Metatheater and Modernity: Baroque and Neobaroque is the first work to link the study of metatheater with the concepts of baroque and neobaroque. Arguing that the onset of European modernity in the early seventeenth century and both the modernist and the postmodernist periods of the twentieth century witnessed a flourishing of the phenomenon of theater that reflects on itself as theater, the author reexamines the concepts of metatheater, baroque, and neobaroque through a pairing and close analysis of seventeenth and twentieth century plays. The comparisons include Jean Rotrou's The True Saint Genesius with Jean-Paul Sartre's Kean and Jean Genet's The Blacks; Pierre Corneille's L'Illusion comique with Tony Kushner's The Illusion; Gian Lorenzo Bernini's The Impresario with Luigi Pirandello's theater-in-theater trilogy; Shakespeare's Hamlet with Pirandello's Henry IV and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; Moli re's Impromptu de Versailles with "impromptus" by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, and Eug ne Ionesco. Metatheater and Modernity also examines the role of technology in the creating and breaking of illusions in both centuries. In contrast to previous work on metatheater, it emphasizes the metatheatrical role of comedy. Metatheater, the author concludes, is both performance and performative: it accomplishes a perceptual transformation in its audience both by defending theater and exposing the illusory quality of the world outside.

Tennessee Williams' characters set the stage for their own dramas. Blanche DuBois (A Streetcar Named Desire), arrived at her sister's apartment with an entire trunk of costumes and props. Amanda Wingfield (The Glass Menagerie) directed her son on how to eat and tries to make her daughter act like a Southern Belle. This book argues for the persistence of one metatheatrical strategy running throughout Williams' entire oeuvre: each play stages the process through which it came into being--and this process consists of a variation on repetition combined with transformation. Each chapter takes a detailed reading of one play and its variation on repetition and transformation. Specific topics include reproduction in Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), mediation in Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981), and how the playwright frequently recycled previous works of art, including his own.

Redrawing the conventional map of Victorian Poetics

The papers of the present volume investigate the potential of the metaphor of life as theater for literary, philosophical, juridical and epistemological discourses from the Middle Ages through modernity, and focusing on traditions as manifold as French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian and Latin-American.

What is special, distinct, modern about modernity? In How the World Became a Stage, William Egginton argues that the experience of modernity is fundamentally spatial rather than subjective and proposes replacing the vocabulary of subjectivity with the concepts of presence and theatricality. Following a Heideggerian injunctive to search for the roots of epochal change not in philosophies so much as in basic skills and practices, he describes the spatiality of modernity on the basis of a close historical analysis of the practices of spectacle from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, paying particular attention to stage practices in France and Spain. He recounts how the space in which the world is disclosed changed from the full, magically charged space of presence to the empty, fungible, and theatrical space of the stage.

Why do able-bodied characters fake disability in 40 early modern English plays? This book uncovers a previously unexamined theatrical tradition and explores the way counterfeit disability captivated the Renaissance stage. Through detailed case studies of both lesser-known and canonical plays (by Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston, and others), Lindsey Row-Heyveld demonstrates why counterfeit disability proved so useful to early modern playwrights. Changing approaches to almsgiving in the English Reformation led to increasing concerns about feigned disability. The theater capitalized on those concerns, using the counterfeit-disability tradition to explore issues of charity, epistemology, and spectatorship. By illuminating this neglected tradition, this book fills an important gap in both disability history and literary studies, and explores how fears of counterfeit disability created a feedback loop of performance and suspicion. The result is the still-pervasive insistence that even genuinely disabled people must perform in order to, paradoxically, prove the authenticity of their impairments.

Most philosophy has rejected the theater, denouncing it as a place of illusion or moral decay; the theater in turn has rejected philosophy, insisting that drama deals in actions, not ideas. Challenging both views, The Drama of Ideas shows that theater and philosophy have been crucially intertwined from the start. Plato is the presiding genius of this alternative history. The Drama of Ideas presents Plato not only as a theorist of drama, but also as a dramatist himself, one who developed a dialogue-based dramaturgy that differs markedly from the standard, Aristotelian view of theater. Puchner discovers scores of dramatic adaptations of Platonic dialogues, the most immediate proof of Plato's hitherto unrecognized influence on theater history. Drawing on these adaptations, Puchner shows that Plato was central to modern drama as well, with figures such as Wilde, Shaw, Pirandello, Brecht, and Stoppard using Plato to create a new drama of ideas. Puchner then considers complementary developments in philosophy, offering a theatrical history of philosophy that includes Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Burke, Sartre, Camus, and Deleuze. These philosophers proceed with constant reference to theater, using theatrical terms, concepts, and even dramatic techniques in their writings. The Drama of Ideas mobilizes this double history of philosophical theater and theatrical philosophy to subject current habits of thought to critical scrutiny. In dialogue with contemporary thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum, Iris Murdoch, and Alain Badiou, Puchner formulates the contours of a "dramatic Platonism." This new Platonism does not seek to return to an idealist theory of forms, but it does point beyond the reigning philosophies of the body, of materialism and of cultural relativism.

Unruly Audiences and the Theater of Control in Early Modern London explores the effects of audience riots on the dramaturgy of early modern playwrights, arguing that playwrights from Marlowe to Brome often used their plays to control the physical reactions of their audience. This study analyses how, out of anxiety that unruly audiences would destroy the nascent industry of professional drama in England, playwrights sought to limit the effect that their plays could have on the audience. They tried to construct playgoing through their drama in the hopes of creating a less-reactive, more pensive, and controlled playgoer. The result was the radical experimentation in dramaturgy that, in part, defines Renaissance drama. Written for scholars of Early Modern and Renaissance Drama and Theatre, Theatre History, and Early Modern and Renaissance History, this book calls for a new focus on the local economic concerns of the theatre companies as a way to understand the motivation behind the drama of early modern London.

Shakespeare Studies is an annual peer-reviewed volume featuring the work of performance scholars, literary critics and cultural historians. The journal focuses primarily on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but embraces theoretical and historical studies of socio-political, intellectual and artistic contexts that extend well beyond the early modern English theatrical milieu. In addition to articles, Shakespeare Studies offers opportunities for extended intellectual exchange through its thematically-focused forums, and includes substantial reviews. An international Editorial Board maintains the quality of each volume so that Shakespeare Studies may serve as a reliable resource for all students of Shakespeare and the early modern period – for research scholars and also for teachers, actors and directors. Volume 51 includes a Forum on the work of Michael D Bristol, with contributions from J. F. Bernard, Gail Kern Paster, James Siemon, Jill Ingram, Unhae Park Langis and Julia Reinhard Lupton, Anna Lewton-Brain and Brooke Harvey, Nicholas Utzig, and Paul Yachnin. Volume 51 includes articles from the Next Generation Plenary of the Shakespeare Association of America and essays by Laurence Senelick ("A Gift to Anti-Semites: Shylock on the Pre-Revolutionary Russian Stage"), Christopher D'Addario ("Metatheater and the Urban Everyday in Ben Jonson's Epicoene and The Alchemist"), and Denise A. Walen ("Elbowing Katherine of Valois"). Book reviews consider eleven important publications on liberty of speech and female voice; theaters of catastrophe; adaptations of Macbeth; staging touch in Shakespeare's England; the criticism of Hugh Grady; Shakespeare and World War II film; Shakespeare and digital pedagogy; Shakespeare and forgetting; Shakespeare and disability studies, and Shakespeare's private life.