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Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760–1850 (Early America: History, Context, Culture)
by Jenna M. GibbsHow popular theater, including blackface characters, reflected and influenced attitudes toward race, the slave trade, and ideas of liberty in early America.Jenna M. Gibbs explores the world of theatrical and related print production on both sides of the Atlantic in an age of remarkable political and social change. Her deeply researched study of working-class and middling entertainment covers the period of the American Revolution through the first half of the nineteenth century, examining controversies over the place of black people in the Anglo-American moral imagination. Taking a transatlantic and nearly century-long view, Performing the Temple of Liberty draws on a wide range of performed texts as well as ephemera—broadsides, ballads, and cartoons—and traces changes in white racial attitudes.Gibbs asks how popular entertainment incorporated and helped define concepts of liberty, natural rights, the nature of blackness, and the evils of slavery while also generating widespread acceptance, in America and in Great Britain, of blackface performance as a form of racial ridicule. Readers follow the migration of theatrical texts, images, and performers between London and Philadelphia. The story is not flattering to either the United States or Great Britain. Gibbs's account demonstrates how British portrayals of Africans ran to the sympathetic and to a definition of liberty that produced slave manumission in 1833 yet reflected an increasingly racialized sense of cultural superiority. On the American stage, the treatment of blacks devolved into a denigrating, patronizing view embedded both in blackface burlesque and in the idea of "Liberty," the figure of the white goddess.Performing the Temple of Liberty will appeal to readers across disciplinary lines of history, literature, theater history, and culture studies. Scholars and students interested in slavery and abolition, British and American politics and culture, and Atlantic history will also take an interest in this provocative work.
El perro del hortelano (Teatro Ser. #Vol. 14)
by Lope de VegaLlamada también La condesa de Belflor, es un ejemplo de comedia de enredo y costumbres, escrita hacia 1618. Diana, la condesa, está enamorada de su secretario Teodoro, que ama a Marcela, aunque está dispuesto a prestar oídos a su señora. Pero Diana se encuentra en un dilema: ni quiere casarse con él porque no pertenece a su clase, ni le da el consentimiento para que se case con Marcela. Sin embargo, cuando se entera de que Teodoro puede ser descendiente del conde Ludovico, acaban sus dudas.
Philoctetes
by Paul Woodruff Peter Meineck SophoclesFirst published in Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff's Sophocles: Four Tragedies, this riveting translation by Peter Meineck of Sophocles' Philoctetes features a new Introduction by Paul Woodruff.
Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet: A Study of Shakespeare's Method
by Leon Harold CraigShakespeare's famous play, Hamlet, has been the subject of more scholarly analysis and criticism than any other work of literature in human history. For all of its generally acknowledged virtues, however, it has also been treated as problematic in a raft of ways. In Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet, Leon Craig explains that the most oft-cited problems and criticisms are actually solvable puzzles. Through a close reading of the philosophical problems presented in Hamlet, Craig attempts to provide solutions to these puzzles. The posing of puzzles, some more conspicuous, others less so, is fundamental to Shakespeare's philosophical method and purpose. That is, he has crafted his plays, and Hamlet in particular, so as to stimulate philosophical activity in the "judicious" (as distinct from the "unskillful") readers. By virtue of showing what so many critics treat as faults or flaws are actually intended to be interpretive challenges, Craig aims to raise appreciation for the overall coherence of Hamlet: that there is more logical rigor to its plot and psychological plausibility to its characterizations than is generally granted, even by its professed admirers. Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet endeavors to make clear why Hamlet, as a work of reason, is far better than is generally recognized, and proves its author to be, not simply the premier poet and playwright he is already universally acknowledged to be, but a philosopher in his own right.
