Anthem Studies in Theatre and Performance – serie

‘Molière on Stage’ takes the reader onstage, backstage and into the audience of Molière’s plays, analyzing the performance of his works in both his own time and in ours. Written by a professional stage director with over fifty years’ experience directing and translating Molière, this text explores how the playwright strove to create a communal experience of shared laughter, and investigates four key topics relating to this achievement: Molière’s early experiences that lead to his later theater experiences; his central great plays of love and lust; his comedic genius and his passion for the stage; and the final words and performances of his life.

‘Molière on Stage’ takes the reader onstage, backstage and into the audience of Molière’s plays, analyzing the performance of his works in both his own time and in ours. Written by a professional stage director with over fifty years’ experience directing and translating Molière, this text explores how the playwright strove to create a communal experience of shared laughter, and investigates four key topics relating to this achievement: Molière’s early experiences that lead to his later theater experiences; his central great plays of love and lust; his comedic genius and his passion for the stage; and the final words and performances of his life.

“On Beckett: Essays and Criticism” is the first collection of writings about the Nobel Prize–winning author that covers the entire spectrum of his work, and also affords a rare glimpse of the private Beckett. More has been written about Samuel Beckett than about any other writer of this century – countless books and articles dealing with him are in print, and the progression continues geometrically. “On Beckett” brings together some of the most perceptive writings from the vast amount of scrutiny that has been lavished on the man; in addition to widely read essays there are contributions from more obscure sources, viewpoints not frequently seen. Together they allow the reader to enter the world of a writer whose work has left an impact on the consciousness of our time perhaps unmatched by that of any other recent creative imagination.

The vanished world of India’s late-colonial theatre provides the backdrop for the autobiographies in this book. The life-stories of a quartet of early Indian actors and poet-playwrights are here translated into English for the first time. These men were schooled not in the classroom but in large theatrical companies run by Parsi entrepreneurs. Their memoirs, replete with anecdote and humor, are as significant to the understanding of the nationalist era as the lives of political leaders or social reformers.

The idea of the tragic has permeated Western culture for millennia, and has been expressed theatrically since the time of the ancient Greeks. However, it was in the Europe of the twentieth century – one of the most violent periods of human history – that the tragic form significantly developed. ‘Modern European Tragedy’ examines the consciousness of this era, drawing a picture of the development of the tragic through an in-depth analysis of some of the twentieth century’s most outstanding texts.

“On Beckett: Essays and Criticism” is the first collection of writings about the Nobel Prize–winning author that covers the entire spectrum of his work, and also affords a rare glimpse of the private Beckett. More has been written about Samuel Beckett than about any other writer of this century – countless books and articles dealing with him are in print, and the progression continues geometrically. “On Beckett” brings together some of the most perceptive writings from the vast amount of scrutiny that has been lavished on the man; in addition to widely read essays there are contributions from more obscure sources, viewpoints not frequently seen. Together they allow the reader to enter the world of a writer whose work has left an impact on the consciousness of our time perhaps unmatched by that of any other recent creative imagination.

A primary focus of ‘Sites of Performance: Of Time and Memory’ is the impact of time and memory as they intersect and constitute the varied spaces of theatre. These spaces include more traditional sites of theatre, such as those involving stages and curtains, actors and audiences, as well as those other theatres or spaces of performance that range from performance and installation art, to the performance of a string quartet, and from the writing of performance, to the performance of writing.

The idea of the tragic has permeated Western culture for millennia, and has been expressed theatrically since the time of the ancient Greeks. However, it was in the Europe of the twentieth century – one of the most violent periods of human history – that the tragic form significantly developed. ‘Modern European Tragedy’ examines the consciousness of this era, drawing a picture of the development of the tragic through an in-depth analysis of some of the twentieth century’s most outstanding texts.

In addition to providing the first English translation of the anticolonial Marathi classic ‘Kichaka-Vadha’, this volume is the only edition of the play, in any language, to provide an extensive historical-critical analysis which draws on a comprehensive range of archival documents. It is also the first study to locate this landmark text within such an expansive theatre-historical and political landscape. ‘Globalization, Nationalism and the Text of “Kichaka Vadha”’ illuminates the complex policies and mechanisms of theatrical censorship in the British Raj, and offers many rare production photographs.

“Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography” examines theatrical biography as a nascent genre in eighteenth-century England. This study specifically focuses on Thomas Davies’ 1780 memoir of David Garrick as the first moment of mastery in the genre’s history, the three-way war for the right to tell Charles Macklin’s story at the turn of the century and James Boaden’s theatrical biography spree in the 1820s and 1830s, including the lives of John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, Dorothy Jordan and Elizabeth Inchbald. This project investigates the extent to which biographers envisioned themselves as artists, inheriting the anxiety of impermanence and correlating fear of competition that plagued their thespian subjects. It traces a suggestive, but not determinative, outline of generic development, noting the shifting generic features that emerge in context of a given work’s predecessors. Drawing heavily on primary sources, then-contemporary reviews and archival material in the form of extra-illustrated or “scrapbooked” editions of the biographies, this text is invested in the ways that the increasing emphasis on materiality was designed to consolidate, but often challenged, the biographer’s authority. This turn to materiality also authorized readerly participation, allowing readers to “co-author” biographies through the use of material insertions, asserting their own presence in the texts about beloved thespians.

‘Dialogues on Beckett’ is a collection of 12 conversations about 12 plays by Samuel Beckett, discussions about the meaning of life and the universe between an agnostic and a Christian, based on a close reading of the text. It is also based on the thesis that Beckett’s main concern in his plays is Christian theology or, more broadly, the religious interpretation of the world. All his plays are an argument with that interpretation; in particular, they question the idea of theodicy and the philosophy of consolation. The aim of ‘Dialogues on Beckett’ is to make the reader aware of this essential theme in the playwright’s work, to interpret it in this light and to show his original approach to the subject. Beckett argues that we live in a post-Christian era. But for him this knowledge is no reason for joy; rather, it is a source of sadness, fear and even despair.

This book is a fresh, archivally nourished study of creative practice and exchange in theatre and the visual arts in eighteenth-century France. It focuses on moments of intense collaboration between artists, actors and writers, and on the ways in which entrepreneurship, innovation and aesthetic partnership worked between theatrical and visual arts across the long history of the eighteenth century. It breaks with traditional accounts by emphasizing not the theories of Tableau or even overlaps in subject matter between visual art and theatre, but instead on innovation, risk, community and knowledge transfer in the context of an enlightenment thirst for innovation and for commercial and reputational success. It re-examines the work of familiar figures such as Boucher, Favart and David, in the context of their networks and their relations with less familiar figures from Gillot and Charles-Antoine Coypel to Ignazio Degotti and Prince Hoare, and draws on theories of innovation transfer and mutuality to re-examine the nature of the relationship between theatre and the visual arts, painting a vivid new story of ambitions, friendships, triumphs and disasters, a story which binds theatre and the visual arts in a tight, complex and highly productive mesh.

The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography problematizes the absence of the dancing body in treatises in order to reconstruct it through a series of intertextual readings triggered by Thoinot Arbeau’s definition of dance in his 1589 dance treatise, Orchesographie. The notion of the intertext as elaborated by Michael Riffaterre is used to understand a series of relationships between dance and other activities within which the historical dancing body emerges to the light of day. Arbeau’s discussion of dance as a mute rhetoric in the demonstrative genre points to the intertext of Quintilian’s The Oratorical Institution where the genus demonstrativum is explained as epideixis, the goal of which is to inspire confidence and charm the audience. The second intertext explored is that of civility as found in courtesy books where the posture of the body and the parameters of movement are outlined, converging in the gesture of the révérence. The categories of pose and movement are then read into the structure of the basse danse, the quintessential courtly social dance of the period. The relation of pose to movement or of stillness to mobility is further theorized through the terms of earlier Italian treatises, specifically in terms of fantasmata as used by Domenico da Piacenza.

Kunqu, recognized by UNESCO in 2001 as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, is among the oldest and most refined traditions of the family of genres known as xiqu (music-drama or “Chinese opera”). Today, the art form’s musical and performance traditions are being passed on by senior artists. This book consists of twelve explanatory narrations in English, selected and translated from among an expansive collective endeavour in Chinese. Each performer narration sheds light on the human processes that create and transmit celebrated pieces of theatre. Annotations place these narratives in historical, literary, discursive, and aesthetic contexts. Close critical attention reveals kunqu as a living and changing art form. Methodologically, this work breaks new ground by centering the performers’ perspective rather than the text, providing a complement and a challenge to performance analysis, and ideological, sociological, or plot-based perspectives on xiqu.

Time Out of Mind is one of the most ambitious, complex, and provocative albums of Bob Dylan’s distinguished artistic career. The present book interprets the songs recorded for Time Out of Mind as a series of dreams by a single singer/dreamer. These dreams overlap and intermingle, but three primary levels of meaning emerge. On one level, the singer/dreamer envisions himself as a killer awaiting execution for killing his lover. On another level, the song-cycle functions as religious allegory, dramatizing the protagonist’s relentless struggles with his lover as a battle between spirit and flesh, earth and heaven, salvation and damnation. On still another level, Time Out of Mind is a meditation on American slavery and racism, Dylan’s most personal encounter with the subject, but one tangled up in associations with the minstrelsy tradition and debates surrounding cultural appropriation. Time Out of Mind marks the culmination of several recurring themes that have preoccupied Dylan for decades, and it serves as a pivotal turning point toward his late renaissance in terms of both subject matter and intertextual approach.

The Anthem Beckett Studies Reader, edited by S. E. Gontarski, is an indispensable guide to the restless, rigorously inventive field of Beckett studies—one that mirrors Samuel Beckett’s own refusal of settled meanings and stable forms. Bringing together landmark essays and influential critical interventions, this collection maps the evolution of Beckett scholarship across literature, theater, media, philosophy, and performance, revealing how Beckett’s work continues to unsettle interpretive habits and disciplinary boundaries alike.

