COMPARATIVE DRAMA最新文献

{"title":"Arthur Miller's Suicidology of the Stage: Suicide and Dramatic Form in Death of a Salesman","authors":"Nicholas Duddy","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a920785","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a920785","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Arthur Miller's Suicidology of the Stage:<span>Suicide and Dramatic Form in <em>Death of a Salesman</em></span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Nicholas Duddy (bio) </li> </ul> <p>On August 5, 1962, the body of Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller's exwife, was found in the bedroom of her Brentwood home. Tangled bedsheets, bottles of pills, a rotary phone receiver by her hand—the room resembled the mise-en-scène of a murder mystery, and in death the cultural icon received just as much attention as in life.<sup>1</sup> Newspapers across the world announced her death with front page headlines that were both equivocal and sensational: \"Marilyn Dead\" (<em>Daily News</em>), \"Marilyn Phone Riddle\" (<em>Daily Express</em>), \"Marilyn Monroe Kills Self: Found Nude in Bed … Hand On Phone … Took 40 Pills\" (<em>New York Mirror</em>).<sup>2</sup></p> <p>Less than two weeks later, Los Angeles County Coroner Theodore Curphey, clad in a white lab coat, cigar in mouth, sat before a room of reporters to announce the findings of his inquest. He prefaced his ruling with a public appeal:</p> <blockquote> <p>Ladies and gentlemen, I must be frank to state that in seeking in my own mind any justification for this conference the most impelling reason that occurred to me is the importance of recognizing that in the death of Marilyn Monroe she has unwittingly and unfortunately played the greatest role of her career in focusing the attention of every one of us living on the gravity of a worldwide problem that bathetically cries out for a solution.<sup>3</sup></p> </blockquote> <p>Sitting beside Curphey were two men, psychologist Norman Farberow and psychiatrist Robert Litman, who had helped the coroner reach the verdict of a \"probable suicide\" by performing a \"psychological autopsy\" on Monroe, studying her lifestyle, behavior, and character traits to uncover her suicidal state of mind.<sup>4</sup> Solemn in their black suits, Farberow and <strong>[End Page 33]</strong> Litman fielded questions from the press about Monroe's final moments. \"The only conclusion we could reach was suicide,\" Litman stated. \"Or at least a gamble with death.\"<sup>5</sup></p> <p>Farberow and Litman had developed this method of psychological enquiry while working with Edwin Shneidman at the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center, an organization established just four years earlier as a clinical practice, public health agency, and research site into suicide. The Center's origins, though, date to 1949, the year <em>Death of a Salesman</em> opened in Broadway's Morosco Theatre. While Miller refined <em>Salesman</em>'s production script, Shneidman, who would later be considered \"a father of contemporary suicidology,\" analyzed 721 suicide notes pulled from a coroner's vault and compared them in a blind test to simulated notes written by non-suicidal individuals.<sup>6</sup> This systematic st","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"59 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140043811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Paracelsan Philosophy and Plot in Romeo and Juliet","authors":"Jaecheol Kim","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2023.a913246","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2023.a913246","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> The Paracelsan Philosophy and Plot in <em>Romeo and Juliet</em> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jaecheol Kim (bio) </li> </ul> <h2>Shakespeare, Paracelsus, and the Early Modern Medical Turn</h2> <p>Disease is often communicated through language, and the trajectory of contagion is coterminous with its discursive orbit. Early modern dramatic works, especially the plays of Shakespeare, pay keen attention to the linguistic matrix of disease.<sup>1</sup> Shakespeare lived during a time of important shifts in the history of medicine and disease, when leprosy gradually receded to the margins of social and medical concern, giving way to collective anxieties related to the rise of syphilis and occasional plague outbreaks. English Renaissance drama developed alongside this general shift in the medical concerns and disease control measures of English society.<sup>2</sup> In this essay, I investigate these parallel developments by exploring how Paracelsan medicine affected the literary imagination generally and Shakespeare's imagination in particular as a new system of medical thought, a system circulating in London print shops and apothecaries of the period, and I read <em>Romeo and Juliet</em> as a medical narrative informed by this system.