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Journal articles on the topic 'English dramatist'
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1
Gill, R. "A New Dramatist." English 34, no. 150 (September 1, 1985): 256–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/english/34.150.256.
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Harrison, Tom. "Shakespeare, Court Dramatist. By Richard Dutton." English: Journal of the English Association 65, no. 251 (2016): 390–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/english/efw053.
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Prośniak, Anna. "“Sardoodledom” on the English Stage: T. W. Robertson and the Assimilation of Well-Made Play into the English Theatre." Text Matters, no. 10 (November 24, 2020): 446–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.10.25.
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The article discusses a vital figure in the development of modern English theatre, Thomas William Robertson, in the context of his borrowings, inspirations, translations and adaptations of the French dramatic formula pièce bien faite (well-made play). The paper gives the definition and enumerates features of the formula created with great success by the French dramatist Eugène Scribe. Presenting the figure of Thomas William Robertson, the father of theatre management and realism in Victorian theatre, the focus is placed on his adaptations of French plays and his incorporation of the formula of the well-made play and its conventional dramatic devices into his original, and most successful, plays, Society and Caste. The paper also examines the critical response to the well-made play in England and dramatists who use its formula, especially from the point of view of George Bernard Shaw, who famously called the French plays of Scribe and Victorien Sardou—“Sardoodledom.”
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Delisle, Jeanne-Mance, Yves Saint-Piene, Leatiote Lieblein, and Harry Standjofski. "A Live Bird in Its Jaws, Urban Myths: Anton & No Cycle." Canadian Theatre Review 77 (December 1993): 87. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/ctr.77.019.
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The dramatic work of Jeanne-Mance Delisle deserves to be known by an English-speaking public. Regrettably, Un réel ben beau ben triste (1981), the work on which her reputation as a dramatist was built, remains untranslated. Thus Yves Saint-Pierre’s able rendering of the play for which she received the Governor General’s Award for drama in 1987 is all the more welcome.
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Mohsin Hadi Al-Hajmee, Ali Abdul. "Ben Jonson, Literary Style, and Presents Most Famous Plays." INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SOCIAL SCIENCES & HUMANITIES 13, no. 02 (2023): 479–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.37648/ijrssh.v13i02.038.
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Drama has always fascinated audiences. Audiences have been captivated by dramatic presentations of the plights of others since antiquity, which not only satisfies their natural curiosity but also provides a platform from which dramatists can tackle pressing issues of the day and present them in a manner that is both easily understood and literately accessible. Many of Ben Jonson's plays, like Volpone, or The Fox (1606) and The Alchemist (1610), are caustic condemnations of prevailing societal norms. The famed British poet and dramatist Ben Jonson was born in London on 11 June 1572. His father, who was a priest, died just a month before his birth, and his mother promptly remarried again master bricklayer Robert Brett. After getting a classical education at school, Ben Jonson rose from an apprentice bricklayer and soldier to become one of the most acclaimed playwrights and poets of the 17th century. As a writer, he had a troubled beginning, having spent time in prison for writing a controversial play and then murdered another actor shortly after his release. Jonson was a contentious figure due to the extent to which he satirised the English upper classes as he grew in stature. Although he never entirely reconciled himself to English authority, his talent as a dramatist and courtier earned him a pension from King James I and, in effect, the position of unofficial Poet Laureate of England. He brought to the fore the comedy of humor. The current study aims to study the English Playwright Ben Johnson, commenting on his literary style, and presents his most famous plays Volpone, or The Fox (1606) and The Alchemist (1610). The research paper falls into introduction, two sections, and a conclusion which sums the whole findings.
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Singh, Dr Pramod Kumar. "Mahesh Dattani’s “Do the Needful”: An Unconventional Romantic Comedy." SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 8, no. 10 (October 29, 2020): 74–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.24113/ijellh.v8i10.10802.
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Mahesh Dattani is a contemporary Indian English Dramatist who gave voice to the 60 million English speakers of India through his drama. He is the first dramatist recognised for his contribution in this field. Through his plays, he raises the problems of eunuch, homosexuality, transgender, child- sexual abuse, gender-discrimination, thought towards HIV-infected people etc. To such issues, he called them ‘fringe issue’ to whom we face but never take it as a part of society. Through ‘Do the Needful’ Mahesh Dattani has presented the problems of male homosexuality. The play was broadcasted by BBC. The play ‘Do the Needful’ is actually an unconventional romantic comedy.
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Kardiansyah, M. Yuseano. "English Drama in the Late of Victorian Period (1880-1901): Realism in Drama Genre Revival." TEKNOSASTIK 15, no. 2 (October 18, 2019): 64. http://dx.doi.org/10.33365/ts.v15i2.100.
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A progressive growth in literature was seen significantly during Victorian period. These decades also saw an overdue revival of drama, in which the existence of drama was started to improve when entering late of Victorian period. Along with that situation, Thomas William Robertson (1829-1871) emerged as a popular drama writer at that time besides the coming of Henrik Ibsen’s works in 1880’s. However, Robertson’s popularity was defeated by other dramatists during late of Victorian period (1880-1901), drama writer like Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). Beside Wilde, there were several well known dramatists during late of Victorian period. Dramatists as Shaw, Jones, and Pinero were also influential toward the development of drama at that time. In the discussion of English drama development, role of late Victorian period’s dramatists was really important toward the development of modern drama. Their works and efforts really influenced the triumph of realism and development of drama after Victorian period ended. Therefore, the development of drama during late of Victorian period is discussed in this particular writing, due to the important roles of dramatist such as Wilde, Shaw, Pinero, and Jones. Here, their roles to the revival of English drama and the trend of realism in the history of English literature are very important.
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Moran, James. "Kate O'Brien in the Theatre." Irish University Review 48, no. 1 (May 2018): 7–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/iur.2018.0326.
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Kate O'Brien initially made her literary reputation as a dramatist rather than a novelist. Her debut play Distinguished Villa (1926) won acclaim in London when first produced onstage, and critics compared her with Seán O'Casey. However, O'Brien's dramatic work manifests some key differences to O'Casey, not least O'Brien's recurring concern with the behavioural norms and sexual predilections of the English middle-classes, and her early awareness of the requirements of the British censor. Although O'Brien is remembered as a figure who transgressed the censorship rules of the Irish government, it was the British system of censorship she first had to navigate.
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McGuinness, Frank. "Saint Behan." Irish University Review 44, no. 1 (May 2014): 78–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/iur.2014.0104.
