Download or read book Secret Sharers in Italian Comedy written by Jackson I. Cope and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern vernacular comedy took shape in early sixteenth-century Italy with the many plays adapted from and modeled on Plautine New Comedy. As Jackson I. Cope demonstrates in this study, some Italian dramatists reacted to the widespread success of this genre with a counterparadigm, a comedy that exploits secrecy as form. In both historically and critically engaging fashion, Cope identifies and examines this major development in Italian theater. Though outwardly similar to New Comedy with its characteristically harmonious closure, this essentially anti-Plautine form employs a secret--known by the audience but unequally shared among the players--to introduce a radical discrepancy between simultaneous stories unfolding in a single action doubly understood. The result is a plot that is misleading at the surface, contingent and unfinished at its end. The audience, in a position of enforced collusion with regard to the secret, becomes a formal ingredient in the production. The play, more cynical than carnivalesque, opens onto vistas of disruption and deception rather than closing on a note of renewed social harmony. Cope's close and original readings of both classic and lesser-known plays by Machiavelli, Ruzante, Cecchi, Grazzini, Fagiuoli, Maggi, and others follow this peculiarly Italian, anti-Plautine paradigm through variations across three centuries to its masterful and complex culmination in Carlo Goldoni's villeggiatura trilogy. Establishing a new comedic canon that demands a revision of Italian dramatic history and the history of European dramatic theory, Secret Sharers in Italian Comedy makes an important contribution to Italian studies and will also attract readers among theater scholars in English, comparative literature, and drama.
Download or read book The Venetian Origins of the Commedia dell Arte written by Peter Jordan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-13 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Venetian Origins of the Commedia dell'Arte is a striking new enquiry into the late-Renaissance stirrings of professional secular comedy in Venice, and their connection to the development of what came to be known as the Commedia dell’Arte. The book contends that through a symbiotic collaboration between patrician amateurs and plebeian professionals, innovative forms of comedy developed in the Venice region, fusing ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture in a provocative mix that had a truly mass appeal. Rich with anecdotes, diary entries and literary – often ribald – comic passages, Peter Jordan's central argument has important implications for the study of Venetian art, popular theatre and European cultural history.
Download or read book Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe written by Timothy McCall and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secrets in all their variety permeated early modern Europe, from the whispers of ambassadors at court to the emphatically publicized books of home remedies that flew from presses and booksellers’ shops. This interdisciplinary volume draws on approaches from art history and cultural studies to investigate the manifestations of secrecy in printed books and drawings, staircases and narrative paintings, ecclesiastical furnishings and engravers’ tools. Topics include how patrons of art and architecture deployed secrets to construct meanings and distinguish audiences, and how artists and patrons manipulated the content and display of the subject matter of artworks to create an aura of exclusive access and privilege. Essays examine the ways in which popes and princes skillfully deployed secrets in works of art to maximize social control, and how artists, printers, and folk healers promoted their wares through the impression of valuable, mysterious knowledge. The authors contributing to the volume represent both established authorities in their field as well as emerging voices. This volume will have wide appeal for historians, art historians, and literary scholars, introducing readers to a fascinating and often unexplored component of early modern culture.
Download or read book Posterity written by Rocco Rubini and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Rocco Rubini studies the motives and literary forms in the making of a "tradition," not understood narrowly, as the conservative, stubborn preservation of received conventions, values, and institutions, but rather more generously and etymologically interpreted: as the deliberate effort on the part of writers to transmit a reformulated past across generations. Leveraging Italian thinkers from Petrarch to Gramsci, with stops at the most prominent humanists in between (including Giambattista Vico, Carlo Goldoni, Francesco De Sanctis, and Benedetto Croce), Rubini gives us an innovative lens through which to view an Italian intellectual tradition that is at once premodern and modern, a legacy that does not depend on a date or a single masterpiece, but instead requires the reader to parse an entire career of writings to uncover deeper, transhistorical continuities that span 600 years. Whether reading forward to the 1930s, or backward to the 14th century, Rubini elucidates the interplay of creation and reception underlying the enactment of tradition, the practice of retrieving and conserving, and the revivification of shared themes and intentions linking these thinkers across time"--
Download or read book Befriending the Commedia dell Arte of Flaminio Scala written by Natalie Crohn Schmitt and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most important theatrical movement in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe, the commedia dell’arte has inspired playwrights, artists, and musicians including Molière, Dario Fo, Picasso, and Stravinsky. Because of its stock characters, improvised dialogue, and extravagant theatricalism, the commedia dell’arte is often assumed to be a superficial comic style. With Befriending the Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala, Natalie Crohn Schmitt demolishes that assumption. By reconstructing the commedia dell’arte scenarios published by troupe manager Flaminio Scala (1547–1624), Schmitt demonstrates that in its Golden Age the commedia dell’arte relied as much on craftsmanship as on improvisation and that Scala’s scenarios are a treasure trove of social commentary on early modern daily life in Italy. In the book, Schmitt makes use of her intensive research into the social and cultural history of sixteenth-century Italy and the aesthetic principles of the period. She combines this research with her insights drawn from studying with contemporary commedia dell’arte performers and from directing a production of one of Scala’s scenarios. The result is a new perspective on the commedia dell’arte that illuminates the style’s full richness.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli written by John M. Najemy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-24 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid portrait of this extraordinary thinker, assessing his place in Western thought since the Renaissance.
