Showing papers on "Comedy published in 1980"

Puritanism and Theatre:Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts

Abstract: Introductory note 1. Time and place 2. Puritanism, censorship and opposition to the theatre 3. Middleton as satirical journalist 4. Early satirical comedies 5. How anti-Puritan are Middleton's city comedies? 6. Money and morals in Middleton's city comedies 7. Middle years: tragi-comedy and moral comedy 8. City employments 9. Hard times and Hengist, King of Kent 10. Political satire: A Game at Chess 11. City tragedy 12. Drama and opposition, 1619-1640 13. From popular drama to leveller style: a postscript Appendices Index.

Early Modern Diplomatic Ceremonial: A Systems Approach

Abstract: Early modern diplomatic ceremonial? What a dull subject! This is a widespread reaction among people who have given the matter any thought. Few individuals today have any desire to study ceremonial: the procedures, traditions, rights, and hopes which governed the behavior of diplomats and rulers when they were performing official acts with one another. Indeed, some early modern diplomats themselves expressed the idea that ceremonies were useless, time-wasting affairs. A French diplomat in Denmark called ceremonial problems "bagatelles," while an Englishman in France referred to them as "vanities" and a Dutch diplomat in Vienna wrote about "these futilities."' The poet-diplomat Matthew Prior talked about "the old road of ceremony and nonsense." Pierre Villars was embarrassed in 1676 that while the rest of Europe was involved in a great war his "great affair" in Savoy was debating whether his wife would be given a straight-backed chair or a chair with arms.2 Although early modern diplomats devoted much time and energy to ceremonial matters, there is no question but that many of them thought such concerns were foolish. The attitudes of historians toward early modern diplomatic ceremonial can be described as ambivalent. Some scholars deride it as ''comedy" while others talk in terms of "ridiculous practices" and "trivial insults" or casually dismiss ceremonies as unimportant.3

The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen

Abstract: Throughout these 79 stories - love stories, stories of childhood, of English middle-class life in the 20s and 30s, of London during the Blitz - the author combines social comedy and reportage

Jacobean city comedy

Abstract: The first decade of the Jacobean age witnessed a sudden profusion of comedies satirizing city life; among these were comedies by Ben Jonson, John Marston and Thomas Middleton, as well as the bulk of the repertory of the newly-established children’s companies at Blackfriars and Paul’s. The playwrights self-consciously forged a new genre which attracted London audiences with its images of folly and vice in Court and City, and hack-writing dramatists were prompt to cash in on a new theatrical fashion. This study, first published in 1980, examines ways in which the Jacobean city comedy reflect on the self-consciousness of audiences and the concern of the dramatists with Jacobean society. This title will be of interest of students of Renaissance Drama, English Literature and Performance.

'Restoration Comedy' and Its Audiences, 1660-1776

Abstract: The nature of the audience in 'Restoration' theatres has been much disputed. Scholars hostile to risque comedy have tended to follow Macaulay in supposing that debauched courtiers feasted upon fictionalized accounts of their own misdeeds. Believers in a genteel 'comedy of manners' have propagated the myth of a courtly coterie audience. Recent scholarship has demolished both suppositions and left us new hypotheses in their place. John Harrington Smith points to a 'change' in comedy in the I68os and I69os which he attributes to the influence of 'the Ladies' in opposition to 'the Gallants' who had the ascendance in the I67os. John Loftis has traced the growth of bourgeois and mercantilist ideology in the drama from 1690 to I737 as a gradual response to changes in audience composition. Both of these studies are, broadly speaking, 'correct', and yet some knotty problems still await our attention. How uniform were the tastes or beliefs of the 'original' Restoration audience at any given time between I66O and I700 ? How significantly did audience outlook shift between 1675 and 1695, or, in other words, between the heyday of Wycherley and that of Congreve ? What happened in the critical years around I700 when the shift to 'sentimental' comedy allegedly took place? If the new bourgeois audience rejected all the 'Restoration stereotypes' after 1700, why did the work not only of Congreve but of his contemporaries and predecessors remain enormously popular for more than half a century? These are large and complicated subjects, and we cannot pretend to offer more than tentative answers. We hope, however, to call some common assumptions into doubt and to suggest that the relationship between 'Restoration comedy' and its changing audience is more complicated than critics have wanted to admit. For a long time people made assumptions about the 'Restoration audience' based on hostile readings of the bawdier comedies. Modern research has demolished those assumptions. But how did the heterogeneous audience we now know to have filled the theatres view the comedies served up for their delectation or instruction ? And contrariwise, our view of the audience has changed: what does our new sense of the audience imply about the plays ?

