Browsing by Subject "Tragedy"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Afterlives of Shakespeare's Tragedies
    (2016-06) McHugh, Caitlin
    When Charles II reopened London theaters and granted patents to William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew, English theater was at a low. Although players persisted since the official closure of the theaters, they were punished for illegal performances with the destruction of their costumes and playhouses. New innovations, such as changeable scenery, machines, and the like, meant that Davenant and Killigrew were starting from scratch, lacking costumes and playhouses to accommodate their needs. One possible reading of the inclusion of pre-1642 plays in the repertoire is that they offered the opportunity to stage productions quickly and to make simple changes for entertainment’s sake. I question this narrative by examining Shakespeare’s tragedies. I explore how late-seventeenth-century adapters of Shakespeare revitalize his work to speak to the trauma of the English Civil Wars and the potential of the English stage. I argue that the modifications made to Shakespeare’s tragedies did not simply cater to changing technologies and tastes. These works show evidence of a drive to provide less ambiguous versions of Shakespeare’s plays with obvious moral messages, most of which comment on the politics of the Restoration. These plays illustrate the potential of English theater as a space for audience education. I reimagine these adaptations as responses to, and attempts to revitalize, the reputation of English theater. In order to illustrate Shakespearean adaptation as a response to the state of theater, I place four of Shakespeare’s tragedies (Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, and Othello) in two different contexts: the instability of Restoration theater and the critical writings of their adapters. The closure of the theaters developed out of a long anti-theatrical prejudice, and the political crises of the late 1670s and early 1680s only increased the difficulty of maintaining the new theater duopoly. In these circumstances, many prominent writers spent time describing criteria for an effective drama. They used prefatory writing to explain their intent and theories. They envisioned a new era for tragedy and drama after the Restoration: one where tragedy took its place on the stage as a finely wrought piece of art and an effective means of moral education.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Facing the Music: The (Im)Possibility of Sublimation in the Works of Samuel Beckett and Marguerite Duras
    (2016-12) Vozel, François-Nicolas
    This study focuses on the persistence of the tragic in capitalist modernity. The works of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) point to the paradoxical endurance of tragic themes in a consumer-centered universe where pleasure and happiness constitute the horizon of existence. The specific works under consideration are Beckett’s Endgame (1957) and Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) as well as Duras’ Moderato Cantabile (1958) and The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein (1964). The timespan that encompasses these publications is the locus of a turning point in French society. After the deprivations of a long war and occupation and during the decade in which France tried to recapture its pre-war prestige, the nation was entering the frantic world of consumerism and mass media. I advance that the reassertion of the tragic in Beckett and Duras has to be read against what Adorno diagnosed as the formulaic character of the products of the culture industry, the commodification of culture, and the narcissistic tendencies in capitalist societies. More specifically, this thesis shows how Beckett and Duras devise a specifically modern revival of the tragic, which is indissolubly bound up with the exploration of the modern psychoanalytic subject of desire. I argue that Beckett’s and Duras’ stylistic experimentations need to be read in relation to Lacan’s turn to ethics in his 1959-1960 seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, which opens a decade of cultural criticism that culminated with the 1969-1970 seminar, The Other Side of Psychanalysis, where Lacan conceptualizes the “discourse of capitalism” as a refined, more insidious, and more efficient version of the discourse of the master.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Reading Dionysus: Euripides' Bacchae among Jews and Christians in the Greco-Roman World
    (2013-08) Friesen, Courtney Jade
    The Bacchae of Euripides was widely popular throughout antiquity. Its narrative stages the arrival of Dionysus in Thebes and the conflict arising from the opposition of the tyrant Pentheus. This dissertation is a study of the reception of this tragedy in antiquity from the third century BCE to the third century CE. As a drama exploring the contestation of political and religious power, readers and audiences in the Hellenistic and Roman periods found new relevancies in the Bacchae for voicing contemporary experiences. Dionysus' role as a symbol of imperial conquest in the Ptolemiac and Roman Empires stood in tension with Euripides' narrative in which he destroyed the Theban tyrant. Jewish and Christian writers also evoked the Bacchae as a means of negotiating their own religious and political identities in the Greco-Roman world. The conflict staged in the tragedy proves to be an enduring expression of problems confronting ancient society. It represents the perennial tension between religion and absolute power, poetic freedom and imperial patronage, and ethnic diversity and social cohesion.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Spectacle of the Suffering Body: Seventeenth-century Aesthetics of Violence
    (2015-07) Bowman, Melanie
    This dissertation treats the aesthetics and ethics of theatrical violence, focusing on late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in France. Tragedy took on the impossible task of presenting, to use Elaine Scarry’s formulation, “world-destroying” pain, using a variety of stage techniques to absorb, amplify, and dissimulate violence. It managed a constant alternation between terror and its foreclosure. Suffering is impossible to represent, and yet it regularly informs the way in which individuals and the theater of state conceive of power, learning, and productive work. Throughout, I consider the ways in which these figure amplify or circumvent an aesthetics of confrontation between tyrant and rebel. Daggers, bloody cloth, and female witnesses to violence absorbed, amplified, and dissimulated the strong affects associated with scenes of suffering bodies. In Chapter 1, I investigate how the weapon in plays such as "Didon se sacrifiant"(circa 1605), "Scédase" (circa 1610), and "Le Cid" (1637) absorb the affects and efficacy associated with sacrificial violence. These plays present violence as a compelling theatrical enactment that could spread itself like a contagion. Chapter 2 focuses on bloody cloth, which in "La mort d’Hercule" (1634), and "Cinna" (1639) both stands in for scenes of bodily suffering and facilitates a transformation from gore to glory. In Chapter 3 I study the shifting status of the witness to state violence by focusing on plays featuring female protagonists who survive brothers. In Garnier’s "Antigone" (1580), Rotrou’s 1637 play of the same name, Hardy’s "Mariamne" (circa 1610) and Tristan l’Hermite’s "La Marianne" (1637), sororal mourning increasingly masked suffering and violence.