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Introduction to Theatre | Acting | Movement | Homepage
The Lark, 1955, and Voltaire's Candide, 1957, in a musical version). She returned to the well-made play with Toys in the
Attic (1960), which was followed by another adaptation, My Mother, My Father, and Me (1963; from Burt Blechman's
novel How Much?). She also edited Anton Chekhov's Selected Letters (1955) and a collection of stories and short novels,
The Big Knockover (1966), by Hammett.
Her reminiscences, begun in An Unfinished Woman (1969), were continued in Pentimento (1973) and Maybe (1980).
After their publication, certain fabrications were brought to light, notably her reporting in Pentimento of a personal
relationship with a courageous woman she called Julia. The woman on whose actions Hellman's story was based denied
acquaintance with the author.
Hellman, a longtime supporter of leftist causes, detailed in Scoundrel Time (1976) her troubles and those of her friends
with the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings during the 1950s. Hellman refused to give the committee the
names of people who had associations with the Communist Party; she was subsequently blacklisted though not held in
contempt of Congress.
Her collected plays, many of which continued to be performed at the turn of the 20th century, were published in 1972.
Bibliography
William Wright, Lillian Hellman (1986); and Joan Mellen, Hellman and Hammett (1996), are biographies. Doris V. Falk, Lillian
Hellman (1978); and Katherine Lederer, Lillian Hellman (1979), offer analyses of her work.
Hughes, Langston
b.
Feb.
1,
1902,
Joplin,
Mo.,
U.S.,
d.
May
22,
1967,
New
York
City
http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?asmbly_id=20872
Black poet and writer who became, through numerous translations, one of the foremost interpreters to the world of the
black experience in the United States. Hughes's parents separated soon after his birth, and young Hughes was raised by
his mother and grandmother. After his grandmother's death, he and his mother moved to half a dozen cities before
reaching Cleveland, where they settled. His poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," written the summer after his graduation
from high school in Cleveland, was published in Crisis (1921) and brought him considerable attention.
After attending Columbia University (1921-22), he explored Harlem, forming a permanent attachment to what he called
the "great dark city." He worked as a steward on a freighter bound for Africa. Back from seafaring and sojourning in
Europe, he won an Opportunity magazine poetry prize in 1925. He received the Witter Bynner Undergraduate Poetry
Award in 1926.
While working as a busboy in a hotel in Washington, D.C., Hughes put three of his own poems beside the plate of Vachel
Lindsay in the dining room. The next day, newspapers around the country reported that Lindsay had discovered a Negro
busboy poet. A scholarship to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania followed, and before Hughes received his degree in
1929, his first two books had been published.
The Weary Blues (1926) was warmly received. Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927) was criticized harshly for its title and for
its frankness, but Hughes himself felt it represented a step forward. A few months after graduation Not Without Laughter
(1930), his first prose work, had a cordial reception. In the '30s his poetry became preoccupied with political militancy;
he travelled widely in the Soviet Union, Haiti, and Japan and served as a newspaper correspondent (1937) in the Spanish
Civil War. He published a collection of short stories, The Ways of White Folks (1934), and The Big Sea (1940), his
autobiography up to the age of 28.
Hughes wrote A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (1956), and the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro (1949)
and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958; with Arna Bontemps). He also wrote numerous works for the stage, including the
lyrics for Street Scene, an opera with music by Kurt Weill. A posthumous book of poems, The Panther and the Lash
(1967), reflected the black anger and militancy of the 1960s. Hughes translated the poetry of Federico García Lorca and
Gabriela Mistral. He was also widely known for his comic character Jesse B. Semple, familiarly called Simple, who
appeared in Hughes's columns in the Chicago Defender and the New York Post and later in book form and on the stage.
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, appeared in 1994.
Bibliography
Biographical and critical works include Faith Berry, Langston Hughes, Before and Beyond Harlem (1983, reissued 1992); Arnold
Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 2 vol. (1986-88); Richard K. Barksdale, Langston Hughes (1977); Edward J. Mullen (ed.),
Critical Essays on Langston Hughes (1986); R. Baxter Miller, The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes (1989); Hans Ostrom,
Langston Hughes: A Study of the Short Fiction (1993); and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K.A. Appiah (eds.), Langston Hughes: Critical
Perspectives Past and Present (1993).
Ibsen, Henrik
b. March 20, 1828, Skien, Nor., d. May 23, 1906, Kristiania [formerly Christiania; now Oslo]
Major Norwegian playwright of the late 19th century who introduced to the European stage a new order of moral analysis
that was placed against a severely realistic middle-class background and developed with economy of action, penetrating
dialogue, and rigorous thought.
Ibsen was born at Skien, a small lumbering town of southern Norway. His father was a respected general merchant in the
community until 1836, when he suffered the permanent disgrace of going bankrupt. As a result, he sank into a querulous
penury, which his wife's withdrawn and sombre religiosity did nothing to mitigate. There was no redeeming the family
misfortunes; as soon as he could, aged just 15, Henrik moved to Grimstad, a hamlet of some 800 persons 70 miles (110
km) down the coast. There he supported himself meagerly as an apothecary's apprentice while studying nights for
admission to the university. And during this period he used his few leisure moments to write a play.
This work, Catilina (1850; Catiline), grew out of the Latin texts Ibsen had to study for his university examinations.
Though not a very good play, it showed a natural bent for the theatre and embodied themes--the rebellious hero, his
destructive mistress--that would preoccupy Ibsen as long as he lived. In 1850 he went to Christiania (known since 1925
by its older name of Oslo), studied for entrance examinations there, and settled into the student quarter--though not,
however, into classes. For the theatre was in his blood, and at the age of only 23 he got himself appointed director and
playwright to a new theatre at Bergen, in which capacity he had to write a new play every year.
This was a wonderful opportunity for a young man eager to work in drama, but it brought Ibsen up against a range of
fearsome problems he was ill-equipped to handle. In the medieval Icelandic sagas Norway possessed a heroic, austere
literature of unique magnificence; but the stage on which these materials had to be set was then dominated by the
drawing-room drama of the French playwright Eugène Scribe and by the actors, acting traditions, and language of
Denmark. Out of these materials young Ibsen was asked to create a "national drama."
First at Bergen and then at the Norwegian Theatre in Christiania from 1857 to 1862, Ibsen tried to make palatable
dramatic fare out of incongruous ingredients. In addition to writing plays which were uncongenial to him and
unacceptable to audiences, he did a lot of directing. He was too inhibited to make a forceful director, but too intelligent
not to pick up a great deal of practical stage wisdom from his experience. After he moved to Christiania and after his
marriage to Suzannah Thoresen in 1858, he began to develop qualities of independence and authority that had been
hidden before.
Two of the last plays that Ibsen wrote for the Norwegian stage showed signs of new spiritual energy. Kjaerlighedens
komedie (1862; Love's Comedy), a satire on romantic illusions, was violently unpopular, but it expressed an authentic
theme of anti-idealism that Ibsen would soon make his own; and in Kongsemnerne (1863; The Pretenders) he dramatized
the mysterious inner authority that makes a man a man, a king, or a great playwright. This one play was in fact the
national drama after which Ibsen had been groping so long, and before long it would be recognized as such. But it came
too late; though the play was good, the theatre in Christiania was bankrupt, and Ibsen's career as a stage writer was
apparently at an end.
But the death of his theatre was the liberation of Ibsen as a playwright. Without regard for a public he thought petty and
illiberal, without care for traditions he found hollow and pretentious, he could now write for himself. He decided to go
abroad, and applied for a small state grant. He was awarded part of it, and in April 1864 he left Norway for Italy. For the
next 27 years he lived abroad, mainly in Rome, Dresden, and Munich, returning to Norway only for short visits in 1874
and 1885. For reasons that he sometimes summarized as "small-mindedness," his homeland had left a very bitter taste in
his mouth.
With him into exile Ibsen brought the fragments of a long semi-dramatic poem to be named Brand. Its central figure is a
dynamic rural pastor who takes his religious calling with a blazing sincerity that transcends not only all forms of
compromise but all traces of human sympathy and warmth as well. "All or nothing" is the demand that his god makes of
Brand and that Brand in turn makes of others. He is a moral hero, but he is also a moral monster, and his heart is torn by
the anguish that his moral program demands he inflict on his family. He never hesitates, never ceases to tower over the
petty compromisers and spiritual sluggards surrounding him. Yet in the last scene where Brand stands alone before his
god, a voice thunders from an avalanche that, even as it crushes the pastor physically, repudiates his whole moral life as
well: "He is the god of love," says the voice from on high. So the play is not only a denunciation of small-mindedness but
a tragedy of the spirit that would transcend it. The poem faced its readers not just with a choice but with an impasse; the
heroic alternative was also a destructive (and self-destructive) alternative. In Norway Brand was a tremendous popular
success, even though (and in part because) its central meaning was so troubling.
Hard on the heels of Brand (1866) came Peer Gynt (1867), another drama in rhymed couplets presenting an utterly
antithetical view of human nature. If Brand is a moral monolith, Peer Gynt is a capering will-o'-the-wisp, a buoyant and
self-centred opportunist who is aimless, yielding, and wholly unprincipled, yet who remains a lovable and beloved rascal.
The wild and mocking poetry of Peer Gynt has ended by overshadowing Brand in the popular judgment. But these two
figures are interdependent and antithetical types who under different guises run through most of Ibsen's classic work.
Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, they are universal archetypes as well as unforgettable individuals.
With these two poetic dramas, Ibsen won his battle with the world; he paused now to work out his future. A
philosophicalhistorical drama on the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate had long been on his mind; he finished it in
1873 under the title Kejser og Galilaeer (Emperor and Galilean), but in a ten-act form too diffuse and discursive for the
stage. He wrote a modern satire, De unges forbund (1869; The League of Youth) and then after many preliminary drafts a
prose satire on small-town politics, Samfundets støtter (1877; Pillars of Society). But Ibsen had not yet found his proper
voice; when he did, its effect was not to criticize or reform social life but to blow it up. The explosion came with Et
dukkehjem (1879; A Doll's House).
This play presents a very ordinary family--a bank manager named Torvald Helmer, his wife Nora, and their three little
children. Torvald supposes himself the ethical member of the family, while his wife assumes the role of a pretty
irresponsible in order to flatter him. Into this snug, not to say stifling, arrangement intrude several hard-minded outsiders,
one of whom threatens to expose a fraud that Nora had once committed (without her husband's knowledge) in order to
obtain a loan needed to save his life. When Nora's husband finally learns about this dangerous secret, he reacts with
outrage and repudiates her out of concern for his own social reputation. Utterly disillusioned about her husband, whom
she now sees as a hollow fraud, Nora declares her independence of him and their children and leaves them, slamming the
door of the house behind her in the final scene.
Audiences were scandalized at Ibsen's refusal in A Doll's House to scrape together (as any other contemporary playwright
would have done) a "happy ending," however shoddy or contrived. But that was not Ibsen's way; his play was about
knowing oneself and being true to that self. Torvald, who had thought all along that he was a sturdy ethical agent, proves
to be a hypocrite and a weak compromiser; his wife is not only an ethical idealist, but a destructive one, as severe as
Brand.
The setting of A Doll's House is ordinary to the point of transparency. Ibsen's plot exploits with cold precision the process
known as "analytic exposition." A secret plan (Nora's forgery) is about to be concluded (she can now finish repaying the
loan), but before the last step can be taken, a bit of the truth must be told, and the whole deception unravels. It is a pattern
of stage action at once simple and powerful. Ibsen used this technique often, and it gained for him an international
audience.
Ibsen's next play, Gengangere (1881; Ghosts), created even more dismay and distaste than its predecessor by showing
worse consequences of covering up even more ugly truths. Ostensibly the play's theme is congenital venereal disease, but
on another level, it deals with the power of ingrained moral contamination to undermine the most determined idealism.
Even after lecherous Captain Alving is in his grave, his ghost will not be laid to rest. In the play, the lying memorial that
his conventionally-minded widow has erected to his memory burns down even as his son goes insane from inherited
syphilis and his illegitimate daughter advances inexorably toward her destiny in a brothel. The play is a grim study of
contamination spreading through a family under cover of the widowed Mrs. Alving's timidly respectable views.
A play dealing with syphilis on top of one dealing with a wife's abandonment of her family sealed Ibsen's reputation as a
Bad Old Man, but progressive theatres in England and all across the Continent began putting on his plays. His audiences
were often small, but there were many of them, and they took his plays very seriously. So did conventionally-minded
critics; they denounced Ibsen as if he had desecrated all that was sacred and holy. Ibsen's response took the form of a
direct dramatic counterattack. Doctor Stockmann, the hero of En folkefiende (1882; An Enemy of the People), functions
as Ibsen's personal spokesman. In the play he is a medical officer, charged with inspecting the public baths on which the
prosperity of his native town depends. When he finds their water to be contaminated, he says so publicly, though the
town officials and townspeople try to silence him. When he still insists on speaking the truth, he is officially declared an
"enemy of the people." Though portrayed as a victim, Doctor Stockmann, like all Ibsen's idealistic truth-tellers after
Brand, also carries within him a deep strain of destructiveness. (His attacks on the baths will, after all, ruin the town; it's
just that by comparison with the truth, he doesn't care about this.) Ibsen's next play would make this minor chord
dominant.
In Vildanden (1884; The Wild Duck) Ibsen completely reversed his viewpoint by presenting on stage a gratuitous,
destructive truth-teller whose compulsion visits catastrophic misery on a family of helpless innocents. With the help of a
number of comforting delusions, Hjalmar Ekdal and his little family are living a somewhat squalid but essentially
cheerful existence. Upon these helpless weaklings descends an infatuated truth-teller, Gregers Werle. He cuts away the
moral foundations (delusive as they are) on which the family has lived, leaving them despondent and shattered by the
weight of a guilt too heavy to bear. The havoc wrought on the Ekdal family is rather pathetic than tragic; but the working
out of the action achieves a kind of mournful poetry that is quite new in Ibsen's repertoire.
Each of this series of Ibsen's classic modern dramas grows by extension or reversal out of its predecessor; they form an
unbroken string. The last of the sequence is Rosmersholm (1886), in which variants of the destructive saint (Brand) and
the all-too-human rogue (Peer) once more strive to define their identities, but this time on a level of moral sensitivity that
gives the play a special air of silver serenity. Ex-parson Johannes Rosmer is the ethical personality, while the adventuress
Rebecca West is his antagonist. Haunting them both out of the past is the spirit of the parson's late wife, who had
committed suicide under the subtle influence, we learn, of Rebecca West, and because of her husband's high-minded
indifference to sex. At issue for the future is a choice between bold, unrestricted freedom and the ancient, conservative
traditions of Rosmer's house. But even as he is persuaded by Rebecca's emancipated spirit, she is touched by his staid,
decorous view of life. Each is contaminated by the other, and for differing but complementary reasons, they tempt one
another toward the fatal millpond in which Rosmer's wife drowned. The play ends with a double suicide in which both
Rosmer and Rebecca, each for the other's reasons, do justice on themselves.
Ibsen's playwriting career by no means ended with Rosmersholm, but thereafter he turned toward a more self-analytic and
symbolic mode of writing that is quite different from the plays that made his world reputation. Among his later plays are
Fruen fra havet (1888; The Lady from the Sea), Hedda Gabler (1890), Bygmester Solness (1892; The Master Builder),
Lille Eyolf (1894; Little Eyolf), John Gabriel Borkman (1896), and Naar vi døde vaagner (1899; When We Dead
Awaken). Two of these plays, Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder, are vitalized by the presence of a demonically
idealistic and totally destructive female such as first appeared in Catiline. Another obsessive personage in these late plays
is an aging artist who is bitterly aware of his failing powers. Personal and confessional feelings infuse many of these last
dramas; perhaps these resulted from Ibsen's decision in 1891 to return to Norway, or perhaps from the series of
fascinated, fearful dalliances he had with young women in his later years. After his return to Norway, Ibsen continued to
write plays until a stroke in 1900 and another a year later reduced him to a bedridden invalid. He died in Kristiania in
1906.
Ibsen was in the forefront of those early modern authors whom one could refer to as the great disturbers; he belongs with
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William Blake. Ibsen wrote plays about mostly prosaic and commonplace
persons; but from them he elicited insights of devastating directness, great subtlety, and occasional flashes of rare beauty.
His plots are not cleverly contrived games but deliberate acts of cognition, in which persons are stripped of their
accumulated disguises and forced to acknowledge their true selves, for better or worse. Thus, he made his audiences
reexamine with painful earnestness the moral foundation of their being. During the last half of the 19th century he turned
the European stage back from what it had become--a plaything and a distraction for the bored--to make it what it had
been long ago among the ancient Greeks, an instrument for passing doom-judgment on the soul.
Bibliography
The standard biographies are Halvdan Koht, Life of Ibsen (1971); and Michael Meyer, Henrik Ibsen, 3 vol. (1967-71; also published in
one vol. as Ibsen, 1971). Both these lives contain bibliographies that can be supplemented by the full-scale bibliographies of Hjalmar
Petterson, Henrik Ibsen (1928); and Ingrid Tedford, Ibsen Bibliography, 1928-57 (1961).
Volumes of critical essays include James McFarlane (comp.), Henrik Ibsen: A Critical Anthology (1970); Michael Egan (comp.), Ibsen:
The Critical Heritage (1972, reissued 1985); Charles R. Lyons (comp.), Critical Essays on Henrik Ibsen (1987); and Rolf Fjelde (ed.),
Ibsen: A Collection of Critical Essays (1965). Among the many full-length critical studies are P.F.D. Tennant, Ibsen's Dramatic
Technique (1948, reprinted 1965); M.C. Bradbrook, Ibsen, the Norwegian: A Revaluation, new ed. (1966); J.L. Wisenthal (ed.), Shaw
and Ibsen (1979); and John S. Chamberlain, Ibsen: The Open Vision (1982).
