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The Illustrated Broadcast? Defining Television Drama, 1946–50

Jason Jacobs

in The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama

Television drama in the late 1940s seemed to have a continuing uncertainty about the themes, form, and style it was taking. This brings to fore the ways in which the television service during this ... More

Television drama in the late 1940s seemed to have a continuing uncertainty about the themes, form, and style it was taking. This brings to fore the ways in which the television service during this period was reddening itself with a prominent aid from television drama. Even though the post-war period saw an increase in the amount of drama on screen, repeat telecast of the plays was still considerable more reliable. The fact that mystery-murder and ‘horror’ productions were preferred during the post-war period along with drama with wartime themes, is exemplified by the late 1940s drama schedules of producing plays of the Gothic, supernatural, or thriller genres, generically known by television management as ‘Horror Plays’. The reopening of post-war service saw technical and stylistic changes such as those regarding camera movements, along with changes in programme content and scheduling.Less

Don Quixote and Shakespeare’s Collaborative Turn to Romance *

Valerie Wayne

in The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes, and the Lost Play

Based upon evidence that English dramatists were aware of the popularity of Don Quixote as early as 1607 and had some access to it before Shelton’s translation was published in 1612, this chapter ... More

Based upon evidence that English dramatists were aware of the popularity of Don Quixote as early as 1607 and had some access to it before Shelton’s translation was published in 1612, this chapter proposes that the turn to romance by Shakespeare and his collaborators between 1608 and 1613 was influenced by Cervantes’s work. An English embassy travelled to Spain to sign peace articles in 1605 only four months after Quixote was published there, and early allusions to Quixote appear in plays by Wilkins, Middleton, and Jonson. Cervantes’s novel may have provided some of the metatextual strategies that are evident in Shakespeare’s late plays beginning with Pericles, for each one puts a figure associated with its source on stage or otherwise grants heightened attention to texts in ways analogous to Quixote’s citation of chivalric romances and the creation of its own metatext.Less

Robert Burns on the Twentieth-Century Stage

Rhona Brown

in Performing Robert Burns: Enactments and Representations of the 'National Bard'

This chapter analyses three twentieth-century plays with Robert Burns as a protagonist – H. Fletcher Lee’s Robert Burns: A Play in Three Acts (1926), Robert Kemp’s The Other Dear Charmer (1951) and ... More

This chapter analyses three twentieth-century plays with Robert Burns as a protagonist – H. Fletcher Lee’s Robert Burns: A Play in Three Acts (1926), Robert Kemp’s The Other Dear Charmer (1951) and Tom Wright’s There was a Man (1965) – and focuses on their representation not only of Burns’s biography, but of his literary corpus. In these performances, Burns’s life is inseparable from his poems and songs: his literary output is portrayed as a direct reflection of the circumstances and events of his life and, in particular, his relationships with women. This chapter argues that the plays’ conflation of the poet’s life and works functions as a metafictional dramatic device which unites the performers and the audience through shared knowledge, and offers meaningful insights into the evolution of Burns’s reception and reputation as an ‘authentic’ Scots bard throughout the twentieth centuryLess

How a Mama on the Couch Evolves into a Black Man with Watermelon: George C. Wolfe, Suzan-Lori Parks, and the Theatre of “Colored Contradictions”

Jennifer Larson

in Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights

This chapter explores the plays of George C. Wolfe, whose work reclaims and reopens the literary and cultural past, and Suzan-Lori Parks, whose work furthers this project. Both playwrights take as ... More

This chapter explores the plays of George C. Wolfe, whose work reclaims and reopens the literary and cultural past, and Suzan-Lori Parks, whose work furthers this project. Both playwrights take as the subjects of their satire the well-worn narratives and even revered texts of the African American canon, and present common stereotypes in order to highlight the racialized past. In so doing, these plays highlight the contradictions of black identity, and ask their audiences to embrace these contradictionsLess

“Slaves? With Lines?”: Trickster Aesthetic and Satirical Strategies in Two Plays by Lynn Nottage

Aimee Zygmonski

in Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights

This chapter argues that Lynn Nottage employs the trickster figure in her plays to destabilize African American stereotypes. In her plays Fabulation and By the Way, Meet Very Stark, Nottage also ... More

This chapter argues that Lynn Nottage employs the trickster figure in her plays to destabilize African American stereotypes. In her plays Fabulation and By the Way, Meet Very Stark, Nottage also provides metacommentary in order to directly provoke the audience. Ultimately, these plays point to a future that rejects these stereotypes.Less

Serpent‐Charmers, and Performers of Legerdemain Tricks, &c.

