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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

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 Satyric Paradise: The Form of W. B. Yeats’s “News for the Delphic Oracle”

Michael Cade-Stewart

in Writing Modern Ireland

This essay examines the poetic forms of W. B. Yeats's “The Statues” and “News for the Delphic Oracle” as well as these poems' place in Yeats's Last Poems and Two Plays. “The Statues” is a tragic ... More

This essay examines the poetic forms of W. B. Yeats's “The Statues” and “News for the Delphic Oracle” as well as these poems' place in Yeats's Last Poems and Two Plays. “The Statues” is a tragic poem, whereas “News for the Delphic Oracle” may be regarded as performing the role of a satyr play in Classical Greek tragedy. The comedy of “News,” like the satyr plays, consists of poking fun at “The Statues,” thereby providing comic relief. This essay considers the shift from “stately ottava rima” and an expression of “Yeats's eugenic convictions” in “The Statues” to a modern imitation of a classical satyr play in “News.” It challenges the assumption of the latter poem's seeming disorder elsewhere in the critical literature and insists on the importance of a dialogue between the two poems.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

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

‘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

The Ends of the Earth: 1960–1961

Will Friedwald

in Straighten Up and Fly Right: The Life and Music of Nat King Cole

The 1960s began well. In 1961, Cole’s wife Maria gave birth to twin girls, and Cole sang at the Inaugural Gala for President John F. Kennedy (who later in the year made a surprise appearance at the ... More

The 1960s began well. In 1961, Cole’s wife Maria gave birth to twin girls, and Cole sang at the Inaugural Gala for President John F. Kennedy (who later in the year made a surprise appearance at the debutante ball for Nat and Maria’s oldest child, Carole). Nat started the decade with his first concert album, Live at the Sands, and his most ambitious concept album, Wild Is Love, followed by an hour-long special for Canadian TV. In the early 1960s, he also recorded some of his most breathtakingly beautiful albums with a new collaborator, the young Ralph Carmichael, who joined him on The Magic of Christmas, the beautiful Touch of Your Lips, and Nat King Cole Sings/George Shearing Plays, which amounted to a three-way collaboration with the great British pianist, Carmichael, and Cole.Less