Part 1. Rhetorical dimensions of drama: the classical context: The enthymeme and the invention of troping in Greek drama / August W. Staub. Theorizing the spectacle: a rhetorical analysis of tragic recognition / Tom Heeney. Exile and the kingdom: reason as nightmare in the Aeschylean vision / John Arthos -- Part 2. The rhetorical in renaissance and neoclassical drama: Epideictic pastoral: rhetorical tensions in the staging of Torquato Tasso's Aminta / Maria Galli Stampino. Shakespeare's rhetoric versus the ideology of Ian McKellen's Richard III / George L. Geckle. And now for application: Venice preserv'd and the rhetoric of textual application / Odai Johnson -- Part 3. War, politics, and the drama: Federalist and republican theatre in the 1790s / Steve Wilmer. Uncle Tom's Cabin and the rhetoric of gradualism / Charles Wilbanks. Dario Fo's angry farce / Stanley Vincent Longman -- Part 4. Contemporary culture: Stain upon the silence: Samuel Beckett's deconstructive inventions / Leigh Anne Howard. Still angry after all these years: performing the language of HIV and the marked body in The normal heart and The destiny of me / Peter Michael Pober.

George L. Parsenios explores the legal character of the Gospel of John in the light of classical literature, especially Greek drama. Johannine interpreters have explored with increasing interest both the legal quality and the dramatic quality of the Fourth Gospel, but often do not connect these two ways of reading John. Some interpreters even assume that the one approach excludes the other, and that John is either legal or dramatic, but not both. Legal rhetoric and tragic drama, however, were joined throughout antiquity in a complex pattern of mutual influence. To connect John to drama, therefore, is to connect John to legal rhetoric, and doing so helps to see even more clearly the pervasiveness of the legal motif in the Gospel of John. Tracing the legal character of seeking in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, for example, sheds new light on the legal character of seeking in the Fourth Gospel, especially in the enigmatic comment of Jesus at John 8:50. New insights are also offered regarding the evidentiary character of the signs of Jesus, based on comparison with Aristotle's comments about signs and rhetorical evidence in both the Poetics and Rhetoric, as well as by comparison with plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. To call the signs of Jesus evidence, however, does not remove them from the dialectical tension inherent in Johannine theology. If the signs are evidence, they are evidence in a world in which the basis of forming judgments has been problematized by the appearance of the Word in the flesh.

Proving fruitful in various applications throughout its two millennia of predominance, the rhetorical téchne appears to have entertained a particularly symbiotic interrelation with drama. With contributions from (among others) a Classicist, historical, linguistic, musicological, operatic, cultural and literary studies perspective, this publication offers interdisciplinary assessments of specific reciprocities between the system of rhetoric and dramatic works: tracing the longue durée of this nexus—highlighting its Ancient foundations, its various Early Modern formations, as well as certain configurations enduring to this day—enables describing shifting degrees of rhetoricity; approaching it from an interdisciplinary viewpoint facilitates focusing on the often sidelined rhetorical phenomena located beyond the textual plane, specifically memoria and actio; tackling this interchange from various viewpoints and with diverse emphases, a long-lasting and highly prolific cross-fertilization between drama and rhetoric is rendered visible. In tendering a balanced panorama of both detailed case studies and descriptive overviews, this volume also points toward terrain yet to be charted in the scholarship to come. The volume was prepared in co-operation with the ERC Advanced Grant Project Early Modern European Drama and the Cultural Net (DramaNet).

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy -- PART I: Women as Protagonists in Male-Authored Drama: Comedy and tragedy -- 1 Fathers, Daughters, Crossdressing, and Names: Women, Rhetoric, and Education in Commedia Erudita -- Coda: "Margherita Costa's Li buffoni (1641): The First (Extant) Female-Authored Scripted Comedy"--2 Fashioning a Genealogy: The Rhetoric of Friendship and Female Virtue in Italian Renaissance tragedy -- Coda: Valeria Miani's Celinda (1611) among Fin de Siècle Italian Tragedies -- PART II: Women as Authors/Women as Protagonists: Pastoral Tragicomedy -- 3 Women Writers and the Canon: Satyr Scenes and Female-Authored Pastoral Drama -- 4 Isabetta Coreglia's Dori (1634): Writing Pastoral Drama Against the Backdrop of the Male Canon and an Incipient Female-Authored Tradition -- 5 Isabetta Coreglia's Erindo il fido (1650) and Isabella Andreini's Mirtilla (1588): Using a Female-Authored Classic as Paradigm -- Appendix -- Bibliography -- Index

The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert "styles." Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W. B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production, and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Worthen's book deserves the attention of any literary critic or serious theatergoer interested in the relationship between modern drama and the spectator.

GREEK DRAMA and the Invention of Rhetoric “An impressively erudite, elegantly crafted argument for reversing what ‘everybody knows’ about the relation of two literary genres that played before mass audiences in the Athenian city state.” Victor Bers, Yale University “Sansone’s book is first-rate and should be read by any scholar interested in the origins of Greek rhetorical theory or, for that matter, interested in Greek tragedy. That Greek tragedy contains elements properly described as rhetorical is familiar, but Sansone goes far beyond this understanding by putting Greek tragedy at the heart of a counter-narrative of those origins.” Edward Schiappa, The University of Minnesota This book challenges the standard view that formal rhetoric arose in response to the political and social environment of ancient Athens. Instead, it is argued, it was the theater of Ancient Greece, first appearing around 500 BC that prompted the development of formalized rhetoric, which evolved soon thereafter. Indeed, ancient Athenian drama was inextricably bound to the city-state’s development as a political entity, as well as to the birth of rhetoric. Ancient Greek dramatists used mythical conflicts as an opportunity for staging debates over issues of contemporary relevance, civic responsibility, war, and the role of the gods. The author shows how the essential feature of dialogue in drama created a ‘counterpoint’—an interplay between the actor making the speech and the character reacting to it on stage. This innovation spurred the development of other more sophisticated forms of argumentation, which ultimately formed the core of formalized rhetoric.