Edward William Lane and Jason Thompson

in An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians

This chapter opens with derwishes who made a living by charming snakes out of houses, and then moves on to the “Howah,” who performed tricks in the street for voluntary contributions—for example, ... More

This chapter opens with derwishes who made a living by charming snakes out of houses, and then moves on to the “Howah,” who performed tricks in the street for voluntary contributions—for example, sleight-of-hand and magic tricks using snakes, knives, and fire breathing. It also looks at fortune telling, done by women who were mostly gipsies, ropedancers and tightrope walkers, who were also gipsies. Finally, this chapter describes the “Kureydatee,” who performed with monkeys, dogs, goats; the ‘farce-players,’ were male actors who performed (often vulgar) comical plays; and puppet-shows done in Turkish.Less

A Scientist in Love: Marie Stopes and A Journal from Japan

Tomoe Kumojima

in Victorian Women's Travel Writing on Meiji Japan: Hospitable Friendship

Chapter 4 investigates Marie Stopes’s interracial, cross-gender relationships with Fujii Kenjirō and Sakurai Jōji through her three published Japanese-related works—A Journal from Japan (1910), ... More

Chapter 4 investigates Marie Stopes’s interracial, cross-gender relationships with Fujii Kenjirō and Sakurai Jōji through her three published Japanese-related works—A Journal from Japan (1910), Love-Letters of a Japanese (1911), and Plays of Old Japan: The ‘Nō’ (1913)—along with her unpublished transcripts and correspondence. It unveils an unconventional, stormy romance, a warm friendship, and literary collaboration. It considers the gender and racial complexities Stopes textually negotiated for the sake of her love and friendship against the rigid imperial ideology and the Victorian notion of femininity, which produced a distinct representation of humanized Japan as Britain’s masculine ally with feminine sensibility. It also discusses particular challenges Western women in a cross-racial relationship faced in Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan. The close examination of this underexplored phase of Stopes’s career reveals the incipience of her sexology and complicates the posthumous, more controversial aspect of her as eugenicist.Less

Inside Hollywood Film

Iván Villarmea Álvarez

in Documenting Cityscapes: Urban Change in Contemporary Non-Fiction Film

This chapter analyses the metafilmic strategies of two titles focused on the way Hollywood has historically represented the city of Los Angeles. The first, Pat O'Neill's The Decay of Fiction (2002), ... More

This chapter analyses the metafilmic strategies of two titles focused on the way Hollywood has historically represented the city of Los Angeles. The first, Pat O'Neill's The Decay of Fiction (2002), is an avant-garde work that documents the last days of a symbolic place, the Ambassador Hotel, by means of a series of fictional reenactments inspired by film noir. The second, Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), is a metafilm essay composed of more than two hundred excerpts from other films that reflects on mainstream cinema's politics of representation. Both works explore the commonplaces of what Rafael Pizarro has termed “the Hollywood Urban Imaginarium”, challenging its visual monopoly from the margins of film industry. The outcome of these two experiments is an ambiguous celebration of the cinematic city that cleverly warns against its systematic tendency towards fakeness and oblivion.Less

Dramatizing the African American Experience of Travel in the Jim Crow South: The Negro Motorist Green Book in the African American Literary Imagination

Michael Ra-Shon Hall

in Freedom Beyond Confinement: Travel and Imagination in African-American Cultural History and Letters

The fifth chapter discusses a play by Calvin A. Ramsey inspired by archival research on The Green Book and Jim Crow-era travel: The Green Book: A Play (2006). Ramsey’s two-act play portrays this ... More

The fifth chapter discusses a play by Calvin A. Ramsey inspired by archival research on The Green Book and Jim Crow-era travel: The Green Book: A Play (2006). Ramsey’s two-act play portrays this moment in US history when The Green Book served as a safeguard for African American travelers. Presenting the narratives of a traveling Green Book salesman, a weary Jewish traveler, and a soldier and his wife, who converge on a tourist home in Jefferson City, Missouri, I argue that Ramsey’s play, alongside Andrea Lee’s short musical “The Golden Chariot” (2002), leverages the critical potential of racial binary to heighten focus on the ways that guidebooks came to bear on critical decisions folks made in their travels. Ramsey’s and Lee’s handling of their material throws into relief the disappointment many African American viewers and critics feel at what many see as a missed opportunity with the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award-winning feature film Green Book (2018), directed by Peter Farrelly and starring Mahershala Ali.Less