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This essay examines Brendan Behan's evolution as a dramatist, linking him to the tradition of O'Casey's urban theatre, particularly Juno and the Paycock, and emphasising his closeness to the experimental drama of his near contemporary, Samuel Beckett. It details how subversively Behan used both music and the Gaelic language in sexualizing the story of The Quare Fellow, how he censors such radical departures in An Giall, and how The Hostage in its wild exuberance restores Behan to the status of a most dangerously liberated dramatist. Finally it looks at the influence of Behan on his most significant follower, the openly queer English playwright, Joe Orton.
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D. Mapari, Ms Dimple, and Shankarlal Khandelwal. "Performative Aspects of Mahesh Dattani’s Plays." International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences 7, no. 4 (2022): 231–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels.74.33.
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Modern theatre in India comprises mainly of English, Hindi, Marathi and Hinglish (comprising of a mix of Hindi and English dialogues) plays. English theatre was brought to India during the British rule and was watched mostly by art connoisseurs of the rich, upper class. This, however, changed after independence, as, many Indians entered the fray and theatre slowly became open for common people too. The post-independence Indian English drama is notable for a wide range of subjects treated, issues presented and also it takes into its compass some globally appealing issues. It displays a remarkable growth and maturity. Mahesh Dattani is a dynamic dramatist, a professional Baratnatyam dancer, a drama teacher, a stage director, and an actor. A person, who has touched almost every aspect of the theatre and has received the first ‘SahityaAkadami Award’ (1998) for writing in English, he is rightly called the successor of Girish Karnad for his innovations in dialogue writing, pragmatic stage decorations, light arrangements, etc. One of his major contributions is that he has infused actability into Indian drama in English. It seems that, all the limitations, which in a way marred the beauty of Indian English theatre down the decades, are finally overcome. As Reena Mitra observes, ‘Dattani confidently challenges the traditional denotations and connotations of the words’ India’ and ‘Indians’.1 What makes his plays ‘performance oriented’ are his dramatic techniques. The paper intends to focus upon the aspects which make his drama stand out.
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Gomes, Marleide da Mota. "Shakespeare’s: his 450th birth anniversary and his insights into neurology and cognition." Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria 73, no. 4 (April 2015): 359–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/0004-282x20150023.
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The works of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), the greatest dramatist and poet of the English language, reflect several cultural values of the Western world which are also shared by other cultures. On his 450th birthday, many of his concepts are admired as descriptions of human feelings and neurological phenomena, demonstrating his insights into what it is today considered cognitive neuroscience
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Semak, O. "Paradox as Means of Expression of Author’s Ideological Position in Dramas of V. Vynnychenko and B. Shaw." Journal of Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University 2, no. 2-3 (July 2, 2015): 110–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.15330/jpnu.2.2-3.110-114.
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The article has the comparative study of the phenomenon of paradox in the plays of theUkrainian playwright V. Vynnychenko and English dramatist B. Shaw. It pays attention to thepossibilities of paradox to express the author’s idea most exactly. This work has the analysis of twotypes of paradox – phraseological one and paradox on the level of the plot and their specificfeatures.
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Klotz, Günther. "Howard Barker: Paradigm of Postmodernism." New Theatre Quarterly 7, no. 25 (February 1991): 20–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00005157.
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The plays of Howard Barker are probably more fervently admired and resolutely disliked than those of any other British dramatist of his generation. Although we have twice published interviews with the playwright about his life and work – first in the original Theatre Quarterly, TQ40 (1981), and more recently in NTQ8 (1986) – subsequent articles in NTQ have tended to be critical of his achievements: we are therefore pleased to present here a view of two of his latest plays, The Last Supper and The Bite of the Night, which, while recognizing precisely those qualities for which Barker has often been attacked, suggests that there is a social as well as a highly theatrical purpose behind the ‘postmodern’ approach to theatricality here identified. Th e author, Günther Klotz, teaches and researches in English studies in Berlin, where he has published numerous critical studies and editions of British dramatists and other writers.
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Weiss, Rudolf. "Harley Granville Barker: the First English Chekhovian?" New Theatre Quarterly 14, no. 53 (February 1998): 53–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00011738.
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Harley Granville Barker, the major innovator in the English theatre at the beginning of the present century, was long underestimated as a playwright, and misjudged as a mediocre imitator of Bernard Shaw. In more recent years major revivals of his plays, as well as new critical studies and editions, have witnessed a renewed interest in Barker as a dramatist, which, Rudolf Weiss here argues, testifies to the Chekhovian rather than the Shavian qualities of his plays. In the following article Weiss explores these qualities in the context of the early reception of Chekhov's plays in Britain, and on the basis of a reassessment of the existing records he offers a new view of Barker's originality as a playwright, concluding that the quasi-Chekhovian stamp of his work does not derive from influence but reflects the distinctive Zeitgeist of the turn of the twentieth century. Rudolf Weiss, who teaches in the English Department of the University of Vienna, has previously published on Arthur Wing Pinero, John Galsworthy, Harley Granville Barker, and Elizabeth Baker.
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Morash, Karen. "Playwriting Manuals, 1888–1925: Jerome K. Jerome, Alfred Hennequin, Agnes Platt, and Moses Malevinsky." New Theatre Quarterly 38, no. 4 (October 18, 2022): 362–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x22000264.
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Since the 1990s, there has been a large number of ‘how-to’ manuals published in English for aspiring playwrights. By and large, these texts treat the pedagogy of playwriting as a recent phenomenon. However, a series of relatively unknown books from the mid-nineteenth century were written with the purpose of teaching the craft of dramatic writing, emphasizing the importance of a hands-on understanding of the theatre and the individual roles within it. This article argues that, while these books are representative of the historical context in which they were written, they also contain advice which is still useful for playwrights, along with fascinating individual characteristics. Texts featured include one of the earliest manuals discovered, written by the anonymous ‘A Dramatist’; a text by the first (known) woman to write a how-to manual in English; and a book which uses a mathematical formula as a foundation for writing a script. Karen Morash is Lead Academic Tutor on the BA Theatre Studies at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance. She is a playwright and poet, and works as a dramaturg with the theatre company Head for Heights.
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Dilorom, Ismoilova. "SEMANTIC-STRUCTURAL PECULIARITIES OF SHAKESPEAREAN NEOLOGISMS." Social Sciences, Humanities and Education Journal (SHE Journal) 2, no. 2 (May 28, 2021): 78. http://dx.doi.org/10.25273/she.v2i2.9227.
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The article reveals the contributions of William Shakespeare to the development of the English language. Author discusses structural features of Shakespearean neologisms and highlights semantic differences in terms of periods of English language. The study reveals the peculiarities of Shakespearean neologisms due to the standpoints of methods of analysis. The article targeted to clarify the neologisms made in the realm of morphological word-formation. The author utilized the observation method and conducted the qualitative research. The neologisms by the dramatist are divided into 4 categories considering their ways of formation. They are following: the neologisms that were coined by affixation; the neologisms that were minted by syntactic way; originally new-born words; the neologisms that were coined by conversion.