Ionesco, Eugene
b. Nov. 26, 1909, , Slatina, Rom., d. March 28, 1994, Paris, France
Romanian
EUGEN
IONESCUhttp://members.eb.com/bol/topic?asmbly_id=21071
Romanian-born French dramatist whose one-act "antiplay" La Cantatrice chauve (1949; The Bald Soprano) inspired a
revolution
in
dramatic
techniques
and
helped
inaugurate
the
http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?xref=422479Theatre of the Absurd. He was elected to the
French Academy in 1970.
Ionesco was taken to France as an infant but returned to Romania in 1925. After obtaining a degree in French at the
University of Bucharest, he worked for a doctorate in Paris (1939), where, after 1945, he made his home. While working
as a proofreader, he decided to learn English; the formal, stilted commonplaces of his textbook inspired the masterly
catalog of senseless platitudes that constitutes The Bald Soprano. In its most famous scene, two strangers--who are
exchanging banalities about how the weather is faring, where they live, and how many children they have--stumble upon
the astonishing discovery that they are indeed man and wife; it is a brilliant example of Ionesco's recurrent themes of selfestrangement and the difficulty of communication.
In rapid succession Ionesco wrote a number of plays, all developing the "antilogical" ideas of The Bald Soprano; these
included brief and violently irrational sketches and also a series of more elaborate one-act plays in which many of his
later themes--especially the fear and horror of death--begin to make their appearance. Among these, La Leçon (1951; The
Lesson), Les Chaises (1952; The Chairs), and Le Nouveau Locataire (1955; The New Tenant) are notable successes. In
The Lesson, a timid professor uses the meaning he assigns to words to establish tyrannical dominance over an eager
female pupil. In The Chairs, an elderly couple await the arrival of an audience to hear the old man's last message to
posterity, but only empty chairs accumulate on stage. Feeling confident that his message will be conveyed by an orator he
has hired, the old man and his wife commit a double suicide. The orator turns out to be afflicted with aphasia, however,
and can speak only gibberish.
In contrast to these shorter works, it was only with difficulty that Ionesco mastered the techniques of the full-length play:
Amédée (1954), Tueur sans gages (1959; The Killer), and Le Rhinocéros (1959; Rhinoceros) lack the dramatic unity that
he finally achieved with Le Roi se meurt (1962; Exit the King). This success was followed by Le Piéton de l'air (1963; A
Stroll in the Air). With La Soif et la faim (1966; Thirst and Hunger) he returned to a more fragmented type of
construction. In the next decade he wrote Jeux de massacre (1970; Killing Game); Macbett (1972), a retelling of
Shakespeare's Macbeth; and Ce formidable bordel (1973; A Hell of a Mess). Rhinoceros, whose protagonist retains his
humanity in a world where humans are mutating into beasts, remains Ionesco's most popular play.
Ionesco's achievement lies in having popularized a wide variety of nonrepresentational and surrealistic techniques and in
having made them acceptable to audiences conditioned to a naturalistic convention in the theatre. His tragicomic farces
dramatize the absurdity of bourgeois life, the meaninglessness of social conventions, and the futile and mechanical nature
of modern civilization. His plays build on bizarrely illogical or fantastic situations using such devices as the humorous
multiplication of objects on stage until they overwhelm the actors. The clichés and tedious maxims of polite conversation
surface in improbable or inappropriate contexts to expose the deadening futility of most human communication. Ionesco's
later works show less concern with witty intellectual paradox and more with dreams, visions, and exploration of the
subconscious.
Bibliography
Surveys of Ionesco's life and works include Nancy Lane, Understanding Eugène Ionesco (1994); and Deborah B. Gaensbauer, Eugene
Ionesco Revisted (1996).
Jones, Leroi (Baraka, Amiri)
b. Oct. 7, 1934, Newark, N.J., U.S.
Also
called
IMAMU
AMIRI
BARAKA,
original
name
(UNTIL
1968)
(EVERETT)
LEROI
JONES
http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?asmbly_id=16580playwright, poet, novelist, and essayist
who wrote of the experiences and anger of black Americans with an affirmation of black life.
A graduate of Howard University (1953), Baraka published his first major collection of poetry, Preface to a Twenty
Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. The poems in The Dead Lecturer (1964) are notable for their strong imagery and lyrical
treatment of violence. This was followed by Black Art (1966), Black Magic (1969), and many subsequent verse
collections. Some of Baraka's poems reflect his interest in blues and jazz, which he wrote about in Blues People: Negro
Music in White America (1963) and Black Music (1967).
In 1964 Baraka's play Dutchman appeared off-Broadway and won critical acclaim. In Dutchman, an encounter between a
white woman and a black intellectual exposes the suppressed anger and hostility of American blacks toward the dominant
white culture. Later that year Baraka's plays The Slave and The Toilet were also produced. He wrote many other plays
and published an autobiographical novel, The System of Dante's Hell (1965); a collection of short stories, Tales (1967);
several collections of essays, including Home: Social Essays (1966); and The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri
Baraka (1984).
Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem in 1965. In 1968 he founded the Black Community
Development and Defense Organization, a Muslim group committed to affirming black culture and to gaining political
power for blacks. Baraka taught at several American universities.
Joyce, James
b. Feb. 2, 1882, Dublin, Ire., d. Jan. 13, 1941, Zürich, Switz.
In
full
JAMES
AUGUSTINE
ALOYSIUS
JOYCE
http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?asmbly_id=21327Irish novelist noted for his experimental
use of language and exploration of new literary methods in such large works of fiction as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans
Wake (1939).
Ulysses
After World War I Joyce returned for a few months to Trieste, and then--at the invitation of Ezra Pound--in July 1920 he
went to Paris. His novel Ulysses was published there on Feb. 2, 1922, by Sylvia Beach, proprietor of a bookshop called
"Shakespeare & Co." Ulysses is constructed as a modern parallel to Homer's Odyssey. All of the action of the novel takes
place in Dublin on a single day (June 16, 1904). The three central characters--Stephen Dedalus (the hero of Joyce's earlier
Portrait of the Artist), Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, and his wife, Molly Bloom--are intended to be
modern counterparts of Telemachus, Ulysses, and Penelope. By the use of interior monologue Joyce reveals the
innermost thoughts and feelings of these characters as they live hour by hour, passing from a public bath to a funeral,
library, maternity hospital, and brothel.
The main strength of Ulysses lies in its depth of character portrayal and its breadth of humour. Yet the book is most
famous for its use of a variant of the interior monologue known as the "stream-of-consciousness" technique. Joyce
claimed to have taken this technique from a forgotten French writer, Édouard Dujardin (1861-1949), who had used
interior monologues in his novel Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888; We'll to the Woods No More), but many critics have
pointed out that it is at least as old as the novel, though no one before Joyce had used it so continuously. Joyce's major
innovation was to carry the interior monologue one step further by rendering, for the first time in literature, the myriad
flow of impressions, half thoughts, associations, lapses and hesitations, incidental worries, and sudden impulses that form
part of the individual's conscious awareness along with the trend of his rational thoughts. This stream-of-consciousness
technique proved widely influential in much 20th-century fiction.
Sometimes the abundant technical and stylistic devices in Ulysses become too prominent, particularly in the muchpraised "Oxen of the Sun" chapter (II, 11), in which the language goes through every stage in the development of English
prose from Anglo-Saxon to the present day to symbolize the growth of a fetus in the womb. The execution is brilliant, but
the process itself seems ill-advised. More often the effect is to add intensity and depth, as, for example, in the "Aeolus"
chapter (II, 4) set in a newspaper office, with rhetoric as the theme. Joyce inserted into it hundreds of rhetorical figures
and many references to winds--something "blows up" instead of happening, people "raise the wind" when they are getting
money--and the reader becomes aware of an unusual liveliness in the very texture of the prose. The famous last chapter of
the novel, in which we follow the stream of consciousness of Molly Bloom as she lies in bed, gains much of its effect
from being written in eight huge unpunctuated paragraphs.
Ulysses, which was already well known because of the censorship troubles, became immediately famous upon
publication. Joyce had prepared for its critical reception by having a lecture given by Valery Larbaud, who pointed out
the Homeric correspondences in it and that "each episode deals with a particular art or science, contains a particular
symbol, represents a special organ of the human body, has its particular colour . . . proper technique, and takes place at a
particular time." Joyce never published this scheme; indeed, he even deleted the chapter titles in the book as printed. It
may be that this scheme was more useful to Joyce when he was writing than it is to the reader.
Finnegans Wake
In Paris Joyce worked on Finnegans Wake, the title of which was kept secret, the novel being known simply as "Work in
Progress" until it was published in its entirety in May 1939. In addition to his chronic eye troubles, Joyce suffered great
and prolonged anxiety over his daughter's mental health. What had seemed her slight eccentricity grew into unmistakable
and sometimes violent mental disorder that Joyce tried by every possible means to cure, but it became necessary finally
to place her in a mental hospital near Paris. In 1931 he and Nora visited London, where they were married, his scruples
on this point having yielded to his daughter's complaints.
Meanwhile he wrote and rewrote sections of Finnegans Wake; often a passage was revised more than a dozen times
before he was satisfied. Basically the book is, in one sense, the story of a publican in Chapelizod, near Dublin, his wife,
and their three children; but Mr. Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (often designated by variations on his initials, HCE,
one form of which is "Here Comes Everybody"), Mrs. Anna Livia Plurabelle, Kevin, Jerry, and Isabel are every family of
mankind, the archetypal family about whom all mankind is dreaming. The 18th-century Italian Giambattista Vico
provides the basic theory that history is cyclic; to demonstrate this the book begins with the end of a sentence left
unfinished on the last page. It is thousands of dreams in one. Languages merge: Anna Livia has "vlossyhair"--wlosy being
Polish for "hair"; "a bad of wind" blows, bâd being Turkish for "wind." Characters from literature and history appear and
merge and disappear as "the intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators" dream on. On another level, the
protagonists are the city of Dublin and the River Liffey--which flows enchantingly through the pages, "leaning with the
sloothering slide of her, giddygaddy, grannyma, gossipaceous Anna Livia"--standing as representatives of the history of
Ireland and, by extension, of all human history. And throughout the book Joyce himself is present, joking, mocking his
critics, defending his theories, remembering his father, enjoying himself.
After the fall of France in World War II (1940), Joyce took his family back to Zürich, where he died, still disappointed
with the reception given to his last book.
Bibliography
A standard biography, Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, new and rev. ed. (1982), is reliable and exhaustive, while his The Consciousness
of Joyce (1977, reissued 1981), examines Joyce's thought, especially his political views. Chester G. Anderson, James Joyce and His
World (1967, reissued 1978), is a sympathetic study of his life and works. Harry Blamires, The Bloomsday Book (1966, reprinted 1974),
is an excellent guide to Ulysses. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, new ed. (1960, reprinted 1972), gives an
intimate account of Joyce at work. Hugh Kenner, Joyce's Voices (1978), is a provocative study of Ulysses. C.H. Peake, James Joyce, the
Citizen and the Artist (1977), employs traditional literary values in criticizing Joyce's works. For the earlier works, both Marvin
Magalaner, Time of Apprenticeship: The Fiction of Young James Joyce (1959, reissued 1970); and a collection of critical essays ed. by
Clive Hart, James Joyce's Dubliners (1969), are useful. Zack Bowen and James F. Carens (eds.), A Companion to Joyce Studies (1984),
is a good handbook. Thomas Jackson Rice, James Joyce: A Guide to Research (1982), is indispensable for the serious student of Joyce.
Kazan, Elia
b. Sept. 7, 1909, Constantinople, Ottoman Empire [now Istanbul, Turkey]
Original name ELIA KAZANJOGLOUS, American director and author, noted for his successes on the stage, especially
with plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, and for his critically acclaimed films.
At the age of four, Kazan was brought to the United States with his immigrant Greek family. He attended Williams
College, Williamstown, Mass., and years later he wrote that the lonesome, unhappy years there provoked in him a deep
antagonism toward privilege. He attended the Drama School at Yale University, and from 1932 to 1939 he was an actor
with the Group Theatre in New York City led by Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman.
Kazan directed his first play in New York City in 1934. He won national notice as a Broadway director with such plays
as Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth (1942); Arthur Miller's All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949);
and Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1949), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and Sweet Bird of Youth
(1959). Kazan was cofounder (with Robert Lewis and Cheryl Crawford) of the Actors Studio in 1947.
In 1944 he began to direct motion pictures. His films, many of which incorporate liberal or socially critical themes,
include A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), Gentlemen's Agreement (1947), on anti-Semitism, and Pinky (1949), on
racism. His classic films A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Viva Zapata! (1952), and On the Waterfront (1954) all starred
Marlon Brando. Both Gentlemen's Agreement and On the Waterfront won him Academy Awards. Other films included
East of Eden (1955), starring James Dean, Baby Doll (1956), and Splendour in the Grass (1960). Kazan was also
codirector of the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center in New York City from 1960 to 1964.
The film America, America (1964) was adapted from his own autobiographical novel of 1962. He also wrote The
Arrangement (1967; film, 1969), about the experiences of a Greek immigrant to the United States, The Assassins (1972),
and The Understudy (1974).
His autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life, was published in 1988. In it, among other things, he defended his decision to
comply with the House Committee on Un-American Activities' request in 1952 that he give the names of other Group
Theatre members who had been secret members of the Communist Party.
Kean, Edmund
b. March 17?, 1789, London, Eng., d. May 15, 1833, London
One of the greatest of English tragic actors, a turbulent genius noted as much for his megalomania and ungovernable
behaviour as for his portrayals of villains in Shakespearean plays.
Though no official record of his birth exists, it has been well established that he was the bastard son of Ann Carey, who
described herself as an itinerant actress and street hawker, and Edmund Kean, a mentally unbalanced youth who
committed suicide at the age of 22. The story of Kean's upbringing is overladen with legend, much of it the product of his
own later fantasies, but during his formative years he was in the charge of Charlotte Tidswell, mistress of Moses Kean,
his father's eldest brother. Tidswell, then a small-part member of the Drury Lane Theatre Company, was the cast-off
mistress of Charles Howard, the 11th Duke of Norfolk. Extremely ambitious for her adopted child, she gave Edmund
both an early stage training and the rudiments of a general education. Her efforts to provide a disciplined home
background were defeated, however, by his willfulness and vagrancy, and for much of his childhood he lived as a waif
and stray.
At the age of 15 he was his own master and set out to conquer the stage, the only world he knew. Joining the company of
one Samuel Jerrold at Sheerness, Kent, for 15 shillings a week, he engaged to "play the whole round of tragedy, comedy,
opera, farce, interlude and pantomime." The ensuing 10-year struggle was especially hard for him to endure, not only
because of the privations of a strolling player's existence but also because it prolonged the agony of his frustrated
ambition. In 1808 he married Mary Chambers, a fellow member of his theatrical company.
Kean's long apprenticeship left scars, particularly an addiction to alcohol, which he had come to rely on as a substitute for
recognition. But the experience of adversity may well have been essential to his artistic achievement. By the standards of
the time, he was unsuited to the great tragic roles. The style then in vogue was artificial, declamatory, and statuesque, and
its leading exponent, http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?xref=6244John Philip Kemble, was an
actor of classic good looks, imposing figure, and vocal eloquence. Though Kean had handsome features, notably
unusually expressive eyes, he was small, with a voice that was harsh, forceful, and commanding rather than melodious.
He could never have hoped to compete with Kemble on Kemble's terms, so he had to become an innovator as well as a
virtuoso. On Jan. 26, 1814, when he made his Drury Lane debut as Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, the
measure of his triumph was not to outshine Kemble but to outmode him.
In his portrayal of Shylock, Kean donned a black beard instead of the traditional comic red beard and wig and played the
Jew as a frenzied and embittered monster of evil armed with a butcher knife. His performance created a sensation, and
Kean quickly came to specialize in other Shakespearean villains, most notably Richard III, Iago, and Macbeth. He also
excelled at playing Othello and Hamlet. His great non-Shakespearean roles were as Sir Giles Overreach in Philip
Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts and as Barabas in Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta.
As an actor Kean relied on his own forceful and turbulent personality and on sudden transitions of voice and facial
expression. There was nothing improvised about his performances, however. Technically they were carefully planned,
and it was said of his portrayal of Othello that, with its unvarying tones and semitones, rests and breaks, forte and piano,
crescendo and diminuendo, it might have been read from a musical score. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge said that
Kean revealed Shakespeare by "flashes of lightning." His range was limited, however. He excelled at malign roles but
usually failed at parts calling for nobility, virtue, tenderness, or comic talent. As the grim archvillain in A New Way to
Pay Old Debts, Kean was so convincing as a rapacious extortioner that he was reputed to have sent the poet Lord Byron
into convulsions; but as Romeo he was almost laughably unpersuasive. Nevertheless, he had a profound and lasting
influence on the art of acting. In magnetic power and domination of the stage he has, possibly, never been equaled.
Though Kean remained a passionately admired actor, as a public figure he became increasingly unpopular. Haunted by
his fear of losing his position as head of the British stage, he was betrayed into displays of jealousy against potential
rivals. At the same time, his fame and fortune (he earned, on the average, £10,000 a year) were insufficient to satisfy his
ambitions. The climax came in 1825, when he was successfully sued for adultery with the wife of a city alderman. This
provided the pretext for a virulent press campaign, in which he was subjected to hostile demonstrations in England and
during his second, and last, tour of the United States. The last eight years of his life were a story of slow suicide by drink
and other excesses.
At Covent Garden on March 25, 1833, playing Othello to his son Charles's Iago, he collapsed during the performance-his last. A few weeks later he died at his house at Richmond, Surrey, leaving his son only his name. The name proved to
be a valuable asset, however, for Charles Kean (1811-68), who established a reputation as the pioneer of representational
realism and who in this sense is considered the forerunner of Sir Henry Irving.
Bibliography
Harold Newcomb Hillebrand, Edmund Kean (1933, reissued 1966), provides the first scholarly examination of the evidence on Kean's
parentage, birth, and upbringing; Giles Playfair, Kean (1939, reprinted 1973), provides fuller documentation. Later works include
Maurice Wilson Disher, Mad Genius (1950); Raymund Fitzsimons, Edmund Kean, Fire from Heaven (1976); and Giles Playfair, The
Flash of Lightning: A Portrait of Edmund Kean (1983).
King, Jr., Martin Luther
b. Jan. 15, 1929, Atlanta, Ga., U.S., d. April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tenn.
Eloquent
black
Baptist
minister
who
led
the
http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?xref=389610Civil Rights Movement in the United States
from the mid-1950s until his death by assassination in 1968. His leadership was fundamental to that movement's success
in ending the legal segregation of blacks in the South and other portions of the United States. King rose to national
prominence through the organization of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, promoting nonviolent tactics such
as the massive March on Washington (1963) to achieve civil rights. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964.
The U.S. Congress voted to observe a national holiday in his honour, beginning in 1986, on the third Monday in January.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
While in Boston, King met Coretta Scott, a native Alabamian who was studying at the New England Conservatory of
Music. They were married in 1953 and had four children. King had been pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in
Montgomery, Alabama, slightly more than a year when the city's small group of civil-rights advocates decided to contest
racial segregation on that city's public bus system. On December 1, 1955, a black woman named
http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?xref=389612Rosa Parks had refused to surrender her bus
seat to a white passenger and as a consequence had been arrested for violating the city's segregation law. Black activists
formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to boycott the transit system and chose King as their leader. He had
the advantage of being a young, well-trained man who was too new in town to have made enemies; he was generally
respected, and his family connections and professional standing would enable him to find another pastorate should the
boycott fail.
In his first speech to the group as its president, King declared:
We have no alternative but to protest. For many years we have shown an amazing patience. We have sometimes given
our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from
that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.
These words introduced to the nation a fresh voice, a skillful rhetoric, an inspiring personality, and in time a dynamic
new doctrine of civil struggle. Although King's home was dynamited and his family's safety threatened, he continued to
lead the boycott until, one year and a few weeks later, the blacks of Montgomery achieved their goal of desegregation of
the city's buses.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Recognizing the need for a mass movement to capitalize on the successful Montgomery action, King set about organizing
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which gave him a base of operation throughout the South, as well
as a national platform from which to speak. King lectured in all parts of the country and discussed problems of blacks
with civil-rights and religious leaders at home and abroad. In February 1959 he and his party were warmly received by
India's prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru; as the result of a brief discussion with followers of Gandhi about the Gandhian
concepts of satyagraha ("devotion to truth"), King became more convinced than ever that nonviolent resistance was the
most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.
In 1960 he moved to his native city of Atlanta, where he became copastor with his father of the Ebenezer Baptist Church.
At this post he devoted most of his time to the SCLC and the civil-rights movement, declaring that the "psychological
moment has come when a concentrated drive against injustice can bring great, tangible gains." His thesis was soon tested
as he agreed to support the sit-in demonstrations undertaken by local black college students. In late October he was
arrested with 33 young people protesting segregation at the lunch counter in an Atlanta department store. Charges were
dropped, but King was sentenced to Reidsville State Prison Farm on the pretext that he had violated his probation on a
minor traffic offense committed several months earlier. The case assumed national proportions, with widespread concern
over his safety, outrage at Georgia's flouting of legal forms, and the failure of President Dwight Eisenhower to intervene.
King was released only upon the intercession of Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy--an action so widely
publicized in the black community throughout the nation that it was felt to have contributed substantially to Kennedy's
slender election victory eight days later.
In the years from 1960 to 1965 King's influence reached its zenith. The tactics of active nonviolence (sit-ins, protest
marches) aroused the devoted allegiance of many blacks and liberal whites in all parts of the country, as well as support
from the administrations of Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. There were also notable failures, as at Albany,
Georgia (1961-62), when King and his colleagues failed to achieve their desegregation goals for public parks and other
facilities.
The Letter From The Birmingham Jail
In Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963, King's campaign to end segregation at lunch counters and in hiring
practices drew nationwide attention when police turned dogs and fire hoses on the demonstrators. King was jailed along
with large numbers of his supporters, including hundreds of schoolchildren. His supporters did not, however, include all
the black clergy of Birmingham, and he was strongly opposed by some of the white clergy who had issued a statement
urging the blacks not to support the demonstrations. From the Birmingham jail King wrote a letter of great eloquence in
which he spelled out his philosophy of nonviolence:
You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite
right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create
such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront
the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. . . . We know through painful experience that
freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
Near the end of the Birmingham campaign, in an effort to draw together the multiple forces for peaceful change and to
dramatize to the nation and to the world the importance of solving the U.S. racial problem, King joined other civil-rights
leaders in organizing the historic March on Washington. On August 28, 1963, an interracial assembly of more than
200,000 gathered peaceably in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial to demand equal justice for all citizens under the law.
Here the crowds were uplifted by the emotional strength and prophetic quality of King's famous "I have a dream" speech,
in which, using biblical phraseology, King emphasized his faith that all men, someday, would be brothers.
The rising tide of civil-rights agitation produced, as King had hoped, a strong effect on national opinion and resulted in
the passage of the http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?xref=389613Civil Rights Act of 1964,
authorizing the federal government to enforce desegregation of public accommodations and outlawing discrimination in
publicly owned facilities, as well as in employment. That eventful year was climaxed by the award to King of the Nobel
Prize for Peace at Oslo in December.
Challenges Of The Final Years
The first signs of opposition to King's tactics from within the civil-rights movement surfaced during the March 1965
demonstrations at Selma, Alabama, which were aimed at dramatizing the need for a federal voting-rights law that would
provide legal support for the enfranchisement of blacks in the South. King organized an initial march from Selma to the
state capitol building in Montgomery but did not lead it himself; the marchers were turned back by state troopers with
nightsticks and tear gas. He determined to lead a second march, despite an injunction by a federal court and efforts from
Washington to persuade him to cancel it. Heading a procession of 1,500 marchers, black and white, he set out across
Pettus Bridge outside Selma until the group came to a barricade of state troopers. But, instead of going on and forcing a
confrontation, he led his followers in kneeling in prayer and then unexpectedly turned back. This decision cost King the
support of many young radicals who were already faulting him for being too cautious. The suspicion of an "arrangement"
with federal and local authorities--vigorously but not entirely convincingly denied--clung to the Selma affair. The country
was nevertheless aroused, resulting in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Throughout the nation, impatience with the lack of greater substantive progress encouraged the growth of black
militancy. Especially in the slums of the large Northern cities, King's religious philosophy of nonviolence was
increasingly questioned. The rioting in the Watts district of Los Angeles (August 1965) demonstrated the depth of the
urban race problem. In an effort to meet the challenge of the ghetto, King and his forces initiated a drive against racial
discrimination in Chicago at the beginning of the following year. The chief target was to be segregation in housing. After
a spring and summer of rallies, marches, and demonstrations, an agreement was signed between the city and a coalition
of blacks, liberals, and labour organizations, calling for various measures to strengthen the enforcement of existing laws
and regulations with respect to housing. But this agreement was to have little effect; the impression remained that King's
Chicago campaign was nullified partly because of the opposition of that city's powerful mayor, Richard J. Daley, and
partly because of the unexpected complexities of Northern racism.
In Illinois and Mississippi alike, King was now being challenged and even publicly derided by young black power
enthusiasts. In the face of mounting criticism, King's response was to broaden his approach to include concerns other than
racism that were equally detrimental to his people's progress. On April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City
and again on the 15th at a mammoth peace rally in that city, he committed himself irrevocably to opposing the United
States' involvement in the Vietnam War. Once before, in early January 1966, he had condemned the war, but official
outrage from Washington and strenuous opposition within the black community itself had caused him to relent. He next
sought to widen his base by forming a coalition of the poor of all races that would address itself to such economic
problems as poverty and unemployment. It was a species of populism, seeking to enroll janitors, hospital workers,
seasonal labourers, and the destitute of Appalachia, along with the student militants and pacifist intellectuals. His
endeavours along these lines, however, did not engender much support in any segment of the population.
His plans for a Poor People's March to Washington were interrupted in the spring of 1968 by a trip to Memphis,
Tennessee, in support of a strike by that city's sanitation workers. On April 4 he was killed by a sniper's bullet while
standing on the balcony of the motel where he and his associates were staying. On March 10, 1969, the accused white
assassin, James Earl Ray, pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison.
Bibliography
King's letters, speeches, sermons, and other documents are collected in Clayborne Carson et al. (eds.), The Papers of Martin Luther
King, Jr. (1992- ). James Melvin Washington (ed.), A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1986,
reissued 1991), is an anthology.
Biographies include David Levering Lewis, King, 2nd ed. (1978); Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound (1982, reprinted 1994);
Frederick L. Downing, To See the Promised Land (1986), a psychohistorical study; Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters (1988), focusing
on King in the history of the American civil-rights movement, 1954-63; and David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross (1986).
Studies of his intellectual influences and sources are John J. Ansbro, Martin Luther King, Jr. (1982); Peter J. Albert and Ronald
Hoffman (eds.), We Shall Overcome (1990); Lewis V. Baldwin, There Is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther King,
Jr. (1991); Keith D. Miller, Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Its Sources (1992); and James H. Cone,
Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (1991). Richard Lischer, The Preacher King: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the
Word That Moved America (1995), analyzes his spoken sermons.
Littlewood, Joan (Maud)
b. 1914?, London
Influential British theatrical director who rejected the standardized form and innocuous social content of the commercial
theatre in favour of experimental productions of plays concerned with contemporary social issues.
After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Littlewood founded in the 1930s Theatre Union, which
specialized in open-air productions, and the Theatre of Action. In 1945, in Manchester, she founded Theatre Workshop-for working class audiences--which in 1953 moved to the Theatre Royal, Stratford, in the East End of London. The
productions were at first mainly of Shakespeare and other classics, with some topical plays written or adapted by her
husband, Ewan MacColl, a folk singer and political dramatist. Gradually the group developed a more definite style.
Influenced by Bertolt Brecht, she encouraged audience participation, allowed onstage improvisation, altered the text, and
used techniques originally developed in the music hall. Her later productions were collective in that the actors shared in
planning the presentations. After the success in 1955 of MacColl's dramatic version of The Good Soldier Schweik, by
Jaroslav Hasek, her influence grew. Oh! What a Lovely War (1963), an original evocation and criticism of World War I
using popular songs of the period, projected newspaper headlines, and other devices to emphasize its message, became
perhaps her most famous production. Other outstanding plays, full of vitality, noisy, and broadly humorous, yet with
subtle characterization, include The Quare Fellow (1956) and The Hostage (1958) by Brendan Behan and A Taste of
Honey (1958) by Shelagh Delaney. Her theatre workshop company was disbanded in 1964, and Joan Littlewood
afterward became interested in projects less narrowly theatrical. In the early 1970s, however, Theatre Workshop was
reformed under her direction. She was also active in the creation of Children's Environments, Bubble Cities linked with
Music Hall around the Theatre Royal, Stratford (1968-75). Thereafter she left England to work in France.
Macready, William Charles
b. March 3, 1793, London, Eng., d. April 27, 1873, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire
English actor, manager, and diarist, a leading figure in the development of acting and production techniques of the 19th
century.
Macready was entered at Rugby to prepare for the bar, but financial difficulties and his sense of personal responsibility
caused him to abandon his education and take up--temporarily, he thought--the theatre, a profession for which he always
felt an intense dislike. In 1810 he made his debut in his father's company, as Romeo, at Birmingham and rapidly acquired
fame in other roles in provincial theatres. In 1816 he appeared at Covent Garden, London, and played a series of
melodramatic villains. He performed with such earnestness and truth that he became firmly established, and by 1820 he
was recognized as one of the finest contemporary English actors, second only to Edmund Kean. Macready achieved his
greatest fame playing such Shakespearean roles as Hamlet, Iago, Lear, Othello, and Richard II.
Macready served as the manager of Covent Garden from 1837 to 1839 and as manager of Drury Lane from 1841 to 1843.
Though his tenures as manager of these theatres were financially unsuccessful, they did allow him to extend his theory of
acting to all the elements of production. He was the first to impose upon the 19th-century theatre the principle of unity:
that the actors and all others connected with a performance were to be guided by the central concepts of the playwright.
In an era when leading actors routinely memorized their lines in private and performed their parts any way they wished,
Macready insisted upon thorough rehearsals in which all the roles were well-played and artistically coherent with each
other. Macready instituted the use of accurate costumes in historical dramas and made special efforts to obtain sets and
scenery that harmonized with the plays. And finally, he rejected the corrupted versions of Shakespeare's plays that were
universally used at that time and instead reverted to the original texts. All of these innovations were realized in
Macready's notable revivals of Shakespeare's As You Like It, Macbeth, King Lear, Henry V, and The Tempest. The
historical research behind these productions influenced English stagecraft, and the principle of theatrical unity anticipated
practice in the 20th century.
Macready worked tirelessly to persuade leading literary figures of the day to turn to the writing of plays. After 1825 he
moved freely in the highest literary and artistic circles of London, and the pages of his voluminous diary detail that life.
Macready made several tours outside England. In 1828 he performed in Paris, and he visited the United States in 1826,
1843, and 1848-49. During Macready's last visit to America in 1849 a longstanding feud started by his rival, the
American actor Edwin Forrest, erupted into tragedy. During a performance of Macbeth by Macready at the Astor Place
Opera House in New York City, Forrest's partisans tried to storm the theatre and thus started a riot in which more than 20
persons were killed and from which Macready narrowly escaped with his life. He returned to England for his farewell
performances and retired from the stage in his favourite role, Macbeth, in 1851.
Macready was an intellectual actor and was at his best in such philosophical roles as Hamlet and Richelieu. He was also
capable of great emotional intensity, however. Although he was a lesser actor than David Garrick and perhaps Kean at his
best, Macready was more important than either in his influence on the acting style and production techniques that made
possible the art of the modern theatre.
Mamet, David
b. Nov. 30, 1947, Chicago, Ill., U.S.
In full DAVID ALAN MAMET, American playwright, director, and screenwriter noted for his often desperate workingclass characters and for his distinctive and colloquial dialogue that is frequently profane. Mamet's use of the rhythms and
rhetoric of everyday speech to delineate character and to describe intricate relationships is also the chief motor of
dramatic development.
Mamet began writing plays while attending Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont (B.A. 1969). Returning to Chicago,
where most of his plays were first staged, he worked at various factory jobs, at a real-estate agency, and as a taxi driver;
all these experiences provided background for his plays. In 1973 he cofounded a theatre company in Chicago. He also
taught drama at several American colleges and universities.
Mamet's plays include Duck Variations (produced 1972), in which two old Jewish men sit on a park bench and trade
misinformation on many subjects. In Sexual Perversity in Chicago (produced 1974; filmed as About Last Night . . .
[1986]), a couple's budding sexual and emotional relationship is destroyed by their friends' interference. American
Buffalo (1976; filmed 1996) concerns dishonest business practices; A Life in the Theatre (1977) explores the teacherstudent relationship; and Speed-the-Plow (1987) concerns scriptwriters. Glengarry Glen Ross (1983; filmed 1992) won
the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
Mamet wrote fiction, plays for children, and screenplays for a number of motion pictures, including The Postman Always
Rings Twice (1981), The Verdict (1982), Rising Sun (1993), and Wag the Dog (1998), all adaptations of novels. He both
wrote and directed the motion pictures House of Games (1987), Homicide (1991), Oleanna (1994), and The Spanish
Prisoner (1998).
Marlowe, Christopher
http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?asmbly_id=22504(baptized Feb. 26, 1564, Canterbury,
Kent, Eng.--d. May 30, 1593, Deptford, near London), Elizabethan poet and Shakespeare's most important predecessor in
English drama, who is noted especially for his establishment of dramatic blank verse.
Last Years And Literary Career
After 1587 Marlowe was in London, writing for the theatres, occasionally getting into trouble with the authorities
because of his violent and disreputable behaviour, and probably also engaging himself from time to time in government
service. Marlowe won a dangerous reputation for "atheism," but this could, in Elizabeth I's time, indicate merely
unorthodox religious opinions. In http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?xref=7545Robert Greene's
deathbed tract, Greenes groats-worth of witte, Marlowe is referred to as a "famous gracer of Tragedians" and is reproved
for having said, like Greene himself, "There is no god" and for having studied "pestilent Machiuilian pollicie." There is
further evidence of his unorthodoxy, notably in the denunciation of him written by the spy Richard Baines and in the
letter of http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?xref=7546Thomas Kyd to the lord keeper in 1593
after Marlowe's death. Kyd alleged that certain papers "denying the deity of Jesus Christ" that were found in his room
belonged to Marlowe, who had shared the room two years before. Both Baines and Kyd suggested on Marlowe's part
atheism in the stricter sense and a persistent delight in blasphemy. Whatever the case may be, on May 18, 1593, the Privy
Council issued an order for Marlowe's arrest; two days later the poet was ordered to give daily attendance on their
lordships "until he shall be licensed to the contrary." On May 30, however, Marlowe was killed by Ingram Frizer, in the
dubious company of Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley, at a lodging house in Deptford, where they had spent most of the
day and where, it was alleged, a fight broke out between them over the bill.
In a playwriting career that spanned little more than six years, Marlowe's achievements were diverse and splendid.
Perhaps before leaving Cambridge he had already written Tamburlaine the Great (in two parts, both performed by the
end of 1587; published 1590). Almost certainly during his later Cambridge years, Marlowe had translated Ovid's Amores
(The Loves) and the first book of Lucan's Pharsalia from the Latin. About this time he also wrote the play Dido, Queen of
Carthage (published in 1594 as the joint work of Marlowe and Thomas Nashe). With the production of Tamburlaine he
received recognition and acclaim, and playwriting became his major concern in the few years that lay ahead. Both parts
of Tamburlaine were published anonymously in 1590, and the publisher omitted certain passages that he found
incongruous with the play's serious concern with history; even so, the extant Tamburlaine text can be regarded as
substantially Marlowe's. No other of his plays or poems or translations was published during his life. His unfinished but
splendid poem Hero and Leander--which is almost certainly the finest nondramatic Elizabethan poem apart from those
produced by Edmund Spenser--appeared in 1598.
There is argument among scholars concerning the order in which the plays subsequent to Tamburlaine were written. It is
not uncommonly held that Faustus quickly followed Tamburlaine and that then Marlowe turned to a more neutral, more
"social" kind of writing in Edward II and The Massacre at Paris. His last play may have been The Jew of Malta, in which
he signally broke new ground. It is known that Tamburlaine, Faustus, and The Jew of Malta were performed by the
Admiral's Men, a company whose outstanding actor was Edward Alleyn, who most certainly played Tamburlaine,
Faustus, and Barabas the Jew.
Works
In the earliest of Marlowe's plays, the two-part Tamburlaine the Great (c. 1587; published 1590), Marlowe's
characteristic "mighty line" (as Ben Jonson called it) established blank verse as the staple medium for later Elizabethan
and Jacobean dramatic writing. It appears that originally Marlowe intended to write only the first part, concluding with
Tamburlaine's marriage to Zenocrate and his making "truce with all the world." But the popularity of the first part
encouraged Marlowe to continue the story to Tamburlaine's death. This gave him some difficulty, as he had almost
exhausted his historical sources in part I; consequently the sequel has, at first glance, an appearance of padding. Yet the
effort demanded in writing the continuation made the young playwright look more coldly and searchingly at the hero he
had chosen, and thus part II makes explicit certain notions that were below the surface and insufficiently recognized by
the dramatist in part I.
The play is based on the life and achievements of Timur (Timurlenk), the bloody 14th-century conqueror of Central Asia
and India. Tamburlaine is a man avid for power and luxury and the possession of beauty: at the beginning of part I he is
only an obscure Scythian shepherd, but he wins the crown of Persia by eloquence and bravery and a readiness to discard
loyalty. He then conquers Bajazeth, emperor of Turkey, he puts the town of Damascus to the sword, and he conquers the
sultan of Egypt; but, at the pleas of the sultan's daughter Zenocrate, the captive whom he loves, he spares him and makes
truce. In part II Tamburlaine's conquests are further extended; whenever he fights a battle, he must win, even when his
last illness is upon him. But Zenocrate dies, and their three sons provide a manifestly imperfect means for ensuring the
preservation of his wide dominions; he kills Calyphas, one of these sons, when he refuses to follow his father into battle.
Always, too, there are more battles to fight: when for a moment he has no immediate opponent on earth, he dreams of
leading his army against the powers of heaven, though at other times he glories in seeing himself as "the scourge of
God"; he burns the Qur'an, for he will have no intermediary between God and himself, and there is a hint of doubt
whether even God is to be granted recognition. Certainly Marlowe feels sympathy with his hero, giving him magnificent
verse to speak, delighting in his dreams of power and of the possession of beauty, as seen in the following of
Tamburlaine's lines:
Nature, that fram'd us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.
But, especially in part II, there are other strains: the hero can be absurd in his continual striving for more demonstrations
of his power; his cruelty, which is extreme, becomes sickening; his human weakness is increasingly underlined, most
notably in the onset of his fatal illness immediately after his arrogant burning of the Qur'an. In this early play Marlowe
already shows the ability to view a tragic hero from more than one angle, achieving a simultaneous vision of grandeur
and impotence.
Marlowe's most famous play is The Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus; but it has survived only in a corrupt form, and its
date of composition has been much-disputed. It was first published in 1604, and another version appeared in 1616.
Faustus takes over the dramatic framework of the morality plays in its presentation of a story of temptation, fall, and
damnation and its free use of morality figures such as the good angel and the bad angel and the seven deadly sins, along
with the devils Lucifer and Mephistopheles. In Faustus Marlowe tells the story of the doctor-turned-necromancer
Faustus, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power. The devil's intermediary in the play,
Mephistopheles, achieves tragic grandeur in his own right as a fallen angel torn between satanic pride and dark despair.
The play gives eloquent expression to this idea of damnation in the lament of Mephistopheles for a lost heaven and in
Faustus' final despairing entreaties to be saved by Christ before his soul is claimed by the devil:
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd.
O, I'll leap up to my God!--Who pulls
Me down?-See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop:
ah, my Christ!-Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!
Yet will I call on him: O, spare me, Lucifer!-Where is it now? 'tis gone: and see, where God
Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his ireful brows!
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!
Just as in Tamburlaine Marlowe had seen the cruelty and absurdity of his hero as well as his magnificence, so here he can
enter into Faustus' grandiose intellectual ambition, simultaneously viewing those ambitions as futile, self-destructive, and
absurd. The text is problematic in the low comic scenes spuriously introduced by later hack writers, but its more sober
and consistent moments are certainly the uncorrupted work of Marlowe.
In The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta, Marlowe portrays another power-hungry figure in the Jew Barabas,
who in the villainous society of Christian Malta shows no scruple in self-advancement. But this figure is more closely
incorporated within his society than either Tamburlaine, the supreme conqueror, or Faustus, the lonely adventurer against
God. In the end Barabas is overcome, not by a divine stroke but by the concerted action of his human enemies. There is a
difficulty in deciding how fully the extant text of The Jew of Malta represents Marlowe's original play, for it was not
published until 1633. But The Jew can be closely associated with The Massacre at Paris (1593), a dramatic presentation
of incidents from contemporary French history, including the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, and with The
Troublesome Raigne and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second (published 1594), Marlowe's great contribution to the
Elizabethan plays on historical themes.
As The Massacre introduces in the duke of Guise a figure unscrupulously avid for power, so in the younger Mortimer of
Edward II Marlowe shows a man developing an appetite for power and increasingly corrupted as power comes to him. In
each instance the dramatist shares in the excitement of the pursuit of glory, but all three plays present such figures within
a social framework: the notion of social responsibility, the notion of corruption through power, and the notion of the
suffering that the exercise of power entails are all prominently the dramatist's concern. Apart from Tamburlaine and the
minor work Dido, Queen of Carthage (of uncertain date, published 1594 and written in collaboration with Thomas
Nashe), Edward II is the only one of Marlowe's plays whose extant text can be relied on as adequately representing the
author's manuscript. And certainly Edward II is a major work, not merely one of the first Elizabethan plays on an English
historical theme. The relationships linking the king, his neglected queen, the king's favourite, Gaveston, and the
ambitious Mortimer are studied with detached sympathy and remarkable understanding: no character here is lightly
disposed of, and the abdication and the brutal murder of Edward show the same dark and violent imagination as appeared
in Marlowe's presentation of Faustus' last hour. Though this play, along with The Jew and The Massacre, shows
Marlowe's fascinated response to the distorted Elizabethan idea of Machiavelli, it more importantly shows Marlowe's
deeply suggestive awareness of the nature of disaster, the power of society, and the dark extent of an individual's
suffering.
In addition to translations (Ovid's Amores and the first book of Lucan's Pharsalia), Marlowe's nondramatic work includes the poem
Hero and Leander. This work was incomplete at his death and was extended by George Chapman: the joint work of the two poets was
published in 1598.
An authoritative edition of Marlowe's works was edited by Fredson Bowers, The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 2nd ed., 2
vol. (1981).
Bibliography
Biographies include Frederick S. Boas, Christopher Marlowe: A Biographical and Critical Study (1940, reprinted 1966); J. Leslie
Hotson, The Death of Christopher Marlowe (1925, reprinted 1967); Calvin Hoffman, The Murder of the Man Who Was "Shakespeare"
(also published as The Man Who Was Shakespeare, 1955); Philip Henderson, Christopher Marlowe, 2nd ed. (1974); and Gerald Pinciss,
Christopher Marlowe (1975, reissued 1984). Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (1992), postulates a
conspiracy resulting in government complicity in Marlowe's murder. Works of criticism include Paul H. Kocher, Christopher Marlowe:
A Study of His Thought, Learning, and Character (1946, reissued 1974); Harry Levin, The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher
Marlowe (1952, reissued 1974); F.P. Wilson, Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare (1953, reissued 1973); J.B. Steane, Marlowe: A
Critical Study (1964, reprinted 1974); Clifford Leech, Christopher Marlowe: Poet for the Stage (1986); Roger Sales, Christopher
Marlowe (1991); and Douglas Cole, Christopher Marlowe and the Renaissance of Tragedy (1995). Anthologies of critical essays
include Clifford Leech (ed.), Marlowe: A Collection of Critical Essays (1964); Judith O'Neill (comp.), Critics on Marlowe (1969); and
Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance B. Kuriyama (eds.), "A Poet and a Filthy Play-Maker" (1987).
Meiningen Company
German MEININGER HOFTHEATERTRUPPE ("Meiningen Court Theatre Troop"), experimental acting group begun
in 1866 and directed by George II, duke of Saxe-Meiningen, and his morganatic wife, the actress Ellen Franz. It was one
of the first companies in which the importance of the director was stressed.
Inspired by the English theatre, particularly by the work of actor Charles Kean, the "Theatre Duke" sought to create a
production style that unified the conception, interpretation, and execution of dramatic works. Assisted by the actor
Ludwig Chronegk, who conducted it on tour, the duke instituted many reforms, among which were an emphasis upon
historical accuracy and authenticity in costumes and sets; the use of steps and platforms to keep the action moving fluidly
on many different levels; the division of groups in crowd scenes into organic yet distinct vocal entities; the introduction
of long, carefully planned rehearsals (anticipating Konstantin Stanislavsky's method); and the displacement of stage
scenery (paintings) by settings in which the actor became a natural part of his environment.
The company's first public performance was in 1874 at Berlin. In 1881 the Meiningen Company went to London, where
it presented three plays by Shakespeare and a number of German and non-German classics. Thereafter, the ensemble
performed in more than 35 European cities, including Moscow and Brussels. In 1890, feeling the work of the company
had been done, the duke closed it.
Its realistic productions profoundly affected the thinking of the Russian director Stanislavsky and the French director
André Antoine, the two major proponents of stage realism, and provided the impetus for the further exploration and
development of naturalistic theatre, which found its greatest expression and perfection in the work of the Moscow Art
Theatre.
Menander
b. c. 342 BC, d. c. 292 BC
Athenian dramatist whom ancient critics considered the supreme poet of Greek New Comedy--i.e., the last flowering of
Athenian stage comedy. During his life, his success was limited; although he wrote more than 100 plays, he won only
eight victories at Athenian dramatic festivals.
Comedy had by his time abandoned public affairs and was concentrating instead on fictitious characters from ordinary
life; the role of the chorus was generally confined to the performance of interludes between acts. Actors' masks were
retained but were elaborated to provide for the wider range of characters required by a comedy of manners and helped an
audience without playbills to recognize these characters for what they were. Menander, who wrote in a refined Attic, by
his time the literary language of the Greek-speaking world, was masterly at presenting such characters as stern fathers,
young lovers, greedy demimondaines, intriguing slaves, and others.
Menander's nicety of touch and skill at comedy in a light vein is clearly evident in the Dyscolus in the character of the
gruff misanthrope Knemon, while the subtle clash and contrast of character and ethical principle in such plays as
Perikeiromene (interesting for its sympathetic treatment of the conventionally boastful soldier) and Second Adelphoe
constitute perhaps his greatest achievement.
Menander's works were much adapted by the Roman writers Plautus and Terence, and through them he influenced the
development of European comedy from the Renaissance. Their work also supplements much of the lost corpus of his
plays, of which no complete text exists, except that of the Dyscolus, first printed in 1958 from some leaves of a papyrus
codex acquired in Egypt.
The known facts of Menander's life are few. He was allegedly rich and of good family, and a pupil of the philosopher
Theophrastus, a follower of Aristotle. In 321 Menander produced his first play, Orge ("Anger"). In 316 he won a prize at
a festival with the Dyscolus and gained his first victory at the Dionysia festival the next year. By 301 Menander had
written more than 70 plays. He probably spent most of his life in Athens and is said to have declined invitations to
Macedonia and Egypt. He allegedly drowned while swimming at the Piraeus (Athens' port).
Meyerhold, Vsevolod Yemilyevich
b. Feb. 9 [Jan. 28, old style], 1874, Penza, Russia, d. Feb. 2, 1940, Moscow
Russian theatrical producer, director, and actor whose provocative experiments in nonrealistic theatre made him one of
the seminal forces in modern theatre.
Meyerhold became a student in 1896 at the Moscow Philharmonic Dramatic School under the guidance of Vladimir
Nemirovich-Danchenko, cofounder of the Moscow Art Theatre. Two years later, Meyerhold joined the Moscow Art
Theatre and there began to formulate his avant-garde theories of symbolic, or "conditional," theatre. In 1906 he became
chief producer at the theatre of Vera Komissarzhevskaya, a distinguished actress of the time, and staged a number of
Symbolist plays that employed his radical ideas of nonrepresentational theatre. For his presentation of Henrik Ibsen's
Hedda Gabler in 1906, Meyerhold rebelled against the stylized naturalism popularized by Konstantin Stanislavsky's art
theatre and instead directed his actors to behave in puppetlike, mechanistic ways. This production marked the beginning
of an innovative theatre in Russia that became known as biomechanics. Meyerhold's unorthodox approach to the theatre
led him to break with Komissarzhevskaya in 1908. Thereafter, drawing upon the conventions of commedia dell'arte and
Oriental theatre, he went on to stage productions in Petrograd (St. Petersburg). During 1920-35 Meyerhold achieved his
greatest artistic success as a director, beginning with Fernand Crommelynck's Le Cocu magnifique (1920; The
Magnificent Cuckold) and ending with his controversial production in 1935 of Aleksandr Pushkin's story "Pikovaya
Dama" ("The Queen of Spades").
Although he embraced the Russian Revolution of 1917, his fiercely individualistic temperament and artistic eccentricity
brought reproach and condemnation from Soviet critics. He was accused of mysticism and neglect of Socialist Realism.
Meyerhold refused to submit to the constraints of artistic uniformity and defended the artist's right to experiment. In 1939
he was arrested and imprisoned. Weeks later, his actress-wife, Zinaida Raikh, was found brutally murdered in their
apartment. Nothing more was heard of him in the West until 1958, when his death in 1942 was announced in the Great
Soviet Encyclopaedia; in a later edition the date was changed to 1940.
Miller, Arthur
b. Oct. 17, 1915, New York City
U.S. playwright who combined social awareness with a searching concern for his characters' inner lives. He is best
known for Death of a Salesman (1949).
Miller was shaped by the Depression, which spelled financial ruin for his father, a small manufacturer, and demonstrated
to the young Miller the insecurity of modern existence. After graduation from high school he worked in a warehouse.
With the money he earned he attended the University of Michigan, where he began to write plays. His first public success
was with Focus (1945), a novel about anti-Semitism. All My Sons (1947), a drama about a manufacturer of faulty war
materials that strongly reflects the influence of Ibsen, was his first important play. Death of a Salesman became one of
the most famous American plays of its period. It is the tragedy of a small man destroyed by false values that are in large
part the values of his society.
The Crucible (1953) was based on the witchcraft trials in Salem, Mass., in 1692, a period Miller considered relevant to
the 1950s, when investigation of subversive activities was widespread. In 1956, when Miller was called before the House
Un-American Activities Committee, he refused to name people he had seen 10 years earlier at an alleged Communist
writers' meeting. He was convicted of contempt but appealed and won.
A Memory of Two Mondays and another short play, A View from the Bridge (a story of an Italian-American longshoreman
whose passion for his niece destroys him), were staged on the same bill in 1955. After the Fall (1964) is concerned with
failure in human relationships and its consequences. The Price (1968) continued Miller's exploration of the theme of guilt
and responsibility to oneself and to others by examining the strained relationship between two brothers. He directed the
London production of the play in 1969.
The Archbishop's Ceiling, produced in Washington, D.C., in 1977, dealt with the Soviet treatment of dissident writers.
The American Clock, a series of dramatic vignettes based on Studs Terkel's Hard Times (about the Great Depression),
was produced at the 1980 American Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C.
Miller also wrote a screenplay, The Misfits (1961), for his second wife, the actress Marilyn Monroe (1926-62). I Don't
Need You Any More, a collection of his short stories, appeared in 1967, and a collection of theatre essays in 1977.
Moliere
baptized Jan. 15, 1622, Paris, France, d. Feb. 17, 1673, Paris
Original name JEAN-BAPTISTE POQUELIN, French actor and playwright, the greatest of all writers of French comedy.
Although the sacred and secular authorities of 17th-century France often combined against him, the genius of Molière
finally emerged to win him acclaim. Comedy had a long history before Molière, who employed most of its traditional
forms, but he succeeded in inventing a new style that was based on a double vision of normal and abnormal seen in
relation to each other--the comedy of the true opposed to the specious, the intelligent seen alongside the pedantic. An
actor himself, Molière seems to have been incapable of visualizing any situation without animating and dramatizing it,
often beyond the limits of probability; though living in an age of reason, his own good sense led him not to proselytize
but rather to animate the absurd, as in such masterpieces as Tartuffe, L'École des femmes, Le Misanthrope, and many
others. It is testimony to the freshness of his vision that the greatest comic artists working centuries later in other media,
such as Charlie Chaplin, are still compared to Molière.
Scandals And Successes
The first night of L'École des femmes (The School for Wives), December 26, 1662, caused a scandal as if people
suspected that here was an emergence of a comic genius that regarded nothing as sacrosanct. Some good judges have
thought this to be Molière's masterpiece, as pure comedy as he ever attained. Based on Paul Scarron's version (La
Précaution inutile, 1655) of a Spanish story, it presents a pedant, Arnolphe, who is so frightened of femininity that he
decides to marry a girl entirely unacquainted with the ways of the world. The delicate portrayal in this girl of an
awakening temperament, all the stronger for its absence of convention, is a marvel of comedy. Molière crowns his
fantasy by showing his pedant falling in love with her, and his elephantine gropings toward lovers' talk are both his
punishment and the audience's delight.