Pink Mist
by Owen SheersFrom the author of I Saw a Man comes a powerful drama in verse that captures both the trauma of modern warfare and the difficulty of transitioning back to normal life after combat. In early 2008, three young friends from Bristol decide to join the army and are deployed to the conflict in Afghanistan. Within a short space of time the three men return to the women in their lives—a wife, a mother, a girlfriend—all of whom must now share the psychological and physical aftershocks of military service. Written from the points of view of each soldier, Sheers explores not only their experiences in the field of battle, but also the grueling process of recovery following a debilitating injury, the strain of PTSD on a new marriage, and the emotional toll of survivor's guilt among soldiers and their loved ones at home. Drawing on interviews with soldiers and their families, Pink Mist illuminates the enduring human cost of war and its all too often devastating effect upon the young lives pulled into its orbit. A work of great dramatic power, documentary integrity, and emotional intensity.
Plays for Two
by Eric Lane Nina ShengoldPlays for Two is a unique anthology of twenty-eight terrific plays for two actors, by a mix of celebrated playwrights and cutting-edge new voices.It takes two to tango--or to perform a duet, fight a duel, or play ping-pong. The two-character play is dramatic confrontation stripped to its essence. These four full-length and twenty-four short plays feature pairs of every sort--strangers, rivals, parents and children, siblings, co-workers, friends, and lovers--swooning or sparring, meeting cute or parting ways. In a dizzying range of moods and styles, these two-handers offer the kind of meaty, challenging roles actors love, while providing readers and audiences with the pleasures of watching the complex give-and-take dynamics of two keenly matched characters.Plays by: Billy Aronson, David Auburn, Pete Barry, Naveen Bahar Choudhury, Anthony Clarvoe, Steven Dietz, Halley Feiffer, Simon Fill, Frank Higgins, David Ives, Jacob Juntunen, Ean Miles Kessler, Neil LaBute, Eric Lane, Kitt Lavoie, Jacqueline E. Lawton, Mark Harvey Levine, Elizabeth Meriwether, Michael Mitnick, Daria Polatin, Marco Ramirez, Kelly Rhodes, Jose Rivera, Paul Rudnick, Edwin Sanchez, Nina Shengold, Cori Thomas, Doug Wright From the Trade Paperback edition.
The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan (Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning)
by Katsuya HiranoIna"The Politics of Dialogic Imagination," Katsuya Hirano seeks to understand why, with its seemingly unrivaled power, the Tokugawa shogunate of early modern Japan tried so hard to regulate the ostensibly unimportant popular culture of Edo (present-day Tokyo)OCoincluding fashion, leisure activities, prints, and theater. He does so by examining the works of writers and artists who depicted and celebrated the culture of play and pleasure associated with EdoOCOs street entertainers, vagrants, actors, and prostitutes, whom Tokugawa authorities condemned to be detrimental to public mores, social order, and political economy. Hirano uncovers a logic of politics within EdoOCOs cultural works that was extremely potent in exposing contradictions between the formal structure of the Tokugawa world and its rapidly changing realities. He goes on to look at the effects of this logic, examining policies enacted during the next eraOCothe Meiji periodOCothat mark a drastic reconfiguration of power and a new politics toward ordinary people under modernizing Japan. Deftly navigating JapanOCOs history and culture, a"The Politics of Dialogic Imagination"provides a sophisticated account of a country in the process of radical transformationOCoand of the intensely creative culture that came out of it. "
The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures: Beyond Postcolonialism (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies #33)
by Erika Fischer-Lichte Torsten Jost Saskya Iris JainThis book provides a timely intervention in the fields of performance studies and theatre history, and to larger issues of global cultural exchange. The authors offer a provocative argument for rethinking the scholarly assessment of how diverse performative cultures interact, how they are interwoven, and how they are dependent upon each other. While the term ‘intercultural theatre’ as a concept points back to postcolonialism and its contradictions, The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures explores global developments in the performing arts that cannot adequately be explained and understood using postcolonial theory. The authors challenge the dichotomy ‘the West and the rest’ – where Western cultures are ‘universal’ and non-Western cultures are ‘particular’ – as well as ideas of national culture and cultural ownership. This volume uses international case studies to explore the politics of globalization, looking at new paternalistic forms of exchange and the new inequalities emerging from it. These case studies are guided by the principle that processes of interweaving performance cultures are, in fact, political processes. The authors explore the inextricability of the aesthetic and the political, whereby aesthetics cannot be perceived as opposite to the political; rather, the aesthetic is the political. Helen Gilbert’s essay ‘Let the Games Begin: Pageants, Protests, Indigeneity (1968–2010)’won the 2015 Marlis Thiersch Prize for best essay from the Australasian Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies Association.