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Maufort, Marc. "A Passage to Belgium: George F. Walker’s “Problem Child” in Brussels." Canadian Theatre Review 105 (January 2001): 20–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/ctr.105.004.
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The 1999-2000 season of the Brussels Théâtre de Poche was marked by its significant production of Canadian dramatist George F. Walker’s “Problem Child”. Although Brussels is generally regarded as a major theatrical platform in Europe, this production constituted Walker’s first performance ever in Brussels, in a French-language translation. French Canadian plays are not unknown to the Belgian theatre going public - witness the repeated success of Tremblay’s dramas over the years in various Brussels venues. However, the entire English Canadian repertoire remains virtually unknown in this European capital. For this reason, the premiere of Walker’s “Problem Child” by the Théâtre de Poche will remain a landmark event in Belgian theatre circles: to my knowledge, it represented the first English Canadian play to be produced in Belgium.
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Figueroa Dorrego, Jorge. "Ariadne’s Adaptation of Alexander Oldys’s The Fair Extravagant in She Ventures and He Wins." Sederi, no. 19 (2009): 177–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.34136/sederi.2009.8.
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In the preface to She Ventures and He Wins (1695), the young woman signing as “Ariadne” says that the plot of this play is taken from “a small novel,” the title of which she does not mention. Neither the editors Lyons and Morgan (1991) nor any of the few critics that have recently commented on this piece have identified the text upon which the play is drawn. The answer to this riddle is to be found in The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets (1699). The main plot of that comedy is Alexander Oldys’s The Fair Extravagant, or The Humorous Bride, a practically unknown text that has not been reprinted since 1682. The aim of this paper is to (re-)unearth that source, and to analyse how Ariadne adapted the male-authored original for her own purposes as a woman dramatist, combined it with a farcical sub-plot, and endeavoured to tailor it to the new tastes of the town.
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Edwards, Gwynne. "Lorca on the English Stage: Problems of Production and Translation." New Theatre Quarterly 4, no. 16 (November 1988): 344–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00002943.
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The production during 1987 of no less than three plays by the usually-neglected Spanish dramatist Lorca – Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba – provided a rare opportunity for a reconsideration of the plays as works for the live theatre, and of the particular problems involved in ‘translating’ them (in every sense of the word) for the English-speaking stage. In the following article. Gwynne Edwards considers the difficulties which confront the translator of Lorca's plays, the production-style which is implicit in Lorca's theatre, and the varying extents to which the three recent productions approximated to it. Gwynne Edwards is Professor of Spanish at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has published full-length studies of Lorca and of Luis Buñuel, and numerous translations of Spanish plays, including two in the volume of Three Plays published by Methuen in 1987, and the version of Blood Wedding used in the Contact Theatre production here considered.
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Braund, Susanna. "TABLEAUX AND SPECTACLES: APPRECIATION OF SENECAN TRAGEDY BY EUROPEAN DRAMATISTS OF THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES." Ramus 46, no. 1-2 (December 2017): 135–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/rmu.2017.7.
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Did Sophocles or Seneca exercise a greater influence on Renaissance drama? While the twenty-first century public might assume the Greek dramatist, in recent decades literary scholars have come to appreciate that the model of tragedy for the Renaissance was the plays of the Roman Seneca rather than those of the Athenian tragedians. In his important essay on Seneca and Shakespeare written in 1932, T.S. Eliot wrote that Senecan sensibility was ‘the most completely absorbed and transmogrified, because it was already the most diffused’ in Shakespeare's world. Tony Boyle, one of the leading rehabilitators of Seneca in recent years, has rightly said, building on the work of Robert Miola and Gordon Braden in particular, that ‘Seneca encodes Renaissance theatre’ from the time that Albertino Mussato wrote his neo-Latin tragedy Ecerinis in 1315 on into the seventeenth century. The present essay offers a complement and supplement to previous scholarship arguing that Seneca enjoyed a status at least equal to that of the Athenian tragedians for European dramatists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My method will be to examine two plays, one in French and one in English, where the authors have combined dramatic elements taken from Seneca with elements taken from Sophocles. My examples are Robert Garnier's play, staged and published in 1580, entitled Antigone ou La Piété (Antigone or Piety), and the highly popular play by John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee entitled Oedipus, A Tragedy, staged in 1678 and published the following year.
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Garner, Stanton B. "History in the Year Two: Trevor Griffiths's Danton." New Theatre Quarterly 11, no. 44 (November 1995): 333–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00009313.
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For British dramatists nurtured in and by the hopes for socialism which characterized the 'sixties and the 'seventies, the Thatcherite period – with the eclipse of a fatally flawed communist system as its international dimension – demanded not only new thinking, but at least the consideration of a new dramaturgy. Stanton B. Garner, Jr., here explores the ways in which one of the most consistently committed of contemporary writers, Trevor Griffiths, confronts in Hope in the Year Two, his play about the death of the French Revolutionary Danton, the dilemma not only of the revolutionary hero, but of the dramatist confronted with attacks upon the concept of history itself, whether from the gurus of post-modernism or of the New Right. Stanton B. Garner, Jr., teaches modern drama in the English Department at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of The Absent Voice: Narrative Comprehension in the Theater (1989) and Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (1994). His current research interests include post-Cold War British drama.
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Ali al-Anezi, Ali. "A Perspective on the Progress of the Theatre of Saad al-Faraj, with Emphasis on Censorship in Kuwait and the challenged Play Custom is Second Nature." Sumerianz Journal of Education, Linguistics and Literature, no. 41 (January 16, 2021): 1–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.47752/sjell.41.1.9.
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This study is an examination of the life and work of the Kuwaiti dramatist Saad al-Faraj (1938 - ). al-Faraj’s name is virtually unknown in the West – particularly in the English-speaking West, although he is well known in Arab World. Only one academic study of any significance has appeared in Arabic on this eminent and fascinating dramatist, who was honoured by NCCAL and the Arab Theatre Institute at the end of his life. This study do not attempt to be comprehensive but focus on particular stages of al-Faraj’s career. This study is, therefore, the only one to attempt to see al-Faraj whole. To do so it combines an account of his life which seeks to comprehend the various forces that shaped his thinking with an analysis of one of his main dramatic work. The study concentrates on the years following the trauma inflicted on the Arab world by the catastrophe of the defeat of June 1967. Al-Faraj’s career can be divided into two phases: the immature plays of his young manhood; his late period – the ‘Epic theatre’, when his Nasrism politics were the main factor shaping his drama. The study places al-Faraj in his historical and sociocultural context and provides a brief background explaining the literary and theatrical traditions of the Arab world that influenced his activity as a dramatist. His late work is then examined in turn and his play Custom is Second Nature is analysed in accordance with the focus of the study. This means that special attention is given to the late period, but no significant work is neglected. The study aims to trace the trajectory of al-Faraj’s development using a variety of sources: the plays themselves, al-Faraj’s own journalism and critical writings, interviews with him, and his close friends and colleagues, in addition to a number of journals, books and articles, some of which contain important interviews with al-Faraj that shed light on his thought and ways of working. Conclusions will be drawn but, more importantly, questions will be raised, and it is hoped that scholars will consider this playwright and his work a subject meriting further research.