</p> <p>From a medical perspective, the plot of <em>Romeo and Juliet</em> reflects the operation of an organic human body. Ben Jonson's city comedy often reflects the early modern reception of humoralism by defining characters based on the four-humor (or four-element) theory. In Jonson's medical imagination, characters are defined by four different humors: yellow bile (fire), black bile (earth), phlegm (water), and blood (air). Characters not only become constructions of different humors but also often <em>fashion</em> their humors. In <em>Every Man in His Humour</em>, for instance, the gullible <strong>[End Page 252]</strong> countryman Stephen identifies himself as a melancholy man because he believes that it is fashionable in the city. Shakespeare also drew on humoralism to develop his characters. In <em>Romeo and Juliet</em>, for instance, Romeo is associated with melancholy at the beginning of the play because his dominant humor is black bile, while hot-tempered Tybalt embodies yellow bile. Paris is phlegmatic because he associates himself with water, specifically while standing before Juliet's grave, which, as he declares, \"with sweet water nightly I will dew, / Or, wanting that, with tears distilled by moans\" (5.3.14–15).<sup>3</sup> Humoral theory was thus for early modern dramatists not only a medical philosophy but also a kind of literary principle. However, the focus of my analysis here is neither overt character constructions based on humoralism nor the prominent medical figures in the play such as Friar Laurence, the Apothecary, or the Nurse. Instead, I will show that <em>Romeo and Juliet","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"86 17","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138442823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2023.a913255","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2023.a913255","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Contributors <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <p><strong>Crystal U. Davis</strong> is Associate Professor of Dance at University of Maryland, College Park. Her research explores implicit bias and how privilege manifests in the body. Her research has been published in the <em>Journal of Dance Education</em>, in the <em>Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education</em>, and in her book, <em>Dance and Belonging: Implicit Bias and Inclusion in Dance Education</em> (McFarland, 2022). Her performances span from East Indian dance to her postmodern choreography examining incongruities between what we say, what we believe, and what we do.</p> <p><strong>Elisabeth Dutton</strong> is Professor of Medieval English Language and Literature at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Her research interests include Julian of Norwich, devotional compilations, and early theatre. Her most recent book, <em>Dramatic Wardrobes</em> (Chronos, 2023), co-authored with Racha Kirakosian, discusses clothing in English and German visionary and dramatic texts. Her research projects, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, include 'Early Drama at Oxford,' 'Medieval Convent Drama,' and beginning in 2024, 'Women, Martyrdom, and Religious Drama in the Abrahamic Traditions.' She is an experienced theatre director and combines archival work with research through performance.</p> <p><strong>Alan B. Farmer</strong> is Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University. He is the co-creator, with Zachary Lesser, of <em>DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks</em>, co-editor, with Adam Zucker, of <em>Localizing Caroline Drama</em> (Palgrave, 2006), and has published widely on book history, Shakespeare, and early modern drama. He is currently working on two projects: a study of lost books in the early modern English book trade and another on the popularity of playbooks in Renaissance England.</p> <p><strong>Baltasar Fra-Molinero</strong> is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Africana Studies at Bates College. He is the author <em>of La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de Oro</em> (The Image of Blacks in Spanish Golden Age Theater) (Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1995). He is the co-author with Sue E. Houchins of <em>Black Bride of Christ: Chicaba, an African Nun in Eighteenth-Century Spain</em> (Vanderbilt University Press, 2019) and the editor of Don <em>Quixote's Racial Other in Annals of Scholarship</em> (2010). He has recently produced with Nelson López and Manuel Olmeddo Gobante a bilingual critical edition of the Spanish seventeenth-century play <em>El valiente negro en Flandes</em> (The Valiant Black Man in Flanders) (Liverpool University Press, 2023). <strong>[End Page 304]</strong></p> <p><strong>Dian Fox</strong> is Professor Emerita of Hispanic Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. She curren","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"85 15","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138442850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Europe by Julie Stone Peters (review)","authors":"Subha Mukherji","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2023.a913254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2023.a913254","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Europe</em> by Julie Stone Peters <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Subha Mukherji (bio) </li> </ul> Julie Stone Peters. <em>Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Europe</em>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp xv + 368. £70. <p>Julie Stone Peters's expansive, exciting, and richly researched book, <em>Law as Performance</em>, opens arrestingly with an account of an aborted trial by combat at Tothill Fields, Westminster, in 1571. The truth was that the parties had settled their legal dispute the day before. But the Queen decreed that the ritual of the trial must go on nonetheless, and entertain the gathered audience—but only for the plaintiffs to fail to show up, and for the event to fail to deliver on the expectations