From 1662 onward the Palais-Royal theatre was shared by Italian actors, each company taking three playing days in each
week. Molière also wrote plays that were privately commissioned and thus first performed elsewhere: Les Fâcheux (The
Impertinents, 1732) at Vaux in August 1661; the first version of Tartuffe at Versailles in 1664; Le Bourgeois
Gentilhomme at Chambord in 1670; and Psyché in the Tuileries Palace in 1671.
On February 20, 1662, Molière married Armande Béjart. It is not certain whether she was Madeleine's sister, as the
documents state, or her daughter, as some contemporaries suggest. There were three children of the marriage; only a
daughter survived to maturity. It was not a happy marriage; flirtations of Armande are indicated in hostile pamphlets, but
there is almost no reliable information.
Molière cleverly turned the outcry produced by L'École des femmes to the credit of the company by replying to his critics
on the stage. La Critique de L'École des femmes in June 1663 and L'Impromptu de Versailles in October were both
single-act discussion plays. In La Critique Molière allowed himself to express some principles of his new style of
comedy, and in the other play he made theatre history by reproducing with astonishing realism the actual greenroom, or
actors' lounge, of the company and the backchat involved in rehearsal.
The quarrel of L'École des femmes was itself outrun in violence and scandal by the presentation of the first version of
Tartuffe in May 1664. The history of this great play sheds much light on the conditions in which Molière had to work and
bears a quite remarkable testimony to his persistence and capacity to show fight. He had to wait five years and risk the
livelihood of his actors before his reward, which proved to be the greatest success of his career. Most men would surely
have given up the struggle: from the time of the first performance of what was probably the first three acts of the play as
it is now known, many must have feared that the Roman Catholic Church would never allow its public performance.
Undeterred, Molière made matters worse by staging a version of Dom Juan, ou le festin de Pierre with a spectacular
ending in which an atheist is committed to hell--but only after he had amused and scandalized the audience. Dom Juan
was meant to be a quick money raiser, but it was a costly failure, mysteriously removed after 15 performances and never
performed again or published by Molière. It is a priceless example of his art. The central character, Dom Juan, carries the
aristocratic principle to its extreme by disclaiming all types of obligation, either to parents or doctors or tradesmen or
God. Yet he assumes that others will fulfill their obligations to him. His servant, Sganarelle, is imagined as his opposite
in every point, earthy, timorous, superstitious. These two form the perfect French counterpart to Don Quixote and
Sancho.
Harassment By The Authorities
While engaged in his battles against the authorities, Molière continued to hold his company together single-handedly. He
made up for lack of authors by writing more plays himself. He could never be sure either of actors or authors. In 1664 he
put on the first play of Jean Racine, La Thébaïde, but the next year Racine transferred his second play, Alexandre le
Grand, to a longer established theatre while Molière's actors were actually performing it. He was constantly harassed by
the authorities. These setbacks may have been offset in part by the royal favour conferred upon Molière, but royal favour
was capricious. Pensions were often promised and not paid. The court wanted more light plays than great works. The
receipts of his theatre were uncertain and fluctuating. In his 14 years in Paris, Molière wrote 31 of the 95 plays that were
presented on his stage. To meet the cumulative misfortunes of his own illness, the closing of the theatre for seven weeks
upon the death of the Queen Mother, and the proscription of Tartuffe and Dom Juan, he wrote five plays in one season
(1666-67). Of the five, only one, Le Médecin malgré lui (The Doctor in Spite of Himself, 1914), was a success.
In the preceding season, however, Le Misanthrope, almost from the start, was treated as a masterpiece by discerning
playgoers, if not by the entire public. It is a drawing-room comedy, without known sources, constructed from the
elements of Molière's own company. Molière himself played the role of Alceste, a fool of a new kind, with high
principles and rigid standards, yet by nature a blind critic of everybody else. Alceste is in love with Célimène (played by
Molière's wife, Armande), a superb comic creation, equal to any and every occasion, the incarnate spirit of society. The
structure of the play is as simple as it is poetic. Alceste storms moodily through the play, finding no "honest" men to
agree with him, always ready to see the mote in another's eye, blind to the beam in his own, as ignorant of his real nature
as a Tartuffe.
The church nearly won its battle against Molière: it prevented public performance, both of Tartuffe for five years and of
Dom Juan for the whole of Molière's life. A five-act version of Tartuffe was played in 1667, but once only: it was banned
by the President of Police and by the Archbishop on pain of excommunication. Molière's reply was to lobby the King
repeatedly, even in a military camp, and to publish a defense of his play called Lettre sur la comédie de l'Imposteur. He
kept his company together through 1668 with Amphitryon (January 13), George Dandin (Versailles, July 18), and
L'Avare (September 9). Sooner or later so original an author of comedy as Molière was bound to attempt a modern sketch
of the ancient comic figure of the miser. The last of his three 1668 plays, L'Avare, is composed in prose that reads like
verse; the stock situations are all recast, but the spirit is different from Molière's other works and not to everyone's taste.
His miser is a living paradox, inhuman in his worship of money, all too human in his need of respect and affection. In
breathtaking scenes his mania is made to suggest cruelty, pathological loneliness, even insanity. The play is too stark for
those who expect laughter from comedy; Goethe started the dubious fashion of calling it tragic. Yet, as before, forces of
mind and will are made to serve inhuman ends and are opposed by instinct and a very "human" nature. The basic comic
suggestion is one of absurdity and incongruity rather than of gaiety.
His second play of 1668, George Dandin, often dismissed as a farce, may be one of Molière's greatest creations. It
centres on a fool, who admits his folly while suggesting that wisdom would not help him because, if things in fact go
against us, it is pointless to be wise. As it happens he is in the right, but he can never prove it. The subject of the play is
trivial, the suggestion is limitless; it sketches a new range of comedy altogether. In 1669, permission was somehow
obtained, and the long run of Tartuffe at last began. More than 60 performances were given that year alone. The theme
for this play, which brought Molière more trouble than any other, may have come to him when a local hypocrite seduced
his landlady. Of the three versions of the play, only the last has survived; the first (presented in three acts played before
the King in 1664) probably portrayed a pious crook so firmly established in a bourgeois household that the master
promises him his daughter and disinherits his son. At the time it was common for lay directors of conscience to be placed
in families to reprove and reform conduct. When this "holy" man is caught making love to his employer's wife, he
recovers by masterly self-reproach and persuades the master not only to pardon him but also to urge him to see as much
of his wife as possible. Molière must have seen even greater comic possibilities in this theme, for he made five acts out of
it. The final version contains two seduction scenes and a shift of interest to the comic paradox in Tartuffe himself, posing
as an inhuman ascetic while by nature he is an all-too-human lecher. It is difficult to think of a theme more likely to
offend pious minds. Like Arnolphe in L'École des femmes, Tartuffe seems to have come to grief because he trusted in wit
and forgot instinct.
Last Plays
The struggle over Tartuffe probably exhausted Molière to the point that he was unable to stave off repeated illness and
supply new plays; he had, in fact, just four years more to live. Yet he produced in 1669 Monsieur de Pourceaugnac for
the King at Chambord and in 1670 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme treated a contemporary theme--social climbing among the bourgeois, or upper middle class-but it is perhaps the least dated of all his comedies. The protagonist Jourdain, rather than being an unpleasant sycophant,
is as delightful as he is fatuous, as genuine as he is naïve; his folly is embedded in a bountiful disposition, which he of
course despises. This is comedy in Molière's happiest vein: the fatuity of the masculine master is offset by the common
sense of wife and servant.
Continuing to write despite his illness, he produced Psyché and Les Fourberies de Scapin (The Cheats of Scapin, 1677) in
1671. Les Femmes savantes (The Blue-Stockings, 1927) followed in 1672; in rougher hands this subject would have been
(as some have thought it) a satire on bluestockings, but Molière has imagined a sensible bourgeois who goes in fear of his
masterful and learned wife. Le Malade imaginaire (Eng. trans., The Imaginary Invalid), about a hypochondriac who fears
death and doctors, was performed in 1673 and was Molière's last work. It is a powerful play in its delineation of medical
jargon and professionalism, in the fatuity of a would-be doctor with learning and no sense, in the normality of the young
and sensible lovers, as opposed to the superstition, greed, and charlatanry of other characters. During the fourth
performance of the play, on February 17, Molière collapsed on stage and was carried back to his house in the rue de
Richelieu to die. As he had not been given the sacraments or the opportunity of formally renouncing the actor's
profession, he was buried without ceremony and after sunset on February 21.
Molière As Actor And As Playwright
Molière's acting had been both his disappointment and his glory. He aspired to be a tragic actor, but contemporary taste
was against him. His public seemed to favour a tragic style that was pompous, with ranting and roaring, strutting and
chanting. Molière had the build, the elasticity, the india-rubber face, as it has been called, of the born comedian. Offstage
he was neither a great talker nor particularly merry, but he would mime and copy speech to the life. He had the tireless
energy of the actor. He was always ready to make a scene out of an incident, to put himself on a stage. He gave one of his
characters his own cough and another his own moods, and he made a play out of actual rehearsals. The characters of his
greatest plays are like the members of his company. It was quite appropriate that he should die while playing the part of
the sick man that he really was.
The actor in him influenced his writing, since he wrote (at speed) what he could most naturally act. He gave himself
choleric parts, servants' parts, a henpecked husband, a foolish bourgeois, and a superstitious old man who cursed "that
fellow Molière." (The comparison with Charlie Chaplin recurs constantly.) Something more than animal energy and a
talent for mime was at work in him, a quality that can only be called intensity of dramatic vision. Here again actors have
helped to recover an aspect of his genius that the scholars had missed, his stage violence. To take his plays as arguments
in favour of reason is to miss their vitality. His sense of reason leads him to animate the absurd. His characters are
imagined as excitable and excited to the point of incoherence. He sacrifices plot to drama, vivacity, a sense of life. He is a
classical writer, yet he is ready to defy all rules of writing.
To think of Molière as a cool apostle of reason, sharing the views of the more rational men of his plays, is a heresy that
dies hard; but careful scrutiny of the milieu in which Molière had to work makes it impossible to believe. The comedies
are not sermons; such doctrine as may be extracted from them is incidental and at the opposite pole from didacticism.
Ideas are expressed to please a public, not to propagate the author's view. If asked what he thought of hypocrisy or
atheism, he would have marvelled at the question and evaded it with the observation that the theatre is not the place for
"views." There is no documentary evidence that Molière ever tried to convey his own opinions on marriage, on the
church, on hell, or on class distinctions. Strictly speaking, his views of these things are unknown. All that is known is that
he worked for and in the theatre and used his amazing power of dramatic suggestion to vivify any imagined scene. If he
has left a sympathetic picture of an atheist, it was not to recommend free thought: his picture of the earthy serving man is
no less vivid, no less sympathetic. Scholars who have tried to make his plays prove things or to convey lessons have
made little sense of his work and have been blind to its inherent fantasy and imaginative power.
Since the power of Molière's writing seems to lie in its creative vigour of language, the traditional divisions of his works
into comedies of manners, comedies of character, and farce are not helpful: he does not appear to have set out in any
instance to write a certain kind of play. He starts from an occasion in Le Mariage forcé (1664; The Forced Marriage,
1762) from doubts about marriage expressed by Rabelais's character Panurge, and in Le Médecin malgré lui he starts
from a medieval fable, or fabliau, of a woodcutter who, to avoid a beating, pretends he is a doctor. On such skeleton
themes Molière animates figures or arranges discussion in which one character exposes another or the roles are first
expressed and then reversed. It is intellectual rhythm rather than what happens, the discussion more than the story, that
conveys the charm, so that to recount the plot may be to omit the essential.
His Unique Sense Of The Comic
The attacks on Molière gave him the chance in his responses to state some aesthetic home truths. Thus, in La Critique de
L'École des femmes, he states that tragedy might be heroic, but comedy must hold the mirror up to nature: "You haven't
achieved anything in comedy unless your portraits can be seen to be living types . . . making decent people laugh is a
strange business." And as for the rules that some were anxious to impose on writers: "I wonder if the golden rule is not to
give pleasure and if a successful play is not on the right track."
The attacks on L'École des femmes were child's play in comparison with the storm raised by Tartuffe and Dom Juan. The
attacks on them also drew from the poet a valuable statement of artistic principle. On Dom Juan he made no public reply
since it was never officially condemned. The documents in defense of Tartuffe are two placets, or petitions, to the King,
the preface to the first edition of 1669 (all these published over Molière's own name), and the Lettre sur la comédie de
l'Imposteur of 1667. The placets and preface are aesthetically disappointing, since Molière was forced to fight on ground
chosen by his opponents and to admit that comedy must be didactic. (There is no other evidence that Molière thought
this, so it is not unfair to assume that he used the argument only when forced.) The Lettre is much more important. It
expresses in a few pregnant lines the aesthetic basis not only of Tartuffe but of Molière's new concept of comedy:
The comic is the outward and visible form that nature's bounty has attached to everything unreasonable, so that we
should see, and avoid, it. To know the comic we must know the rational, of which it denotes the absence and we must see
wherein the rational consists . . . incongruity is the heart of the comic . . . it follows that all lying, disguise, cheating,
dissimulation, all outward show different from the reality, all contradiction in fact between actions that proceed from a
single source, all this is in essence comic.
Molière seems here to put his finger on what was new in his notion of what is comic: a comedy, only incidentally funny,
that is based on a constant double vision of wise and foolish, right and wrong seen together, side by side. This is his
invention and his glory.
A main feature of Molière's technique is a mixing of registers, or of contexts. Characters are made to play a part, then
forget it, speak out of turn, overplay their role, so that those who watch this byplay constantly have the suggestion of
mixed registers. The starting point of Le Médecin malgré lui, the idea of beating a man to make him pretend he is a
doctor, is certainly not subtle, but Molière plays with the idea, makes his woodcutter enjoy his new experience, master
the jargon, and then not know what to do with it. He utters inanities about Hippocrates, is overjoyed to find a patient
ignorant of Latin, so that he need not bother about meaning. He looks for the heart on the wrong side and, undeterred by
having his error recognized, sweeps aside the protest with the immortal: "We have changed all that." The miser robbed of
his money is pathetic, but he does not arouse emotions because his language leads him to the absurd " . . . it's all over . . .
I'm dying, I'm dead, I'm buried." He demands justice with such intemperance that his language exceeds all reason and he
threatens to put the courts in the court. Molière's Misanthrope is even more suggestive in his confusion of justice as an
ideal and as a social institution: "I have justice on my side and I lose my case!" What to him is a scandal of world order is
to others just proof that he is wrongheaded. Such concision does Molière's dramatic speech achieve.
A French Genius
When Voltaire described Molière as "the painter of France," he suggested the range of French attitudes found in the
plays, and this may explain why the French have developed a proprietary interest in a writer whom they seem to regard in
a special sense as their own. They stress aspects of his work that others tend to overlook. Three of these are noteworthy.
First, formality permeates all his works. He never gives realism--life as it is--alone, but always within a pattern and a
form that fuse light and movement, music and dance and speech. Modern productions that omit the interludes in his plays
stray far from the original effect. Characters are grouped, scenes and even speeches are arranged, comic repartee is
rounded off in defiance of realism.
Second, the French stress the poetry where foreigners see psychology. They take the plays not as studies of social mania
but as patterns of fantasy that take up ideas, only to drop them when a point has been made. Le Misanthrope is not
considered as a case study or a French Hamlet but as a subtly arranged chorus of voices and attitudes that convey a
critique of individualism. The play charms by its successive evocations of its central theme. The tendency to speak one's
mind is seen to be many things: idealistic or backbiting or rude or spiteful or just fatuous. It is in this fantasy playing on
the mystery of self-centredness in society that Molière is in the eyes of his own people unsurpassed.
A third quality admired in France is his intellectual penetration in distinguishing the parts of a man from the whole man.
Montaigne, the 16th-century essayist who deeply influenced Molière, divided qualities that are acquired, such as learning
or politeness or skills, from those that are natural, such as humanity or animality, what might be called "human nature"
without other attributes. Molière delighted in opposing his characters in this way; often in his plays a social veneer peels
off, revealing a real man. Many of his dialogues start with politeness and end in open insults.
Molière opposed wit to nature in many forms. His comedy embraces things within the mind and beyond it; reason and
fact seldom meet. As the beaten servant in Amphitryon observes: "That conflicts with common sense. But it is so, for all
that."
Major Works
Les Précieuses ridicules (first performed 1659, published 1660; trans. by B.H. Clark, The Affected Young Ladies, 1915); L'École des
femmes (1663; trans. by the Earl of Longford, The School for Wives, 1948; and by M. Malleson, 1954); Le Tartuffe, ou l'imposteur (first
version 1664, present version 1669; trans. by M. Malleson, The Imposter, 1950); Dom Juan, ou le festin de Pierre (1665; trans. by J.
Ozell as Don John; or, The Libertine, 1665 and rev. and augmented by O. Mandell, 1963); Le Misanthrope (first performed 1666, 1667;
adapted by W. Wycherly, The Plain-Dealer, 1677; trans. by M. Malleson, 1955); L'Avare (1669; trans. by H. Fielding as The Miser,
1733; by M. Malleson, 1950; and by K. Cartledge, 1962, with the same title); Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670; trans. by M. Malleson,
The Prodigious Snob, 1952); Les Femmes savantes (1672; trans. by V. Beringer and M. Down, The Blue-Stockings, 1927); Le Malade
imaginaire (1674; trans. as The Imaginary Invalid by B.H. Clark, 1925; by M. Malleson, 1959; and B. Briscoe, 1967; and as The
Hypochondriac by H. Baker and J. Miller, 1961).
Editions
Collected editions of Molière's works include those by C. Varlet De La Grange, 8 vol. (1682); by M.A. Jolly, 6 vol. (1734); by Eugène
Despois and Paul Mesnard in the "Grands Écrivains de la France Series," 13 vol. (1873-1900); by René Bray in the "Belles Lettres
Series," 8 vol. (1935-52); by Gustave Michaut, 11 vol. (1949); by Robert Jouanny in the "Garnier Series," 2 vol. (1962); and by Georges
Couton in the "Pléiade Series," 2 vol. (1971). Among editions of particular plays those of L'Avare by Charles Dullin (1946), of Le
Malade imaginaire by Pierre Valde (1946), of Tartuffe by Fernand Ledoux (1953), and of Le Misanthrope by Gustave Rudler (1947)
deserve special mention.
