History of European Drama and Theatre

by Fischer-Lichte,Erika

• ISBN13: 9780415180603
• ISBN10: 0415180600
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2004-05-10
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This major study reconstructs the vast history of European Drama from Greek tragedy through to 20th century theatre, focusing on the subject of identity. Throughout history, drama has performed and represented political, religious, national, ethnic, class-related, gendered, and individual concepts of identity. Erika Fischer-Lichte's topics include: * Ancient Greek theatre * Shakespeare and Elizabethan theatre by Corneilli, Racine, Moliere * The Italian commedia dell'arte and its transformations into 18th century drama * The German Enlightenment - Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, and Lenz * Romanticism by Kleist, Byron, Shelley, Hugo, de Vigny, Musset, Buchner, and Nestroy * The turn of the century - Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Stanislavski * The 20th century - Craig, Meyerhold, Artaud, O'Neill, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Muller. Anyone interested in theatre throughout history and today will find this an invaluable source of information.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	ix
INTRODUCTION	1	(7)
Theatre and identity: theatre as a liminal space	1	(7)
1 RITUAL THEATRE	8	(42)
The tragic hero	8	(25)
Theatre and the polis	8	(3)
From curse of the clans to political identity	11	(7)
Conditio humana	18	(7)
Relapse into barbarism	25	(8)
The magic body	33	(17)
Between religious and secular culture: the religious play	33	(2)
The vital body	35	(5)
The frail and tortured body	40	(6)
The end of the plays: the suppression of popular culture	46	(4)
2 THEATRUM VITAE HUMANAE	50	(96)
Theatre as laboratory - man as experiment	50	(30)
'All the world's a stage'	50	(5)
Creator and destroyer of the self	55	(8)
Transformation and discovering identity - from the rites of May to 'rite of passage'	63	(7)
The loss of identity in chaos: the end of the world	70	(10)
The seducer, the martyr and the fool - theatrical archetypes in the Siglo de Oro	80	(17)
'The great theatre of the world'	80	(6)
Honour disgraced and the forfeit of mercy	86	(5)
The transitory social role and the eternal self	91	(5)
Popular theatre between religious and court theatre	96	(1)
Mask and mirror	97	(32)
The court as stage - the self-fashioning of court society	97	(7)
L'honnête homme or the end of social intercourse through noble 'amour propre'	104	(10)
The gaze of the other and the gaze of the king	114	(11)
The stage world as mirror image of the court	125	(4)
From the theatrical to social role-play	129	(17)
Discovering the identity in transformation: commedia dell'arte	129	(7)
Theatre as a model of social reality	136	(10)
3 THE RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES AND THE THEATRE OF ILLUSION	146	(56)
The middle-class family	146	(24)
From strolling players to moral institution: theatre as one constituent of public life	146	(9)
The loving father and his virtuous daughter	155	(6)
The court as counterworld: the seducer and the mistress	161	(4)
The body as 'natural sign' of the soul - the reception of the bürgerliche Trauerspiel and the development of a new art of acting	165	(5)
The mutilated individual	170	(12)
'Nature! Nature! Nothing is so like Nature as Shakespeare's figures'	170	(1)
From the mutilation of the hand to the mutilation of freedom	171	(5)
The self-castration of creative nature	176	(6)
Symbol of the species	182	(20)
From fragment to whole	182	(2)
The ideal society of autonomous individuals	184	(6)
'The transition from man into God'	190	(8)
Middle-class Bildungstheater	198	(4)
4 DRAMATISING THE IDENTITY CRISIS	202	(82)
The enigmatic personality	202	(28)
Personality as a social category in the nineteenth century	202	(3)
The discovery of the unconscious	205	(6)
Decaying values	211	(7)
The outsider: the noble robber and the artist	218	(7)
The demontage of 'personality' in the Vienna Volkstheater	225	(5)
Identity and history	230	(14)
The power of history to define identity	230	(3)
The dissolution of the self in history	233	(5)
The 'fatalism of history' and the concrete utopia of physical nature	238	(6)
The fall of the bourgeois myths	244	(37)
The stage as a public forum of the bourgeoisie	244	(3)
The family	247	(17)
The lie of family life	247	(5)
The battle of the sexes	252	(5)
The fatherless family	257	(7)
The great personality - the artist	264	(20)
The charismatic artist and the femme fatale'	264	(7)
The search for the self	271	(6)
Just ordinary people 'like everyone else ...'	277	(4)
The completion and end of the bourgeois theatre of illusion	281	(3)
5 THEATRE OF THE 'NEW' MAN	284	(68)
The re-theatricalisation of theatre as negation of the individual	284	(14)
Theatre as art - the actor as Ober-Marionette	284	(4)
Theatre as production - the actor as engineer	288	(6)
Theatre as ritual - the actor as hieroglyph	294	(4)
Beyond the individual	298	(26)
The dead as the curse of the living - repeating the Ur-performance	298	(8)
The multiplicity of roles in the theatre of life or the multiple personality	306	(8)
Dialectic of the Enlightenment: the 'new man' in the theatre of the future	314	(10)
Dismemberment and rebirth	324	(28)
End plays	324	(8)
The rebirth of human nature: the redeemed and redeeming body	332	(9)
'Men of new flesh'	341	(11)
Notes	352	(9)
Bibliography	361	(11)
Index of dramatic works	372	(4)
General index	376