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O'Brien, Richard. "“Put not / Beyond the sphere of your activity”: The Fictional Afterlives of Ben Jonson." Ben Jonson Journal 23, no. 2 (November 2016): 169–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/bjj.2016.0163.
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This article investigates the cultural assumptions which underpin five twentieth and twenty-first century fictional depictions of Ben Jonson. Despite the wealth of documentary evidence for Jonson's dramatic and fractious biography, its particular richness has rarely captured the imagination of contemporary authors. To account for the much-reduced presence Jonson occupies in the ongoing fictionalization of the English Renaissance, the author outlines the development of a pseudo-biographical narrative of Jonson's life which evolved over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in relation to the emerging narrative of Shakespeare's. Jonson came to be presented as pedantic, ponderous, and ultimately outclassed by the dramatist who was his main contemporary rival, whose early reputation he was instrumental in creating. Furthermore, this gradual diminution of Jonson's own complexities was directly linked to his success within his lifetime. Outliving Shakespeare and offering an alternative model for theatrical achievement, Jonson presented a threat which had to be neutralized in the service of a protective impulse towards Shakespeare's reputation as a unique genius. The article offers some early instances of semi-fictional anecdotes about Jonson and Shakespeare which present the two dramatists as interchangeable subjects. It then assesses at length more recent Jonson-characters in Brahms and Simon's No Bed for Bacon, Roland Emmerich's Anonymous, Edward Bond's Bingo, Rudyard Kipling's “Proofs of Holy Writ”, and Jude Morgan's The Secret Life of William Shakespeare in the light of the historical reframing of Jonson's life and temperament. Finally, it makes the case for Jonson's story as one particularly suited to our current cultural landscape.
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Sankhyan, Neeraj, and Suman Sigroha. "DECONSTRUCTING FALSE IDENTITY: EXPLORING GENDER DISCRIMINATION AND ROLE-PLAYING IN THE GIRL WHO TOUCHED THE STARS." Celt: A Journal of Culture, English Language Teaching & Literature 15, no. 2 (February 22, 2016): 165. http://dx.doi.org/10.24167/celt.v15i2.469.
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Mahesh Dattani, is an avant-garde Indian English dramatist known for his radical and unconventional dramatic themes. His plays are characterized by an extremely sensitive temperament that delves into the intricacies of the human nature and strives to expose the hypocrisy of the urban life and society. This paper discusses his play The Girl Who Touched the Stars as a quest for a lost identity. In doing so, the paper sheds light upon the underlying themes of gender discrimination, misogyny and role-playing that the playwright uses in this play to show how much these evils are rampant even amongst the educated classes of the society. Specifically, the paper explores the deconstruction of identity of the protagonist as employed by the playwright and examines the implications this technique has on the narrative of the play. The interconnection between the role-playing and the inherent theme of gender discrimination is also analyzed in order to see how these elements complement each other. Also, the paper comments on the efficacy of radio drama as a medium for handling a sensitive theme like this.
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Kulkarni, Prafull D. "Thematic Analysis of the Sociocultural Decapitation in Karnad’s Play: ‘Tale-danda’." Shanlax International Journal of English 12, S1-Dec (December 14, 2023): 273–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.34293/rtdh.v12is1-dec.72.
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Drama is a source of entertainment as well as enlightenment. Girish Karnad uses this audio-visual medium to bring to light a social vice of India, namely, casteism and its age-old impact on its victims. Its sway on society and the resultant retaliation by its sufferers is highlighted by the dramatist using the legendary figure of Mahatma Basaveshwara as a reformer in one of his English plays entitled Tale-danda (The Beheading) in English. Karnad’s approach in this play is full of censure against the oppression of the underprivileged. For ages, they were the victims of social persecution which once resulted in an anti-elitist uprising in south India. The movement later culminated in a kind of sociocultural decapitation of the underprivileged in twelfth-century Karnataka. The present paper attempts to focus on this historical event and its aftermath as dramatized in the play on the avenging individuals.
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Rathore, Dr Madhvi, and Prabha Prabha Gour. "The Exploration of the Postcolonial Essence in The Tempest." SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 8, no. 2 (February 28, 2020): 14. http://dx.doi.org/10.24113/ijellh.v8i2.10429.
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William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is indubitably the best playwright of all time. He acquired an unique place in the world of literature. His plays earned international commendation and acceptance as the finest dramatist in the entire history of English literature. His play, The Tempest has been decoded differently by critics as a postcolonial text. In1611 when William Shakespeare wrote the play The Tempest, colonization was a recent concept in Britain. This paper is an attempt to inspect the postcolonial issues such as subjugation, dominance language, power and knowledge etc. and conjointly converse about the complex relationship that exist between the master and slave in The Tempest.
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Gorenc, Janez. "William Butler Yeats in the Slovene cultural space." Acta Neophilologica 35, no. 1-2 (December 1, 2002): 13–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/an.35.1-2.13-27.
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William Butler Yeats, Irish poet, dramatist and essayist, winner of the Nobel prize in 1923, was also widely known for the active part he played in Irish politics. Even though he was mostly involved culturally - he wro.te about Irish politics in his works, established several literary clubs, founded theatres - he also activated himself as a politician when he was a senator during the years 1923-1928. This article focuses on the mention of his political activities in different English and Slovene texts. It makes a presentation of the vast majority of the texts on Yeats that have appeared in Slovene. It also points out that while the majority of English encyclopaedias and literary histories openly write about Yeats's politics, Slovene texts about Yeats focus mostly on his literary opus and less on his involvement in politics. When they do mention it, however, they usually avoid the details. This article tries to determine some reasons for this fact.
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Hadfield, A. "Reading Shakespeare Historically; Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference; Othello: a contextual history; William Shakespeare: King Lear; Shakespeare's Theory of Drama; Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The ritual foundations of genre; Shakespeare Survey 48: Shakespeare and Cultural Exchange; An Introduction to Shakespeare: The Dramatist in his Context." English 46, no. 184 (March 1, 1997): 64–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/english/46.184.64.
