travis. Allegory and the Tragic Chorus in Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1999. Pp. xii + 243. $27.95. In Allegory and the Tragic Chorus, Roger Travis combines literary theory and Lacanian as well as object-relations psychoanalytic methodologies to study the...

Mathew R. Martin. Between Theater and Philosophy: Skepticism in the Major City Comedies of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Pp. 191. $35.00. Mathew Martin's book contextualizes recent critical concerns such as city comedy's representation of subjectivity and the effects of market forces by placing them within the...

Richard Burt, ed. Shakespeare After Mass Media.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... New York: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xii + 340. $26.95 paperback. Richard Burt's introduction in this volume on the commercial exploitations of Shakespeare's cultural capital is followed by thirteen lively, thoughtful essays divided into two...