aroused. \"This was clearly theatre,\" Peters writes, \"but it was also law\" (3). This vivid recounting of a spectacular event simulating a judicial arbitration places law in the wider context of play and playing in London—the whole range from fencing to theatre—and takes us to the heart of her thesis: law <em>as</em> a performance practice, its history, and its varied manifestations. It shifts the common notion of law as doctrine and rules to make available an understanding of law as performative courtroom action. Thus, it effectively displaces <em>logos</em> with <em>ethos</em> and <em>pathos</em> at the centre of the legal scene. But it also demonstrates that legal performance is a \"constitutive idea in western jurisprudence\" (9), unearthing an array of sources, ancient to early modern, from which law derives sanction, authority, and guidelines.</p> <p>At the same time, Peters brings alive the ambivalence around the theatrical in law—the simultaneous proximity and rivalry that Peter Goodrich so brilliantly excavated (and traced back to Plato) in his short piece on \"Law\" back in 2001, in the Oxford <em>Encyclopaedia of Rhetoric</em> edited by Thomas O. Sloane. As Kathy Eden pointed out in 1986, \"the Renaissance <em>hypocrite</em> originates in the Greek theatre, the Renaissance <em>actor</em> in the Roman law court\" (<em>Legal and Poetic Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition</em>, 5). The observation that law is both theatrical and antitheatrical is not, in fact, unfamiliar to the now mature field of law and literature (though it may yet come as a surprise to legal practitioners unaware of the long, intertwined traditions traced here). What Peters brings to the idea is a grippingly granular analysis of both Aristotle's own oscillations between a rejection of the emotional manipulation of the jury and his visceral intuition of its importance (46–47), and how this paradox plays out in the courtroom. Her a","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"85 14","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138442851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bad Blood: Staging Race Between Early Modern England and Spain by Emily Weissbourd (review)","authors":"Dian Fox","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2023.a913250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2023.a913250","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Bad Blood: Staging Race Between Early Modern England and Spain</em> by Emily Weissbourd <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Dian Fox (bio) </li> </ul> Emily Weissbourd. <em>Bad Blood: Staging Race Between Early Modern England and Spain</em>. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. Pp. v + 218. $55.00. <p>Following the Reconquest's end in 1492, Spain expelled the Jews and Muslims, forcing those remaining to convert to Christianity. At first, subjects suspected of religious recidivism were barred from honors and access to power, some becoming victims of the Inquisition. As the sixteenth century progressed, statutes targeted their descendants (known, respectively, as conversos and Moriscos): any hint of unclean heritage, or \"bad blood,\" could imperil the greater good. Conversos, being white and relatively assimilated, were perceived as especially threatening to the religious establishment for their potential to pass as \"Old\" Christians. Although many Moriscos were also white, they were less integrated into the larger population and attracted less institutional and cultural animus, at least during much of the sixteenth century—before fear of rebellion eventually led to their 1609-14 expulsion from Spain.</p> <p>The pure-blood statutes, which \"inscribe religion as a racial characteristic\" (18), have been seen as the source of emerging Western anti-Semitism and of racism more broadly. Emily Weissbourd, sensitized to these matters by reflection on her own Jewish heritage, helps complicate the originary narrative of modern racism in several respects. First, she is skeptical of received academic conventions: for example, her historically-inflected close readings of Spanish fiction and drama illustrate that the preoccupation in early modern Iberia with a \"clean\" Christian heritage was by no means uncontroversial. Her approach is also intersectional, factoring into the polemics around inherited alterity the contemporaneous rise of the Peninsula's sub-Saharan slave trade. The author's comparative work builds on these foundations to illuminate English consumption and processing of Iberian tropes of essential difference. Ultimately, the author demonstrates that those important Peninsular engines of white Christian claims on power—pure blood orthodoxy and the traffic in Black Africans—also affected and implicated then-contemporary England in incipient racist habits of mind.</p> <p>Weissbourd explains that certain Spanish prose and theatrical texts actually skewered pure blood's purchase on entitlement. She shows that their ironies often failed to penetrate their English translations and adaptations, not to mention modern scholarship. \"Far from a totalizing protoracist discourse that enshrines inconvertible difference, discourses of purity of blood in early modern Spanish culture were a site of contesta","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"90 13","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138442806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players by Jeffery Kennedy (review)","authors":"Beth Wynstra","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2023.a913249","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2023.a913249","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players</em> by Jeffery Kennedy <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Beth Wynstra (bio) </li> </ul> Jeffery Kennedy. <em>Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players</em>. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2023. Pp xii + 626. $49.95. <p>Chapter 19 of Jeffery Kennedy's <em>Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players</em> is titled \"'Unorganized, Amateur, Purely Experimental,' but Still Standing\" (291). The adjectives in this chapter title come from an article that Edna Kenton, chronicler the Provincetown Players, wrote for the <em>Boston Transcript</em> in 1918 to introduce the Players and their goals. These descriptors, however, require much unpacking and contextual detail, for \"unorganized,\" \"amateur,\" and \"purely experimental,\" when taken at face value, cannot explain the positive connotations of such goals nor the work required to keep such goals intact. Enter Jeffrey Kennedy, who is more than up for the task of analyzing the complex history and contributions of the Provincetown Players as well as detailing why their goals were significant for American theatre.</p> <p>At the heart of Kennedy's study is what he points out was missing from Kenton's 1918 article (and much scholarship that followed): a focus on George Cram Cook as the founder and driving force of the Provincetown Players. As Kennedy argues, \"no one but Cook could have initiated the Provincetown Players and then maintained their experiment as long as he did with the resulting vital contributions to American theatre\" (6). Utilizing letters, interviews, board meeting minutes, archival materials as well as providing crisp summaries of the 93 plays produced by the Players, Kennedy offers a multifaceted and voluminous study of Cook and the artists with whom he worked. While Kennedy keeps a close eye on the Players' artistic innovations on the stage, he continuously links the dramatic works with the momentous events happening outside the theatre walls such as the outbreak of World War I, first-wave feminism, and, more than anything, the development of a distinct Bohemian sensibility in Greenwich Village at the start of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. <em>Staging America</em> is an essential sourcebook for those interested in the Players and the birth of a truly American theatre, and it will continue to be a resource for the seasoned scholar or curious student looking for a fascinating study of American modernism, the interconnected web of artists working at the first part of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, and the \"purely experimental\" spirit that pulsed through much of the dramatic, visual, and literary work of the time.</p> <p>The early chapters of <em>Staging America</em> trace George Cram Cook's childhood and student days in Iowa. Cook gr","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"90 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138442807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Vows, Veils, and Masks: The Performance of Marriage in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill by Beth Wynstra (review)","authors":"Alexander Pettit","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2023.a913251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2023.a913251","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Vows, Veils, and Masks: The Performance of Marriage in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill</em> by Beth Wynstra <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Alexander Pettit (bio) </li> </ul> Beth Wynstra. <em>Vows, Veils, and Masks: The Performance of Marriage in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill</em>. Studies in Theatre History and Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2023. Pp x + 214. $92.50. <p>In this confident and overdue analysis of Eugene O'Neill's staged wives, Beth Wynstra reminds us that dramatizing shabby behaviors can be a form of inquiry rather than a revelation of one's own depravity. The application of this truism to wives in O'Neill, however, turns out to be tricky: they <em>do</em> seem a sour and conniving lot, and O'Neill himself <em>was</em> a lousy husband, serially. Thus, as Wynstra observes, the tradition of dismissing these characters as \"undependable,\" \"dangerous,\" \"predatory,\" \"bitches,\" and, in a depressingly Medieval twofer, \"not only lustful but dishonest\" (13). These were the judgments both of 1980s feminists troubled by behaviors of O'Neill's stage-wives and of earlier critics who had discerned attitudes in \"the Master\" (as O'Neill's third wife called him) that they found unobjectionable, per se. No one seems to have considered the possibility that O'Neill's stage-wives might manifest the assessments of causality broadly characteristic of modern drama, naturalism most pointedly.