Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons^™

The Brilliance Of The Servant Without Qualities, Daniel Sack

Daniel Sack

Intended For The Stage?: Samson Agonistes In Performance, Timothy Burbery

Timothy J. Burbery

The year 2000 marked the centenary of an important but overlooked milestone in Milton studies, namely the first staging of Samson Agonistes, by William Poel, in 1900. While many scholars may be aware of isolated productions of the tragedy, the extent and variety of its stage history is perhaps less well-known. The work was successful as a dramatic reading throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet it had never been attempted on the boards until Poel’s landmark production. That event ushered in a range of performances throughout the twentieth century, and nearly every decade saw several dramatizations. At least fifteen …

Playing Devil's Advocate: The Attractive Shakespearean Villain, Jonathan Montgomery Green

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The characters of William Shakespeare have spawned countless words of critical interpretation inspired by the playwright's aptitude for fashioning intricate and conflicted figures. As a master character craftsman, Shakespeare is consistent in creating fascinatingly deep characters, and many of them have even gone so far as to generate entire literary archetypes. From the contemplative Prince Hamlet to the despicable yet charming John Falstaff, Shakespeare's characters remain eternal representatives of what any good character should be: interesting, provocative, and complicated.

However, among the playwright's most hypnotic figures are his villains, those characters whom audiences should by all counts detest but cannot …

Power And Relationships In The Plays Of Neil Labute: Directing And Performing In Some Girl(S), Mary Peyton Griffith

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores the major works of Neil LaBute's career as a playwright and screenwriter, including the criticism he has received on theatrical and literary levels. The themes most prevalent in the thesis are the use of power and manipulation in the relationships between LaBute's characters and the ongoing maturation of his characters that coincides with the maturation of his work. The second section of the thesis follows the production, directing, and acting in LaBute's play Some Girl(s).

The Evocation Of The Physical, Metaphysical, And Sonic Landscapes In Samuel Beckett's Short Dramatic Works, Theresa A. Incampo

Senior Theses and Projects

A historical analysis of the playwright’s theatrical spaces including the concept of temporality, which is central to the subsequent elements within the physical, metaphysical and sonic landscapes. The choice to focus on the philosophy of phenomenology centers on the notion that these short dramatic works present the theatrical landscape as the conscious character perceives it to be. The perceptual experience is explained by Maurice Merleau-Ponty as the relationship between the body and the world and the way as to which the self-limited interior space of the mind interacts with the limitless exterior space that surrounds it.

"Speak To Me In Vernacular, Doctor": Translating And Adapting Tirso De Molina's El Amor Médico For The Stage, Sarah A. Brew

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Considered one of the greatest playwrights of the Spanish Golden Age, Tirso de Molina (1580?-1648) lived something of a double life, alternating—much like the characters in his plays—between two separate and often conflicting lives. Though Tirso, whose real name was Gabriel Téllez, spent the greater portion of his life in the church as a Mercedarian friar, his dramatic output as a playwright was prodigious in scope. Fewer than 90 of his plays survive today, and only a handful have been translated into English. This M.F.A. thesis therefore presents the first-ever English-language translation and adaptation of one of Tirso’s plays, El …

Shakespeare Burlesque And The Performing Self, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

This paper argues that Victorian Shakespeare burlesques reveal an alternate literary history: a movement away from private, novelistic consciousness toward collaborative performance. Many materialist scholars fault post-Romantic critics for casting Shakespeare as a psychological realist and reading his plays as if they were novels. The burlesque treatment of Hamlet’s soliloquies, however, suggests a contrary trajectory, challenging the equation of Shakespearean character with psychological reflection. Rather than inaugurating a tradition of interiority, Hamlet’s soliloquies generate social speech in works like Gilbert’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, inviting audience participation. The burlesque imperative also inflects novels like Dickens’s Great Expectations, turning the …

American Art Theatre In The Digital Archive, Patrick Michael Finelli

Theatre and Dance Faculty Publications

Based on a critical examination, evaluation, and selection of primary and secondary sources related to American art theater that have moved from the private into the public digital realm, Finelli reflects and comments on key issues related to the digital archive and theater historiography. His objective was to analyze the notion of digital archives and consider how accessing materials in electronic form affects the practice of writing history. He hypothesizes that the process of digitizing library and archival materials has a significant affect upon archival elements through their transformation into the digital realm, bringing about change in both an ontological …

New Canadian Realisms: New Essays On Canadian Theatre Vol. 2, Kim Solga, Roberta Barker

Kim Solga

New Essays in Canadian Theatre Volume 2: New Canadian Realisms gathers writing by celebrated scholars and artists from both Canada and the US in order to explore what this much-debated genre might be doing for political performance in Canada today. Topics range from Hollywood’s influence on the look and feel of the contemporary Canadian “real,” to the power and the pitfalls of a “realism of redress” in intercultural Canadian theatre, to the apparently oxymoronic notion of “devised” realism, to the complexities of Indigenous realism(s). Together, this book’s authors suggest that Canada’s theatrical realisms are, like so much else among us, …

New Canadian Realisms: Eight Plays, Kim Solga, Roberta Barker

Kim Solga

New Canadian Realisms: Eight Plays collects works of contemporary theatre, each of which may be defined as “realist” through both a crucial link to the past and a zest for re-tooling old definitions. Grounded by Gwen Pharis Ringwood’s pioneering Still Stands the House, the anthology also features trey anthony’s ’da Kink in my hair, Tara Beagan’s Miss Julie: Sheh’mah, Madeleine Blais-Dahlem’s sTain, Hillar Liitoja’s The Last Supper, selections from the Impromptu Splendor series by National Theatre of the World, Theatre Replacement’s BioBoxes, and Zuppa Theatre’s Penny Dreadful, as well as a series of text-specific introductions and a resource page for …