Learning to Play Poker: The Re-vision of Irish Women’s Agency in Gina Moxley’s Danti-Dan (1995)

Nelson Barre

in The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, Volume 2 (1992-2016)

Gina Moxley’s Danti-Dan (1995) depicts a world where children grow up too fast and yet do not understand the implications of their actions. The female characters in the play depict a range of ... More

Gina Moxley’s Danti-Dan (1995) depicts a world where children grow up too fast and yet do not understand the implications of their actions. The female characters in the play depict a range of emotional and sexual agencies that sometimes run counter to the expected narratives of 1970s Ireland. I argue that Moxley’s play revises and complicates old tropes about sexuality among Ireland’s youth. Her use of characters ranging from thirteen to eighteen, all of whom have incorrect and incomplete knowledge of sex, demonstrates some of the ways in which young women try to take back agency in an otherwise patriarchal society. Consideration of the original production and its socio-political context provides avenues of critical examination, as does relating the play to the #WakingTheFeminists movement which erupted some twenty years after its premiere.Less

Nevertheless, She Persisted: Celia de Fréine’s Luíse (2016)

Brian Ó Conchubhair

in The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, Volume 2 (1992-2016)

The Irish monologue play (in English) arguably reached its apex in the 1990s and Noughties. Yet this still-popular form is strangely absent in the Irish-language theatrical tradition. This absence is ... More

The Irish monologue play (in English) arguably reached its apex in the 1990s and Noughties. Yet this still-popular form is strangely absent in the Irish-language theatrical tradition. This absence is all the more striking given the role attributed to the Irish oral tradition that seems to haunt the English-language monologue form in Ireland. As in much of her other creative work – dramatic, musical, and poetic – Celia de Fréine is in this regard a ground-breaker and paradigm shifter. Her 2016 Irish-language monologue Luíse focuses on Luíse Ghabhánach Ní Dhufaigh who established Scoil Bhríde, Ireland’s first Irish-language immersion school in Dublin. The play explores the life, times, and socio-political views of this remarkable woman in a way that captures her energy, vision, and independence of mind. This chapter demonstrates that the monologue form is the ideal one for this topic but also offers a potentially rich tool for Irish-language theatre.Less

Anne Devlin: Depicting a Gendered Journey: Men and Women on The Long March (1984)

Megan W. Minogue

in The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, Volume 1 (1716-1992)

In Anne Devlin’s 1984 television play The Long March, political and historical narratives frame the lives of two families – the Walshes and the Molloys – who live in predominantly republican areas of ... More

In Anne Devlin’s 1984 television play The Long March, political and historical narratives frame the lives of two families – the Walshes and the Molloys – who live in predominantly republican areas of West Belfast. While the individual characters in these families have lived through many similar experiences and events, the march forward for the next generation is often gendered, with some avenues being more open to or acceptable for men rather than women. And, as Devlin highlights, the male experience of the Troubles is often deemed more “legitimate” than the female. In the end, however, Devlin’s play demonstrates the sombre inevitability of a long march ahead for all characters: a lack of any comfortable resolution, both dramatically and in the political landscape, ensures that Devlin leaves her audience with an unsettling sense that both men and women have not come very far from where they started.Less

There’s Something about Mary: Staging the Divine in “Kyndely” Language, Time, and the Social World

Eleanor Johnson

in Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama

This chapter studies the participatory contemplation that is staged in the N-Town cycle’s Mary plays to show how these plays both resonate with and complicate the theological environment of East ... More

This chapter studies the participatory contemplation that is staged in the N-Town cycle’s Mary plays to show how these plays both resonate with and complicate the theological environment of East Anglia, where they are most likely written. Through a combination of poetic, sonic, and linguistic effects--ranging from acrostics and alliteration to code-switching and vernacular puns--the Mary sequence builds on the incarnational theology of the likes of Nicholas Love and invites its audiences to experience their own likeness to and kinship with Virgin Mary. They do so in a manner that is not simply affective--not simply about the creation of empathy with Mary herself--but also and in fact primarily cognitive, originally in a deeply intellectual understanding of how Mary, a time-bound human being, could possibly contain the eternal Jesus within her body, and bring him into the world of time, history, and death. In the Mary plays, as in the other contemplative works in this book, the Middle English vernacular is crucial to the participatory enactment of contemplation, and to its enactment of how contemplation intersects with the social world.Less

