Lawrence Danson
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780198186281
- eISBN:
- 9780191674488
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198186281.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter analyses Oscar Wilde's essay of dramatic theory entitled The Truth of Masks. It discusses a cross-dressed production of As You Like It and a novel about cross-dressing, Mademoiselle de ...
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This chapter analyses Oscar Wilde's essay of dramatic theory entitled The Truth of Masks. It discusses a cross-dressed production of As You Like It and a novel about cross-dressing, Mademoiselle de Maupin, which both affected Wilde's way of thinking about the part of the binary he called Illusion. The chapter attempts to explain the message of this essay and provides commentaries on criticisms of this work.Less
This chapter analyses Oscar Wilde's essay of dramatic theory entitled The Truth of Masks. It discusses a cross-dressed production of As You Like It and a novel about cross-dressing, Mademoiselle de Maupin, which both affected Wilde's way of thinking about the part of the binary he called Illusion. The chapter attempts to explain the message of this essay and provides commentaries on criticisms of this work.
David Brown
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199231836
- eISBN:
- 9780191716201
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199231836.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
This book uses the way in which poetry and drama have in the past opened people to the possibility of religious experience as a launching pad for advocating less wooden approaches to Christian ...
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This book uses the way in which poetry and drama have in the past opened people to the possibility of religious experience as a launching pad for advocating less wooden approaches to Christian worship today. So far from encouraging imagination and exploration, hymns and sermons now more commonly merely consolidate belief. Again, contemporary liturgy in both its music and its ceremonial fails to take seriously either current dramatic theory or the sociology of ritual. Yet this was not always so. Poetry and drama, the book suggests, grew out of religion, and therefore, the book proposes, creative potential needs to be rediscovered by religion.Less
This book uses the way in which poetry and drama have in the past opened people to the possibility of religious experience as a launching pad for advocating less wooden approaches to Christian worship today. So far from encouraging imagination and exploration, hymns and sermons now more commonly merely consolidate belief. Again, contemporary liturgy in both its music and its ceremonial fails to take seriously either current dramatic theory or the sociology of ritual. Yet this was not always so. Poetry and drama, the book suggests, grew out of religion, and therefore, the book proposes, creative potential needs to be rediscovered by religion.
R. Darren Gobert
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780804786386
- eISBN:
- 9780804788267
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804786386.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind
This chapter concerns playwriting and dramatic theory after Descartes. It demonstrates how the much-discussed problem of dramatic catharsis originates in an incommensurability produced by ...
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This chapter concerns playwriting and dramatic theory after Descartes. It demonstrates how the much-discussed problem of dramatic catharsis originates in an incommensurability produced by Cartesianism, since the universal experience of pity and fear theorized by Aristotle cannot be reconciled with an audience of individualized subjects. Pierre Corneille responded to this incommensurability in Nicomède, whose script is analyzed alongside two of its performances: at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1651, and at the Louvre in 1658. Corneille reconfigured tragedy in order to foreground wonder, the precise emotion that Descartes located at the center of his emotional physics and moral philosophy. These Cartesian innovations, theorized in Corneille's copious theoretical writings, were in turn mimicked in English theater and dramatic theory of the period, especially that of John Dryden, whose essays "Of Dramatick Poesy" and "Conquest of Granada" are discussed.Less
This chapter concerns playwriting and dramatic theory after Descartes. It demonstrates how the much-discussed problem of dramatic catharsis originates in an incommensurability produced by Cartesianism, since the universal experience of pity and fear theorized by Aristotle cannot be reconciled with an audience of individualized subjects. Pierre Corneille responded to this incommensurability in Nicomède, whose script is analyzed alongside two of its performances: at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1651, and at the Louvre in 1658. Corneille reconfigured tragedy in order to foreground wonder, the precise emotion that Descartes located at the center of his emotional physics and moral philosophy. These Cartesian innovations, theorized in Corneille's copious theoretical writings, were in turn mimicked in English theater and dramatic theory of the period, especially that of John Dryden, whose essays "Of Dramatick Poesy" and "Conquest of Granada" are discussed.
Joseph Harris
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780198701613
- eISBN:
- 9780191771453
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198701613.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
The introduction explains the corpus, methodology, and rationale of the study. It clarifies key terms and concepts, raising some of the key questions that subsequent chapters will address. In ...