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.V, Praveen S. "Shakespeare-The Brand." International Journal of Emerging Research in Management and Technology 6, no. 8 (June 25, 2018): 179. http://dx.doi.org/10.23956/ijermt.v6i8.135.
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William Shakespeare is known to the world as one of the greatest dramatist in the history of English Literature. It is unusual to attribute either Shakespeare or his works in the world of marketing, yet it is the fact that, even after 450 years, Shakespeare is still a recognizable and powerful brand in the world of today. Shakespearean festival was still being celebrated all over the world. Royal Society of Shakespeare still performs Shakespearean dramas every year, in more than twenty languages. It shows the brand image of Shakespeare, having in the world today. Aristotle, a Greek Philosopher, in his attempt to understand poetry and drama, expressed his view in his famous work Poetics that, both drama and poetry appeals to the emotions of a reader and spectators. The success of a drama, depends on the extent to which, a dramatist can able to capture the emotions of the audience. It is necessary for writers to have a unique brand personality to market their art. Every writer has their own set of target audience and follows various strategies to satisfy them. This paper deals with, how Shakespeare employed different strategies to create his own brand image, that helped him positioning his art among his target audience, thus ending up creating one of the greatest and powerful brand image in the History.
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Manoj Kumar. "Mahesh Dattani’s Tara: A Critical Study of Gender and Social Discrimination." Creative Launcher 4, no. 1 (April 30, 2019): 69–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.53032/tcl.2019.4.1.11.
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Mahesh Dattani is a well known Indian English dramatist. He was born in 1958 in Bangalore, India. He is resourceful theatre artist, a drama teacher, stage director and a good dancer. He was awarded with the prestigious Sahitya Academy Award for his plays; Final Solutions and Other Plays. It is the first Indian dramatist who received this eminent award. Apart from this, he wrote many plays like Dance like a Man, Bravely Fought the Queen, Tara, Where There’s a Will, Thirty Days in September, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai, The Tale of a Mother Feeling Her Child, Complete Plays, (it holds 8 plays), Morning Raja, Collected Plays 2 Vol., Collected Plays. The themes of gender discrimination and social upheavals keep a lot of implication in his plays. He is a very strong and genuine voice of the middle class society in India. Most of the characters of his plays belong to the middle and lower class family. He deals the issues of societal construct of gender, the position of patriarchy, the dilemma and problems of homosexuals, the institution of marriage, the hypocrisy of the middle class and some other which are directly related to the middle class sensibility. There is expression of everyday events. He does not endeavour to present an unfeasible realism.Discrimination, Feminism, Patriarchy, Inequality
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Alqadumi, Emad A. "The iconoclastic theatre: transgression in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine." EJOTMAS: Ekpoma Journal of Theatre and Media Arts 7, no. 1-2 (April 15, 2020): 281–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ejotmas.v7i1-2.18.
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This article examines Christopher Marlowe’s iconoclasm as a dramatist by probing transgressive features in his Tamburlaine the Great, parts I and II. By depicting instances of excessive violence, from the perspective of this study, Marlowe flouts everything his society cherishes. His Tamburlaine demystifies religious doctrines and cultural relations; it challenges the official view of the universe and customary theatrical conventions of Renaissance drama. It destabilizes the norms and values of the Elizabethans and brings about a crisis between the Elizabethan audience and their own culture. Furthermore, Marlowe’s experimentalism in Tamburlaine expands the imaginative representations to include areas never formerly visited, consequently creating an alternative reality for his audience and transforming the popular English theatre in an unprecedented manner.
Keywords: Drama, Christopher Marlowe, Elizabethan theatre, Literature, Iconoclasm
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Macedo, Ana Gabriela. "A Grande Vaga de Frio (‘The Great Frost’): The transmigration of Orlando into Portuguese." Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 13, no. 3 (December 1, 2020): 345–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jafp_00036_3.
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In October 2017, Luísa Costa Gomes, Portuguese dramatist, created for the stage what she called a ‘genre transformation’ or more accurately, she argues, a ‘transmigration’ of Woolf’s large-spectrum fictional (utopian, fantastical, parodic) biographic narrative, that spans three centuries of English history, while accompanying the extraordinary life trajectory of its protagonist, Orlando. The rich and manifold ambivalence of the text is explored in Luísa Costa Gomes’s ‘transformation’, first of all in terms of its rendering into a dramatic monologue which condenses the original narrative in about forty pages of what she calls a ‘programmatic reconstruction of the source text’, which, she offers, is but a ‘commented and seasoned active reading’, after all the ‘fundamental prerequisite of any reading’. The play aims to capture the essence of Orlando’s fluidity in between genders, in between cultures, and historical moments. It amplifies the inner dialogues of the text with the texts of history and those of the male and female protagonists that embody it, plus the implicit dialogue between the authorial voice and the voice of the dramaturg as that of yet another reader. The new text thus ‘transmigrated’ into Portuguese, resounds as a ‘haunted monologue’ that is, after all, deeply plurivocal and uncannily dialogical.
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Kitishat, Amal Riyadh. "Riders to the Sea between Regionalism and Universality: A Cultural Perspective." Theory and Practice in Language Studies 9, no. 3 (March 1, 2019): 255. http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/tpls.0903.01.
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This study aims at discussing Riders to the Sea; it aims to investigate nationalism and cultural identity as two significant ways against the English cultural colonialism. Though many critics regard J.M. Synge as; and thus consider him as an example of regional dramatist because his works are related to the local Irish material. However; this study aims to correct this vision of Synge as only about Irish Celtic culture, but as an innovator of the Irish theatre and as a culturalist who shifted Irish theatre into a universal scope. Thus, though Synge's fame is due to his treatment of the "folk" drama; still, he finds in Ireland’s folk tales, myths, and traditional legends a rich source for universal interests. By tracing the reinforcement of the Irish setting and oral culture for a cultural function which aims at establishing the Irish identity and reviving its national heritage, the study argues that Synge's dramatic presentations were not only of regional or local value; but also of international and cultural significance. That is though J.M. Synge introduces his theme in a local Irish context, with a particular focus on peasants; he was able to transform the Irish theatre from the local context to universality.
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RABEY, DAVID IAN. "Two Against Nature: Rehearsing and Performing Howard Barker's Production of his Play The Twelfth Battle of Isonzo." Theatre Research International 30, no. 2 (July 2005): 175–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883305001173.
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The English dramatist/director Howard Barker has, through a unique combination of style, content, theoretical argument and mise-en-scène, persistently countered conventional presumptions and propositions of the supposedly ‘natural’ diminutions or ‘inevitable’ restrictions whereby one might think, feel, speak, act, love and exist. His work offers a purposefully anti-naturalistic expansion of vocabulary: of language, terms of experience, scenic and physical expression, and being. This article presents an actor's account of preparing and playing a role, under Barker's direction, in a two-hander play, and offers a reading of the play's strategic dynamics based on these experiences, and of the characters' uses of self-conscious performances in order to sustain and subvert artifice, with references to Greenblatt's theories of theatrical charisma and eroticism, and Baudrillard's theories of seduction.