Poor Tom: Living King Lear
by Simon Palfrey"King Lear "is perhaps the most fierce and moving play ever written. And yet there is a curious puzzle at its center. The figure to whom Shakespeare gives more lines than anyone except the kingOCoEdgarOCohas often seemed little more than a blank, ignored and unloved, a belated moralizer who, try as he may, can never truly speak to the playOCOs savaged heart. He saves his blinded father from suicide, but even this act of care is shadowed by suspicions of evasiveness and bad faith. In "Poor Tom," Simon Palfrey asks us to go beyond any such received understandingsOCoand thus to experience "King Lear" as never before. He argues that the part of Edgar is ShakespeareOCOs most radical experiment in characterization, and his most exhaustive model of both human and theatrical possibility. The key to the Edgar character is that he spends most of the play disguised, much of it as OC Poor Tom of Bedlam, OCO and his disguises come to uncanny life. The Edgar role is always more than one person; it animates multitudes, past and present and future, and gives life to states of being beyond the normal reach of the sensesOCoundead, or not-yet, or ghostly, or possible rather than actual. And because the Edgar role both connects and retunes all of the figures and scenes in "King Lear," a close attention to this particular part can shine stunning new light on how the whole play works. The ultimate message of PalfreyOCOs bravura analysis is the same for readers or actors or audiences as it is for the characters in the play: see and listen feelingly; pay attention, especially when it seems as though there is nothing there. "
Popular Musical Theatre in London and Berlin
by Len Platt Tobias Becker David Linton Len Platt Tobias BeckerIn the decades before the Second World War, popular musical theatre was one of the most influential forms of entertainment. This is the first book to reconstruct early popular musical theatre as a transnational and highly cosmopolitan industry that included everything from revues and operettas to dance halls and cabaret. Bringing together contributors from Britain and Germany, this collection moves beyond national theatre histories to study Anglo-German relations at a period of intense hostility and rivalry. Chapters frame the entertainment zones of London and Berlin against the wider trading routes of cultural transfer, where empire and transatlantic song and dance produced, perhaps for the first time, a genuinely international culture. Exploring adaptations and translations of works under the influence of political propaganda, this collection will be of interest both to musical theatre enthusiasts and to those interested in the wider history of modernism.
Post-Show Discussions in New Play Development
by Teresa A. FisherMany theatres host post-show discussions, or talkbacks, as part of their season. This book is a critical examination of what has/has not worked with post-show discussions utilized in new play development, providing a framework for understanding discussions, steps for building the foundation of them, and various strategies for structuring them.
A Practical Guide to Greener Theatre: Introduce Sustainability Into Your Productions
by Ellen E. JonesProtecting the environment should be a priority of every theatrical production, but it can be challenging to mount an environmentally-friendly show with limited time, resources, and information. A Practical Guide to Greener Theatre: Introduce Sustainability Into Your Productions not only gives you the information you need to make greener decisions, but provides you with practical, workable solutions. You will learn how to assess and improve every production area – from costuming and painting, lighting and technical direction, to administrative offices and the rehearsal process. Checklists, examples of successful strategies, and step-by-step instructions will show you how to identify areas where manageable, sustainable changes can make your productions greener, and advice from working professionals, with experience greening their own productions, will leave you confident that your processes are environmentally sound. Even non-technical people who find themselves responsible for supervising productions will find green solutions that can be instituted with a staff of volunteers or students. Remember: every step toward sustainability is a step forward. Discover small fixes that will make your theatre productions greener. Examine ways to introduce greener practices in the design, execution, and strike process. Explore how introducing sustainability into your theatre productions can save your company time and money. Learn how sustainability and safety intersect to help protect your workers and volunteers.
