Theatricality, Playtexts and Society

Theatricality, Playtexts and Society
Author: David Barnett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2024-05-31
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1009506331

This Element proposes a novel way of defining, understanding and approaching theatricality, a term that exists both in the theatre and, more broadly, in everyday life. It argues that four foundational, material processes of theatre-making manifest themselves in all playtexts in both overt and covert forms. Each of the four sections defines a different theatrical process, explores its functions in two chosen playtexts and examines its implications for the wider experience of the spectators outside the theatre. The study concludes with a supplementary reflection on performance to show how even seemingly untheatrical playtexts can be analysed and staged to reveal their unspoken theatricality. It also argues that this new understanding of theatricality has politics, that the artifice of any theatre and the constructedness of any society are analogous and that both, consequently, can be fundamentally changed. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Theatricality, Playtexts and Society

Theatricality, Playtexts and Society
Author: David Barnett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-06-30
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9781009506298

This Element proposes a novel way of defining, understanding and approaching theatricality, a term that exists both in the theatre and, more broadly, in everyday life. It argues that four foundational, material processes of theatre-making manifest themselves in all playtexts in both overt and covert forms. Each of the four sections defines a different theatrical process, explores its functions in two chosen playtexts and examines its implications for the wider experience of the spectators outside the theatre. The Element concludes with a supplementary reflection on performance to show how even seemingly untheatrical playtexts can be analysed and staged to reveal their unspoken theatricality. It also argues that this new understanding of theatricality has a politics, that the artifice of any theatre and the constructedness of any society are analogous and that both, consequently, can be fundamentally changed. This Element is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Theatricality

Theatricality
Author: Tracy C. Davis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2003
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780521012072

This collection of specially-commissioned, accessible, essays explores that element of performance theory known as theatricality. Six case studies use historically specific circumstances to illustrate how and why the concept of theatricality was and is used. Topics discussed include early use of the term; employment of 'theatricality' by a number of other disciplines to describe events; non-Western interpretation of theatricality; and its use when discussing and analyzing political and cultural events and philosophies. The book provides a first-step guide for those discovering the complex yet rewarding world of performance theory.

Interludes and Early Modern Society

Interludes and Early Modern Society
Author: Peter Happé
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2007
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9042023031

The essays in this collection, contributed by an internationally distinguished group of scholars, bring up to date many aspects of the criticism of the English Interludes. The development of these plays was a significant part of the history of the growth of English drama in the sixteenth century to the extent that they may be regarded as its main stream. Arising by means of a felicitous combination of the development of printing and the growth of a professional theatre, plays of this type quickly became a forum for the presentation and exploration of many contemporary themes. They became a useful means of disseminating a wide variety of opinions and public concerns as well as exhibiting at times the intellectual brilliance of the Renaissance.The essays here are concentrated upon power, particularly in its religious and political aspects, gender and theatricality. The political and religious upheavals of the Reformation under the Tudor monarchy form a background as well as a focus at times. In particular the position of women in sixteenth-century society is examined in essays on several plays. There is also discussion of the development of theatrical techniques as playwrights worked closely with small acting companies to reach a wide audience ranging from the royal court to the common streets. This was achieved, as a number of essays make clear, through a variety of entertaining theatrical devices.ContentsPeter HAPPE: IntroductionJean-Paul DEBAX: Complicity and Hierarchy: A Tentative Definition of the Interlude GenusLynn FOREST-HILL: Maidens and Matrons: The Theatricality of Gender in the Tudor InterludesPeter HAPPE: Skelton's Magnyfycence: Theatre, Poetry, InfluenceMike PINCOMBE: Comic Treatment of Tragic Character in Godly Queen Hester Janette DILLON: Powerful Obedience: Godly Queen Hester and Katherine of AragonBob GODFREY: Feminine Singularity: The Representation of Young Women in Some Early Tudor InterludesDavid MILLS: Wit to Woo: The Wit InterludesDermot CAVANAGH: Reforming Sovereignty: John Bale and Tragic DramaGreg WALKER: Flytyng in the Face of Convention: Protest and Innovation in Lindsay's Satyre of the Thrie EstaitisJohn J. MCGAVIN: Working Towards a Reformed Identity in Lindsay's Satyre of the Thrie EstaitisPaul Whitfield WHITE: The Pammachius Affair at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1545Roberta MULLINI: Impatient Poverty: The Intertextual Game of SatirePeter THOMSON: Sound City Jests and Country Pretty Jests: Jack Juggler and Gammer Gurton's NeedleAlice HUNT: Legitimacy, Ceremony and Drama: Mary Tudor's Coronation and RespublicaDavid BEVINGTON: Staging the Reformation: Power and Theatricality in the Plays of William Wager

Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Violence

Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Violence
Author: Emma Willis
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2021-11-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3030851028

This book examines a series of contemporary plays where writers put theatre itself on stage. The texts examined variously dramatize how theatre falls short in response to the demands of violence, expose its implication in structures of violence—including racism and gender-based violence—and illustrate how it might effectively resist violence through reconfiguring representation. Case studies, which include Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present and Fairview, Ella Hickson’s The Writer and Tim Crouch’s The Author, provide a range of practice-based perspectives on the question of whether theatre is capable of accounting for and expressing the complexities of structural and interpersonal violence as both lived in the body and borne out in society. The book will appeal to scholars and artists working in the areas of violence, theatre and ethics, witnessing, memory and trauma, spectatorship and contemporary dramaturgy, as well as to those interested in both the doubts and dreams we have about the role of theatre in the twenty-first century.