Biography
Earlier literature is superseded by Gustave Michaut, La Jeunesse de Molière (1922, reprinted 1968), Les Débuts de Molière à Paris
(1923, reissued 1968), and Les Luttes de Molière (1925, reissued 1968). See also John L. Palmer, Molière: His Life and Works (1930,
reprinted 1970); Gustave Michaut (ed.), Molière: raconté par ceux qui l'ont vu (1932); Georges Mongrédien, La Vie privée de Molière
(1950); Gertrud Mander, Moliere (1973; originally published in German, 1967); and René Bray, Molière, homme de théâtre, new ed.
(1963, reissued 1972). Official documents have been collected in Madeleine Jurgens and Elizabeth Maxfield-Miller, Cent Ans de
recherches sur Molière, sur sa famille et sur les comédiens de sa troupe (1963).
Theatrical history
Henry C. Lancaster, A History of French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century, pt. 3 (1936, reprinted 1966); Antoine Adam,
Historie de la littérature française au XVIIe siècle, vol. 3 (1956); Pierre Mélèse, Le Théâtre et le public à Paris sous Louis XIV (1934,
reprinted 1976); Theodore Van Vree, Les Pamphlets et libelles littéraires contre Molière (1933); and Burt E. and Grace P. Young (eds.),
Le Registre de La Grange, 2 vol. (1947, reprinted 1977). On particular plays, see Antoine Adam, "La Genèse des 'Précieuses ridicules,' "
Revue d'histoire de la philosophie et d'histoire générale da le civilisation, 14-16 (January-March 1939); Jacques Arnavon, Le
Misanthrope de Molière (1930, reprinted 1970), and L'École des femmes de Molière (1936); and René Jasinki, Molière et le Misanthrope
(1951, reissued 1970).
General criticism
Paul F. Saintonge and R.W. Christ, Fifty Years of Molière Studies: A Bibliography, 1892-1941 (1942, reissued 1977); Roger Johnson,
Editha S. Neumann, and Guy T. Trail (eds.), Molière and the Commonwealth of Letters (1975), a study that includes Paul Saintonge's
"Thirty Years of Molière Studies: A Bibliography, 1942-1971"; Laurence Romero, Molière: Traditions in Criticism, 1900-1970 (1974);
Will G. Moore, Molière: A New Criticism (1949, reprinted 1973); Jacques Guicharnaud, Molière, une aventure théâtrale. Tartuffe, Dom
Juan, Le Misanthrope (1963); Harold C. Knutson, Molière: An Archetypal Approach (1976); and Nicholas Grene, Shakespeare, Jonson,
Molière: The Comic Contract (1980), a comparative study.
Moscow Art Theatre
Also called (UNTIL 1939) MOSCOW ART THEATRE, Russian MOSCOVSKY AKADEMICHESKY
KHUDOZHESTVENNY TEATR, OR MOSCOVSKY KHUDOZHESTVENNY TEATR, abbreviation MKHAT,
outstanding Russian theatre of theatrical naturalism founded in 1898 by two teachers of dramatic art, Konstantin
Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko.
Its purpose was to establish a theatre of new art forms, with a fresh approach to its function. Sharing similar theatrical
experience and interests, the cofounders met and it was agreed that Stanislavsky was to have absolute control over stage
direction while Nemirovich-Danchenko was assigned the literary and administrative duties. The original ensemble was
made up of amateur actors from the Society of Art and Literature and from the dramatic classes of the Moscow
Philharmonic Society, where Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko had taught. Influenced by the German
http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?xref=8345Meiningen Company, Stanislavsky began to
develop a system of training for actors that would enable them to perform realistically in any sort of role and situation.
After some 70 rehearsals, the Moscow Art Theatre opened with Aleksey Tolstoy's Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich in October
1898. For its fifth production it staged Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, a play that had failed in its first production. With its
revival of The Seagull, the Art Theatre not only achieved its first major success but also began a long artistic association
with one of Russia's most celebrated playwrights: in Chekhov's artistic realism, the Art Theatre discovered a writer suited
to its aesthetic sensibilities. In The Seagull, as in all of Chekhov's plays, the Art Theatre emphasized the subtext, the
underlying meaning of the playwright's thought. Artistically, the Art Theatre tried all that was new. Its repertoire included
works of Maksim Gorky, L.N. Andreyev, Leo Tolstoy, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Gerhart Hauptmann, among others, and
it staged works of political and social significance as well as satires, fantasies, and comedies.
After the Russian Revolution it received crucial support from V.I. Lenin and A.V. Lunacharsky, first commissar of
education in the Soviet Union, and in 1922 the Art Theatre toured Europe and the United States, garnering critical
acclaim wherever it performed. Returning to Moscow in 1924, the theatre continued to produce new Soviet plays and
Russian classics until its evacuation in 1941. Two successful tours of London in the late 1950s and early '60s
reestablished its preeminence in world theatre. The Art Theatre has exercised a tremendous influence on theatres all over
the world: it fostered a number of experimental studios (e.g., Vakhtangov Theatre, Realistic Theatre, Habima Theatre,
Musical Studio of Nemirovich-Danchenko), and, today, virtually all professional training in acting uses some aspects of
Konstantin Stanislavsky's method.
More on the Moscow Art Theatre
The movement toward Naturalism that was sweeping Europe reached its highest artistic peak in Russia in 1898 with the
formation of the Moscow Art Theatre (later called the Moscow Academy Art Theatre). Its name became synonymous
with that of Anton Chekhov, whose plays about the day-to-day life of the landed gentry achieved a delicate poetic realism
that was years ahead of its time. Konstantin Stanislavsky , its director, became the 20th century's most influential theorist
on acting. In the early 19th century Russian theatre had been one of the most backward in Europe, content to play a
repertoire of stock theatrical pieces, mainly French comedies and farces, or Russian imitations of them. Little time was
spent on rehearsal; the plays were so similar that the same performances and sets could be used time and again. However,
the Meiningen Company, which had visited Russia during the late 1880s, had pointed the way to reform with its
exemplary discipline.
During a 17-hour conversation in a Moscow restaurant, Stanislavsky, an amateur actor of considerable experience, and
Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, a playwright, teacher, and drama critic, talked over their vision of an ideal theatre
company, its artistic policy, and its production methods. On the basis of their discussion, they formed a group they called
the Moscow Art Theatre Company. No great stir was made until, later that year, they revived Chekhov's Chayka (1896;
The Seagull), which had failed badly in its incompetent first production in St. Petersburg. An instant success, the new
production established the reputation of both Chekhov and Stanislavsky. The intimacy and truthfulness of the acting were
something entirely new. Through his stagings of several of Chekhov's other plays, Dyadya Vanya (1897; Uncle Vanya ),
Tri sestry (1901; Three Sisters), and Vishnyovy sad (1904; The Cherry Orchard), Stanislavsky developed a style of
infinitely detailed production, the result of long and methodical rehearsals, to achieve an almost perfect surface
naturalism.
Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir Ivanovich
b. Dec. 23 [Dec. 11, old style], 1858, Ozurgety, Russia d. April 25, 1943, Moscow
Russian playwright, novelist, producer, and cofounder of the famous Moscow Art Theatre.
At the age of 13, Nemirovich-Danchenko was directing plays and experimenting with different stage effects. He received
his formal education at Moscow State University, where his talents as a writer and critic began to appear. As a young
dramatist, his plays, which were presented at the Maly Theatre (Moscow), were highly praised and respected, and he
received at least two awards for playwriting.
In 1891 he became an instructor of dramatic art at the Moscow Philharmonic Society. Olga Knipper, Vsevolod
Meyerhold, and Yevgeny Vakhtangov were only a few of the actors and directors who came under his influence and who
eventually went on to win recognition on the Russian stage. As a teacher, Nemirovich-Danchenko expounded his ideas
on theatrical art, the most important of which, such as the need for longer, organized rehearsals and a less rigid acting
style, were subsequently incorporated by Konstantin Stanislavsky into his Method system of acting. In 1897, realizing
that the Russian stage was in need of drastic reform, Nemirovich-Danchenko called a meeting with Stanislavsky to
outline the aims and policies of a new theatre, an actor's theatre, first named the Moscow Art and Popular Theatre.
Although Stanislavsky was given absolute authority over staging the productions, the contributions of NemirovichDanchenko were considerable. Both as producer and as literary adviser, he was chiefly responsible for the reading and
selection of new plays, and he instructed Stanislavsky on matters of interpretation and staging as well.
Nemirovich-Danchenko encouraged both Anton Chekhov and Maksim Gorky to write for the theatre, and he is credited
with the successful revival of Chekhov's Seagull after it had failed dismally at the Aleksandrinsky Theatre. Applying the
dramatic reforms of the Moscow Art Theatre to light opera, Nemirovich-Danchenko founded the Moscow Art Musical
Studio in the early 1920s and achieved outstanding success with his staging of La Périchole and Lysistrata in New York
City (1925). His autobiography was translated as My Life in the Russian Theater (1936).
O'Casey, Sean
b. March 30, 1880, Dublin, Ire., d. Sept. 18, 1964, Torquay, Devon, Eng.
Original name JOHN CASEY, Irish playwright renowned for realistic dramas of the Dublin slums in war and revolution,
in which tragedy and comedy are juxtaposed in a way new to the theatre of his time.
O'Casey was born into a lower middle-class Irish Protestant family. His father died when John was six, and thereafter the
family became progressively poorer. With only three years of formal schooling, he educated himself by reading. He
started work at 14, mostly at manual labour, including several years with the Irish railways. (O'Casey would later
exaggerate the hardships and poverty he had experienced during childhood.)
O'Casey became caught up in the cause of Irish nationalism, and he changed his name to its Irish form and learned
Gaelic. His attitudes were greatly influenced by the poverty and squalor he witnessed in Dublin's slums and by the
teachings of the Irish labour leader Jim Larkin. O'Casey became active in the labour movement and wrote for the Irish
Worker. He also joined the Irish Citizen Army, a paramilitary arm of the Irish labour unions, and drew up its constitution
in 1914. At this time he became disillusioned with the Irish nationalist movement because its leaders put nationalist ideals
before socialist ones. O'Casey did not take part in the 1916 Easter Rising against the British authorities.
Disgusted with the existing political parties, he turned his energies to drama. His tragicomedies reflect in part his mixed
feelings about his fellow slum dwellers, seeing them as incapable of giving a socialist direction to the Irish cause but at
the same time admirable for their unconquerable spirit.
After
several
of
his
plays
had
been
rejected,
the
http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?xref=461975Abbey Theatre in Dublin produced The Shadow
of a Gunman (1923), set during the guerrilla strife between the Irish Republican Army and British forces. In 1924 the
Abbey staged Juno and the Paycock, his most popular play, set during the period of civil war over the terms of Irish
independence. The Plough and the Stars (1926), with the 1916 Easter Rising as its background, caused riots at the Abbey
by patriots who thought the play denigrated Irish heroes. When first produced in the 1920s, these plays had an explosive
effect on the audiences at the Abbey and helped to enlarge that theatre's reputation.
O'Casey went to England in 1926, met the Irish actress Eileen Carey Reynolds, married her, and henceforth made
England his home. His decision to live outside Ireland was motivated in part by the Abbey's rejection of The Silver
Tassie, a partly Expressionist antiwar drama produced in England in 1929. Another Expressionist play, Within the Gates
(1934), followed, in which the modern world is symbolized by the happenings in a public park. The Star Turns Red
(1940) is an antifascist play, and the semiautobiographical Red Roses for Me (1946) is set in Dublin at the time of the
Irish railways strike of 1911.
His later plays, given to fantasy and ritual and directed against the life-denying puritanism he thought had beset Ireland,
include Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949), The Bishop's Bonfire (1955), and The Drums of Father Ned (1958). His last fulllength play was a satire on Dublin intellectuals, Behind the Green Curtains (published 1961).
O'Casey's three indisputably great plays are The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, and The Plough and the
Stars. All are tragicomedies set in the slums of Dublin during times of war and revolution. Violent death and the
everyday realities of tenement life throw into relief the blustering rhetoric and patriotic swagger of men caught up in the
struggle for Irish independence. The resulting ironic juxtapositions of the comic and tragic reveal the waste of war and
the corrosive effects of poverty. O'Casey's gifts were for vivid characterization and working-class language, and, though
he portrayed war and poverty, he wrote some of the funniest scenes in modern drama. O'Casey's later plays are not
considered as powerful or moving as his earlier realistic plays. In his later plays he tended to abandon vigorous
characterization in favour of expressionism and symbolism, and sometimes the drama is marred by didacticism.
Six volumes of O'Casey's autobiography appeared from 1939 to 1956; they were later collected as Mirror in My House
(1956) in the United States and as Autobiographies (1963) in Great Britain. O'Casey's letters from 1910 to 1941 were
edited by David Krause in two volumes (1975, 1980).
Bibliography
C. Desmond Greaves, Sean O'Casey: Politics and Art (1979), traces O'Casey's social thought. Garry O'Connor, Sean O'Casey: A Life
(1988), is a corrective on biographical points.
Odets, Clifford
b. July 18, 1906, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S., d. Aug. 14, 1963, Hollywood, Calif.
Leading dramatist of the theatre of social protest in the United States during the 1930s. His important affiliation with the
celebrated http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?xref=9183Group Theatre contributed to that
company's considerable influence on the American stage.
From 1923 to 1928 Odets learned his profession as an actor in repertory companies; in 1931 he joined the newly founded
Group Theatre as one of its original members. Odets' Waiting for Lefty (1935), his first great success, used both
auditorium and stage for action and was an effective plea for labour unionism; Awake and Sing (1935) was a naturalistic
family situation drama; and Golden Boy (1937) was about an Italian youth who became a professional prizefighter.
Paradise Lost (1935) deals with the tragic life of a middle-class family. In 1936 he married the Austrian actress Luise
Rainer.
Odets moved to Hollywood in the late '30s to write for motion pictures and became a successful director. His later plays
include The Big Knife (1949), The Country Girl (1950; British title Winter Journey), and The Flowering Peach (1954). A
musical based on Golden Boy was made in 1964.
O'Neill, Eugene
b. Oct. 16, 1888, New York, N.Y., U.S., d. Nov. 27, 1953, Boston, Mass.
In
full
EUGENE
GLADSTONE
O'NEILLhttp://members.eb.com/bol/topic?asmbly_id=30874 foremost American dramatist
and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. His masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night (produced
posthumously 1956), is at the apex of a long string of great plays, including Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie
(1922), Strange Interlude (1928), Ah! Wilderness (1933), and The Iceman Cometh (1946).
Early Life
O'Neill was born into the theatre. His father, James O'Neill, was a successful touring actor in the last quarter of the 19th
century whose most famous role was that of the Count of Monte Cristo in a stage adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas
père novel. His mother, Ella, accompanied her husband back and forth across the country, settling down only briefly for
the birth of her first son, James, Jr., and of Eugene.
Eugene, who was born in a hotel, spent his early childhood in hotel rooms, on trains, and backstage. Although he later
deplored the nightmare insecurity of his early years and blamed his father for the difficult, rough-and-tumble life the
family led--a life that resulted in his mother's drug addiction--Eugene had the theatre in his blood. He was also, as a child,
steeped in the peasant Irish Catholicism of his father and the more genteel, mystical piety of his mother, two influences,
often in dramatic conflict, which account for the high sense of drama and the struggle with God and religion that
distinguish O'Neill's plays.
O'Neill was educated at boarding schools--Mt. St. Vincent in the Bronx and Betts Academy in Stamford, Conn. His
summers were spent at the family's only permanent home, a modest house overlooking the Thames River in New
London, Conn. He attended Princeton University for one year (1906-07), after which he left school to begin what he later
regarded as his real education in "life experience." The next six years very nearly ended his life. He shipped to sea, lived
a derelict's existence on the waterfronts of Buenos Aires, Liverpool, and New York City, submerged himself in alcohol,
and attempted suicide. Recovering briefly at the age of 24, he held a job for a few months as a reporter and contributor to
the poetry column of the New London Telegraph but soon came down with tuberculosis. Confined to the Gaylord Farm
Sanitarium in Wallingford, Conn., for six months (1912-13), he confronted himself soberly and nakedly for the first time
and seized the chance for what he later called his "rebirth." He began to write plays.
Entry Into Theatre
O'Neill's first efforts were awkward melodramas, but they were about people and subjects--prostitutes, derelicts, lonely
sailors, God's injustice to man--that had, up to that time, been in the province of serious novels and were not considered
fit subjects for presentation on the American stage. A theatre critic persuaded his father to send him to Harvard to study
with George Pierce Baker in his famous playwriting course. Although what O'Neill produced during that year (1914-15)
owed little to Baker's academic instruction, the chance to work steadily at writing set him firmly on his chosen path.
O'Neill's first appearance as a playwright came in the summer of 1916, in the quiet fishing village of Provincetown,
Mass., where a group of young writers and painters had launched an experimental theatre. In their tiny, ramshackle
playhouse on a wharf, they produced his one-act sea play Bound East for Cardiff. The talent inherent in the play was
immediately evident to the group, which that fall formed the Playwrights' Theater in Greenwich Village. Their first bill,
on Nov. 3, 1916, included Bound East for Cardiff--O'Neill's New York debut. Although he was only one of several
writers whose plays were produced by the Playwrights' Theater, his contribution within the next few years made the
group's reputation. Between 1916 and 1920, the group produced all of O'Neill's one-act sea plays, along with a number of
his lesser efforts. By the time his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, was produced on Broadway, Feb. 2, 1920, at
the Morosco Theater, the young playwright already had a small reputation.
Beyond the Horizon impressed the critics with its tragic realism, won for O'Neill the first of four Pulitzer prizes in drama-others were for Anna Christie, Strange Interlude, and Long Day's Journey into Night--and brought him to the attention
of a wider theatre public. For the next 20 years his reputation grew steadily, both in the United States and abroad; after
Shakespeare and Shaw, O'Neill became the most widely translated and produced dramatist.
