John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, 1728-2004

Literary Criticism / By /
John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, 1728-2004

Author: Uwe Böker

Publisher: Rodopi

ISBN: 9789042021136

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 347

View: 743

When Richard Steele remarked that the greatest Evils in human Society are such as no Law can come at, he was not able to forsee the spectacular success of John Gay's satire of society, the administration of law and crime, politics, the Italian opera and other topics. Gay's The Beggar's Opera, with its mixture of witty dialogue and popular songs, was imitated by 18th century writers, criticized by those on the seats of power, but remained a favourite of the English theatre public ever since. With N. Playfair's 1920 revival and B. Brecht's and K. Weill's 1928 Dreigroschenoper, Gay's play has been a starting-point for dramatists such as V. Havel (Zebrácká opera, 1975), W. Soyinka (Opera Wonyosi, 1977), Ch. Buarque (Ópera do Malandro, 1978), D. Fo (L'opera dello sghignazzo, 1981), A. Ayckbourn (A Chorus of Disapproval, 1984), as well as others such as Latouche, Hacks, Fassbinder, Dear, Wasserman, and Lepage.Apart from contributions by international scholars analysing the above-named plays, the editors' introduction covers other dramatists that have payed hommage to Gay. This interdisciplinary collection of essays is of particular interest for scholars working in the field of drama/theatre studies, the eighteenth century, contemporary drama, postcolonial studies, and politics and the stage.

A Narratology of Drama

Literary Criticism / By /
A Narratology of Drama

Author: Christine Schwanecke

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

ISBN: 9783110724110

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 433

View: 114

This volume argues against Gérard Genette’s theory that there is an “insurmountable opposition” between drama and narrative and shows that the two forms of storytelling have been productively intertwined throughout literary history. Building on the idea that plays often incorporate elements from other genres, especially narrative ones, the present study theorises drama as a fundamentally narrative genre. Guided by the question of how drama tells stories, the first part of the study delineates the general characteristics of dramatic narration and zooms in on the use of narrative forms in drama. The second part proposes a history of dramatic storytelling from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century that transcends conventional genre boundaries. Close readings of exemplary British plays provide an overview of the dominant narrative modes in each period and point to their impact in the broader cultural and historical context of the plays. Finally, the volume argues that throughout history, highly narrative plays have had a performative power that reached well beyond the stage: dramatic storytelling not only reflects socio-political realities, but also largely shapes them.

The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical

Music / By /
The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical

Author: Robert Gordon

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 9780199988747

Category: Music

Page: 777

View: 309

The first comprehensive academic survey of British musical theatre from its origins, The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical offers both a historical account of musical theatre from 1728 and a range of in-depth critical analyses of key works and productions that illustrate its aesthetic values and sociocultural meanings.

Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century

Social Science / By /
Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century

Author: Tiffany Potter

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

ISBN: 9781442641815

Category: Social Science

Page: 345

View: 244

Top scholars in eighteenth-century studies examine the significance of the parallel devaluations of women's culture and popular culture by looking at theatres and actresses; novels, magazines, and cookbooks; and populist politics, dress, and portraiture.

The Marriage between Literature and Music

Social Science / By /
The Marriage between Literature and Music

Author: Nick Ceramella

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

ISBN: 9781527581432

Category: Social Science

Page: 425

View: 927

Music and literature have often been interconnected through the centuries. This is an intellectual and spiritual marriage between two artistic worlds, which are both part of a creative system that lends voice to one another. As this book argues, while music is one single form of expression, literature can be expressed in the form of either poetry or prose. However, they find their apotheosis, their most natural relationship, when poetry is set to music, especially when it is lyrical and has similar phrasing and rhythms to music. The book, thus, shows that music offers an additional perspective to literature, while the latter gives words to the feelings that the former arouses. As such, though both can stand alone, if put together, they form a complementary entity that everybody can enjoy.

