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This chapter examines the collective spaces invoked in James Joyce's career-long obsession with dramatic form—from the epiphanies he wrote as a teenager through his 1918 play Exiles to the closet drama of the Nighttown (or “Circe”) episode of Ulysses. Joyce's experiments with theatrical form constitute a running commentary on his interest in the “depths” of the psyche. The different conceptions of theatrical space embedded in the idea of epiphany lend a dual valence to this keystone of Joycean aesthetics. If, on the one hand, epiphany imagines a humiliating theater of psychic exposure, on the other it gestures toward a perverse collective space where such exposures would lose their policing force. These isolating and collectivist impulses are both visible in Joyce's play Exiles, which follows Ibsenesque naturalism in its representation of psychic motivation but allows its characters to mount a notable collective resistance to the diagnostic imperative structuring their stage existence.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to prove the very simple proposition that in Euripidean tragedy, dramatic form is a kind of political content. The project is motivated by two separate but intersecting problems. The first is the problem of Euripidean tragedy. There are eighteen extant tragedies confidently attributed to Euripides and many of them are, for lack of a better word, odd. With their disjointed, action-packed plots, comic touches, and frequent happy endings, they seem to stretch the generic boundaries of tragedy as we usually think of it. The second problem is the relation between the play and its contemporary world, the political world of democratic Athens. Tragic dramas were, almost without exception, set in the mythic past, not in the fifth-century polis, and almost never allude overtly to their contemporary moment. The remainder of the chapter discusses the meaning of politics of form by way of a brief illustration.

Please Provide (as in Journal Copy) It was customary in the seventeenth century to assimilate court ballet with drama, as both art forms were seen to strive for a common aim: the imitation or representation of nature. However, critics were also keen to point out their essential differences, for, unlike tragedy, ballet disregarded the rules of new-classical aesthetics and its only concern seemed to be to please and to entertain. This was particularly evident in the court ballets written by Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin between 1639 and 1641. Unsurprisingly, they were singled out for special criticism by theorists of the ballet, who highlighted their dramatic shortcomings, and failed to see that they constituted another form of dramatic aesthetics, which was conspicuous precisely because of its emancipation from the structures of Aristotelian theory. It could be said that the ballets of Desmarets had all the hallmarks of contemporary tragicomedy: irregularity of construction, diversity of action, disregard for the unity of tone, etc., but in adapting the principles of this new aesthetics to the ballet, Desmarets ran the risk of transgressing the boundaries of tragicomedy and even of drama, approaching a genre which was no longer dramatic but narratice, i.e. epic poetry.

This chapter discusses how Lawrence of Arabia becomes implicated in a more significant story about Hollywood's embarrassing political history. It shows the changes Michael Wilson (one of the film's screenwriters) made on the script of Lawrence of Arabia, as well as the controversy that surrounded the Michael Wilson affair. It first provides some background information on Wilson and at the same time relates how he learns to become political in his art and the constraints placed upon him by government and industry censorship. It then studies the structure of the final screenplay and describes Lean's reservations about his treatment and Robert Bolt's innovations in dramatic form. The chapter also looks at some of Lean's dissatisfactions with Wilson's artistic treatment and the cuts made in the film that damaged it considerably.

The book’s introduction maps out its contribution to ongoing critical conversations surrounding literary form, the history of the body and the senses, the experience and effects of sound, and historical phenomenology. Through brief readings of The Revenger’s Tragedy and Epicoene, it introduces the two forms, and the two auditory models, that are at the heart of this analysis. How these two forms developed, and how and why hearing became so central to their content, plot, and structure, are introduced as the key questions that motivate this study.

This chapter articulates different aspects of the force-field impacting on current TV drama provision. It considers that new accounts of the pleasures of television are required in respect of the specificity of the medium, introducing the key factors in the force-field of both the production of contemporary TV drama and the relevant core debates in critical analysis of the television medium and its dramatic forms. Whilst recognising the impact of visual style, attention is paid to narrative forms as well as aspects of drama, as traditionally conceived. The emphasis is on the Anglo-American axis, but the broad context of contemporary television production is recognised to be globalising in tendency. One of the tensions at the heart of the discussion, however, is that audiences worldwide are known to prefer local product, given the choice.

This paper (an Inaugural Lecture) discusses the fundamental tasks of scholar and student: the closest possible comprehension of the text must precede, but also aid, appreciation of vocabulary, style and poetic idiom; then comes understanding of dramatic form; last, attention to cultural background and presuppositions. All these must be woven into play-commentaries and general studies which inform the reader, but are frank with problems, and which suggest to the sensibility. A final section raises the difficulties and methods of translating tragic texts (the author has translated Aeschylus) – but also the rewards, not least in widening access to their artistic and emotive power.