Staging Ben

Staging Ben
Author: Marshall Botvinick
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 115
Release: 2016-01-14
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1443887625

Ben Jonson has frequently been maligned for his antitheatricalism and inability to conceive of his plays as anything other than a reading experience. Staging Ben: A Collection of Essays on the Theatricality of Jonson’s Plays offers a rebuttal of this mischaracterization of Jonson’s work. Featuring contributions from both Renaissance literature scholars and theatre practitioners, this volume of essays demonstrates the prodigious theatrical imagination of one of the world’s most underappreciated dramatists. It explores the problems associated with producing a Jonson play – from length to topicality to cast size – and offers solutions for those who have an interest in bringing Jonson’s plays to life. Specific plays explored in this collection are Sejanus, Volpone, The Alchemist, Catiline, and Bartholomew Fair.

Roman Tragedy

Roman Tragedy
Author: Mario Erasmo
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0292782136

Roman tragedies were written for over three hundred years, but only fragments remain of plays that predate the works of Seneca in the mid-first century C.E., making it difficult to define the role of tragedy in ancient Roman culture. Nevertheless, in this pioneering book, Mario Erasmo draws on all the available evidence to trace the evolution of Roman tragedy from the earliest tragedians to the dramatist Seneca and to explore the role played by Roman culture in shaping the perception of theatricality on and off the stage. Performing a philological analysis of texts informed by semiotic theory and audience reception, Erasmo pursues two main questions in this study: how does Roman tragedy become metatragedy, and how did off-stage theatricality come to compete with the theatre? Working chronologically, he looks at how plays began to incorporate a rhetoricized reality on stage, thus pointing to their own theatricality. And he shows how this theatricality, in turn, came to permeate society, so that real events such as the assassination of Julius Caesar took on theatrical overtones, while Pompey's theatre opening and the lavish spectacles of the emperor Nero deliberately blurred the lines between reality and theatre. Tragedy eventually declined as a force in Roman culture, Erasmo suggests, because off-stage reality became so theatrical that on-stage tragedy could no longer compete.

Drama and Resistance

Drama and Resistance
Author: Claire Sponsler
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 1997
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780816629275

Provides a cultural and historical context for medieval popular drama. In Drama and Resistance, Claire Sponsler explores the intertwined histories of bodily subjectivity, commodity culture, and theatricality in late medieval England. In a fascinating consideration of popular drama in the period from 1350 to 1520, she argues that many types of performances during this time represented cultural evasions of the imposition of disciplinary power. The medieval theater was a social site where resistance, masked from the full scrutiny of authority by theatricality, was practiced, articulated, and enacted. Sponsler examines three key discourses of authoritarian bodily and commodity control -- clothing laws, conduct literature, and Books of Hours -- and pairs them with three kinds of theatrical performances that enact resistance to disciplining codes -- Robin Hood performances, morality plays, and Corpus Christi pageants. She considers the contradictions and inconsistencies in the repressive official discourses and analyzes the ways in which the staging of forbidden acts like cross-dressing, social and sexual misbehavior, and violence against the body challenged these discourses. Drawing on recent social theory, Drama and Resistance is an important contribution to medieval studies and the history of theater.

Incapacity and Theatricality

Incapacity and Theatricality
Author: Tony McCaffrey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2019-01-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1351165186

Incapacity and Theatricality acknowledges the distinctive contribution to contemporary theatrical performance made by actors with intellectual disabilities. It presents a close examination of certain key theatrical performances across a variety of different media, including John Cassavetes’ 1963 social issues film A Child Is Waiting; the performance art collaboration between Robert Wilson and Christopher Knowles; and the provocative pranksterism of Christoph Schlingensief’s talent show mockumentary FreakStars 3000. Tracing a global path of performances, Incapacity and Theatricality offers an analysis of how actors with intellectual disabilities have emerged onto the main stage, and how their inclusion calls into question long-held assumptions about both theatre and intellectual disability. For postgraduate students, or anyone interested in the shifting dynamics of twenty-first century theatre, McCaffrey’s work offers a vital consideration of the intersubjective relations between people with and without intellectual disabilities and ultimately addresses urgent questions about the situation and representation of the contemporary subject caught up somewhere between incapacity and theatricality.

Theatricality

Theatricality
Author: Elizabeth Burns
Publisher:
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1973
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: