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John Dryden and the Late 17Th Century Dramatic Experience Lecture 16 (C) by Asher Ashkar Gohar 1 Credit Hr
JOHN DRYDEN AND THE LATE 17TH CENTURY DRAMATIC EXPERIENCE LECTURE 16 (C) BY ASHER ASHKAR GOHAR 1 CREDIT HR. JOHN DRYDEN (1631 – 1700) HIS LIFE: John Dryden was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who was made England's first Poet Laureate in 1668. He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the “Age of Dryden”. The son of a country gentleman, Dryden grew up in the country. When he was 11 years old the Civil War broke out. Both his father’s and mother’s families sided with Parliament against the king, but Dryden’s own sympathies in his youth are unknown. About 1644 Dryden was admitted to Westminster School, where he received a predominantly classical education under the celebrated Richard Busby. His easy and lifelong familiarity with classical literature begun at Westminster later resulted in idiomatic English translations. In 1650 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. degree in 1654. What Dryden did between leaving the university in 1654 and the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 is not known with certainty. In 1659 his contribution to a memorial volume for Oliver Cromwell marked him as a poet worth watching. His “heroic stanzas” were mature, considered, sonorous, and sprinkled with those classical and scientific allusions that characterized his later verse. This kind of public poetry was always one of the things Dryden did best. On December 1, 1663, he married Elizabeth Howard, the youngest daughter of Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Berkshire. -
Human Sacrifice and Seventeenth- Century Economics: Otway's Venice
id3316428 pdfMachine by Broadgun Software - a great PDF writer! - a great PDF creator! - http://www.pdfmachine.com http://www.broadgun.com HUMAN SACRIFICE AND SEVENTEENTH- CENTURY ECONOMICS: OTWAY’S VENICE PRESERV’D Derek Hughes University of Warwick Whereas human sacrifice in Virgil in inseparable from Aeneas’ mission, Tasso and his imitators repeatedly oppose Christian imperialism to the practice of human sacrifice, and see such imperialism as culminating in the abolition of cannibalistic sacrifice in the New World. The contrary view?? That European civilization itself embodied forms of sacrificial barbarity appears not only in the well-known condemnations of conquistador atrocities but, in England, in critical accounts of the growing culture of measurement, enumeration, and monetary exchange. Answering the contention that the East Indies trade did not justify the sacrifice of lives that it entailed, Dudley Digges responded by citing Neptune’s justification in the Aeneid of the sacrifice of Palinurusto the cause of empire: “unum pro multis [dabitur caput].” Not all authors were, however, so complacent. Particularly in the late seventeenth-century, authors such as Dryden, Otway, and Aphra Behn came to see the burgeoning trading economy as embodying systems of exchange which, in reducing the individual to an economic cipher, recreated the primal exchanges of human sacrifice. In Venice Preserv’d (1682), for example, Otway depicts an advanced, seventeenth-century trading empire, initially regulated by clocks, calendars, documents, and coinage. As the play proceeds, these are increasingly revealed to be elaborations of more primitive forms of exchange. A perpetually imminent regression to pre-social anarchy is staved off by what Otway portrays as the originary forms of economic transaction: the submissive offering of weapons to potential foes (daggers change hands far more often than coins) or the offering of the body in the act of human sacrifice. -
The Heroic Tragedy
The Heroic Tragedy Heroic Tragedy is a name given to the form of tragedy which had some vogue in the beginning of the Restoration period (1660-1700). It was drama in the epic mode – grand, rhetorical and declamatory at its best and often bombastic at its worst. Its themes were love and honour, and it was considerably influenced by French classical drama, especially by the works of Corneille and Racine. John Dryden thus defined it in the preface to The Conquest of Granada (1672) : “ An heroic play ought to be an imitation, in little, of an heroic poem ; and consequently … love and valour ought to be the subject of it”. In these plays, as in an epic, the protagonist is a large-scale warrior whose actions involve the fate of an empire. A noble hero and an equally noble heroine are typically placed in a situation in which their passionate love is in conflict with the demands of honour and with the hero’s patriotic duty to his country. When the conflict ends in a disaster, the effect is a tragedy. Heroic drama was staged in a spectacular and operatic fashion, and in it one can detect the influences of opera which, at this time, was establishing itself. The two main early works of this genre were The Siege of Rhodes (1656) and The Spaniards in Peru (1658) by Sir William Davenant who was virtually the pioneer of English opera and who promoted heroic drama. The main plays thereafter were Robert Howard’s The Indian Queen (1665) and those by Dryden. -
Moral Vision in the Drama of Thomas Otway