A Practical Guide to Stage Lighting
by Steven Louis ShelleyIn the first edition of A Practical Guide to Stage Lighting, Steve Shelley cracked open his production book and showed how to prepare a lighting design and create the paperwork needed to mount a production.In the second edition, he pulled back the curtain and showed the methods and processes that go on before the light plot is finalized and ready to go to into the shop, even dealing with cutting the plot in half.In this third edition, Shelley throws the door wide open and shows step-by-step how to construct every lighting system in the Hokey light plot. Combining his diacritical analysis, killer drafting, and analytic use of the Slinky Method and Slinky Calculations, he presents the Periodic Table of Fundamental Lighting Systems and shows the basic methods used to create multi-instrument lighting systems. Highlights include:-Over 100 new topics, including analysis and application of the three categories of collaboration; a detailed examination of production meetings and one-on-one meetings; and meeting checklists with management and the creative team.-Over 50 new illustrations, including Shelley's Periodic Table of Fundamental Lighting Systems; groundplans, sections, and front elevations that illustrate basic system wash configurations for each direction of light. -Analysis, calculation, and step-by-step technical construction of each lighting system in the Hokey light plot.-Explanation of a manufacturer's cut sheet, and how to apply basic formulas to determine the beam size, footcandles, and gel transmission for lighting instruments.-Updated process of pre-programming computer lighting consoles prior to the load-in.-Comprehensive overview of archiving paperwork and softcopy for a production.
Prison Shakespeare and the Purpose of Performance: Repentance Rituals and the Early Modern
by Niels HeroldOver the last decade a number of prison theatre programs have developed to rehabilitate inmates by having them perform Shakespearean adaptations. While twentieth and twenty-first century ideas about theatre as therapy, political resistance, and popular education hold sway for many programs, this book focuses on how prison theatre today reveals certain elements of the early modern theatre that were themselves responses to cataclysmic changes in theological doctrine and religious practice. Herold reads the Shakespearean theatre at once historically and forward ("presentising"). He examines the precise dramaturgical and ideological elements of this historical theatre that are today conducive to the remarkable rehabilitative success of prison theatre programs like Shakespeare Behind Bars.
Prometheus Bound
by Aeschylus Joel AgeePrometheus Bound is the starkest and strangest of the classic Greek tragedies, a play in which god and man are presented as radically, irreconcilably at odds. It begins with the shock of hammer blows as the Titan Prometheus is shackled to a rock in the Caucasus. This is his punishment for giving the gift of fire to humankind and for thwarting Zeus's decision to exterminate the human race. Prometheus's pain is unceasing, but he refuses to recant his commitment to humanity, to whom he has also brought the knowledge of writing, mathematics, medicine, and architecture. He hints that he knows how Zeus will be brought low in the future, but when Hermes demands that Prometheus divulge his secret, he refuses and is sent spinning into the abyss by a divine thunderbolt. To whom does humanity look for guidance: to the supreme deity or to the rebel Titan? What law controls the cosmos? Prometheus Bound, one of the great poetic achievements of the ancient world, appears here in a splendid new translation by Joel Agee that does full justice to the harsh and keening music of the original Greek.
QLab 3 Show Control
by Jeromy HopgoodUsed from Broadway to Britain's West End, QLab software is the tool of choice for many of the world's most prominent sound, projection, and integrated media designers. QLab 3 Show Control: Projects for Live Performances & Installations is a project-based book on QLab software covering sound, video, and show control. With information on both sound and video system basics and the more advanced functions of QLab such as MIDI show control, new OSC capabilities, networking, video effects, and microphone integration, each chapter's specific projects will allow you to learn the software's capabilities at your own pace. Tutorials and additional resources are featured at www.focalpress.com/cw/hopgood.
