Download or read book Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres written by Matthew Steggle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did Shakespeare's original audiences weep? Equally, while it seems obvious that they must have laughed at plays performed in early modern theatres, can we say anything about what their laughter sounded like, about when it occurred, and about how, culturally, it was interpreted? Related to both of these problems of audience behaviour is that of the stage representation of laughing, and weeping, both actions performed with astonishing frequency in early modern drama. Each action is associated with a complex set of non-verbal noises, gestures, and cultural overtones, and each is linked to audience behaviour through one of the axioms of Renaissance dramatic theory: that weeping and laughter on stage cause, respectively, weeping and laughter in the audience. This book is a study of laughter and weeping in English theatres, broadly defined, from around 1550 until their closure in 1642. It is concerned both with the representation of these actions on the stage, and with what can be reconstructed about the laughter and weeping of theatrical audiences themselves, arguing that both actions have a peculiar importance in defining the early modern theatrical experience.

Download or read book Greek Laughter and Tears written by Margaret Alexiou and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-05 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the range and complexity of human emotions and their transmission across cultural traditionsWhat makes us laugh and cry, sometimes at the same time? How do these two primal, seemingly discrete and non-verbal modes of expression intersect in everyday life and ritual, and what range of emotions do they evoke? How may they be voiced, shaped and coloured in literature and liturgy, art and music?Bringing together scholars from diverse periods and disciplines of Hellenic and Byzantine studies, this volume explores the shifting shapes and functions of laughter and tears. With a focus on the tragic, the comic and the tragicomic dimensions of laughter and tears in art, literature and performance, as well as on their emotional, socio-cultural and religious significance, it breaks new ground in the study of ancient and Byzantine affectivity.Key featuresIncludes an international cast of 25 distinguished contributors Prominence is given to performative arts and to interactions with other cultures Transitions from Late Antiquity to Byzantium, and from Byzantium to the Renaissance, form focal points from which contributors look backwards, forwards and sidewaysHighlights the variety, audacity and quality of the finest Byzantine works and the extent to which they anticipated the renaissance

Download or read book Laughter Humor and Comedy in Ancient Philosophy written by Pierre Destrée and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient philosophers were very interested in questions about laughter, humor and comedy. They theorized about laughter and its causes, moralized about the appropriate uses of humor and what it is appropriate to laugh at, and wrote treaties on comedic composition. This volume explores themes that were important for ancient philosophers: the psychology of laughter, the ethical and social norms governing laughter and humor, and the philosophical uses of humor and comedic technique.

Download or read book Luke Paideia Commentaries on the New Testament written by Mikeal C. Parsons and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2015-02-10 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mikeal Parsons, a leading scholar on Luke and Acts, examines cultural context and theological meaning in Luke in this addition to the well-received Paideia series. This commentary, like each in the projected eighteen-volume series, proceeds by sense units rather than word-by-word or verse-by-verse. Paideia commentaries explore how New Testament texts form Christian readers by attending to the ancient narrative and rhetorical strategies the text employs, showing how the text shapes theological convictions and moral habits, and making judicious use of maps, photos, and sidebars in a reader-friendly format.

Download or read book Paideia at Play written by Werner Riess and published by Barkhuis. This book was released on 2008 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paidea, the yearning for, and display of knowledge, reached its height as a cultural concept in the works of the Second Sophistic, an elite literary and philosophical movement seeking to ape the style and achievements of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. A crucial element in the display of paidea was an ability to mix the witty and playful with the serious and instructive. The Second Sophistic is known as a Greek phenomenon, but these essays ask how the Latin author Apuleius fitted into this framework, and created a distinctively latin expression of paidea, focusing on the elements of playfulness at its heart.