MORAL VISION IN THE DRAMA OF THOMAS OTWAY By JOHN DAVID WALKER A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE COUNCIL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE KEQIHEEMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA June, 1967 ..i^.l^lVERSITY OF FLORIDA 3 1262 08552 4071 PR^ACE What Is known about Thomas Otway extends but a short distance beyond his artistic achievements. Records of his life are sparse, and other than his date and place of birth (3 March, 1652, Milland in the parish of Trotton, Sussex); his matriculation at Winchester College and (1668) and Oxford (1669) ; his military service in Flanders (1678) ; his death (14 April, 1685), little else has been uncovered. Scholars, however, have taken Otway's The Poet's Complaint of his Muse (1680) as being autobiographical, and without any objective sources to corrobo- rate the "facts" of the poem, have "constructed" from it a biography, disregarding the transformation which may occur to a poet's history when 2 subjected to the pressures of an artistic mold. Though there are no extant manuscripts written by Otway, biograph- ers have assumed that six letters published in 1697 in a volume entitled Familiar Letters by the Earl of Rochester . And several other Persons of Honour and Quality and "signed" with Otway's name are genuine. The letters bear no superscription, yet biographers uncritically have accepted a statement made in 1713 by the original publishers of the See J. C. Ghosh, The Works of Thomas Otway (Oxford, 1932), I, 6-29, All quotations from Otway's works are taken from this edition. -
Thesis Final Copy
Affect, Audience and Genre: Reading the Connection between the Restoration Playhouse and the Secret History by Erin M. Keating M.A., Concordia University, 2006 B.A., Wilfrid Laurier University, 1998 THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of English Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences © Erin M. Keating 2012 Simon Fraser University Spring 2012 All rights reserved. However, in accordance with the Copyright Act of Canada, this work may be reproduced, without authorization, under the conditions for "Fair Dealing." Therefore, limited reproduction of this work for the purposes of private study, research, criticism, review and news reporting is likely to be in accordance with the law, particularly if cited appropriately. APPROVAL Name: Erin Keating Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Title of Thesis: Affect, Audience and Genre: Reading the Connection between the Restoration Playhouse and the Secret History Examining Committee: __________________________________________ Dr. Carolyn Lesjak Graduate Chair and Associate Professor of English __________________________________________ Dr. Betty Schellenberg Senior Supervisor Professor of English __________________________________________ Dr. Diana Solomon 2nd Reader Assistant Professor of English __________________________________________ Dr. Peter Dickinson 3rd Reader Professor of English __________________________________________ Dr. Lisa Shapiro Internal Examiner Chair and Associate Professor of Philosophy __________________________________________ -
136 December 2000
PRESIDENT: J Scott McCracken BA FSA MIFA VICE PRESIDENTS: Viscountess Hanworth, Arthur Turner, Lionel Green and William Rudd BULLETIN NO. 136 DECEMBER 2000 PROGRAMME DECEMBER-MARCH Tuesday 12 December 2.30pm British Library, guided tour Meet at 2.20 at the information desk. The Library is at 96 Euston Road. Nearest station St Pancras. Cost £5/£3.50. (Fully booked). Coffee shop and restaurant available. Saturday 20 January 2.30pm Snuff Mill Centre Peter Tilley: ‘The Kingston Project’ This project, based at Kingston University, extracts details from censuses, parish registers, directories and similar sources for Kingston town in the second half of the 19th century. The information is being used to build up a picture of local families and life-cycles. The speaker will illustrate his talk. (Drivers should use the Morden Hall Garden Centre car-park. Take the path across the bridge; go through the gateway towards Morden Cottage. The Snuff Mill is straight ahead. Bus routes 118,157,164) Saturday 17 February 2.30pm The Canons John and Jo Brewster: ‘The Story of Southwark Cathedral’ The speakers are ‘Working Friends’ of the Cathedral, who give their active support as regular guides. Their talk will be illustrated with slides. We have booked a visit on 26 May, when the Brewsters hope to be our guides. (The Canons is in Madeira Road, Mitcham, close to bus routes 118 and 152 and the Mitcham Tramlink stop. Use the leisure centre car-park.) Saturday 17 March 2.30pm Mill House Ecology Centre, Mitcham Martin Boyle: ‘The Wildlife of Mitcham Common’ Martin Boyle is Warden of Mitcham Common. -
SS Library Anthologies
