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Author: Robert S. Miola Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
This book surveys Shakespeare's comedies, charting the influence upon them of the ancient playwrights, Plautus and Terence. Robert S. Miola analyses these sources, and places the comedies in their Renaissance context, as well as in the larger context of European theatre. Discovering new indebtedness, and discerning new patterns in previously attested borrowings, Shakespeare and Classical Comedy presents an integrated and comprehensive assessment of the complex interactions of the Classical, Shakespearean, and other Renaissance theatres. Robert S. Miola re-evaluates Plautus and Terence in the light of their Greek antecedents, and gives special attention to Renaissance translations and commentaries, Italian theorists, and playwrights, as well as contemporary dramatists such as Middleton, Jonson, Heywood, and Chapman. Four broad categories organize the discussion - New Comedic errors, intrigue, alazoneia (pretension), and romance - and each is illustrated by illuminating readings of individual Shakespearean plays. The author keeps in view Shakespeare's eclecticism, his habit of combining disparate sources and traditions, as well as the rich history of literary criticism and theatrical interpretation. The book concludes by discussing the presence of New Comedy in tragedy, in Hamlet and King Lear. Robert S. Miola's thoroughly researched book ranges over a vast amount of European drama, from Aristophanes to Beckett and Ionesco. It makes an important contribution to our understanding not only of Shakespeare and his foremost antecedents, but also of Renaissance theatre, and its complex adaptations of ancient texts and traditions.
Author: Heather Hirschfeld Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0191043451 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 593
Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy offers critical and contemporary resources for studying Shakespeare's comic enterprises. It engages with perennial, yet still urgent questions raised by the comedies and looks at them from a range of new perspectives that represent the most recent methodological approaches to Shakespeare, genre, and early modern drama. Several chapters take up firmly established topics of inquiry such Shakespeare's source materials, gender and sexuality, hetero- and homoerotic desire, race, and religion, and they reformulate these topics in the materialist, formalist, phenomenological, or revisionist terms of current scholarship and critical debate. Others explore subjects that have only relatively recently become pressing concerns for sustained scholarly interrogation, such as ecology, cross-species interaction, and humoral theory. Some contributions, informed by increasingly sophisticated approaches to the material conditions and embodied experience of theatrical practice, speak to a resurgence of interest in performance, from Shakespeare's period through the first decades of the twenty-first century. Others still investigate distinct sets of plays from unexpected and often polemical angles, noting connections between the comedies under inventive, unpredicted banners such as the theology of adultery, early modern pedagogy, global exploration, or monarchical rule. The Handbook situates these approaches against the long history of criticism and provides a valuable overview of the most up-to-date work in the field.
Author: Cesar Lombardi Barber Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691149526 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 323
Book Description
In this classic work, acclaimed Shakespeare critic C. L. Barber argues that Elizabethan seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night are the key to understanding Shakespeare's comedies. Brilliantly interweaving anthropology, social history, and literary criticism, Barber traces the inward journey--psychological, bodily, spiritual--of the comedies: from confusion, raucous laughter, aching desire, and aggression, to harmony. Revealing the interplay between social custom and dramatic form, the book shows how the Elizabethan antithesis between everyday and holiday comes to life in the comedies' combination of seriousness and levity. "I have been led into an exploration of the way the social form of Elizabethan holidays contributed to the dramatic form of festive comedy. To relate this drama to holiday has proved to be the most effective way to describe its character. And this historical interplay between social and artistic form has an interest of its own: we can see here, with more clarity of outline and detail than is usually possible, how art develops underlying configurations in the social life of a culture."--C. L. Barber, in the Introduction This new edition includes a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt, who discusses Barber's influence on later scholars and the recent critical disagreements that Barber has inspired, showing that Shakespeare's Festive Comedy is as vital today as when it was originally published.
Author: Aristophanes Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 0141959487 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 383
Book Description
From the fifth to the second century BC, innovative comedy drama flourished in Greece and Rome. This collection brings together the greatest works of Classical comedy, with two early Greek plays: Aristophanes' bold, imaginative Birds, and Menander's The Girl from Samos, which explores popular contemporary themes of mistaken identity and sexual misbehaviour; and two later Roman comic plays: Plautus' The Brothers Menaechmus - the original comedy of errors - and Terence's bawdy yet sophisticated double love-plot, The Eunuch. Together, these four plays demonstrate the development of Classical comedy, celebrating its richness, variety and extraordinary legacy to modern drama.
Author: Bart Van Es Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198723350 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 145
Book Description
In this Very Short Introduction Bart Van Es analyses Shakespeare's comedic plays, picking out the family resemblances across these works. He considers their shared themes such as confusion and cross dressing, misguided love, twins and substitutions, and explores the bard's verbal artistry and wit.
Author: Joseph Allen Bryant Publisher: University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 9780813130958 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
In Shakespeare's hand the comic mode became an instrument for exploring the broad territory of the human situation, including much that had normally been reserved for tragedy. Once the reader recognizes that justification for such an assumption is presented repeatedly in the earlier comedies -- from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night -- he has less difficulty in dispensing with the currently fashionable classifications of the later comedies as problem plays and romances or tragicomedies and thus in seeing them all as manifestations of a single impulse. Bryant shows how Shakespeare, early a.
Author: Sudha Gopalakrishnan Publisher: ISBN: Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 184
Book Description
A comparative study of classical Indian and Western drama with special reference to comedy reveals interesting similarities and differences between the two in respect of aesthetic theory, theatric practice and elements of dramatic composition. The common ground between Western and Sanskrit theatre relates to the use of stage-devices like pantomime, off-stage voices, soliloquy and play within the play, as well as histrionic elements like dance and music, and the exaggerated costume and make up of the characters. But apart from these, Indian drama, as outlined in Natya Sastra and maintained by stage performances through the centuries is markedly different from the Western, because while the latter mostly depends on realistic devices the former is basically a stylized mode of theatre which caters to an idealized audience. In Western drama, the interest of the audience in watching a play lies in the effective rendering of the dialogue, so that the verbal text is of primary value. But in traditional Sanskrit dramatic practice, the actor is encouraged to resort to an elaborate method of improvisation, using vocal and /or gestural expression, supplemented by the appropriate movements of the face and other parts of the body as well as by musical accompaniment. The written text has therefore only a minimal importance here. The method of dramatic composition of the comedies in both Western and Sanskrit traditions also bears striking similarities and divergences. These may be seen in the methods of employing plot, situation and themes as well as in the creation of character and the use of language. In the present study, the comedies of Shakespeare and Bhasa have been selected for closer analysis, because they seem to encompass within their respective spheres a wide variety of levels and interpretations of Western and Indian comedy. The two dramatists also seem to share a common underlying philosophy of comedy, namely, a joyous involvement in the process of living.
Author: Leo Salingar
Author: Leo Salingar
Author: Alexander Leggatt
Author: Robert S. Miola
Author: Heather Hirschfeld
Author: Cesar Lombardi Barber
Author: Aristophanes
Author: Bart Van Es
Author: Joseph Allen Bryant
Author: Sudha Gopalakrishnan
Author: Edward Berry