Download or read book The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature written by Sean Keilen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-03-31 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-ranging and ambitiously conceived Research Companion, contributors explore Shakespeare’s relationship to the classic in two broad senses. The essays analyze Shakespeare’s specific debts to classical works and weigh his classicism’s likeness and unlikeness to that of others in his time; they also evaluate the effects of that classical influence to assess the extent to which it is connected with whatever qualities still make Shakespeare, himself, a classic (arguably the classic) of modern world literature and drama. The first sense of the classic which the volume addresses is the classical culture of Latin and Greek reading, translation, and imitation. Education in the canon of pagan classics bound Shakespeare together with other writers in what was the dominant tradition of English and European poetry and drama, up through the nineteenth and even well into the twentieth century. Second—and no less central—is the idea of classics as such, that of books whose perceived value, exceeding that of most in their era, justifies their protection against historical and cultural change. The volume’s organizing insight is that as Shakespeare was made a classic in this second, antiquarian sense, his work’s reception has more and more come to resemble that of classics in the first sense—of ancient texts subject to labored critical study by masses of professional interpreters who are needed to mediate their meaning, simply because of the texts’ growing remoteness from ordinary life, language, and consciousness. The volume presents overviews and argumentative essays about the presence of Latin and Greek literature in Shakespeare’s writing. They coexist in the volume with thought pieces on the uses of the classical as a historical and pedagogical category, and with practical essays on the place of ancient classics in today’s Shakespearean classrooms.
Download or read book Giorgio Strehler Directs Carlo Goldoni written by Scott Malia and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-12-11 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giorgio Strehler Directs Carlo Goldoni uses Giorgio Strehler’s Goldoni productions (and Arlecchino servitore di due padroni in particular) as a means to defining his directorial aesthetic. The book provides a framework for examining the director’s career that is expansive rather than restrictive, using Goldoni and Arlecchino servitore di due padroni as a through-line for Strehler’s fifty-year career at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano. This research defines Strehler’s multifaceted style and brings to light interrelationships among his various works, creating a base from which a variety of subsequent critical inquiries can be made. It also establishes Strehler’s identity within the larger scope of the Italian theatre as a whole. Finally, it creates the critical challenge of finding more expansive notions of directorial style and concept that unite diverse ideologies without delimiting our understanding of the director. Crucial to understanding Strehler’s work with Arlecchino servitore di due padroni is his consistent reinterpretation of the play, which received no less than five distinct productions during Strehler’s lengthy career. His repeated reworking of existing productions provides a baseline for examining what elements were maintained and what elements changed or evolved. The four key influences that defined Strehler’s aesthetic in his work with Arlecchino were commedia dell’Arte, Bertolt Brecht, “refractive theatricality” and Jacques Copeau. Through these productions, Strehler created a dialogue with his audience and helped change the reputation of Carlo Goldoni both in his own country and abroad.
Download or read book Rape of Lucretia and the Founding of Republics written by Melissa M. Matthes and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Matthes (U. of Maryland) stages a conversation between feminism and republicanism to analyze the linkage between "founding stories" of republics, sexual violence, and gender hierarchy. While pointing out the differences in the retellings of Lucretia's rape by Livy, Machiavelli, and Rousseau, she argues that their commonality is in appropriating the classical tale to support the view that the alternative to violence is citizenship and politics infused with common good notions of agency, action, and community. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Thicker Than Water written by Lauren Weindling and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2023-04-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The proverb goes that "blood is thicker than water." But do common bloodlines in fact demand special duties or prescribe affections? Does this maxim presume that we can or should only love others biologically similar to ourselves? Are we nobler if we do, or somehow defective if we don't? "Thicker than Water" examines the roots of this belief by studying the omnipresent discourse of bloodlines and kindred relations in the literature of early modern Europe, specifically its role in the creation and maintenance of oppressive social structures. Lauren Weindling examines how drama from England, France, and Italy tests these assumptions about blood and love, exposing their underlying political function. Among the key texts that Weindling studies are Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice, Pierre Corneille's Le Cid, Giambattista della Porta's La Sorella and its English analog, Thomas Middleton's No Wit/Help Like a Woman's, John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, and Machiavelli's La Mandragola. Each of these plays in some way offers an extreme limit case for these beliefs in plots of love, courtship, and marriage (e.g., blood feuds or incest). They also illustrate that blood functions not as a biological basis for affinities, but discursively. Moreover, they feature the voices of marginalized groups, unprivileged by this ideology, which present significant counterpoints to this bloody worldview. Those outsiders reveal that finding alternative vocabularies to the bloody discourse of elite groups is both extremely difficult and often ineffectual, further evidenced by their persistence today. Much critical work on blood has examined this discourse as it manifests onstage: as evidence of guilt, the product of violence, or in bleeding figures. This book, instead, examines the work that blood does unseen in its connection to discourses of love and kinship-arbitrating social and emotional connections between persons, and thus underwriting our deepest forms of social organization"--
Download or read book Aretino s Satyr written by Raymond B. Waddington and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pietro Aretino's literary influence was felt throughout most of Europe during the sixteenth-century, yet English-language criticism of this writer's work and persona has hitherto been sparse. Raymond B. Waddington's study redresses this oversight, drawing together literary and visual arts criticism in its examination of Aretino's carefully cultivated scandalous persona - a persona created through his writings, his behaviour and through a wide variety of visual arts and crafts. In the Renaissance, it was believed that satire originated from satyrs. The satirist Aretino promoted himself as a satyr, the natural being whose sexuality guarantees its truthfulness. Waddington shows how Aretino's own construction of his public identity came to eclipse the value of his writings, causing him to be denigrated as a pornographer and blackmailer. Arguing that Aretino's deployment of an artistic network for self-promotional ends was so successful that for a period his face was possibly the most famous in Western Europe, Waddington also defends Aretino, describing his involvement in the larger sphere of the production and promotion of the visual arts of the period. Aretino's Satyr is richly illustrated with examples of the visual media used by the writer to create his persona. These include portraits by major artists, and arti minori: engravings, portrait medals and woodcuts.