Titles An Anthology of Greek Drama: First Series (Edited by C.A. Robinson Jr.) Aeschylus: Agamemnon Sophocles: Oedipus the King, Antigone Euripides: Medea, Hippolytus Aristophones: Lysistrata An Anthology of Greek Drama: Second Series (Edited by C.A. Robinson Jr.) Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound, Choephoroe, Eumenides Sophocles: Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus Euripes: The Trojan Women, The Bacchae Aristophanes: The Clouds, The Frogs Greek Drama (Edited by Moses Hadas) Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Summary of Choephoroe, Eumenides Sophocles: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Summary of Oedipus at Colonus, Philoctetes Euripides: Medea, Hippolytus, The Trojan War Aristophanes: The Frogs Greek Tragedies, Volume I (Edited by Grene & Lattimore) Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound Sophocles: Oedipus the King, Antigone Euripides: Hippolytus Classical Comedy, Greek and Roman (Edited by Robert W. Corrigan) Aristophones: Lysistrata, The Birds Menander: The Grouch Plautus: The Menaechmi, Mostellaria Terence: The Self-Tormentor Masters of Ancient Comedy (Edited by Lionel Casson) Aristophenes: The Acharnians Mendander: The Grouch, The Woman of Sarnos, The Arbitration, She Who Was Shorn Plautus: The Haunted House, The Rope Terence: Phormio, The Brothers Farces, Italian Style (Edited by Bari Rolfe) The Phantom Father Dr Arlecchino or the Imaginary Autopsee The Dumb Wife The Kind Father in Spite of Himself The Lovers of Bologna Commedia Dell'Arte (Edited by Bari Rolfe) 20 Lazzi 35 Scenes The Lovers of Verona Drama of the English Renaissance (Edited by M.L. Wine) Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus Thomas Dekker: The Shoemaker's Holiday, A Pleasant Comedy of the Gentle Craft Ben Jonson: Volpone or The Foe Francis Beaumont: The Knight of the Burning Pestle Ben Jonson: The Masque of Blackness Francis Beaumont & John Fletcher: Philaster John Webster: The Duchess of Malfi Thomas Middleton & William Rowley: The Changeling John Ford: The Broken Heart Four English Tragedies (Edited by J.M. -
Mthaniel Lee «S Ri7al Queens
MTHANIEL LEE «S RI7AL QUEENS: A STUDY OF DRAMATIC TASTE AND TECHNIQUE IN THE RESTORATION DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State U niversity By NANCY ELOISE LE^S, A.B., M.A. The Ohio State U niversity 1957 Approved by: Department of English TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I INTRODUCTION.......... ......................................................................... 1 II ALEXANDI-R AS H E R O ................................................................... 13 III Tr^ RIVAL QUEENS AS T R A G E D Y .......................................... kS n Ç E RIVAL QUEENS ON THE BOARDS............................................ 86 V n&&^IIC]3FLm#K% OF THE RIVAL QUEENS . 128 BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................................................... 158 XI CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION In the annals of English drama, the period of the Restoration is labeled chiefly as the age of the comedy of manners, the witty, sophis ticated, amoral society comedy written primarily for the pleasure of the audience of nobility and gentry that attended the theatres duiring the reign of Charles II. Critical studies devoted to this genre have been numerous; the plays of Etherege, t^cherley, and Congreve, as w ell as those of their lesser contemporaries in this field, have been examined in d ivid u ally and c o lle c tiv e ly by scholars of several genera tions. Aesthetically, such attention seems justified. Restoration plays which have survived their age are, for the most part, ccmedies. Dryden’s All for Love is the only notable exception. The serious drama of the Restoration is just as representative of the age, notwithstanding its limitations as lasting literature; indeed, Allardyce Nicoll calls heroic tragedy "that most characteristic of all the Restoration theatrical species."^ Thus it cannot be ignored in any 1. -
UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Mongrel Forms Tragedy
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Mongrel Forms Tragedy, Comedy, and Mixed Genres in Britain, 1680-1760 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Vivian Leigh Davis 2012 © Copyright by Vivian Leigh Davis 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Mongrel Forms Tragedy, Comedy, and Mixed Genres in Britain, 1680-1760 By Vivian Leigh Davis Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2012 Professor Felicity A. Nussbaum, Chair This dissertation analyzes the unlicensed mixtures of tragedy and comedy that appeared in the playhouses, periodicals, and novels of the eighteenth century. Scholars have argued that in the Restoration’s coterie theaters, the Hegelian dialectic of tragicomedy functioned as a heuristic device for debates about political theory. “Mongrel forms” extends this premise, contending that by the turn into the eighteenth century, the tidiness of bipartite tragicomedy had been replaced by powerful ideas about generic contagion and corruption. For an increasingly bourgeois audience, tragicomic monsters and mongrels, widely derided by literary and dramatic critics, became associated less with debates about kingship and more closely aligned with a discourse on the perils and pleasures of different kinds of social mixing. As dramatic genres were mediated by live, feeling bodies, the “mongrelization” of tragedy and comedy created sites of contact in which social categories, such as race, class, gender and sexuality, could be contested or confirmed. Inverted generic hierarchies, and the social re-organization they intimated, could be ii attacked as aesthetically monstrous. The blended form’s resistance to regulation was also deployed subversively to make visible identities and experiences not otherwise legible. -
The Reception of Ancient Greek Tragedy in England 1660- 1760
