Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Drama

Farce has always been relegated to the lowest rung of the ladder of dramatic genres. Distinctions between farce and more literary comic forms remain clouded, even in the light of contemporary efforts to rehabilitate this type of comedy. Is farce really nothing more than slapstick-the "putting out of candles, kicking down of tables, falling over joynt-stools," as Thomas Shadwell characterized it in the seventeenth century? Or was his contemporary, Nahum Tate correct when he declared triumphantly that "there are no rules to be prescribed for that sort of wit, no patterns to copy; and 'tis...

"He has chosen death: Refusing to eat or drink, that he may bring Disgrace upon me; for there is a custom, An old and foolish custom, that if a man Be wronged, or think that he is wronged, and starve Upon another's threshold till he die, The common people, for all time to come, Will raise a heavy cry against that threshold, Even though it be the King's." from The King's Threshold

The King's Threshold was first performed in Dublin by the Irish National Theatre Society in 1903 and first published in New York in 1904. The Cornell Yeats edition of this play about a...

Under the Tudor monarchy, English law expanded to include the category of "treason by words." Rebecca Lemon investigates this remarkable phrase both as a legal charge and as a cultural event. English citizens, she shows, expressed competing notions of treason in opposition to the growing absolutism of the monarchy. Lemon explores the complex participation of texts by John Donne, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare in the legal and political controversies marking the Earl of Essex's 1601 rebellion and the 1605 Gunpowder Plot.

Lemon suggests that the articulation of diverse ideas about...

In Dr. Faustus, Christopher Marlowe wrote a profoundly religious drama despite the theater's newfound secularism and his own reputation for anti-Christian irreverence. The Aesthetics of Antichrist explores this apparent paradox by suggesting that, long before Marlowe, Christian drama and ritual performance had reveled in staging the collapse of Christianity into its historical opponents paganism, Judaism, worldliness, heresy. By embracing this tradition, Marlowe's work would at once demonstrate the theatricality inhering in Christian worship and, unexpectedly, resacralize...

Halpern addresses such topics as imperialism and modernism's...

- The] ongoing proliferation of new versions of Carmen presents an ideal opportunity to study relationships between literature and the performing arts. The Fate of Carmen investigates these relationships, exploring in particular how and why certain literary texts appear to renew their own textual practices in modes of expression which are not uniquely verbal--- from the Introduction

Beginning with Prosper Merimee's 1845 novella, Carmen has been the subject of countless portrayals--from Bizet's 1874 opera, to various dramatic, dance, and musical renditions, to the...