Download or read book A Handbook to the Reception of Greek Drama written by Betine van Zyl Smit and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-02-29 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Handbook to the Reception of Greek Drama offers a series of original essays that represent a comprehensive overview of the global reception of ancient Greek tragedies and comedies from antiquity to the present day. Represents the first volume to offer a complete overview of the reception of ancient drama from antiquity to the present Covers the translation, transmission, performance, production, and adaptation of Greek tragedy from the time the plays were first created in ancient Athens through the 21st century Features overviews of the history of the reception of Greek drama in most countries of the world Includes chapters covering the reception of Greek drama in modern opera and film

Download or read book Aristophanes in Performance 421 BC AD 2007 written by Edith Hall and published by MHRA. This book was released on 2007 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flying to Heaven to demand an end to war, building Cloudcuckooland in the sky, descending to Hades to retrieve a dead tragedian - such were the cosmic missions on which Aristophanes, the father of comedy, sent his heroes of the classical Athenian stage. The wit, intellectual bravura, political clout and sheer imaginative power of Aristophanes' quest dramas have profoundly influenced humorous literature and satire, but this volume, which originated at an international conference held at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford University in 2004, is the first interdisciplinary study of their seminal contribution to the evolution of comic performance. Interdisciplinary essays by specialists in Classics, Theatre, and Modern Literatures trace the international performance history of Aristophanic comedy, and its implication in aesthetic and political controversies, from antiquity to the twenty-first century. The story encompasses Jonson's satire, Cromwell's Ireland, German classicism, British Imperial India, censorship scandals in France, Greece and South Africa, Brechtian experiments in East Berlin, and musical theatre from Gilbert and Sullivan to Stephen Sondheim.

Download or read book Norms and Nobility written by David V. Hicks and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-08-06 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reissue of a classic text, Norms and Nobility is a provocative reappraisal of classical education that offers a workable program for contemporary school reform. David Hicks contends that the classical tradition promotes a spirit of inquiry that is concerned with the development of style and conscience, which makes it an effective and meaningful form of education. Dismissing notions that classical education is elitist and irrelevant, Hicks argues that the classical tradition can meet the needs of our increasingly technological society as well as serve as a feasible model for mass education.

Download or read book Talking about Laughter written by Alan H. Sommerstein and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2009-03-05 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fourteen studies, including some previously unpublished, by Alan Sommerstein on Aristophanes and his fellow dramatists. Each chapter deals with its own topic, but between them they build up a multifaceted picture of the dramatist, the genre, and its interactions with the society of classical Athens.

Download or read book Laughing Atoms Laughing Matter written by T. H. M. Gellar-Goad and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-02-14 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laughing Atoms, Laughing Matter: Lucretius' De Rerum Natura and Satire offers the first comprehensive examination of Roman epic poet Lucretius’ engagement with satire. Author T. H. M. Gellar-Goad argues that what has often been understood as an artfully persuasive exposition of Epicurean philosophy designed to convert the uninitiated is actually a mimesis of the narrator’s attempt to effect such a conversion on his internal narrative audience—a performance for the true audience of the poem, whose members take pleasure from uncovering the literary games and the intertextual engagement that the performance entails. Gellar-Goad aims to track De Rerum Natura along two paths of satire: first, the broad boulevard of satiric literature from the beginnings of Greek poetry to the plays, essays, and broadcast media of the modern world; and second, the narrower lane of Roman verse satire, satura, beginning with early authors Ennius and Lucilius and closing with Flavian poet Juvenal. Lucilius is revealed as a major, yet overlooked, influence on Lucretius. By examining how Lucretius’ poem employs the tools of satire, we gain a richer understanding of how it interacts with its purported philosophical program.

Download or read book Courtesans at Table written by Laura McClure and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witty nicknames, crude jokes, public nudity and lavish monuments, all of these things distinguished Greek courtesans from respectable citizen women in ancient Greece. Although prostitutes appear as early as archaic Greek lyric poetry, our fullest accounts come from the late second century CE. Drawing on Book 13 of the Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae--which contains almost all known references to hetaeras from all periods of Greek literature--Laura K. McClure has created a window onto the ways ancient Greeks perceived the courtesan and the role of the courtesan in Greek life.

Download or read book Alexander written by Harold Littledale and published by Purple House Press. This book was released on 2016-07-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was bedtime. Chris and his father sat down side by side on Chris's bed. They talked of Chris's friend Alexander, the red horse with green stripes. "Alexander was a pretty bad horse today," Chris said. "He wouldn't eat his cereal. He wouldn't sit up at the table and he spilled his milk." "That's too bad," said Chris's father. "What else happened?" The ensuing conversation of Alexander's bad day makes for an entertaining read, along with its priceless ending.

