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This chapter examines the strategies and tropes used by the Arab and Persian chroniclers in the medieval Muslim narratives of the battle of Manzikert, and the didactic purposes for which these narratives are used. Qur'anic resonances, such as presenting the arrogant Byzantine emperor Romanus as a latter-day Pharaoh, and other Muslim elements in these accounts, such as the importance of positioning the battle on a Friday, are discussed. Narrative techniques, including theatrical features, are analysed. The influence of the Mirrors for Princes advice literature is also examined. This chapter emphasises in its conclusion that these accounts can hardly be described as providing concrete details about the actual battle of Manzikert; instead, they are vehicles through which Arabic and Persian writers can praise their Turkish overlords, can vaunt the military prowess traditionally associated with the Turks, and – through the triumphal symbol of none other than the captured Byzantine emperor himself – can proclaim the triumph of Islam over Christianity. Thus Manzikert provides not only a spur but also an examplar for subsequent Muslim victories over the Christian foe.

It explores some of the key anti-illusionist strategies deployed in the films: those that endow the films with theatricality through staging and performance. More than just an arsenal of reflexive decides, cinematic theatricality serves to frame the discourse on the aesthetics, ethics and politics of role-playing. The theatrum mundi metaphor underlying the films takes them well beyond the restrictions of Hollywood cinema; it both contributes to an underlying fantasy and game structure typical of metafiction in general, and asserts the relevance of fiction to reflect on the world, or rather on representations of the world.

The Riot of the Statues in 387 CE was a decisive moment in the history of Antioch in Syria. After the revolt, tears and public lamentations took over, as the inhabitants awaited imperial punishment. In the course of the crisis the rhetorician Libanius and the preacher John Chrysostom each tried to negotiate a settlement of the dispute between the authorities and the city. Their speeches depict dramatic scenes of collective weeping and lamentation and thus reflect not only emotional states but also the public use of tears. In doing so, they shine light on the theatrical qualities of emotional responses in social interaction. The analysis of the purposes for which both authors exploit the themes of laughing and wailing reveals two contrasting attitudes to urban society and oratory. While both recognise the vital role of laughter and tears in managing social relationships, Libanius’ representation of emotional expressions aims to eulogise the virtues of an imperial officer and maintain the traditional order of society. Chrysostom, by contrast, teaches his audience which emotions are acceptable in a Christian society and which are not. His aim is to implement an emotion management that is oriented towards the heavenly realm.

This chapter argues that Milton revises and rehabilitates the moral ideal of his divorce tracts in the final books of Paradise Lost. For this new concept of sympathy, which after the Fall is no longer rooted in the sympathetic nature of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton develops a moral lexicon purged of occultist terms of art. The reconciliation of Adam and Eve after the Fall hinges on their ability to sympathize with each other. Human sympathy, Milton suggests, compensates for the loss of universal sympathy. The chapter goes on to argue that, in the final movement of the epic, Milton moves sympathy further into the realm of moral philosophy by extending his analysis from economics—that is, domestic relations—to ethics and politics. Adam receives an intensive education in sympathy from the angel Michael, who uses theatrical scenes to inculcate an ethical ideal based on temperance and poised between narcissism and over-identification. Michael goes on to show Adam that a sympathetic polity is possible in the fallen world, but is continually vulnerable to the ambitions of the sinful. In identifying sympathy as a fundamental moral challenge in human experience, the chapter concludes, Milton anticipates David Hume’s “modern” philosophy.

This chapter examines Almodóvar’s film Los amantes pasajeros/I’m So Excited! against the backdrop of Spain’s economic crisis. Describing the shift of director Pedro Almodóvar from melodrama to drawing room farce made evident in this film, the chapter highlights its theatricality; in so doing, it argues that the Los amantes pasajeros owes much to broad traditions of theatre acting that range from vaudeville, to mime to classic Shakespearian. The language of theatrical acting that the film employs, to that end, incorporates gestures and dramatic histrionics in order to make a clear indictment of the current state of Spain in crisis. By making clear the links between the politics of acting and acting out politics, the chapter’s account of performance further demonstrates just how nuanced the landscape of Spanish acting can be.

Unlike many other French ethnographers, Michel Leiris published his “literary” work, L’Afrique fantôme, before his more scientifically oriented ethnographic texts. Yet, in this sprawling and introspective diary, Leiris constantly asserts that ethnographic research must end in failure. This chapter examines the broad stakes of L’Afrique fantôme and suggests that book’s interest lies less in the failure of the voyage it recounts than in the continuous sense of starting over and the ever deeper sense of movement that emerges in its pages. Leiris’s sense of disillusionment and his experience of the impossibility of continuing his journey as he had originally imagined it are formalized in a metaphor of theatricality that this chapter examines at length by considering how it is ultimately tied to Leiris’s utopian desire for a living document that is both rhetorical and anthropological.