England Re-Oriented

History / By /
England Re-Oriented

Author: Humberto Garcia

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

ISBN: 9781108851572

Category: History

Page:

View: 522

What does the love between British imperialists and their Asian partners reveal about orientalism's social origins? To answer this question, Humberto Garcia focuses on westward-bound Central and South Asian travel writers who have long been forgotten or dismissed by scholars. This bias has obscured how Joseph Emin, Sake Dean Mahomet, Sheikh I'tesamuddin, Abu Taleb Khan, Abul Hasan Khan, Yusuf Khan Kambalposh, and Lutfullah Khan found in their conviviality with Englishwomen and men a strategy for inhabiting a critical agency that appropriated various media to make Europe commensurate with Asia. Drama, dance, masquerades, visual art, museum exhibits, music, postal letters, and newsprint inspired these genteel men to recalibrate Persianate ways of behaving and knowing. Their cosmopolitanisms offer a unique window on an enchanted third space between empires in which Europe was peripheral to Islamic Indo-Eurasia. Their queer intimacies encrypt a mediated history of orientalist mimic men under the spell of a powerful Persian manhood.

Rushing Into Floods

English drama / By /
Rushing Into Floods

Author: Gunda Windmüller

Publisher: V&R unipress GmbH

ISBN: 9783899719680

Category: English drama

Page: 344

View: 155

The dramatic representation of maritime spaces, characters and plots in Restoration and early eighteenth-century English theatres served as a crucial discursive negotiation of a burgeoning empire. This study focuses on staging the sea in a period of growing maritime, commercial and colonial activity, a time when the prominence of the sea and shipping was firmly established in the very fabric of English life. As theatres were re-established after the Restoration, playhouses soon became very visible spaces of cultural activity and important locales for staging cultural contact and conflict. Plays staging the sea can be read as central in representing the budding maritime empire to metropolitan audiences, as well as negotiating political power and knowledge about the other. The study explores well-known plays by authors such as Aphra Behn and William Wycherley alongside a host of more obscure plays by authors such as Edward Ravenscroft and Charles Gildon as cultural performances for negotiating cultural identity and difference in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The Threepenny Opera

Performing Arts / By /
The Threepenny Opera

Author: Bertolt Brecht

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

ISBN: 9781350205291

Category: Performing Arts

Page: 152

View: 229

One of Bertolt Brecht's best-loved and most performed plays, The Threepenny Opera was first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin (now the home of the Berliner Ensemble). Based on the eighteenth-century The Beggar's Opera by John Gay, the play is a satire on the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho. With Kurt Weill's music, which was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce the jazz idiom into the theatre, it became a popular hit throughout the western world. This new edition is published here in John Willett and Ralph Manhein's classic translation with commentary and notes by Anja Hartl.

Law, Crime and Deviance since 1700

History / By /
Law, Crime and Deviance since 1700

Author: David Nash

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

ISBN: 9781472585295

Category: History

Page: 344

View: 241

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2017 Law, Crime and Deviance since 1700 explores the potential for the 'micro-study' approach to the history of crime and legal history. A selection of in-depth narrative micro-studies are featured to illustrate specific issues associated with the theme of crime and the law in historical context. The methodology used unpacks the wider historiographical and contextual issues related to each thematic area and facilitates discussion of the wider implications for the history of crime and social relations. The case studies in the volume cover a range of incidents relating to crime, law and deviant behaviour since 1700, from policing vice in Victorian London to chain gang narratives from the southern United States. The book concludes by demonstrating how these narratives can be brought together to produce a more nuanced history of the area and suggests avenues for future research and study.

Václav Havel

Biography & Autobiography / By /
Václav Havel

Author: Kieran Williams

Publisher: Reaktion Books

ISBN: 9781780237114

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 224

View: 308

Václav Havel claimed to want a quiet life dedicated to writing, but he lived exactly the opposite: as the most famous dissident—via his poetry, plays, and essays—in Czechoslovakia under Communist rule. This biography is the first to pay close attention to Havel’s beginnings as a poet, placing his later, more famous works in the context of his poetical beginnings. In doing so, Kieran Williams sheds new light on Havel’s formative years and the stylistic and philosophical influences that would come to shape one of the most famous Czech writers—and political leaders—of the twentieth century. Williams connects the plays for which Havel is best known to his earlier poetry as well as to his development as a writer of profound insight on the arts, his country’s social and political turmoil, and the modern condition at large. He also contextualizes Havel’s oeuvre within his dramatic private life and his ambivalence about being the scion of a patriotic and cosmopolitan Prague family. Reading Havel’s works in Czech alongside his voluminous correspondence, Williams produces a full, rounded picture of a figure of extraordinary artistic and political courage beset with inner paradoxes.