The Anthem Beckett Studies Reader, edited by S. E. Gontarski, is an indispensable guide to the restless, rigorously inventive field of Beckett studies—one that mirrors Samuel Beckett’s own refusal of settled meanings and stable forms. Bringing together landmark essays and influential critical interventions, this collection maps the evolution of Beckett scholarship across literature, theater, media, philosophy, and performance, revealing how Beckett’s work continues to unsettle interpretive habits and disciplinary boundaries alike.

During the Romantic period, Hannah Cowley (1743–1809) achieved fame both as a playwright and a poet, composing popular comedies and, as Anna Matilda, amorous Della Cruscan verse. But despite a recent surge of scholarly interest in her works, her controversial comedy The World as It Goes; or A Party at Montpelier (performed 1781) has never been published. During its premiere, audience members loudly objected to the play’s bawdy content, and it closed after a single performance. The comedy’s catastrophic failure provides insights into the theatrical tastes, anxieties and mores of late eighteenth-century audiences and influenced the manner in which Cowley handled controversial issues in her subsequent plays. This edition of The World as It Goes is based on the Larpent licensing holograph manuscript held by the Huntington Library (LA 548). The transcription of the play is supplemented with an introduction providing cultural, theatrical, historical and biographical contexts; contemporaneous reviews; and a note on the text.

Without exception, existing studies of cinematic Shakespeare adaptations conform to the long-established paradigm of the descriptive history. Even comprehensive studies of segments of this vast and diverse grouping of films (by Robert H. Ball, Jeremy Sams, Mark T. Burnett, Luke McKernan, et al.) focus on readily available screening prints of films with nary an acknowledgement of the textual uncertainties of films subject to editorial intervention and the vicissitudes of material history; lost, damaged, fragmentary or censored films barely creep within range of critical radars, and even when they do seem only to merit passing consideration. As a consequence, historical accounts of Shakespearean film production are skewed in the direction of conformity, and the dominant perspectives – chronological narrative, intermittent contributions to adaptation studies and episodes in genre history – rely on the assumption of a relatively stable canon of Shakespeare films (that can on occasion be supplemented by rediscoveries). The present work explodes this mythology and explores the underlying assumptions behind the mask of critical convenience. No less significantly, it martials the research of ten years into a coherent, cumulative, chapter-by-chapter argument that proposes methodologies that will not only herald a comprehensive revision of the Shakespeare film canon, but also establish a standard methodology that redirects attention to “hidden” aspects of even the most widely discussed of these texts, thereby making significant methodological contributions to a number of emerging fields of study.

This book argues that theatre and drama help us to understand the concern about ‘fake news’. Moran shows that ‘fake news’ has arisen in the twenty-first century through what are essentially a series of performance contexts. Although the concept of ‘fake news’ has developed to great prominence since 2016, there is a much longer history of theatre makers and thinkers grappling with the ideas that underpin our modern worries about misinformation being distributed in the press, in broadcast news, and via social media.

It is a book about dying, or, more accurately, about the representation of dying in the theatre. Its chief concern is how actors undertook to translate words and concepts into forms legible and significant to an audience. It deals with the ways in which playwrights wrote about death and attitudes towards death in their cultures. Nevertheless, the emphasis is on the practice of acting. This “death spectacle” runs the gamut. From the Greek tragic stage which was highly selective in determining which deaths it (re)enacted to the elaborately stylized murders and suicides in the Kabuki to the lavish blood-letting of the Elizabethans to the deathbed visitations of the modern era, what was acceptable and/or enjoyable fluctuates wildly.

Time Out of Mind is one of the most ambitious, complex, and provocative albums of Bob Dylan’s distinguished artistic career. The present book interprets the songs recorded for Time Out of Mind as a series of dreams by a single singer/dreamer. These dreams overlap and intermingle, but three primary levels of meaning emerge. On one level, the singer/dreamer envisions himself as a killer awaiting execution for killing his lover. On another level, the song-cycle functions as religious allegory, dramatizing the protagonist’s relentless struggles with his lover as a battle between spirit and flesh, earth and heaven, salvation and damnation. On still another level, Time Out of Mind is a meditation on American slavery and racism, Dylan’s most personal encounter with the subject, but one tangled up in associations with the minstrelsy tradition and debates surrounding cultural appropriation. Time Out of Mind marks the culmination of several recurring themes that have preoccupied Dylan for decades, and it serves as a pivotal turning point toward his late renaissance in terms of both subject matter and intertextual approach.

This book highlights the important creative work of Belarusian theatre and filmmakers seeking to raise awareness of the Pro-democracy movement and human rights abuses in Belarus and to build communities of care and mourning following the fraudulent 2020 presidential elections in Belarus. Examining the work of the Belarus Free Theatre, Andrei Kureichik, and the Kupalautsy Theatre, it demonstrates how documentary theatre, adaptation, and digital theatre have enabled displaced, dissident artists to form international communities to support Belarusian dissidents in these fraught times.