Period Of The Major Works
O'Neill's capacity for and commitment to work were staggering. Between 1920 and 1943 he completed 20 long plays-several of them double and triple length--and a number of shorter ones. He wrote and rewrote many of his manuscripts
half a dozen times before he was satisfied, and he filled shelves of notebooks with research notes, outlines, play ideas,
and other memoranda. His most-distinguished short plays include the four early sea plays, Bound East for Cardiff, In the
Zone, The Long Voyage Home, and The Moon of the Caribbees, which were written between 1913 and 1917 and
produced in 1924 under the overall title S.S. Glencairn; The Emperor Jones (about the disintegration of a Pullman porter
turned tropical-island dictator); and The Hairy Ape (about the disintegration of a displaced steamship coal stoker).
O'Neill's plays were written from an intensely personal point of view, deriving directly from the scarring effects of his
family's tragic relationships--his mother and father, who loved and tormented each other; his older brother, who loved
and corrupted him and died of alcoholism in middle age; and O'Neill himself, caught and torn between love for and rage
at all three.
Among his most-celebrated long plays is Anna Christie, perhaps the classic American example of the ancient "harlot with
a heart of gold" theme; it became an instant popular success. O'Neill's serious, almost solemn treatment of the struggle of
a poor Swedish-American girl to live down her early, enforced life of prostitution and to find happiness with a likable but
unimaginative young sailor is his least-complicated tragedy. He himself disliked it from the moment he finished it, for, in
his words, it had been "too easy."
The first full-length play in which O'Neill successfully evoked the starkness and inevitability of Greek tragedy that he felt
in his own life was Desire Under the Elms. Drawing on Greek themes of incest, infanticide, and fateful retribution, he
framed his story in the context of his own family's conflicts. This story of a lustful father, a weak son, and an adulterous
wife who murders her infant son was told with a fine disregard for the conventions of the contemporary Broadway
theatre. Because of the sparseness of its style, its avoidance of melodrama, and its total honesty of emotion, the play was
acclaimed immediately as a powerful tragedy and has continued to rank among the great American plays of the 20th
century.
In The Great God Brown, O'Neill dealt with a major theme that he expressed more effectively in later plays--the conflict
between idealism and materialism. Although the play was too metaphysically intricate to be staged successfully in 1926,
it was significant for its symbolic use of masks and for the experimentation with expressionistic dialogue and action-devices that since have become commonly accepted both on the stage and in motion pictures. In spite of its confusing
structure, the play is rich in symbolism and poetry, as well as in daring technique, and it became a forerunner of avantgarde movements in American theatre.
O'Neill's innovative writing continued with Strange Interlude. This play was revolutionary in style and length: when first
produced, it opened in late afternoon, broke for a dinner intermission, and ended at the conventional hour. Techniques
new to the modern theatre included spoken asides or soliloquies to express the characters' hidden thoughts. The play is
the saga of Everywoman, who ritualistically acts out her roles as daughter, wife, mistress, mother, and platonic friend.
Although it was innovative and startling in 1928, its obvious Freudian overtones have rapidly dated the work.
One of O'Neill's enduring masterpieces, Mourning Becomes Electra, represents the playwright's most complete use of
Greek forms, themes, and characters. Based on the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus, it was itself three plays in one. To give
the story contemporary credibility, O'Neill set the play in the New England of the Civil War period, yet he retained the
forms and the conflicts of the Greek characters: the heroic leader returning from war; his adulterous wife, who murders
him; his jealous, repressed daughter, who avenges him through the murder of her mother; and his weak, incestuous son,
who is goaded by his sister first to matricide and then to suicide.
Following a long succession of tragic visions, O'Neill's only comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, appeared on Broadway in 1933.
Written in a lighthearted, nostalgic mood, the work was inspired in part by the playwright's mischievous desire to
demonstrate that he could portray the comic as well as the tragic side of life. Significantly, the play is set in the same
place and period, a small New England town in the early 1900s, as his later tragic masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into
Night. Dealing with the growing pains of a sensitive, adolescent boy, Ah, Wilderness! was characterized by O'Neill as
"the other side of the coin," meaning that it represented his fantasy of what his own youth might have been, rather than
what he believed it to have been (as dramatized later in Long Day's Journey into Night).
The Iceman Cometh, the most complex and perhaps the finest of the O'Neill tragedies, followed in 1939, although it did
not appear on Broadway until 1946. Laced with subtle religious symbolism, the play is a study of man's need to cling to
his hope for a better life, even if he must delude himself to do so.
Even in his last writings, O'Neill's youth continued to absorb his attention. The posthumous production of Long Day's
Journey into Night brought to light an agonizingly autobiographical play, one of O'Neill's greatest. It is straightforward in
style but shattering in its depiction of the agonized relations between father, mother, and two sons. Spanning one day in
the life of a family, the play strips away layer after layer from each of the four central figures, revealing the mother as a
defeated drug addict, the father as a man frustrated in his career and failed as a husband and father, the older son as a
bitter alcoholic, and the younger son as a tubercular, disillusioned youth with only the slenderest chance for physical and
spiritual survival.
O'Neill's tragic view of life was perpetuated in his relationships with the three women he married--two of whom he
divorced--and with his three children. His elder son, Eugene O'Neill, Jr. (by his first wife, Kathleen Jenkins), committed
suicide at 40, while his younger son, Shane (by his second wife, Agnes Boulton), drifted into a life of emotional
instability. His daughter, Oona (also by Agnes Boulton), was cut out of his life when, at 18, she infuriated him by
marrying Charlie Chaplin, who was O'Neill's age.
Until some years after his death in 1953, O'Neill, although respected in the United States, was more highly regarded
abroad. Sweden, in particular, always held him in high esteem, partly because of his publicly acknowledged debt to the
influence of the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, whose tragic themes often echo in O'Neill's plays. In 1936 the
Swedish Academy gave O'Neill the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first time the award had been conferred on an
American playwright.
O'Neill's most ambitious project for the theatre was one that he never completed. In the late 1930s he conceived of a
cycle of 11 plays, to be performed on 11 consecutive nights, tracing the lives of an American family from the early 1800s
to modern times. He wrote scenarios and outlines for several of the plays and drafts of others but completed only one in
the cycle--A Touch of the Poet--before a crippling illness ended his ability to hold a pencil. An unfinished rough draft of
another of the cycle plays, More Stately Mansions, was published in 1964 and produced three years later on Broadway, in
spite of written instructions left by O'Neill that the incomplete manuscript be destroyed after his death.
O'Neill's final years were spent in grim frustration. Unable to work, he longed for his death and sat waiting for it in a
Boston hotel, seeing no one except his doctor, a nurse, and his third wife, Carlotta Monterey. O'Neill died as broken and
tragic a figure as any he had created for the stage.
Major Works
One-Act Plays Of The Sea:
Bound East for Cardiff (performed 1916); The Long Voyage Home (performed 1917), later used as the title of a film version of O'Neill's
plays of the sea; Ile (performed 1917); In the Zone (performed 1917); The Moon of the Caribbees (performed 1918), published in a
collection, The Moon of the Caribbees, and Six Other Plays of the Sea (1919), which included the first book publication of the above
plays plus The Rope (performed 1918), and Where the Cross Is Made (performed 1918). This same collection was published in 1940 as
The Long Voyage Home: Seven Plays of the Sea.
Longer Plays:
Beyond the Horizon (performed and published 1920); The Emperor Jones (performed 1920, published 1921); Anna Christie (performed
1921, published 1922); The Hairy Ape (1922); All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924); Desire Under the Elms (performed 1924, published
1925); The Great God Brown (1926); Marco Millions (performed 1928, published 1927); Strange Interlude (1928), a two-part play in
nine acts; Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), a trilogy comprising Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted; Ah, Wilderness! (1933),
O'Neill's only comedy; The Iceman Cometh (written 1939, performed and published 1946); A Touch of the Poet (written 1935-42;
performed and published posthumously, 1957), third of a projected cycle of 11 plays to be collectively entitled A Tale of the Possessors,
Self-Dispossessed; Long Day's Journey into Night (written 1939-41; performed and published posthumously, 1956); A Moon for the
Misbegotten (written 1943; performed 1957, published 1952); Hughie (written 1941; performed 1964, published 1959, one of a
projected cycle of one-act plays, to have been collectively entitled By Way of Orbit); More Stately Mansions (unfinished, written 193541; performed 1962, published 1964).
The handiest source for all the plays is "The Library of America" Complete Plays, 3 vol. (1988). Some of the other plays have been
published as separate volumes.
Bibliography
Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill, enlarged ed. (1973, reissued 1987); Doris Alexander, The Tempering of Eugene O'Neill (1962);
and Louis Shaeffer, O'Neill, Son and Playwright (1968, reprinted 1989), and O'Neill, Son and Artist (1973, reprinted 1990), are
biographies. Critical studies of his works include Virginia Floyd (ed.), Eugene O'Neill: A World View (1980), and The Plays of Eugene
O'Neill: A New Assessment (1985); Frederic I. Carpenter, Eugene O'Neill, rev. ed. (1979); Travis Bogard, Contour in Time: The Plays of
Eugene O'Neill, rev. ed. (1988); and Richard F. Moorton, Jr. (ed.), Eugene O'Neill's Century: Centennial Views on America's Foremost
Tragic Dramatist (1991).
Osborne, John
b. Dec. 12, 1929, London, Eng., d. Dec. 24, 1994, Shropshire
In
full
JOHN
JAMES
OSBORNE
http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?asmbly_id=23487British playwright and film producer
whose Look Back in Anger (performed 1956) ushered in a new movement in British drama and made him known as the
first of the "Angry Young Men".
The son of a commercial artist and a barmaid, Osborne used insurance money from his father's death in 1941 for a
boarding- school education at Belmont College, Devon. He hated it and left after striking the headmaster. He went home
to his mother in London and briefly tried trade journalism until a job tutoring a touring company of juvenile actors
introduced him to the theatre. He was soon acting himself, later becoming an actor-manager for various repertory
companies in provincial towns and also trying his hand at playwriting. His first play, The Devil Inside Him, was written
in 1950 with his friend and mentor Stella Linden, an actress and one of Osborne's first passions.
Osborne made his first appearance as a London actor in 1956, the same year that Look Back in Anger was produced by
the English Stage Company. Although the form of the play was not revolutionary, its content was unexpected. On stage
for the first time were the 20- to 30-year-olds of Great Britain who had not participated in World War II and found its
aftermath shabby and lacking in promise. The hero, Jimmy Porter, although the son of a worker, has, through the state
educational system, reached an uncomfortably marginal position on the border of the middle class from which he can see
the traditional possessors of privilege holding the better jobs and threatening his upward climb. Jimmy Porter continues
to work in a street-market and vents his rage on his middle-class wife and her middle-class friend. No solution is
proposed for Porter's frustrations, but Osborne makes the audience feel them acutely.
Osborne's next play, The Entertainer (1957), projects a vision of a contemporary Britain diminished from its days of selfconfidence. Its hero is a failing comedian, and Osborne uses the decline of the music-hall tradition as a metaphor for the
decline of a nation's vitality. In 1958 Osborne and director Tony Richardson founded Woodfall Film Productions, which
produced motion pictures of Look Back in Anger (1959), The Entertainer (1959), and, from a filmscript by Osborne that
won an Academy Award, Tom Jones (1963), based on the novel by Henry Fielding.
Luther (1961), an epic play about the Reformation leader, again showed Osborne's ability to create an actably rebellious
central figure. His two Plays for England (1962) include The Blood of the Bambergs, a satire on royalty, and Under Plain
Cover, a study of an incestuous couple playing games of dominance and submission.
The tirade of Jimmy Porter is resumed in a different key by a frustrated solicitor in Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence
(1964). A Patriot for Me (1965) portrays a homosexual Austrian officer in the period before World War I, based on the
story of Alfred Redl, and shows Osborne's interests in the decline of empire and the perils of the nonconformist. West of
Suez (1971) revealed a measure of sympathy for a type of British colonizer whose day has waned and antipathy for his
ideological opponents, who are made to appear confused and neurotic. Osborne's last play, Déjàvu (1992), a sequel to
Look Back in Anger, revisits Jimmy Porter after a 35-year interval.
As revealed in the first installment of Osborne's autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981), much of the fire in Look
Back in Anger was drawn from Osborne's own early experience. In it he attacks the mediocrity of lower-middle-class
English life personified by his mother, whom he hated, and discusses his volatile temperament. The second part of his
autobiography appeared in 1991 under the title Almost a Gentleman. Osborne was married five times.
Having come to the stage initially as an actor, Osborne achieved note for his skill in providing actable roles. He is also
significant for restoring the tirade--or passionately scathing speech--to a high place among dramatic elements. Most
significantly, however, he reoriented British drama from well-made plays depicting upper-class life to vigorously realistic
drama of contemporary life.
Bibliography
Herbert Goldstone, Coping with Vulnerability: The Achievement of John Osborne (1982); Arnold P. Hinchliffe, John Osborne (1984).
Papp, Joseph
b. June 22, 1921, Brooklyn, New York, N.Y., U.S., d. Oct. 31, 1991, New York, N.Y.
Original
name
JOSEPH
PAPIROFSKY
http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?asmbly_id=23614American theatrical producer and
director, founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theatre. He was a major innovative force in the
American theatre in the second half of the 20th century.
Papp studied acting and directing at the Actor's Laboratory Theatre in Hollywood from 1946 to 1948, when he became its
managing director. Two years later he took a position as assistant stage manager of the national touring company of
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. In 1954, after two years as a stage manager for the Columbia Broadcasting System
(CBS) television network in New York City, Papp founded the New York Shakespeare Festival, which became a unique
institution in the New York theatrical milieu. The festival gave free performances of Shakespearean plays in various
locations around the city, including outdoor productions in Central Park. (In 1962 the company received a newly built,
permanent home in the park, the Delacorte Theatre.) Papp worked with little or no pay for several years to establish the
festival, producing and directing the majority of the plays himself. He remained its artistic director until 1991.
In 1967 he founded the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theatre, which concentrated on contemporary and
experimental dramas. Several of its productions eventually traveled to Broadway, including Hair (1967), Sticks and
Bones (1971), That Championship Season (1972), and A Chorus Line (1975). The latter musical became the longestrunning show in Broadway's history. (The old Astor Library in Lower Manhattan was "recycled" into a seven-theatre
complex to serve as the Public's physical plant.) Papp was one of the most dynamic Off-Broadway producers from the
1960s through the 1980s, and he championed many innovative playwrights, including David Rabe and John Guare, and
talented actors, such as George C. Scott and Meryl Streep, who later achieved prominence.
Pinter, Harold
b. Oct. 10, 1930, London, Eng.
English playwright who achieved international renown as one of the most complex and challenging post-World War II
dramatists. His plays are noted for their use of understatement, small talk, reticence--and even silence--to convey the
substance of a character's thought, which often lies several layers beneath, and contradicts, his speech.
The son of a Jewish tailor, Pinter grew up in London's East End in a working-class area. He studied acting at the Royal
Academy of Dramatic Art in 1948 but left after two terms to join a repertory company as a professional actor. Pinter
toured Ireland and England with various acting companies, appearing under the name David Baron in provincial
repertory theatres until 1959. After 1956 he began to write for the stage: The Room (1957) and The Dumbwaiter (1957),
his first two plays, are one-act dramas that established the mood of comic menace that was to figure largely in his early
plays. His first full-length play, The Birthday Party (1958; filmed 1968), puzzled the London audiences and lasted only a
week, but later it was televised and revived successfully on the stage.
After Pinter's radio play A Slight Ache (1959) was adapted for the stage, his reputation was secured by his second fulllength play, The Caretaker (1960; filmed 1963), which established him as more than just another practitioner of the thenpopular Theatre of the Absurd. His next major play, The Homecoming (1965), helped establish him as the originator of a
unique dramatic idiom. Such later plays as Landscape (1969), Silence (1969), Night (1969), and Old Times (1971)
virtually did away with physical activity on the stage. Pinter's later successes included No Man's Land (1975) and
Betrayal (1978). From the 1970s on, Pinter did much directing, of both his own and others' works. His Poems and Prose
1941-1977 was published in 1978.
Pinter's plays are ambivalent in their plots, presentation of character, and endings, but they are works of undeniable
power and originality. They typically begin with a pair of characters whose stereotyped relations and role-playing are
disrupted by the entrance of a stranger; the audience sees the psychic stability of the couple break down as their fears,
jealousies, hatreds, sexual preoccupations, and loneliness emerge from beneath a screen of bizarre yet commonplace
conversation. In The Caretaker, for instance, a wheedling, garrulous old tramp comes to live with two neurotic brothers,
one of whom underwent electroshock therapy as a mental patient. The tramp's attempts to establish himself in the
household upset the precarious balance of the brothers' lives, and they end up evicting him. The Homecoming focuses on
the return to his London home of a university professor who brings his wife to meet his brothers and father. The woman's
presence exposes a tangle of rage and confused sexuality in this all-male household, but in the end she decides to stay
with the father and his two sons after having accepted their sexual overtures without protest from her overly detached
husband.
Dialogue is of central importance in Pinter's plays and is perhaps the key to his originality. His characters' colloquial
speech consists of disjointed and oddly ambivalent conversation that is punctuated by resonant silences. The characters'
speech, hesitations, and pauses reveal not only their own alienation and the difficulties they have in communicating but
also the many layers of meaning that can be contained in even the most innocuous statements.
In addition to works for the stage, Pinter wrote radio and television dramas and a number of successful motion-picture
screenplays. Among the latter are those for three films directed by Joseph Losey, The Servant (1963), Accident (1967),
and The Go-Between (1971), as well as ones for The Last Tycoon (1974), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), and
the screen version of Pinter's play Betrayal (1982).