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Saxena, Ritu. "Girish Karnad : A Tribute." Dialogue: A Journal Devoted to Literary Appreciation 15, no. 1-2 (December 30, 2019): 1–4. http://dx.doi.org/10.30949/dajdtla.v14i1-2.1.
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Girish Karnad is a writer, dramatist, director and actor par excellence. He belongs to a generation that has produced Dharamveer Bharati, Mohan Rakesh and Vijay Tendulkar who have created a national theatre for modern India, which is the legacy of his generation. Jnanpitha Awardee, Karnad is the author of many well known plays in Kannada and English. He has represented Indian art and culture in foreign lands. Girish Karnad was a conscious writer, who had keenly observed cultural and political upheavals in India and brings in a new equation in his plays. In this paper, I propose to analyze the selected plays of Indian playwright Grirish Karnad who has experimented with the fusion of the traditional and the modern dramatic forms and content. Karnad is most famous as a playwright and his plays have become a byword for imagination, innovation and craftsmanship. In the subsequent years, Karnad continued to post script narratives, interpreting for us histories and myths, forging an idiom of writing that was tethered to both the past and present. Karnad's practice of drawing source from myths and tales lends the play an immediacy of appeal. This paper thus studies Karnad's selected plays from the point of view of themes and techniques. While doing so, the focus will mainly be on the history and myth in his dramatic works-Karnad's journey from his first drama 'Yayati holds a mirror to the very evolution of a truly 'Indian theatre.'
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Laurella, Robert. "Knighthoods and Empty Benches: Wilkie Collins’s Armadale and the Late Victorian Culture Industry." Victorian Popular Fictions Journal 3, no. 2 (December 17, 2021): 134–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.46911/tnox1088.
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In locating Wilkie Collins’s novel Armadale (1866) in the context of its two subsequent dramatic versions, this article considers how the Victorian culture industry contended with an aggressively expanding market economy. It positions Collins’s work amid an ongoing Victorian debate that was especially prevalent in literary and dramatic periodicals concerning the bifurcated development of English drama and novels. Highlighting how Collins flexibly adapted his writing for the stage in the face of legal, commercial, and artistic pressures strengthens emerging links between the ostensibly discrete fields of novelistic and theatrical writing. The adaptation of novels for the stage is one of the primary areas where developing intellectual property law collided with cultural production, opening up, for writers such as Collins, new avenues to write, produce, and entertain. This article aims to expand on recent studies of the evolving nature of copyright law in the nineteenth century by considering the forms of cultural production that context facilitated. Considering the legal context of these adaptations in concert with, however, and not as ancillary to or separate from, their social and political valences highlights the modes of production that arose despite – or perhaps as a result of – the opaque nature of Victorian intellectual property laws. Wilkie Collins the successful dramatist, as opposed to Wilkie Collins the novelist writing for the stage, emerged in his own right partly due to the copyright contests that initially encouraged him to adapt his novels in the first place.
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Alqadumi, Emad Abd Elkareem. "Wordplay and World-Play: The Minima Visibilia in The Construction of Linguistic Sciences." JURNAL ARBITRER 6, no. 1 (May 25, 2019): 8. http://dx.doi.org/10.25077/ar.6.1.8-14.2019.
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This paper aims to illustrate, by using a single sentence as the focus of the study, the inseparability of wordplay and worldplay. It intends to illustrate how playing with a sentence like "Wordplay was a game Shakespeare played competently" can help us understand the very complex and fascinating phenomena of language, endless play. At first glance, the sentence may appear to be giving a piece of information on the English Elizabethan dramatist. However, this same sentence can also be used to illustrate the countless possible interpretations of any discourse. In addition, the sentence can be used to illustrate how linguistic sciences such as phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, stylistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, comparative linguistics and discourse analysis separate some properties as representative of the entire science while suppressing all the others as insignificant in order to control the playfulness of language.
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Khavronich, A. A. "THE STYLISTIC FUNCTIONING OF SCRIPTURAL ALLUSIONS IN AN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH PLAY “JOHAN BAPTYSTES PREACHYNGE” BY J. BALE." Bulletin of Udmurt University. Series History and Philology 30, no. 6 (December 11, 2020): 1001–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.35634/2412-9534-2020-30-6-1001-1007.
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The given article analyzes the peculiarities of the stylistic functioning of allusions to the Holy Scripture within one religious play belonging to the modern early English period, namely “Johan Baptystes Preachynge” produced by a dramatist J. Bale. The analysis is performed from the standpoint of linguopoetics. We consider stylistic features via the correlation of form and meaning, dissection of the conceptual component, juxtaposition with medieval plays representing adaptations of the same scriptural plot. Within the framework of this analysis we identify and assess elements performing the function of impact incorporated into the scriptural allusions and estimate their role in the selection of other lexical units, construction of extended metaphors, syntactic shaping of particular fragments of the play. We draw a conclusion that via the extension of scriptural metaphorical complexes the author brings about a meaningful focus shift to ensure a protestant reinterpretation of the included biblical theses. A substantial share of stylistically marked elements undergoes semantic expansion and develops adherent connotations since they relate to the pivotal elements of the allusions.
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Faedo, María José Álvarez. "Thomas D’Urfey’s Adaptation of Cervantes’s Quixote: The Comical History of Don Quixote." Anglia 141, no. 3 (September 1, 2023): 303–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ang-2023-0022.
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Abstract The Comical History of Don Quixote (1694) is one of the first dramatizations of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel in English, written in three parts. Starting with the episode of Cardenio and Luscinda in the first part, Thomas D’Urfey takes liberties with the characters and twists the plot, mixing chapters and embellishing it with songs by composer Henry Purcell and music by other contemporary artists. However, this dramatist presents us with a noble and quite sensible Don Quixote, as opposed to a histrionic Sancho, thus inverting the essence of the original characters in Cervantes’s novel.This article will analyze – from the perspective of studies on theatrical adaptation, such as Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006) and Jane Barnette’s ADAPTURGY: The Dramaturg’s Art and Theatrical Adaptation (2018) – Thomas D’Urfey’s The Comical History of Don Quixote (1694) as an adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Quixote. The author will explore the different episodes that D’Urfey chose to rewrite in the three parts of his play, analyzing the differences and similitudes between the original stories in the novel and their adapted version in the play, in order to prove that, on the one hand, Cervantes’s novel was already widely known by English audiences when D’Urfey’s plays were premiered, on the other, that he adapted the existing material to suit the preferences of English seventeenth-century audiences and, finally, that he created a parody in which Don Quixote is actually a nobler character than that of the preceding seventeenth-century adaptations.1
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Chaudhuri, Sukanta. "Shakespeare Comes to Bengal." Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance 27, no. 42 (November 23, 2023): 31–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.27.03.
