Dramatic Literature, Criticism, and Theory

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  Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley

  Busby Berkeley was the premier dance director of motion pictures. His originality and sharply defined style brought him professional acclaim and financial reward. He saved a studio from bankruptcy and a doomed genre from senescence. He wasn't a choreographer. According to “Buzz”, choreographers were defined with artists such as Agnes de Mille. He defined “dance directing”. Busby Berkeley was a specialist in the best and limiting sense of the word. For musical pictures, he had no stylistic equal, yet he films he directed outside his purview were often middling and anonymous, lacking the imprimatur that defined his finest work. The ...Read More

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  Women's Acts: Plays by Women Dramatists of Spain’s Golden Age

  Seventeenth-century Spain witnessed a rich flowering of dramatic activity that paralleled the Renaissance stage in other European countries. Yet this Golden Age traditionally has been represented in print almost entirely by male playwrights. With Women's Acts, Teresa Scott Soufas makes available eight plays by five long-neglected women dramatists: Angela de Azevedo, Ana Caro Mallen de Soto, Leonor de la Cueva y Silva, Feliciana Enriquez de Guzman, and Marla de Zayas y Sotomayor.

  In an age when moralists denounced women's participation in the public arena, these women transgressed traditional gender ideology by creating works for the secular stage. Female characters in ...Read More

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  The History of Southern Drama

  Mention southern drama at a cocktail party or in an American literature survey, and you may hear cries for “Stella!” or laments for “gentleman callers.” Yet southern drama depends on much more than a menagerie of highly strung spinsters and steel magnolias.

  Charles Watson explores this field from its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century roots through the southern Literary Renaissance and Tennessee Williams’s triumphs to the plays of Horton Foote, winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize. Such well known modern figures as Lillian Hellman and DuBose Heyward earn fresh looks, as does Tennessee Williams’s changing depiction of the South—from sensitive analysis to ...Read More

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  The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory

  Shakespeare's plays were not always the inviolable texts they are almost universally considered to be today. The Restoration and eighteenth century committed what many critics view as one of the most subversive acts in literary history—the rewriting and restructuring of Shakespeare's plays.

  Many of us are familiar with Nahum Tate's "audacious" adaptation of King Lear with its resoundingly happy ending, but Tate was only one of a score of playwrights who adapted Shakespeare's plays. Between 1660 and 1777, more than fifty adaptations appeared in print and on the stage, works in which playwrights augmented, substantially cut, or completely rewrote the ...Read More

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  Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley and Brome

  The most neglected of the English Renaissance playwrights are the major Carolines-Philip Massinger, John Ford, James Shirley, and Richard Brome. Writing in the 1620s and 1630s, always in the shadow of their great precursors, Shakespeare and Jonson, they have often been dubbed mere purveyors of slick, escapist sensationalism who avoided the great issues of their day and turned away from the impending breakdown of English society. Ira Clark's revisionist book shows us these dramatists and their time whole, particularly through analysis of their treatment of sociopolitical issues-issues that find echoes in twentieth-century concerns.

  For each of these playwrights, Clark ...Read More

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  Karagiozis: Culture and Comedy in Greek Puppet Theater

  Karagiozis—a form of comic folk drama employing stock puppet figures—was immensely popular in Greece until recent years, when newer forms of entertainment have virtually eclipsed it. Derived from ancient Byzantine and Greek sources, it takes its name from the principal puppet character, the clever, humpbacked fool-hero Karagiozis, who appears in many guises, surrounded by a cast of folk caricatures from all walks of life.

  Kostas and Linda Myrsiades present here a tripartite view of Karagiozis: a translation of a typical text taken directly from a live performance; interviews with one of the last master Karagiozis puppeteers; and an analysis of ...Read More

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  A Mirror to Nature: Transformations in Drama and Aesthetics 1660–1732

  In this provocative study, Rose Zimbardo examines a crucial revolution in aesthetics that took place in the late seventeenth century and that to this day dominates our response to literature. Although artists of that time continued to follow the precept "imitate nature," that nature no longer corresponds to the earlier understanding of the term. What had been in essence an allegorical mode came to be a literal one.

  Focusing on the drama of the period as an exemplary form, Zimbardo shows how it moved from depicting a metaphysical reality of idea to portraying an inner reality of individual experience. ...Read More

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  Henslowe's Rose: The Stage and Staging

  Some of the most famous plays in the English language were performed on the stage of the Rose theater, which stood on the Bankside in Elizabethan London. Henslowe's Rose is the first full-length study of this important theater.

  Rhodes gives as full an account as the evidence of contemporary pictures and documents permits of those Rose, the method of its construction, its general plan, its repertory of plays, and its staging. From the action of these plays he deduces the form of the stage itself and the nature of its facilities. The total of five openings in the walls ...Read More