Comic Transformations in Shakespeare

Abstract: First published in 1980 In this study of Shakespeare's ten early comedies, from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night, the concept of a dynamic of comic form is developed; the Falstaff plays are seen as a watershed, and the emergence of new comic protagonists - the resourceful, anti-romantic romantic heroine and the Fool - as the summit of the achievement The plays are explored from three complementary perspectives - theoretical, developmental and interpretative which lead to a further understanding of the powerful relation between the plays' formal complexity and their naturalistic verisimilitude

Live at the Village Vanguard

Abstract: Since 1934, the Village Vanguard in New York's Greenwich Village has hosted the foremost in live jazz, folk music, and comedy. Its owner, Max Gordon, has now written a personal history of his club and the hundreds of entertainment legends who have played there. Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Woodie Guthrie, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Josh White, Pete Seeger--Max has stories about all of them. And what stories! As Nat Hentoff says in his introduction, "A good many so-called professional writers have not done nearly so well."

From fringe to flying circus: Celebrating a unique generation of comedy, 1960-1980

Abstract: Describes the development of stage, radio, television, and film humor in Great Britain and profiles the careers of British comedians

Ancient Greek literature

Abstract: K. J. Dover and three other classical scholars have collaborated in writing this new historical survey of Greek literature from B.C. 700 to 550 A.D. The book concentrates on the elements in Greek literature and attitudes to life which are unfamiliar to us, and to the elements which appear most powerfully to succeeding generations.Poetry, tragedy, comedy, history, science, and philosophy are all examined through the available literature.

The Comedy of Language: Studies in Modern Comic Literature

Abstract: "Polhemus sketches several distinctions between nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists and concludes that what most characterizes the nineteenth century, from the perspective of the twentieth, is the tendency in its comic fiction to criticize and to undermine the dogma and institutions of religion and to put faith instead of the existence of the comic perspective. "Comic Faith" is a virtuoso performance of impressive stature; I suspect the book will be influential for many years to come." John Halperin, "Modern Fiction Studies""

With ground teeth : a study of Flannery O'Connor's women

Abstract: ......................................... iv INTRODUCTION ................................... vii CHAPTER I BUSY BODY AND DEAD SOUL: O'CONNOR’S TWENTIETH-CENTURY MARTHA ........... 1 CHAPTER II MOTHERS AND SURROGATE MOTHERS ........... 57 CHAPTER III THE O ’CONNOR WOMEN IN LOVE AND MARRIAGE.............................. 100 CONCLUSION.......................................133 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................... 140 V I T A ............................................. 146

The Education of an Americanist

Abstract: The America of my infancy was, perhaps to a great degree than would now apply, the America of classic juvenile fiction the West of R. M. Ballantyne and Fenimore Cooper, the South of Uncle Remus and Uncle Tom's Cabin and, a little later, the Gothic of Edgar Allen Poe and the Mississippi Valley of Mark Twain a country that had about as close a relationship to one's direct experience as the Spanish Main or the African jungle or the Scotland of Bonnie Prince Charlie. The real America of Coolidge and Hoover offered little to attract and hold attention apart from gangsters and G-Men (about which I recall writing and acting in a school play Dull Days in Chicago). As appetites grew a little more discriminating the realism of Sinclair Lewis and the satire of John P. Marquand took over from the Hollywood America of thrills and comedy. Even so, America was, in every sense, a far-away country, full of portent and significance of course, but not exciting and relevant, still less attractive. The coming of Roosevelt and the New Deal should have changed all that, of course. Honesty obliges me to admit that for a third year undergraduate at Oxford, absorbed in Greats, the American re-birth was infinitely less real and challenging than the Nazi eruption in Europe. There is a memory of a dapper, bouncy little figure lecturing to avid audiences in the North School in 1934. But to me Felix Frankfurter, then the visiting George Eastman Professor, was just another American whose lectures on the New Deal and the Constitution held one up en route to Henry Price's expositions of the Theory of Knowledge. The Rooseveltian impact first became intelligible to

The Last Laugh: Comedy as a Political Touchstone in Britain from "The Entertainer" to "Comedians"

Abstract: Writing in Theatre Quarterly about recent political theatre in Britain, David Edgar states that "one common experiment has been the attempt to draw upon traditions culled from popular culture, most notably the music hall . ." 1The most recent British playwright to use the folk image of the music hall to examine social and political issues is Trevor Griffiths, whose play Comedians comes almost exactly twenty years after John Osborne's The Entertainer used the music hall metaphor to examine the social revolution that has been taking place in Britain since 1945. As an institution the music hall has been dead some thirty years,2 but, in that period, it has become of interest to socialists, sociologists, and some playwrights, as a symbol of the true working-class heritage the new British society is seeking. In attempting to create an egalitarian social ethos free from bourgeois associations, there are those in Britain who look back at the music hall as an example of a truly popular cultural form.