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India has the longest engagement with Shakespeare of any non-Western country. In the eastern Indian region of Bengal, contact with Shakespeare began in the eighteenth century. His plays were read and acted in newly established English schools, and performed professionally in new English theatres. A paradigm shift came with the foundation of the Hindu College in Calcutta in 1817. Shakespeare featured largely in this new ‘English education’, taught first by Englishmen and, from the start of the twentieth century, by a distinguished line of Indian scholars. Simultaneously, the Shakespearean model melded with traditional Bengali popular drama to create a new professional urban Bengali theatre. The close interaction between page and stage also evinced a certain tension. The highly indigenized theatre assimilated Shakespeare in a varied synthesis, while academic interest focused increasingly on Shakespeare’s own text.
Beyond the theatre and the classroom, Shakespeare reached out to a wider public, largely as a read rather than performed text. He was widely read in translation, most often in prose versions and loose adaptations. His readership extended to women, and to people outside the city who could not visit the theatre. Thus Shakespeare became part of the shared heritage of the entire educated middle class. Bengali literature since the late nineteenth century testifies strongly to this trend, often inducing a comparison with the Sanskrit dramatist Kalidasa. Most importantly, Shakespeare became part of the common currency of cultural and intellectual exchange.
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Li, Qichen. "Unraveling the Complexity of Cleopatra in Shakespeares Antony and Cleopatra." Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media 43, no. 1 (March 14, 2024): 233–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.54254/2753-7048/43/20240876.
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William Shakespeare, widely regarded as the paramount dramatist and poet of the English Renaissance, crafted the renowned tragedy Antony and Cleopatra towards the end of his illustrious career. In this play, Shakespeare revitalized a Roman classic, breathing new life into its narrative, particularly through his portrayal of Cleopatra as a character of remarkable complexity. She emerges as both a sensuous oriental queen and an astute politician, inviting diverse interpretations from critics and establishing herself as a controversial literary figure. This paper delves into the intricacies of Cleopatras character, employing textual analysis and comparative methods to unveil the challenges and complexity inherent in her portrayal. The study begins by examining various interpreted versions of Cleopatra, illustrating the nuanced perspectives that contribute to her controversial nature. Subsequently, an exploration of Shakespeares dramatic techniques elucidates how he effectively conveys the multifaceted dimensions of Cleopatras character. The paper then delves into historical and dramatic sources to provide a comprehensive understanding of the factors influencing the complexity of Cleopatra. Shakespeares success in crafting a captivating and intricate Cleopatra has fueled continuous research and interpretation across subsequent generations. The complexity of Cleopatras image not only reflects the cultural dynamics of ancient Rome and Shakespeares era but also underscores the challenges faced by women in positions of power and love. Her characterization is a result of the intricate interplay between culture, gender, and power dynamics. This study aims to deepen our comprehension of Cleopatras portrayal in Antony and Cleopatra, offering examples and insights for future research endeavors centered around similar themes.
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Brandt, George W. "Banditry Unleash'd; or, How The Robbers Reached the Stage." New Theatre Quarterly 22, no. 1 (February 2006): 19–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x06000273.
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Friedrich Schiller – poet, historian, and philosopher as well as dramatist – is acknowledged to be a towering figure in German-language theatre, yet has had only a fitful impact on the stages of the English-speaking world, where such of his works as Don Carlos, Intrigue and Love (Luisa Miller in the operatic version) and William Tell are better known through the filters of Verdi and Rossini than in their original form. But there were signs in 2005 – the bicentenary of Schiller's death at the tragically early age of forty-five – that the English theatre was taking more notice of this major playwright, with Phyllida Lloyd's production of Mary Stuart and Michael Grandage's of Don Carlos both well received. In the article which follows, George W. Brandt traces Schiller's troubled breakthrough into professional theatre as a young man with his first play, The Robbers – which, while significantly different from his later work, does anticipate his lifelong preoccupation with the theme of freedom. George W. Brandt, Senior Research Fellow and Professor Emeritus in the Drama Department of the University of Bristol, has previously contributed to NTQ with articles on Bristol's Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory Company (NTQ 72), and Iffland's 1796 guest performance in the Weimar of Goethe and Schiller (NTQ 77).
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Sharma, Sumit. "PLAGIARISM." UP STATE JOURNAL OF OTOLARYNGOLOGY AND HEAD AND NECK SURGERY VOLUME 7, VOLUME 7 NUMBER 2 NOV 2018 (November 1, 2019): 21–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.36611/upjohns/19.4.
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The term known as “Plagiarism” was first coined in English around the year 1601 by the dramatist Ben Jonson, in order to characterize someone committing theft in literary. The term plagiarize is taken from the Latin word plagiary to kidnap. So a plagiarist is the one committing plagiarism. Plagiarism is a serious form of scientific misconduct that results from “the failure to attribute words, ideas, or findings to their true authors” Specifically, the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) defines plagiarism as “the use of others’ published and unpublished ideas or words without attribution or permission, and presenting them as new and original rather than derived from an existing source” The AIM of the present review is to provide a thorough account of plagiarism to builds awareness about all dimensions of plagiarism and the measures that a Scientific Researcher can adopt to avoid plagiarism
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Shrimpton, Neville. "Thomas Decker and the death of Boss Coker." Africa 57, no. 4 (October 1987): 531–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1159898.
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Opening ParagraphThomas Alexander Leighton Decker, o.b.e., teacher, journalist, broadcaster, poet, dramatist, linguist and senior civil servant—to name only some of the major occupations or preoccupations of his busy life—was the man who, more than any other, crusaded for the acceptance of Krio as a language in its own right. At a time when others dismissed Sierra Leone's main lingua franca as a debased or corrupt form of English and failed to recognise its distinct identity and full potential, Thomas Decker never once faltered in his conviction that it was as good a language as any other. He spent much of his life trying to convince others of the truth of this, and the fact that Krio has at last begun to gain the acceptance he sought for it is in no small measure due to him and his efforts on its behalf.
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Wu, Yue. "Samuel Johnson’s Literary Criticism in the Light of Preface to Shakespeare." International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation 5, no. 11 (November 26, 2022): 178–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.32996/ijllt.2022.5.11.19.