</p> <p>Wynstra corrects this error. In her reckoning, reactive dismissals \"halt curiosity about—and more important, empathy for—the heavy burdens and responsibilities that women shoulder, both in O'Neill's time and in our own\" (175). Her main lines of argument are complementary if not always confluent. First, she positions the wives in the evolving discourse about companionate marriage and uxorial identity promulgated in the \"women's magazines\" of the post-Progressive Era. Second, she posits an O'Neill who habitually \"depicted smart, complex women\" (114). Misogynistic aspects of O'Neill's plays that have been \"used to diminish or dismiss the [wives],\" she asserts, are actually \"rooted in and connected to the cultural norms and expectations for women of the time\" (175). To assume that O'Neill endorsed the totalizing jackasseries <em>du jour</em> is to ignore the nature of an oeuvre preoccupied with society's desecration of the individual. We needn't like Ruth Mayo in <em>Beyond the Horizon</em> any more than we like Hickey in <em>The Iceman Cometh</em>. O'Neill asks us to understand his characters' deformities. Wynstra complies.</p> <p>As her chapter subtitles indicate, Wynstra organizes her book around stages of courtship and marriage, with nods to theme: \"Promises of Marriage,\" \"Early- and Middle-Stage Marriages,\" \"Infidelity and Balance of Power,\" and \"Nostalgia and Narrative-Making in Late Stages of Marria","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"85 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138442853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race by Noémie Ndiaye (review)","authors":"Baltasar Fra-Molinero","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2023.a913252","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2023.a913252","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race</em> by Noémie Ndiaye <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Baltasar Fra-Molinero (bio) </li> </ul> Noémie Ndiaye. <em>Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race</em>. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. 358 pp. + 12 color plates. Hardcover and e-book $64.95, paperback $24.95. <p><em>Scripts of Blackness</em> puts English, French, and Spanish early modern literatures in conversation with each other. Its comparatist method showcases the history of the African diaspora in each country's colonial development. Noémie Ndiaye explores what she calls \"the invention of performative blackness\" (6) in early modern Europe by paying attention to archival material of words and images that reveals a common narrative: blackness becomes transnational and intercolonial, as she calls it. Early modern slavery itself was the first transnational institution in the Atlantic world, and blackness was its embodiment.</p> <p>The introductory chapter analyzes the lexicogical commonalities of the word <em>race</em> in English, Spanish and French. Early modern dictionaries and vocabularies show how the word moved from meaning social degree and religious adscription to add distinction of people by phenotype. Blackness became a race, a visible marker of pre-established difference that justifies domination. The chapter then establishes the genesis of performative blackness in the Iberian Peninsula, where the main cities of Spain and Portugal contained the largest communities of black Africans. Literary texts as early as the fifteenth century give evidence of the creation of a canon to represent blackness that includes speech, music, and dance. The introduction also explores research methodologies that justify the study of black representations in countries where there was no significant black population (France, England) but where there was a growing interest in representing blackness, especially in the form of dancing among aristocrats in what the author sees as early examples of colonial fantasies. Representing blackness in court balls expressed a desire for trans-Atlantic empire. The representation of blackness by whites was staged as spectacle and as a mainstay of white supremacy. The author addresses the need to study these processes, as today white supremacy and anti-Black racism are a global pandemic and a threat to humanity. <em>Scripts of Blackness</em> establishes historical distinctions in the various processes by which representations of blackness came into being. With the onset of the Atlantic slave trade, blackness became a performance in early modern European courts. Racial impersonation took the form of black-up (created after make-up, cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness) an","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"85 13","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138442852","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cultures of Witnessing: Law and the York Plays by Emma Lipton (review)","authors":"Elisabeth Dutton","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2023.a913248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2023.a913248","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Cultures of Witnessing: Law and the York Plays</em> by Emma Lipton <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Elisabeth Dutton (bio) </li> </ul> Emma Lipton. <em>Cultures of Witnessing: Law and the York Plays</em>. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. Pp. 248. $65. <p>Records of the York plays are preserved in the <em>York Memorandum Books</em>, manuscripts that also contain administrative records and charters defining and demonstrating York's politically powerful civic culture. These books offer some rationale for the approach that Emma Lipton follows in <em>Cultures of Witnessing</em>: the now firmly established interdisciplinary method that places the study of law alongside topics more generally explored in departments of language and literature. The York Plays are perhaps the most researched examples of medieval drama, but Lipton's approach does enable her to offer some new insights into their familiar material, particularly the Trial, Crucifixion and Last Judgment plays on which her discussion focuses.