Recovers the hidden history of theater professionals who transgressed the gendered expectations of their time

Theology in the modern era often assumes that the consummate form of theological discourse is objective prose—ignoring or condemning apophatic traditions and the spiritual eros that drives them. For too long, Kierkegaard has been read along these lines as a progenitor of twentieth-century neo-orthodoxy and a stern critic of the erotic in all its forms. In contrast, Hughes argues that Kierkegaard envisions faith fundamentally as a form of infinite, insatiable eros. He depicts the essential purpose of Kierkegaard’s writing as to elicit ever-greater spiritual desire, not to provide the satisfactions of doctrine or knowledge. Hughes’s argument revolves around close readings of provocative, disparate, and (in many cases) little-known Kierkegaardian texts. The thread connecting all of these texts is that they each conjure up some sort of performative “stage setting,” which they invite readers to enter. By analyzing the theological function of these texts, the book sheds new light on the role of the aesthetic in Kierkegaard’s authorship, his surprising affinity for liturgy and sacrament, and his overarching effort to conjoin eros for God with this-worldly love.

The first book-length study of Horace Walpole's scandalous The Mysterious Mother, including critical essays, an abridged script, and a facsimile edition Horace Walpole's five-act tragedy The Mysterious Mother (1768), a sensational tale of incest and intrigue, was initially circulated only among the author's friends. Walpole never permitted it to be performed during his lifetime except as a private theatrical. He described his play as a "delicious entertainment for the closet" and claimed that he "did not think it would do for the stage." Yet the essays in this volume trace a history of private readings, amateur theatricals, and even early public performances, demonstrating that the play was read and performed more than Walpole's protests suggest. Exploring a wide variety of topics--including the play's crypto-Catholicism, its treatments of incest, guilt, motherhood, orphans, and scientific spectacle, and the complex relations between print and performance--the essays demonstrate the rich relevance of The Mysterious Mother to current critical discussions. The volume includes the proceedings of a mini-conference hosted at Yale University in 2018 on the occasion of a staged reading of the play. Also included are the director's reflections, an abridged script, a facsimile of Walpole's own copy of the full-length play, and reproductions of the illustrations he commissioned from Lady Diana Beauclerk.

Closely examining staged images of Japanese femininity, this study centers on the mid-Meiji souvenir photography of Kusakabe Kimbei, approaching from the artist’s perspective while referencing his culture’s visual and traditional practices. The analysis attempts to construe visual material in its original context using various points of departure, including the sociocultural significance of the staged models, the visual display of the photographic models in relation to the visibility problem of Japanese women in Meiji visual media, and Kimbei’s visual encodings of Japanese femininity. By means of contextualized analysis, this survey seeks to illuminate the intricate structure of significations embedded on the visual plane, ultimately demonstrating how Kimbei’s female images present a locus of multilayered meanings.

This book takes the reader through the translation and performance processes of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2004-05 Spanish Golden Age season to establish a model for translating, rehearsing, and performing Spanish Golden Age drama.

Offering the first sustained and comprehensive scholarly consideration of the dramatic potential of the blazon, this volume complicates what has become a standard reading of the Petrarchan convention of dismembering the beloved through poetic description. At the same time, it contributes to a growing understanding of the relationship between the material conditions of theater and interpretations of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The chapters in this collection are organized into five thematic parts emphasizing the conventions of theater that compel us to consider bodies as both literally present and figuratively represented through languge. The first part addresses the dramatic blazon as used within the conventions of courtly love. Examining the classical roots of the Petrarchan blazon, the next part explores the violent eroticism of a poetic technique rooted in Ovidian notions of metamorphosis. With similar attention paid to brutality, the third part analyzes the representation of blazonic dismemberment on stage and screen. Figurative battles become real in the fourth part, which addresses the frequent blazons surfacing in historical and political plays. The final part moves to the role of audience, analyzing the role of the observer in containing the identity of the blazoned woman as well as her attempts to resist becoming an objectified spectacle.

Staging Subversions: The Performance-within-a-Play in French Classical Theater defines a new type of metadrama using Le Tartuffe as its paradigm and explores the complex, ambiguous, and enlightening relationships that metadrama maintains with the social and political orders. While metadramatic scenes are most often concerned with theater itself, the performance-within-a-play adopts an important function in the play's plot, and, consequently, in the social world of the play. The performance-within-a-play is particularly associated by the classical playwrights with the family structure, with the class system, with women's social roles, and with the politics of absolutism.