Download or read book Lucian s Laughing Gods written by Inger NI Kuin and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2023-04-10 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English-language monograph about religion and Lucian of Samosata

Download or read book Ben Jonson Renaissance Dramatist written by Sean McEvoy and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-17 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new guide to the English renaissance's most erudite and yet most street-wise dramatist strongly asserts the theatrical brilliance of his greatest plays in performance, then and now.The book integrates all of Jonson's major plays into the milieu of the turbulent years which produced them, and analyses the way each work examines the issues and challenges of those years: money, power, sex, crime, identity, gender, the theatre itself. It offers a lucid guide to the competing critical views of a playwright who is far more than the obverse of his friend and rival William Shakespeare, and it explains in detail how the undoubted power and energy of these plays in modern performance should be the touchstone of their quality to both critic and reader. The plays discussed include the early Comedies, the Roman Tragedies (Sejanus and Catiline), Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair and The Devil is an Ass.

Download or read book Subversive Virtue written by James A. Francis and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much attention has been devoted in recent years to Christian asceticism in Late Antiquity. But Christianity did not introduce asceticism to the ancient world. An underlying theme of this fascinating study of pagan asceticism is that much of the work on Christian &"holy men&" has ignored earlier manifestations of asceticism in Antiquity and the way Roman society confronted it. Accordingly, James Francis turns to the second century, the &"balmy late afternoon of Rome's classical empire,&" when the conflict between asceticism and authority reached a turning point. Francis begins with the emperor Marcus Aurelius (121&–180), who warned in his Meditations against &"display[ing] oneself as a man keen to impress others with a reputation for asceticism or beneficence.&" The Stoic Aurelius saw ascetic self-discipline as a virtue, but one to be exercised in moderation. Like other Roman aristocrats of his day, he perceived practitioners of ostentatious physical asceticism as a threat to prevailing norms and the established order. Prophecy, sorcery, miracle working, charismatic leadership, expressions of social discontent, and advocacy of alternative values regarding wealth, property, marriage, and sexuality were the issues provoking the controversy. If Aurelius defined the acceptable limits of ascetical practice, then the poet Lucian depicted the threat ascetics were perceived to pose to the social status quo through his biting satire. In an eye-opening analysis of Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Francis shows how Roman society reined in its deviant ascetics by &"rehabilitating&" them into pillars of traditional values. Celsus's True Doctrine shows how the views pagans held of their own ascetics influenced their negative view of Christianity. Finally, Francis points out striking parallels between the conflict over pagan asceticism and its Christian counterpart. By treating pagan asceticism seriously in its own right, Francis establishes the context necessary for understanding the great flowering of asceticism in Late Antiquity

Download or read book Allusions and Reflections written by Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-06-18 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In June 2012, scholars from a number of disciplines and countries gathered in Stockholm to discuss the representation of ancient mythology in Renaissance Europe. This symposium was an opportunity for the participants to cross disciplinary borders and to problematize a well-researched field. The aim was to move beyond a view of mythology as mere propaganda in order to promote an understanding of ancient tales and fables as contemporary means to explain and comprehend the Early Modern world. W ...

Download or read book The Shorter Socratic Writings written by Xenophon and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents translations of three dialogues Xenophon devoted to the life and thought of his teacher, Socrates. Each is accompanied by notes and an interpretative essay that will introduce new readers to Xenophon and foster further reflection in those familiar with his writing. "Apology of Socrates to the Jury" shows how Socrates conducted himself when he was tried on the capital charge of not believing in the city's gods and corrupting the young. Although Socrates did not secure his own acquittal, he profoundly impressed some listeners who then helped to shape the public perception of philosophy as a noble, if highly idiosyncratic, way of life. In "Oeconomicus," Xenophon relates the conversation Socrates had on the day he turned from the study of natural philosophy to that of moral and political matters. "Oeconomicus" is concerned most directly with the character and purpose of Socrates' political philosophy. Xenophon provides entertaining portraits of Socrates' circle of friends in the "Symposium." In the process, he conveys the source of every individual's pride in himself, thus defining for each a conception of human excellence or virtue. The dialogue concludes with Socrates' beautiful speech on love (eros) and its proper place in the good or happy life.