</p> <p>The book first describes the particular legal privileges granted to the city of York by successive English kings: the negotiation of these privileges provides \"crucial context for the depiction of legal witnessing in the York plays\" (6). Also outlined in the Introduction is the rise in the legal significance of witnesses as a result of the ban, imposed by the Fourth Lateran Council, on trial by ordeal: witnessing and jury trials, however, relied \"as much on rumor or shared knowledge as they did on direct perception\" (9), and many individuals were disqualified as witnesses on the basis of condition, gender, age, reputation, and fortune. Nonetheless, witnessing was an important civic duty, contributing to local, legal identity within the city. Witness records are also here described as similar to records of performance, with their accounts of places, times and persons resembling \"the unities of action, place and time long associated with the drama\" (17). Of course, these unities were no concern of medieval drama itself, but they may suggest associations in the mind of the modern scholar of drama.</p> <p>Subsequent chapters use medieval witnessing to theorize dramatic space, speech acts, affect, and temporality. Dramatic space is discussed in chapter 1 in relation to the York play of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem: unsurprisingly, comparison is drawn with the royal entry of King Henry IV into the city, but new light is cast on the comparison by Lipton's discussion of those present at the entry as if they were legal witnesses, \"neighbors close enough to have seen and heard relevant events, or to have local knowledge of reputation accorded by spatial proximity\" (24-5). The idea of the witness as neighbor then contributes to observations about the different stations around York at which e","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"90 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138442808","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Old Words into Something New\": David Bowie and Enda Walsh's Lazarus","authors":"Michael Jaros","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2023.a913244","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2023.a913244","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> \"Old Words into Something New\":<span>David Bowie and Enda Walsh's <em>Lazarus</em></span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Michael Jaros (bio) </li> </ul> <h2>Introduction: Avant-garde jukebox musical?</h2> <p>When it was announced that David Bowie was to be involved in the creation of a new musical called <em>Lazarus</em>, which would premiere at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2015, it became the most sold-out ticket in that company's history.<sup>1</sup> Its popularity was buoyed by the fact that Ivo van Hove, one of the most successful directors in the contemporary theatre, would direct, and Enda Walsh, the well-known Irish playwright who had recently achieved success adapting the film <em>Once</em> for the stage, would co-author the script. Billed as a sequel to Walter Tevis' 1963 novel <em>The Man Who Fell to Earth, Lazarus</em> continues the saga of the alien Thomas Newton, who is stranded on earth living on a diet of cereal and gin and watching a continuous stream of television.</p> <p>When <em>Lazarus</em> opened, reaction to the production was tepid. Critics appeared thoroughly confused by the piece, which was decidedly distant from any sort of jukebox musical where, as Millie Taylor notes, \"the familiarity of the music is used to draw the audience into an interaction with the performance.\"<sup>2</sup> For Hilton Als, who titled his <em>New Yorker</em> review \"static,\" <em>Lazarus</em> amounted to only so much cold noise. After praising Bowie's genius, recounting his own personal memories of the singer's music, and recalling Bowie's masterfully surreal performance in the 1976 film adaptation of Tevis' novel, Als maintained that he found the play to be confusingly fragmented and cold.<sup>3</sup> Bowie's memorable music was certainly present, along with some new songs: people at the New York Theatre Workshop watching the premiere would themselves hear the title <strong>[End Page 194]</strong> song \"Lazarus\" several weeks before Bowie himself released the single. A cadre of characters sung his songs, but the narrative surrounding them was fragmentary and hallucinatory. Various characters, who may or may not be figments of his imagination, arrive and depart, and ultimately Newton himself \"finds rest\" in an escape to the stars.</p> <p>Despite such critical reservations, <em>Lazarus</em> eventually transferred to London. In the interim, however, Bowie died, succumbing to cancer. I will argue that, alongside his last studio album <em>Blackstar</em>, which was timed for release with Bowie's birthday and subsequent death, the musical <em>Lazarus</em> was itself also a deep reflection on mortality and Bowie's own performative legacy. In co-writer Enda Walsh's dramaturgy, Bowie recognized the return of such themes again and again, and he chose Walsh specifically to help craft such a story for the musical. Given its subject mat","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"90 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138442811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}