The Queen's Dumbshows
by Claire SponslerNo medieval writer reveals more about early English drama than John Lydgate, Claire Sponsler contends. Best known for his enormously long narrative poems The Fall of Princes and The Troy Book, Lydgate also wrote numerous verses related to theatrical performances and ceremonies. This rich yet understudied body of material includes mummings for London guildsmen and sheriffs, texts for wall hangings that combined pictures and poetry, a Corpus Christi procession, and entertainments for the young Henry VI and his mother.In The Queen's Dumbshows, Sponsler reclaims these writings to reveal what they have to tell us about performance practices in the late Middle Ages. Placing theatricality at the hub of fifteenth-century British culture, she rethinks what constituted drama in the period and explores the relationship between private forms of entertainment, such as household banquets, and more overtly public forms of political theater, such as royal entries and processions. She delineates the intersection of performance with other forms of representation such as feasts, pictorial displays, and tableaux, and parses the connections between the primarily visual and aural modes of performance and the reading of literary texts written on paper or parchment. In doing so, she has written a book of signal importance to scholars of medieval literature and culture, theater history, and visual studies.
Quotable Shakespeare (Quotable Ser.)
by Max MorrisThis entertaining collection gathers together William Shakespeare's wisest and wittiest quotations. Quotable Shakespeare proves that brevity is the soul of wit and is sure to delight all lovers of the Bard's uniquely perceptive and influential works.
Quotable Shakespeare (Quotable Ser.)
by Max MorrisThis entertaining collection gathers together William Shakespeare's wisest and wittiest quotations. Quotable Shakespeare proves that brevity is the soul of wit and is sure to delight all lovers of the Bard's uniquely perceptive and influential works.
Reading Shakespeare through Philosophy: Reading Shakespeare Through Philosophy (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare)
by Peter Kishore SavalReading Shakespeare through Philosophy advocates that the beauty of Shakespearean drama is inseparable from its philosophical power. Shakespeare’s plays make demands on us even beyond our linguistic attention and historical empathy: they require thinking, and the concepts of philosophy can provide us with tools to aid us in that thinking. This volume examines how philosophy can help us to re-imagine Shakespeare’s treatment of individuality, character, and destiny, particularly at certain moments in a play when a character’s relationship to space or time becomes an enigma to us. The author focuses on the dramatization of seemingly magical relationships between the individual and the cosmos, exploring and rethinking the meanings of 'individual', 'cosmos' and 'magic' through a conceptually acute reading of Shakespeare's plays. This book draws upon a variety of thinkers including Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz and Kant, in search of a revitalized philosophical criticism of Julius Caesar, Love’s Labor’s Lost, The Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens, and Twelfth Night.
Reading Style
by Jenny DavidsonA professor, critic, and insatiable reader, Jenny Davidson investigates the passions that drive us to fall in love with certain sentences over others and the larger implications of our relationship with writing style. At once playful and serious, immersive and analytic, her memoir/critique shows how style elicits particular kinds of moral judgments and subjective preferences, which turn reading into a highly personal and political act.Melding her experiences as reader and critic, Davidson opens new vistas onto works by Jane Austen, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Pynchon; adds richer dimension to critiques of W. G. Sebald, Alan Hollinghurst, Thomas Bernhard, and Karl Ove Knausgaard; and allows for a sophisticated appreciation of popular fictions by Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Lionel Shriver, George Pelecanos, and Helen DeWitt. She privileges diction, syntax, point of view, and structure over plot and character, identifying the intimate mechanics that draw us in to literature's sensual frameworks and move us to feel, identify, and relate. Davidson concludes with a reading list of her favorite titles so others can share in her literary adventures and get to know better the imprint of her own reading style.