THE RECEPTION OF ANCIENT GREEK TRAGEDY IN ENGLAND 1660- 1760 Michael Waters, University College London Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 1 I, Michael Waters confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 ABSTRACT The dissertation enquires into some of the forms that the reception of ancient Greek tragedy took in England between 1660 and 1760. It looks at those critics and translators who engaged most with ancient Greek tragedy and whose engagement was accompanied by an interest in ancient theory and native English literature. Chapter 1, after examining works by George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmershe, Thomas Goffe, Thomas May and Christopher Wase, considers William Joyner’s original tragedy The Roman Empress (1670) in order to see what use Joyner made of Sophocles’ Oedipus and Euripides’ Hippolytus and Medea. Chapter 2 turns to the writings of, especially, John Dryden, Thomas Rymer, John Dennis and Charles Gildon, who were the most prolific and interesting commentators on dramatic theory in England at this time, and assesses their different perspectives on the questions of tragedy and the modern stage. Chapter 3 addresses separately comments on ancient Greek tragedy contained in Jeremy Collier’s attack on contemporary English theatre in A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) and in replies to him. Chapter 4 concentrates on Lewis Theobald’s translations of Sophocles’ Electra (1714) and Oedipus (1715) and how his views of ancient Greek tragedy influenced, and were influenced by, his interest in Shakespeare, an edition of whose plays he published in 1733. -
A Re-Examination of Spectacle and the Spectacular in Restoration Theatre, 1660-1714
Changing Scenes and Flying Machines: A Re-examination of Spectacle and the Spectacular in Restoration Theatre, 1660-1714 Lyndsey Bakewell A Doctoral Thesis Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy at Loughborough University October 2015 ©Lyndsey Bakewell, 2015 i Abstract Changing Scenes and Flying Machines: A Re-examination of Spectacle in Restoration Theatre, 1660-1714. Key words: Restoration Theatre, Spectacle, Plays, Machinery, Scenery, Costumes, Performers, Puppetry, Automata, Special Effects. This thesis builds upon the existing scholarship of theatrical historians such as Robert D. Hume, Judith Milhous and Jocelyn Powell, and seeks to broaden the notion of the term spectacle in relation to Restoration theatrical performances, as defined by Milhous as scenery, machinery, large cast sizes and music.1 By arguing that we should not see spectacle in Restoration theatre merely in terms of machinery and scenery, as some have done, but that it properly includes a wider range of elements, such as puppetry and performers, the thesis contends that spectacle on the Restoration stage was more of an integral aspect of theatrical development than previously thought. Through drawing on the wide aspects of theatrical presentation, including setting, stage use, mechanics, costumes and properties, puppetry and performers, this thesis examines how the numerous aspects of the Restoration performance, both in their singularity and as a collective, provided a performance driven by spectacle in order to create an appealing entertainment for its audience. In order to navigate and appreciate the complexity of theatrical performance in this period, the thesis has been divided into key aspects of theatrical presentation, each of which are argued to offer a variant of spectacle. -
Gendering Fear Heroic Figurations and Fearful Imagination in Restoration Drama
Gendering Fear Heroic Figurations and Fearful Imagination in Restoration Drama Christiane Hansen In European cultures, concepts of the heroic are closely interrelated with con- cepts of fear. Fear, to different degrees, is something the hero or heroine not only experiences, but – as a transgressive and perplexing figure – might also inspire. Variously, critics have assumed that a climate or background of collective fear is one of the potential factors associated with the cultural production of and de- mand for heroic figures. Fear, moreover, intersects with frameworks of awe and admiration, with the poetics of tragedy and the pathetic, and is thus closely linked to the shifting aesthetic paradigms within which heroic figures are (re)shaped. Yet, instead of proposing an essentialist explanation of how fear func- tions within a cultural syntax of heroic figurations, my essay will adopt an em- phatically historical perspective by outlining how cultural negotiations of the he- roic in Restoration England made use of contemporary concepts of fear and fearlessness. Focusing on the intersection of heroic concepts with the shifting poetics of the stage, it will single out a distinctive and – as will be argued – cru- cially important aspect: the interrelation of fear and imagination.1 In line with the concept of gender as a ‘tracer’,2 it will be suggested to use the category of gender, and the relationality it implies, to lay bare the entanglements of fear and fearful imagination with constructions of (heroic) exceptionality. To that end, samples from prototypical English royalist drama of the early 1670s – John Dryden’s Conquest of Granada and Tyrannick Love – will be compared to plays of the early 1680s, most importantly, Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d, which under the impression of political and aesthetic crisis already exemplify a strong drift towards pathetic tragedy.