‘Indeed everybody did come’: Parties, Publicity and Intimacy in Gertrude Stein’s Plays

Alex Goody

in The Modernist Party

In, ‘“Indeed everybody did come”: Parties, Publicity and Intimacy in Gertrude Stein’s Plays’, Alex Goody finds that the conduciveness to creativity of the public/private space of the party is ... More

In, ‘“Indeed everybody did come”: Parties, Publicity and Intimacy in Gertrude Stein’s Plays’, Alex Goody finds that the conduciveness to creativity of the public/private space of the party is ambiguous when the creativity in question is that of the host. As Goody recounts, Gertrude Stein’s publishing success with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) precipitated ‘a disturbing invasion of her inner sense of self’ in which her private interiority was ‘opened out to the external world’s values and definitions’. But this tension between publicity and private autonomy had already emerged as Stein and Toklas admitted the expatriate avant-garde to their domestic space at their parties in rue de Fleurus. Both parties and book success exposed Stein’s private life to a publicity that threatened the sense of linguistic singularity with which she was investing her writing. This threat is textually mapped out in the plays Stein wrote about parties at the beginning and end of her career: What Happened. A Play in Five Acts (1913) and A Play Called Not And Now (1936).Less

Experimental Drama and Soviet Constructivist Theater

Lisa Nanney

in John Dos Passos and Cinema

By the time he served in World War I, Dos Passos was well-versed in classical and contemporary visual art and a practiced painter. The war revealed to him how organizations and forces—such as ... More

By the time he served in World War I, Dos Passos was well-versed in classical and contemporary visual art and a practiced painter. The war revealed to him how organizations and forces—such as governments, corporations, the press, and the military—could subvert individual self-determination, so he brought his visual aesthetics to bear on his early writing to seek artistic methods that could combine non-verbal aesthetics with political ideas, could transcend current literary forms, and could move readers to engaged interaction and activism. Like his early anti-war novels One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921), his experimental plays and set designing with the New Playwrights Theatre group, which he co-founded in New York in the mid-1920s, responded to the expanded aesthetic potentials of modernism. His early dramas, such as The Garbage Man (1927), reflect his increasing awareness that the theater had to create an innovative, immersive experience to compete as a cultural and political force with film, which was rapidly assuming unparalleled power as public entertainment both in the U.S. and Russia.Less

Items The Plays, Novels, Short Fiction and Non-Fiction of Jack Kahane

in Obelisk: A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press

This chapter presents a list of plays, novels, short stories, and non–fiction written by Jack Kahane. These include Two Plays published by Sherratt and Hughes, Laugh and Grow Rich published by Grant ... More

This chapter presents a list of plays, novels, short stories, and non–fiction written by Jack Kahane. These include Two Plays published by Sherratt and Hughes, Laugh and Grow Rich published by Grant Richards Ltd., and The Vain Serenade published by Constable and Co. Ltd. This chapter provides information on the publication dates, title page, collation, pagination, binding, and cover image of these works by Kahane.Less

Printers, Readers, and Writers

Richard Wendorf

in Printing History and Cultural Change: Fashioning the Modern English Text in Eighteenth-Century Britain

This chapter begins the process of explaining why changes in typographical conventions took place in the second half of the eighteenth century. Dozens of writers produced rules or suggestions about ... More

This chapter begins the process of explaining why changes in typographical conventions took place in the second half of the eighteenth century. Dozens of writers produced rules or suggestions about how capitalization and italics should be used—and they are discussed in full. These include grammars, rhetorics, encyclopedias, and printing manuals. These are generally conservative in nature and lag behind actual printing practice at the time. Was there also a transformation in the nature of the reading public at this time? There are many signs that although reading aloud continued in a variety of ways and places (social reading), silent reading was also prevalent; there was also a movement from intensive to extensive reading habits. Samuel Johnson and Benjamin Franklin are key sources in tracing these changes, as are the key exponents of the elocutionary movement. Did individual writers change their own practice of writing as well? An extended analysis of the private correspondence of major writers demonstrates that many did abandon the capital later in their careers. This is also borne out in the correspondence of the 10th Earl of Huntingdon, which includes letters from dozens of different writers, and in the Larpent Collection of Dramatic Plays at the Huntington Library, which includes scribal copies of plays submitted to the Examiner of Plays.Less