Real and Phantoms Pains: An Anthology of New Russian Drama
by John FreedmanAn anthology of ten plays embodying the Russian literary movement that began in the late twentieth century. The plays selected for this anthology reflect the issues and styles typical of the new wave of dramatic writing in Russia. New drama flourished (almost) exclusively in small spaces, often in dingy basements that employed and accommodated small numbers of people. The big theaters largely turned a blind eye to what was happening on small stages and in backrooms in playhouses, libraries, and community centers in a few chosen hot spots around Russia: primarily Moscow, Yekaterinburg and Togliatti. In many cases, they took actively hostile stances toward it. This would change, however. And by the beginning of the century&’s second decade, new drama was threatening to become a mainstream phenomenon. Not every theater staged plays associated with new drama, but almost every one began staging plays influenced by the themes, methods, and language of the new drama movement. Featuring work from Yury Klavdiev, Olga Mukhina, Pavel Pryazhko, Vasily Sigarev, Maksym Kurochkin, Mikhail Durnenkov, Vyacheslav Durnenkov, Yaroslava Pulinovich, Yelena Gremina, and Maxim Osipov.&“Few people know more about what is happening on the Moscow scene than John Freedman (including few Russians). As Moscow Times theater critic throughout the post-Soviet period John could well have seen more theatrical productions in Russia than anyone else. I can&’t imagine anyone who would do a better job.&” —Blair A. Ruble, Director, Program on Global Sustainability & Resilience, Woodrow Wilson Center&“While other existing volumes focus on 18th, 19th, and early 20th century Russian drama, Freedman&’s edition would present the unique and important contributions of the new generation of Russian writers portraying the realities and experiences of a post-Soviet generation. John has carefully selected a representative cohort of ten of the most visible, productive, and influential of these writers for the volume.&” —Thomas J. Garza, University Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin
Renaissance Drama on the Edge
by Lisa HopkinsRecurring to the governing idea of her 2005 study Shakespeare on the Edge, Lisa Hopkins expands the parameters of her investigation beyond England to include the Continent, and beyond Shakespeare to include a number of dramatists ranging from Christopher Marlowe to John Ford. Hopkins also expands her notion of liminality to explore not only geographical borders, but also the intersection of the material and the spiritual more generally, tracing the contours of the edge which each inhabits. Making a journey of its own by starting from the most literally liminal of physical structures, walls, and ending with the wholly invisible and intangible, the idea of the divine, this book plots the many and various ways in which, for the Renaissance imagination, metaphysical overtones accrued to the physically liminal.
Renaissance Shakespeare/Shakespeare Renaissances: Proceedings of the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress
by Stanley Wells Joel Rodgers Randall Martin Robert Darcy Atsuhiko Hirota Darryl Chalk Supriya Chaudhuri Kimberly R. West Sukanta Chaudhuri Margaret Shewring Richard Fotheringham Ros King James J. Marino Brian Walsh Eleanor Collins M. A. Katritzky Martin Hilský Ann Jennalie Cook Vlasta Gallerová Karel Kríž Robert Sturua Jean-Christophe Mayer Galz Engler Madalina Nicolaescu Kaori Kobayashi Patrick Lonergan Zeno Ackermann Tina Krontiris Emily Oliver Shaul Bassi Barry Freeman Carla Della Gatta Cristiane Busato Smith Sharon O'Dair Emma Depledge Anna Cetera Courtney Lehmann Poonam Trivedi Bi-Qi Beatrice Lei Graham Holderness Jill L. Levenson Hersh ZeifmanSelected contributions to the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress, which took place in July 2011 in Prague, represent the contemporary state of Shakespeare studies in thirty-eight countries worldwide. Apart from readings of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, more than forty chapters map Renaissance contexts of his art in politics, theater, law, or material culture and discuss numerous cases of the impact of his works in global culture from the Americas to the Far East, including stage productions, book culture, translations, film and television adaptations, festivals, and national heritage. The last section of the book focuses on the afterlife of Shakespeare in the work of the leading British dramatist Tom Stoppard. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Revisiting The Tempest
by Silvia Bigliazzi Lisanna CalviRevisiting The Tempest offers a lively reconsideration of how The Tempest encourages interpretation and creative appropriation. It includes a wide range of essays on theoretical and practical criticism focusing on the play's original dramatic context, on its signifying processes and its present-time screen remediation.