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Preface to Shakespeare has long been considered a classic document of English literary criticism. In it, Johnson sets forth his editorial principles and provides an appreciative analysis of the merits and defects of the work of the great Elizabethan dramatist—Shakespeare. The present paper mainly discusses Johnson’s literary theories proposed in Preface to Shakespeare which can be concluded as follows: First, Johnson’s famous theory of “general nature,” in which he emphasizes the importance of the universality of literary works. Second, the importance of morality and didacticism in literature. Third, Johnson’s opposition to confirming “three unities” dogmatically, especially the unity of time and the unity of place. Except for the discussion of Johnson’s theories, the present paper also summarizes the features and the limitations of Johnson’s criticism. Through the analysis of Johnson’s views on literature in Preface to Shakespeare, the present paper provides a general overview of Samuel Johnson’s literary criticism.
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MacKenzie, Clayton. "Of death and dukes: "King Henry VI Part 2" and the "danse macabre"." Journal of English Studies 13 (December 15, 2015): 71. http://dx.doi.org/10.18172/jes.2788.
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William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk, was captured and murdered by English sailors on 2 May 1450. The event is dramatically re-enacted in Shakespeare’s early history play King Henry VI Part 2. Shakespeare’s version differs markedly from known sources. In particular, the dramatist frames the death of Suffolk as a danse macabre experience in which the victim is taunted, diminished and ultimately dragged off to the grave. The Protestant Reformation had liberated a swathe of Roman Catholic iconographies, the danse macabre amongst them, breaking them free from their traditional semantic moorings and allowing them to find novel significances on the Elizabethan stage. King Henry VI Part 2 represents a preliminary engagement with the danse macabre, a search for new possibilities and new meanings. The danse macabre form is used more coherently and cohesively in later Shakespeare plays but King Henry VI Part 2 appears to be an early, deliberate attempt to explore its potential.
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Rutter, Carol Chillington. "Harrison, Herakles, and Wailing Women: ‘Labourers’ at Delphi." New Theatre Quarterly 13, no. 50 (May 1997): 133–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00008794.
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As well as being a widely published poet, Tony Harrison is well known as a dramatist for his reworkings of classical materials, from ancient Greek to medieval. When he was invited to contribute a play for the eighth International Meeting on Ancient Greek Drama, on the theme of ‘Crossing Millennia’, to be held at the European Cultural Centre of Delphi in August 1995, he chose to present a version of The Labourers of Herakles set on a building site – a building site the Greek sponsors specially ‘constructed’ for the event. In describing the single performance of the play, Carol Chillington Rutter, who teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, vividly evokes the theatrical forcefulness of the occasion: but she questions what she considers the ambivalence of Harrison's theatre work in its presentation and treatment of women – of which the decision to visualize the chorus of women in Labourers as cement mixers was most strikingly emblematic.
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Obed Doku, Dr Samuel. "Dignity Overpowers Conspiracy of Race Politics and Mercantilism in Thomas Southerne’s Oronooko." SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 4, no. 11 (February 28, 2016): 15. http://dx.doi.org/10.24113/ijellh.v4i11.1764.
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John Dryden describes Thomas Southerne as “pure” in reference to the purity of his language, and Alexander Pope delineates Southerne in his “Epistle to Augustus” as an “elderly dramatist skilled in expressing ‘the passions’” and cites him along with Johnson, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Wycherley, and Rowe as great English playwrights” (qtd. in Kaufman 10). However, not many critics are that generous to Southerne, the only playwright courageous enough to bring a black face on to the English theater in 1695, except Shakespeare who did it with Othello in 1603. The best position critics rank Southerne, author of ten plays, is as the sixth best playwright in English Restoration Theatre. Probably, because of the parasite formula that was in vogue in the 17th century when Southerne wrote Oronooko and which he profoundly capitalized on to write his most famous play, he is not particularly regarded as one of the ingenious playwrights of his era. At best, many critics regard Southerne’s talent as falling short of the mercurial abilities of Dryden, Etheridge, Wycherley, Congreve, and Otway. Some critics, however, are of the view that although Southerne was not fashionably original, his creativity in his ability to refashion and reconfigure the original works he preyed on to make them refreshing and entertaining, should render him as one of the best during the apogee moments of the Restoration era. In this piece, I argue that the antimony of racial politics and the salience of mercantilism in Southerne’s Oronooko dignify women and minorities, even as it simultaneously agitated and mollified the nerves of dealers and supporters of the slave trade.
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Oommen, Susan. "Inventing Narratives, Arousing Audiences: the Plays of Mahesh Dattani." New Theatre Quarterly 17, no. 4 (November 2001): 347–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00014986.
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In this article Susan Oommen looks at the plays of the popular Indian dramatist Mahesh Dattani as conversations between the writer and his audience on models of reality, and interprets their performance as moments in subjectivization. In initiating an audience into redefining identity, she argues that Dattani provides the parameters within which problematizations may be reviewed and better understood. He also seeks to queer the debate on Indian middle-class morality, thereby challenging its privileged status and underscoring the interconnection between repression and invisibility. The question for the audience is whether Dattani's plays can cue them into experiences of resistance and encourage them to reinvent narratives that may then function as personal histories. One of the plays on which this article focuses, Dance Like a Man, was seen during this year's Edinburgh Festival as part of the Celebration of Indian Contemporary Performing Arts. Susan Oommen works in the English Department in Stella Maris College, India, where she has been on the faculty since 1975. She spent the past academic year at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University.
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Eze, Norbert Oyibo, and Oyindamola Samuel Adesunloye. "Paradoxes of a Conventional Society: A Study of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and Benard Shaw’s Heartbreak House." Sprin Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences 3, no. 1 (January 15, 2024): 28–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.55559/sjahss.v3i1.192.
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Drama is a cognitive process and means of concretely translating abstract ideas into reality. It provides a vent for dramatists to vividly capture the rhythms of life in their societies. From the eons of time, the modus operandi of drama has placed it on a pedestal of a gadfly that prods, points and comments on the realities of its time. It is, therefore, pertinent to say that the mind of the dramatist is fertilized by the various social, economic cum political realities that are operational within the domain of his/her existence. This study focuses on two English plays; namely Ben Jonson’s Elizabethan play, The Alchemist, and George Benard Shaw’s modern drama- Heartbreak House. The selection of these models is anchored on the staggering power of their authors to detect the symptoms of social diseases that are present in their societies at their moments of writing and which by their being exacerbated in our own time, appear transhistorical in nature. The objectives of this study are to highlight the contradictory qualities and properties (paradoxes) of a modern society; one that seeks growth in all ramifications (education, politics, science, among others) and yet finds solace in mundaneness as exemplified by the two plays. The second objective is to comparatively look at the realities in the world of the two plays and what is obtainable now in our own age. Therefore, the interpretation of the past and the new meanings of the present will be juxtaposed and evaluated. Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory will provide frame of reference for the study while interpretive approach shall be content analysis.