Egeon's Debt: Self‐Division and Self‐Redemption in The Comedy of Errors

Abstract: ventions of farce provided their own peculiar restraints, since farce is a kind of drama “that not even Shakespeare could extend beyond somewhat narrow limits.’’2 Repeatedly, the reader is warned not to waste time searching for latent meanings in the text.3 Rather, we are advised to be grateful for what we do have: a “superb farce,” a “pure comedy of event.” We may value it as an “assimilation and extension of Plautine comedy,”4 for its “symmetry and near flawlessness o f . . . much v to say about love, politics, or human nature. 9, 1 The generic con-

Aspects of Television

Abstract: Because this book has been more concerned to clarify the processes rather than the explicit content of a television education, many important aspects of television have inevitably remained uncharted. This chapter attempts to fill some of the gaps by outlining possible teaching approaches to a number of aspects of television which have so far not been discussed: 1. The interview 2. Television documentary 3. Television comedy 4. Popular programmes of some ‘educational’ interest 5. ‘Classic’ serials

The Beginning of Menander, ΑΔΕΛΦΟΙ B

Abstract: Eventually and inevitably the study of a Roman comedy leads to the question of its relationship to the Greek model and to the nature of the original play. In recent years Terence's Adelphoe has stimulated numerous publications on the Menandrian comedy and on the changes which were made by the Latin dramatist. Greatest attention has been paid to the ending of the Greek play. This article, however, will examine the first two ‘acts’ of the Terentian comedy and will offer a reconstruction of its primary model that differs from those that have been proposed in the major studies on this problem.

Pinter's Betrayal and the Comedy of Manners

Abstract: From the Restoration comedies of manners through drawing room comedy of the twentieth century, marriage is the joke whose punch line is adultery. In the dance d deux, a trois, even a quarre. marriage represents society's rules and property arrangements, to which even the most ardent lovers become bound and from which adultery is the symbolic release, the expression of free will. I say symbolic because, while mocking marriage, Restoration manners comedy gave no satisfying answers about the conduct of long-term adultery.

Chaplin and Brecht: The Gold Rush and the Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

Abstract: Several critics have called attention to Charlie Chaplin's influence on Brecht, pointing out that some of Brecht's plays are inspired in part by incidents or techniques which Chaplin uses in his films. The slapstick comedy and other stage business in In the Jungle of Cities, for example, is thought to owe much to Chaplin as well as to the Munich comedian Karl Valentin.1 The figure of Schweyk has Chaplinesque characteristics and there are also close similarities between the millionaire in Chaplin's film City Lights and Puntila2 as well as between Grusha's first encounter with the child in The Caucasian Chalk Circle and a similar pantomime in The Kid^ , to mention but a few examples. The close parallels between The Gold Rush and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny have, however, been neglected. Brecht saw Chaplin's Gold Rush in 1926, one year after it had been released, and commented on the film favorably in a short note entitled "Weniger Sicherheit."* Mahagonny was written in the years 1928/29 and the opera received its premiere in 1930. It is clear from a comparison of these two works that there is a marked resemblance in theme, plot and setting, showing that Gold Rush was an important source of inspiration for Brecht while he was writing Mahagonny. Before discussing Mahagonny and Gold Rush, it will be useful to consider why Brecht admired Chaplin and his films so deeply. From early on, Brecht was interested in the film, although he was critical of it on many occasions, especially while he was in Hollywood during the years of exile. At that time, his negative comments refer above all to the capitalist nature of the film's production and to its escapist tendencies, particularly the mandatory happy ending demanded by Hollywood, which Brecht had earlier parodied in his own play Happy End. On frequent occasions, in fact, Brecht calls the film a narcotic. Earlier, however, in "The Film, the Novel and Epic Theatre, "^ from the Threepenny Lawsuit, Brecht is more positive about the film, in particular in his assessment of its structural qualities and of the way in which its characters are portrayed. Although we must keep in mind that Brecht is referring mostly to the silent film here, his remarks nevertheless give us insights into the importance he assigned to the film as a new art form. Brecht notes that in the film the characters are seen from the outside and that the film demands external action and not introspective psychology. He conceives of the film as being a powerful weapon in fighting the introspective psychology of the bourgeois novel, and by implication of all introspective psychology in literature- and in the theatre in particular- which Brecht was also attacking in his theoretical writings and in his plays. Brecht also points to the non-aristotelian qualities of the film. He believes that the film does not depend totally on empathy and mimesis; rather it delights in a broad, epic structure. Despite some reservations, Brecht summarizes his remarks on the film by saying: "Here again the road leads over capitalism's dead body; but here again this road is a good one."6 In the light of this interest, it is not surprising that Brecht should have seen many films, including those of Chaplin. Apart from Gold Rush, Brecht also saw dry Lights^ and in his Arbeitsjournal he mentions that he saw Monsieur Verdoux in March, 1947.8 Additional comments show a familiarity with other films of Chaplin, although the actual names of the films are not specified. While Brecht was in Hollywood, he also had the chance to become friendly with Chaplin since they had friends in common, particularly Hanns Eisler, who wrote the music for several of Brecht's plays. Brecht's interest in Chaplin, in fact, spanned his whole life-time. In his theoretical writings, Brecht has left us several clues as to why he admired Chaplin. The program to the premiere of Drums in the Night, performed at the Munich Kammerspiele in September, 1922, contains a note in which Brecht compares Chaplin and Karl Valentine These early comments reveal much of what Brecht liked in the technique of Valentin and Chaplin. …