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The introduction explains the corpus, methodology, and rationale of the study. It clarifies key terms and concepts, raising some of the key questions that subsequent chapters will address. In particular, it explores the relationship between the defiantly modern term ‘subjectivity’ and that cliché of early modern theatre theory, the ‘rules’, arguing that the early modern period understood the dramatic rules as reflecting unchanging rules of universal human psychology. The introduction also explains the practical and theoretical differences between dramatic spectators and related audiences (readers and critics). Above all, it argues that the spectator often emerges in these texts less as a genuine human being than as a hypothetical ‘ideal’ spectator—a textual construct whose hypothetical responses are drafted in to serve the theoretician’s own arguments. The implicit tension between actual spectators and the model spectator constructed by dramatic theory will be played out throughout the following chapters.Less
The introduction explains the corpus, methodology, and rationale of the study. It clarifies key terms and concepts, raising some of the key questions that subsequent chapters will address. In particular, it explores the relationship between the defiantly modern term ‘subjectivity’ and that cliché of early modern theatre theory, the ‘rules’, arguing that the early modern period understood the dramatic rules as reflecting unchanging rules of universal human psychology. The introduction also explains the practical and theoretical differences between dramatic spectators and related audiences (readers and critics). Above all, it argues that the spectator often emerges in these texts less as a genuine human being than as a hypothetical ‘ideal’ spectator—a textual construct whose hypothetical responses are drafted in to serve the theoretician’s own arguments. The implicit tension between actual spectators and the model spectator constructed by dramatic theory will be played out throughout the following chapters.
R. Darren Gobert
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780804786386
- eISBN:
- 9780804788267
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804786386.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind
This book explores theater history's unexamined importance to Cartesian philosophy alongside Descartes's unexamined impact on theatre history. Put another way, it provides a new reading of mind-body ...
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This book explores theater history's unexamined importance to Cartesian philosophy alongside Descartes's unexamined impact on theatre history. Put another way, it provides a new reading of mind-body union informed not only by Descartes's Passions of the Soul and his correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia but also by stage theory and practice, while simultaneously itemizing the contributions of Cartesianism to this theory and practice. For example, Descartes's coordinate system reshaped theater architecture's use of space—as demonstrated by four iconic theaters in Paris and London, whose historical productions of Racine's Phèdre are analyzed. Descartes's theory of the passions revolutionized understandings of the emotional exchange between spectacle and spectator in general and dramatic catharsis in particular—as demonstrated in Descartes-inflected plays and dramatic theory by Pierre Corneille and John Dryden. And Descartes's philosophy engendered new models of the actor's subjectivity and physiology—as we see not only in acting theory of the period but also in metatheatrical entertainments such as Molière's L'Impromptu de Versailles and the English rehearsal burlesques that it inspired, such as George Villiers's The Rehearsal. In addition to plays both canonical and obscure and the writings of Descartes and Elisabeth of Bohemia, the book's key texts include religious jeremiads, aesthetic treatises, letters, frontispieces, architectural plans, paintings, ballet libretti and all manner of theatrical ephemera found during research in England, France, and Sweden.Less
This book explores theater history's unexamined importance to Cartesian philosophy alongside Descartes's unexamined impact on theatre history. Put another way, it provides a new reading of mind-body union informed not only by Descartes's Passions of the Soul and his correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia but also by stage theory and practice, while simultaneously itemizing the contributions of Cartesianism to this theory and practice. For example, Descartes's coordinate system reshaped theater architecture's use of space—as demonstrated by four iconic theaters in Paris and London, whose historical productions of Racine's Phèdre are analyzed. Descartes's theory of the passions revolutionized understandings of the emotional exchange between spectacle and spectator in general and dramatic catharsis in particular—as demonstrated in Descartes-inflected plays and dramatic theory by Pierre Corneille and John Dryden. And Descartes's philosophy engendered new models of the actor's subjectivity and physiology—as we see not only in acting theory of the period but also in metatheatrical entertainments such as Molière's L'Impromptu de Versailles and the English rehearsal burlesques that it inspired, such as George Villiers's The Rehearsal. In addition to plays both canonical and obscure and the writings of Descartes and Elisabeth of Bohemia, the book's key texts include religious jeremiads, aesthetic treatises, letters, frontispieces, architectural plans, paintings, ballet libretti and all manner of theatrical ephemera found during research in England, France, and Sweden.