This chapter is devoted to a single, highly provocative Eucharistic Discourse: “The Woman Who Was a Sinner.” It begins by analyzing why Kierkegaard focuses on this story from Luke 7, rather than the other similar stories in the gospels. It argues that Kierkegaard treats this disruptive and desirous woman as an image of Christian faith itself. The author then interprets Kierkegaard’s highly theatrical “staging” of the woman’s story through the lens of the theatrical techniques identified in Chapter One. The chapter concludes by considering the potent effect of imagining this story amidst the aesthetic and liturgical backdrop of Vor Frue Kirke as Kierkegaard intended.

This chapter is devoted to Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, his most extended treatment of ethics and Christian love. Works of Love is frequently interpreted as running contrary to the author’s fundamental theses about desire and theatricality. In opposition to such interpretations, this chapter argues that Kierkegaard presents love for God as a form of infinite, insatiable desire. It show that for Kierkegaard genuine love for human beings can only be rooted in such passionate relationship to God. The chapter concludes by showing that Kierkegaard figures the very nature of existence in theatrical terms. It interprets Kierkegaard’s famous broken engagement to Regine Olsen in just this light.

This chapter argues that performance is crucial to understanding the political campaigns of the early Labour leaders in the late nineteenth century. Morris examines the performative language of politics, assessing the link between political rhetoric, performance and electoral campaigns. Through a case study of the two leading political actors of the emergent Socialist movement, H.M. Hyndman and Keir Hardie, and their particular political appeals the chapter analyses the non-verbal element of their campaigns and how they conceptualised themselves as performers. historians should consider more than just the words and messages that politicians were offering, they should also examine the methods and mediums by which those words were delivered and the way in which politicians used a theatrical frame to convince their constituents, with their particular performances becoming their political message.

In close conversation with the previous chapter, Deleuze’s concept of ‘crystal-image’ is used here to explore various reflexive structures and show how pivotal they are to the construction of an aesthetic of opacity. Mises en abyme, mirror images, widespread theatricality help interrogate the fluid and playful relationship between illusion and reality. Like Magritte and Renoir, Chabrol excels at subverting the representation of reality by making it look oneiric or uncanny, sometimes through a mere detail. Through the key examples of La Fille coupée en deux as ‘crystal-film’ and L’Enfer as paranoid narrative, this chapter examines how and to what extent Chabrol challenges the status of the image and the reception process.

Claiming that torture is a phenomenon specific to societies rather than to human individuals or other forms of life, this chapter analyzes the psycho-social consequences of torture as a practice that denies to some of its members the protection against human vulnerability that is constitutive of society. Drawing on D. W. Winnicott's location of cultural experience in games of recognition, it claims that the tendency of culture to perform sociality in theatrical forms makes it possible to reverse this tendency and perform in torture the vulnerability and negation of sociality. Since denial of the other is also a theatrical act, it necessarily enlists a third party, or witness, who either resists the exclusion of the victim from the social bond orlooks away. Since the position of the third party now is increasingly occupied by the eye and ear of digital recording, the chapter describes the psychic structure of not-seeing that is produced by the paradoxical mediality of violence: that at once destroys the capacity for expression and lodges in the psyche, and group memory, more stubbornly.

This section introduces a critical framework that discusses the interplay and interconnectedness of media and the dynamic tension between theatricality and the visual arts in the spectrum of Beckett's Breath (1969). Argumentation builds upon the investigation of Fried's seminal theory “Art and Objecthood,” (1967) and Beckett's aesthetic theory in the “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit”(1949); both discourses are considered in relation to disciplinary or medial entanglements.

The second chapter elaborates further on Fried's theory and its negative reception and provides a critical overview of Fried's controversial theory and its ideological ramifications by questioning Fried's high-modernist narrative about the viewing experience of visual art, as either a pure optical experience or as a strong gestalt. The chapter critically examines Fried's binarism between modernist presentness and minimalism's real time by arguing against Fried's claim that the worst aspect of minimalism is the manifestation of unlimited durationality.

This chapter focuses on the scenographic architecture of Augustan era Rome. The author sees in this monumental architecture the foundations of the Romans’ concept of their imperial ruins. The urban renewal program and buildings like Augustus’s mausoleum, the Ara Pacis, or the theater of Marcellus, turned Rome’s center into the empire’s theo-political stage. The new ornate scene-buildings, or scaenae frons, which decorated Rome’s first permanent theaters, were also part of the empire’s theatricality of politics. The iconic buildings of this architectural stage and their ruins would remain European imperialism’s literal and metaphorical core, a stage-in-ruins to be reconquered literally and metaphorically through the ages.

To learn the game, an aspiring professional wrestler at the Johnny Rodz Unpredictable School of Professional Wrestling must do more than acquire athletic and performative skills. He must also assimilate masculine codes of behaviour to earn the right to enter and perform in the squared circle. Learning the game is an often brutal reality check, an enforced encounter with one’s own physical, intellectual, and emotional limitations experienced through the tedium of repetitive practice and the volatility of other men. It is an exercise in managing the self, as much about learning to submit as it is about dominating, and about learning to accept the demand that one lose as it is about enjoying the pleasure of winning, or at least the appearance of winning. As with many other masculine rites of passage, it is ironic that to prove their manhood wrestlers must first surrender it to the others.