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The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert "styles." Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W. B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production, and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Worthen's book deserves the attention of any literary critic or serious theatergoer interested in the relationship between modern drama and the spectator.
In Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater, W.B. Worthen examines how the dynamic interplay between dramatic text and stage production shapes the audience's experience in the modern theater. Dividing the "rhetoric" of theatrical performance into three modes--realistic, poetic, and political--Worthen traces the course of British and American drama from the 1880s through the 1980s, showing how textual conventions and performance practices direct the interpretive performance of the theater audience. The realistic theater translates the objectivity associated with science into a vehicle for treating social class. Worthen examines realism's onstage representation of social "others" for an invisible, privileged offstage audience; he discusses the problem drama of the turn of the century (Robins, Shaw, Galsworthy, Glaspell), the experiments of O'Neill, Rice, and the American Method, and the contemporary realism of Pinter, Shepard and Bond. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. The plays of Yeats, Auden, Eliot, and Beckett explore the kinds of authority--over actors and audiences--that poetic theater can achieve. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period (Barnes, Brenton, Churchill, Fornes, Nichols, Osborne, Soyinka) is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Treating a wide variety of plays and drawing extensively on performance history, Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater outlines the strategies that have produced both the modern drama onstage and the modern audience in the theater.
Proving fruitful in various applications throughout its two millennia of predominance, the rhetorical téchne appears to have entertained a particularly symbiotic interrelation with drama. With contributions from (among others) a Classicist, historical, linguistic, musicological, operatic, cultural and literary studies perspective, this publication offers interdisciplinary assessments of specific reciprocities between the system of rhetoric and dramatic works: tracing the longue durée of this nexus—highlighting its Ancient foundations, its various Early Modern formations, as well as certain configurations enduring to this day—enables describing shifting degrees of rhetoricity; approaching it from an interdisciplinary viewpoint facilitates focusing on the often sidelined rhetorical phenomena located beyond the textual plane, specifically memoria and actio; tackling this interchange from various viewpoints and with diverse emphases, a long-lasting and highly prolific cross-fertilization between drama and rhetoric is rendered visible. In tendering a balanced panorama of both detailed case studies and descriptive overviews, this volume also points toward terrain yet to be charted in the scholarship to come. The volume was prepared in co-operation with the ERC Advanced Grant Project Early Modern European Drama and the Cultural Net (DramaNet).
Why did medieval dramatists weave so many scenes of torture into their plays? Exploring the cultural connections among rhetoric, law, drama, literary creation, and violence, Jody Enders addresses an issue that has long troubled students of the Middle Ages. Theories of rhetoric and law of the time reveal, she points out, that the ideology of torture was a widely accepted means for exploiting such essential elements of the stage and stagecraft as dramatic verisimilitude, pity, fear, and catharsis to fabricate truth. Analyzing the consequences of torture for the history of aesthetics in general and of drama in particular, Enders shows that if the violence embedded in the history of rhetoric is acknowledged, we are better able to understand not only the enduring "theater of cruelty" identified by theorists from Isidore of Seville to Antonin Artaud, but also the continuing modern devotion to the spectacle of pain.
Consistently daring while being solid, W.B. Worthen's selection of plays now includes topical and provocative pieces like Sophie Treadwell's Machinal and classroom favorites like William Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Luis Valdez's Los vendidos, and Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian's The Other Shore. --Book Jacket.
Featuring roughly sixty specially commissioned essays by an international cast of leading rhetoric experts from North America, Europe, and Great Britain, the Handbook will offer readers a comprehensive topical and historical survey of the theory and practice of rhetoric from ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment up to the present day.
In Hamlet, when the melancholy prince kills Polonius, the dramatic tension is enhanced by the audience's knowledge that Polonius lurks behind the curtain, and that Hamlet will mistake him for his detested stepfather. Though this tension is understood and appreciated by readers of the play, its dynamics of raw intensity are perhaps best understood by the interplay between performers and audience members. By addressing both enthusiasts of theater and enthusiasts of dramatic literature, Thaiss and Davis demonstrate how one's understanding of drama is enriched by critical attention to both performance and text. It specifically addresses the writing needs of a novice playwright, not in conjunction with "writing about literature," but about the play as subject in its own right. This book provides critical analysis of play texts, as well as performance reviews, theater history research, and other examples that enliven understanding and promote versatility. In its sequence of chapters, it addresses projects of increasing sophistication, from performance reviews and play analyses to theater history research and dramatic theory papers. As a general guide to good writing, this book also promotes learning and critical/creative thought. Introductory chapters cover the principles of good writing and offer strategies to help readers overcome writer's block, organize effectively and avoid common usage and style pitfalls. Anyone interested in drama and/or literature.
"When the world comes to an end," Viennese writer Karl Kraus lamented in 1908, "all the big city orchestras will still be playing The Merry Widow." Viennese operettas like Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow were preeminent cultural texts during the Austro-Hungarian Empire's final years. Alternately hopeful and nihilistic, operetta staged contemporary debates about gender, nationality, and labor. The Operetta Empire delves into this vibrant theatrical culture, whose creators simultaneously sought the respectability of high art and the popularity of low entertainment. Case studies examine works by Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán, Oscar Straus, and Leo Fall in light of current musicological conversations about hybridity and middlebrow culture. Demonstrating a thorough mastery of the complex early twentieth‐century Viennese cultural scene, and a sympathetic and redemptive critique of a neglected popular genre, Micaela Baranello establishes operetta as an important element of Viennese cultural life—one whose transgressions helped define the musical hierarchies of its day.
"A must-have for all actors who encounter speeches that are longer than three sentences. On the surface, that would be classic works from Sophocles through Shakespeare—with the 17th and 18th centuries thrown in. Dig deeper and the book’s value to actors of modern and contemporary drama is inescapable. Ibsen, Shaw, Williams, Miller, Shepard, Wilson, Kushner, and Suzan-Lori Parks all wrote plays that are filled with powerful rhetorical devices that demand lively, thorough, and specific consideration. This book is a guide that unfolds the mysteries of classical rhetoric in a clear, concise, and effective manner, a book for speakers who want to move their audiences. It is aimed at actors, but also belongs on the shelf of lawyers, advertising copywriters, and, of course, public officials. I will use it in my classes and workshops and enthusiastically recommended it to all actors and actor trainers." —Leslie Reidel, Department of Theatre, University of Delaware