Download or read book Renaissance Perceptions of Continuity and Discontinuity in Europe c 1300 c 1550 written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-09-24 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on recent revisionist trends, this book offers a refreshing new perspective on the Renaissance and presents an invaluable examination of continuities and discontinuities from Petrarch to Machiavelli, from Giotto to Dürer, and from Italy to Burgundy, Bohemia and beyond.
Download or read book Creating the Divine Artist written by Patricia A. Emison and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2004 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of why Michelangelo first, and then many other, Renaissance artists and works were called "divine" by contemporaries, this study ranges from fourteenth-century praise of Dante to a variety of sixteenth-century habits of courtly compliment.
Download or read book Self Translation written by Anthony Cordingley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-01-17 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Self-Translation: Brokering originality in hybrid culture provides critical, historical and interdisciplinary analyses of self-translators and their works. It investigates the challenges which the bilingual oeuvre and the experience of the self-translator pose to conventional definitions of translation and the problematic dichotomies of "original" and "translation", "author" and "translator". Canonical self-translators, such Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov and Rabindranath Tagore, are here discussed in the context of previously overlooked self-translators, from Japan to South Africa, from the Basque Country to Scotland. This book seeks therefore to offer a portrait of the diverse artistic and political objectives and priorities of self-translators by investigating different cosmopolitan, post-colonial and indigenous practices. Numerous contributions to this volume extend the scope of self-translation to include the composition of a work out of a multilingual consciousness or society. They demonstrate how production within hybrid contexts requires the negotiation of different languages within the self, generating powerful experiences, from crisis to liberation, and texts that offer key insights into our increasingly globalized culture.
Download or read book Rhetoric and Contingency written by DS Mayfield and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 899 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human life is susceptible of changing suddenly, of shifting inadvertently, of appearing differently, of varying unpredictably, of being altered deliberately, of advancing fortuitously, of commencing or ending accidentally, of a certain malleability. In theory, any human being is potentially capacitated to conceive of—and convey—the chance, view, or fact that matters may be otherwise, or not at all; with respect to other lifeforms, this might be said animal’s distinctive characteristic. This state of play is both an everyday phenomenon, and an indispensable prerequisite for exceptional innovations in culture and science: contingency is the condition of possibility for any of the arts—be they dominantly concerned with thinking, crafting, or enacting. While their scope and method may differ, the (f)act of reckoning with—and taking advantage of—contingency renders rhetoricians and philosophers associates after all. In this regard, Aristotle and Blumenberg will be exemplary, hence provide the framework. Between these diachronic bridgeheads, close readings applying the nexus of rhetoric and contingency to a selection of (Early) Modern texts and authors are intercalated—among them La Celestina, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Wilde, Fontane.
Download or read book Conrad on Film written by Gene M. Moore and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-11-27 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers the first comprehensive, international survey of more than eighty films and videos based on the life and work of Joseph Conrad. Essays by leading film and literary scholars examine the films, both in the context of film history and technology, and in terms of the theoretical and practical problems facing directors - including Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola and Andrzej Wajda - who have attempted to put Conrad on film. Conrad was the first major English author to adapt his work for the screen, and the story of his unpublished 'film-play' is told in an important chapter. The challenges of finding visual analogues for Conrad's narrative irony and filmic equivalents for his narrators are also examined. The volume is well illustrated and includes a detailed filmography and film bibliography, making it a landmark study of Conrad films and film adaptations in general.
Download or read book Gender and the Comic in the Works of Alessandro Piccolomini written by Lizbeth Langston and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