Pirandello, Luigi
b. June 28, 1867, Agrigento, Sicily, Italy, d. Dec. 10, 1936, Rome
Italian playwright, novelist, and short-story writer, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature. With his invention of
the "theatre within the theatre" in the play Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore (1921; Six Characters in Search of an
Author), he became an important innovator in modern drama.
Pirandello was the son of a sulfur merchant who wanted him to enter commerce. Pirandello, however, was not interested
in business; he wanted to study. He first went to Palermo, the capital of Sicily, and, in 1887, to the University of Rome.
After a quarrel with the professor of classics there, he went in 1888 to the University of Bonn, Ger., where in 1891 he
gained his doctorate in philology for a thesis on the dialect of Agrigento.
In 1894 his father arranged his marriage to Antonietta Portulano, the daughter of a business associate, a wealthy sulfur
merchant. This marriage gave him financial independence, allowing him to live in Rome and to write. He had already
published an early volume of verse, Mal giocondo (1889), which paid tribute to the poetic fashions set by Giosuè
Carducci. This was followed by other volumes of verse, including Pasqua di Gea (1891; dedicated to Jenny SchulzLander, the love he had left behind in Bonn) and a translation of J.W. von Goethe's Roman Elegies (1896; Elegie
romane). But his first significant works were short stories, which at first he contributed to periodicals without payment.
In 1903 a landslide shut down the sulfur mine in which his wife's and his father's capital was invested. Suddenly poor,
Pirandello was forced to earn his living not only by writing but also by teaching Italian at a teacher's college in Rome. As
a further result of the financial disaster, his wife developed a persecution mania, which manifested itself in a frenzied
jealousy of her husband. His torment ended only with her removal to a sanatorium in 1919 (she died in 1959). It was this
bitter experience that finally determined the theme of his most characteristic work, already perceptible in his early short
stories--the exploration of the tightly closed world of the forever changeable human personality.
Pirandello's early narrative style stems from the verismo ("realism") of two Italian novelists of the late 19th century-Luigi Capuana and Giovanni Verga. The titles of Pirandello's early collections of short stories--Amori senza amore
(1894; "Loves Without Love") and Beffe della morte e della vita (1902-03; "The Jests of Life and Death")--suggest the
wry nature of his realism that is seen also in his first novels: L'esclusa (1901; The Outcast) and Il turno (1902; Eng. trans.
The Merry-Go-Round of Love). Success came with his third novel, often acclaimed as his best, Il fu Mattia Pascal (1904;
The Late Mattia Pascal). Although the theme is not typically "Pirandellian," since the obstacles confronting its hero
result from external circumstances, it already shows the acute psychological observation that was later to be directed
toward the exploration of his characters' subconscious.
Pirandello's understanding of psychology was sharpened by reading such works as Les altérations de la personnalité
(1892), by the French experimental psychologist Alfred Binet; and traces of its influence can be seen in the long essay
L'umorismo (1908; On Humor), in which he examines the principles of his art. Common to both books is the theory of
the subconscious personality, which postulates that what a person knows, or thinks he knows, is the least part of what he
is. Pirandello had begun to focus his writing on the themes of psychology even before he knew of the work of Sigmund
Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The psychological themes used by Pirandello found their most complete expression
in the volumes of short stories La trappola (1915; "The Trap") and E domani, lunedì . . . (1917; "And Tomorrow,
Monday . . . "), and in such individual stories as "Una voce," "Pena di vivere così," and "Con altri occhi."
Meanwhile, he had been writing other novels, notably I vecchi e i giovani (1913; The Old and The Young) and Uno,
nessuno e centomila (1925-26; One, None, and a Hundred Thousand). Both are more typical than Il fu Mattia Pascal.
The first, a historical novel reflecting the Sicily of the end of the 19th century and the general bitterness at the loss of the
ideals of the Risorgimento (the movement that led to the unification of Italy), suffers from Pirandello's tendency to
"discompose" rather than to "compose" (to use his own terms, in L'umorismo), so that individual episodes stand out at the
expense of the work as a whole. Uno, nessuno e centomila, however, is at once the most original and the most typical of
his novels. It is a surrealistic description of the consequences of the hero's discovery that his wife (and others) see him
with quite different eyes than he does himself. Its exploration of the reality of personality is of a type better known from
his plays.
Pirandello wrote over 50 plays. He had first turned to the theatre in 1898 with L'epilogo, but the accidents that prevented
its production until 1910 (when it was retitled La morsa) kept him from other than sporadic attempts at drama until the
success of Così è (se vi pare) in 1917. This delay may have been fortunate for the development of his dramatic powers.
L'epilogo does not greatly differ from other drama of its period, but Così è (se vi pare) began the series of plays that were
to make him world famous in the 1920s. Its title can be translated as Right You Are (If You Think You Are). A
demonstration, in dramatic terms, of the relativity of truth, and a rejection of the idea of any objective reality not at the
mercy of individual vision, it anticipates Pirandello's two great plays, Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and
Enrico IV (1922; Henry IV). Six Characters is the most arresting presentation of the typical Pirandellian contrast between
art, which is unchanging, and life, which is an inconstant flux. Characters that have been rejected by their author
materialize on stage, throbbing with a more intense vitality than the real actors, who, inevitably, distort their drama as
they attempt its presentation. And in Henry IV the theme is madness, which lies just under the skin of ordinary life and is,
perhaps, superior to ordinary life in its construction of a satisfying reality. The play finds dramatic strength in its hero's
choice of retirement into unreality in preference to life in the uncertain world.
The production of Six Characters in Paris in 1923 made Pirandello widely known, and his work became one of the
central influences on the French theatre. French drama from the existentialistic pessimism of Jean Anouilh and Jean-Paul
Sartre to the absurdist comedy of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett is tinged with "Pirandellianism." His influence can
also be detected in the drama of other countries, even in the religious verse dramas of T.S. Eliot.
In 1920 Pirandello said of his own art:
I think that life is a very sad piece of buffoonery; because we have in ourselves, without being able to know why,
wherefore or whence, the need to deceive ourselves constantly by creating a reality (one for each and never the same for
all), which from time to time is discovered to be vain and illusory . . . My art is full of bitter compassion for all those who
deceive themselves; but this compassion cannot fail to be followed by the ferocious derision of destiny which condemns
man to deception.
This despairing outlook attained its most vigorous expression in Pirandello's plays, which were criticized at first for being
too "cerebral" but later recognized for their underlying sensitivity and compassion. The plays' main themes are the
necessity and the vanity of illusion, and the multifarious appearances, all of them unreal, of what is presumed to be the
truth. A human being is not what he thinks he is, but instead is "one, no one and a hundred thousand," according to his
appearance to this person or that, which is always different from the image of himself in his own mind. Pirandello's plays
reflect the verismo of Capuana and Verga in dealing mostly with people in modest circumstances, such as clerks,
teachers, and lodging-house keepers, but from whose vicissitudes he draws conclusions of general human significance.
The universal acclaim that followed Six Characters and Henry IV sent Pirandello touring the world (1925-27) with his
own company, the Teatro d'Arte in Rome. It also emboldened him to disfigure some of his later plays (e.g., Ciascuno a
suo modo [1924]) by calling attention to himself, just as in some of the later short stories it is the surrealistic and fantastic
elements that are accentuated.
After the dissolution, because of financial losses, of the Teatro d'Arte in 1928, Pirandello spent his remaining years in
frequent and extensive travel. In his will he requested that there should be no public ceremony marking his death--only "a
hearse of the poor, the horse and the coachman."
Bibliography
Gaspare Giudice, Pirandello (1975), presents the life and work of Pirandello in the setting of his time; it is probably the best general
account of the author. Works of criticism include Walter Starkie, Luigi Pirandello, 1867-1936, 3rd ed. rev. and enlarged (1965), a very
personal, critical account, with extracts and synopses, of Pirandello's work in the context of European literature; Thomas Bishop,
Pirandello and the French Theater (1960), a useful discussion of Pirandello's ideas and an account of his lasting influence on the French
theatre; Glauco Cambon (compiler), Pirandello: A Collection of Critical Essays (1967), a helpful set of discussions of various aspects of
Pirandello criticism; Oscar Büdel, Pirandello, 2nd ed. (1969), a brief work that will be more useful to those who already have some idea
of the European background of Pirandello; Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, The Mirror of Our Anguish: A Study of Luigi Pirandello's
Narrative Writings (1978); Olga Ragusa, Luigi Pirandello: An Approach to His Theatre (1980); A. Richard Sogliuzzo, Luigi Pirandello,
Director: The Playwright in the Theatre (1982); and Anthony Caputi, Pirandello and the Crisis of Modern Consciousness (1988).
Piscator, Erwin
b. Dec. 17, 1893, Ulm, Ger.,d. March 30, 1966, Starnberg, W.Ger.
Theatrical producer and director famed for his ingenious Expressionistic staging techniques; the originator of the epic
theatre style later developed by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht.
Having studied at the König school of dramatic art and the university, Piscator began as a volunteer at the Hoft Theater;
he became in turn an actor and director. Working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic (1919-33), Piscator frankly used
the theatre to convey radical political instruction. Though not a communist, he sympathized at the time with the German
working-class parties. A bold innovator, he used films and newsreels to enlarge landscapes and convey mass events, and
he employed many optical, acoustical, and mechanical devices to create an experience of total theatre. His passion for
machinery could be self-defeating, for sometimes the blaring loudspeakers, flashing lights, air-raid sirens, and revolving
sets prevented the viewers from getting the message. In exile during World War II, he headed the Dramatic Workshop of
the New School for Social Research in New York City, from 1939 to 1951, when he returned to West Germany as
director of West Berlin's Volksbühne. He continued to produce sensational works, such as Rolf Hochhuth's Deputy, a
study of the role of Pope Pius XII during the Nazi era, and The Investigation by Peter Weiss, dealing with the mass
murders at Auschwitz concentration camp.
Bibliography
John Willett's The Theatre of Erwin Piscator: Half a Century of Politics in the Theatre was published in 1979.
Plautus
b. c. 254 BC,, Sarsina, Umbria? [Italy] d. 184
Great Roman comic dramatist, whose works, loosely adapted from Greek plays, established a truly Roman drama in the
Latin language.
Approach To Drama
The Roman predecessors of Plautus in both tragedy and comedy borrowed most of their plots and all of their dramatic
techniques from Greece. Even when handling themes taken from Roman life or legend, they presented these in Greek
forms, setting, and dress. Plautus, like them, took the bulk of his plots, if not all of them, from plays written by Greek
authors of the late 4th and early 3rd centuries BC (who represented the "New Comedy," as it was called), notably by
Menander and Philemon. Plautus did not, however, borrow slavishly; although the life represented in his plays is
superficially Greek, the flavour is Roman, and Plautus incorporated into his adaptations Roman concepts, terms, and
usages. He referred to towns in Italy; to the gates, streets, and markets of Rome; to Roman laws and the business of the
Roman law courts; to Roman magistrates and their duties; and to such Roman institutions as the Senate.
Not all references, however, were Romanized: Plautus apparently set little store by consistency, despite the fact that some
of the Greek allusions that were left may have been unintelligible to his audiences. Terence, the more studied and
polished playwright, mentions Plautus' carelessness as a translator and upbraids him for omitting an entire scene from one
of his adaptations from the Greek (though there is no criticism of him for borrowing material, such plagiarism being then
regarded as wholly commendable). Plautus allowed himself many other liberties in adapting his material, even combining
scenes from two Greek originals into one Latin play (a procedure known as contaminatio).
Even more important was Plautus' approach to the language in which he wrote. His action was lively and slapstick, and
he was able to marry the action to the word. In his hands, Latin became racy and colloquial, verse varied and choral.
Whether these new characteristics derived from now lost Greek originals--more vigorous than those of Menander--or
whether they stemmed from the established forms and tastes of burlesque traditions native to Italy, cannot be determined
with any certainty. The latter is the more likely. The result, at any rate, is that Plautus' plays read like originals rather than
adaptations, such is his witty command of the Latin tongue--a gift admired by Cicero himself. It has often been said that
Plautus' Latin is crude and "vulgar," but it is in fact a literary idiom based upon the language of the Romans in his day.
The plots of Plautus' plays are sometimes well organized and interestingly developed, but more often they simply provide
a frame for scenes of pure farce, relying heavily on intrigue, mistaken identity, and similar devices. Plautus is a truly
popular dramatist, whose comic effect springs from exaggeration, burlesque and often coarse humour, rapid action, and a
deliberately upside-down portrayal of life, in which slaves give orders to their masters, parents are hoodwinked to the
advantage of sons who need money for girls, and the procurer or braggart soldier is outwitted and fails to secure the
seduction or possession of the desired girls. Plautus, however, did also recognize the virtue of honesty (as in Bacchides),
of loyalty (as in Captivi), and of nobility of character (as in the heroine of Amphitruo).
Plautus' plays, almost the earliest literary works in Latin that have survived, are written in verse, as were the Greek
originals. The metres he used included the iambic six foot line (senarius) and the trochaic seven foot line (septenarius),
which Menander had also employed. But Plautus varied these with longer iambic and trochaic lines and more elaborate
rhythms. The metres are skillfully chosen and handled to emphasize the mood of the speaker or the action. Again, it is
possible that now lost Greek plays inspired this metrical variety and inventiveness, but it is much more likely that Plautus
was responding to features already existing in popular Italian dramatic traditions. The Senarii (conversational lines) were
spoken, but the rest was sung or chanted to the accompaniment of double and fingered reed pipes. It could indeed be said
that, in their metrical and musical liveliness, performances of Plautus' plays somewhat resembled musicals of the mid20th century.
Plautus' original texts did not survive. Even by the time that Roman scholars such as Varro, a contemporary of Cicero,
became interested in the playwright, only acting editions of his plays remained. These had been adapted, modified, cut,
expanded, and generally brought up-to-date for production purposes. Critics and scholars have ever since attempted to
establish a "Plautine" text, but 20th-century editors have admitted the impossibility of successfully accomplishing such a
task. The plays had an active stage life at least until the time of Cicero and were occasionally performed afterward.
Whereas Cicero had praised their language, the poet Horace was a more severe critic and considered the plays to lack
polish. There was renewed scholarly and literary interest in Plautus during the 2nd century AD, but it is unlikely that this
was accompanied by a stage revival, though a performance of Casina is reported to have been given in the early 4th
century. St. Jerome, toward the end of that century, says that after a night of excessive penance he would read Plautus as
a relaxation; in the mid-5th century, Sidonius Apollinaris, a Gallic bishop who was also a poet, found time to read the
plays and praise the playwright amid the alarms of the barbarian invasions.
During the Middle Ages, Plautus was little read--if at all--in contrast to the popular Terence. By the mid-14th century,
however, the Humanist scholar and poet Petrarch knew eight of the comedies. As the remainder came to light, Plautus
began to influence European domestic comedy after the Renaissance poet Ariosto had made the first imitations of
Plautine comedy in the Italian vernacular. His influence was perhaps to be seen at its most sophisticated in the comedies
of Molière (whose play L'Avare, for instance, was based on Aulularia), and it can be traced up to the present day in such
adaptations as Jean Giraudoux's Amphitryon 38 (1929), Cole Porter's musical Out of This World (1950), and the musical
and motion picture A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1963). Plautus' stock character "types" have
similarly had a long line of successors: the braggart soldier of Miles Gloriosus, for example, became the "Capitano" of
the Italian commedia dell'arte, is recognizable in Nicholas Udall's Ralph Roister Doister (16th century), in Shakespeare's
Pistol, and even in his Falstaff, in Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), and in Bernard Shaw's Sergius in Arms and the
Man (1894), while a trace of the character perhaps remains in Bertolt Brecht's Eilif in Mother Courage and Her Children
(1941). Thus, Plautus, in adapting Greek "New Comedy" to Roman conditions and taste, also significantly affected the
course of the European theatre.
Major Works
Twenty-one comedies (most dates uncertain) have survived: Amphitruo (Amphitryon); Asinaria (The Comedy of Asses); Aulularia (The
Pot of Gold); Bacchides (The Two Bacchuses); Captivi (The Captives); Casina; Cistellaria (The Casket Comedy); Curculio; Epidicus;
Menaechmi (The Two Menaechmuses); Mercator (The Merchant); Miles Gloriosus (The Braggart Warrior); Mostellaria (The Haunted
House); Persa (The Persian); Poenulus (The Little Carthaginian); Pseudolus (first produced 191 BC); Rudens (The Rope); Stichus (first
produced 200 BC); Trinummus (Three Bob Day); Truculentus; Vidularia (fragmentary; The Tale of a Travelling Bag).
There is an English translation of all the extant plays in the "Loeb Series" (1916-38) and a French translation in the "Budé Series" (193240). Several of the plays have been translated in the "Penguin Classics Series." Many other translations of specific plays are available.
Bibliography
Full bibliography is in G.E. Duckworth, The Nature of Roman Comedy, pp. 447-464 (1952); a more recent but selective one may be
found in Mason Hammond, Arthur M. Mack, and Walter Moskalew, Plautus: Miles Gloriosus, rev. ed., pp. 59-66 (1970). Still
fundamental are the collections of ancient evidence and the discussions in Martin Schanz, 4th ed. by Carl Hosius, Geschichte der
römische Literatur I: Die römischen Literatur in der Zeit der Republik, pp. 55-86 (1927); and the article "Maccius" by A.F. Sonnenberg
in Pauly-Wissowa Realencyclopädie, vol. 14, col. 95-126 (1928). Useful is the briefer article "Plautus" by G.W. Williams in the Oxford
Classical Dictionary, 2nd ed., pp. 843-844 (1970). In addition to Duckworth (above), a good account is in William Beare, The Roman
Stage, 3rd ed. (1964). A standard text is that by M.W. Lindsay, 2 vol. (1904 and reprints). The Loeb edition with English translation by
Paul Nixon, 5 vol. (1916-38 and reprints), unfortunately used the text of Friedrich Leo, 2nd ed. (1895-96).
Poor Theatre
In terms of furthering the actor's technique, the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, together with Stanislavsky and Brecht
(see above), are the key figures of the 20th century. Grotowski first became internationally known when his Laboratory
Theatre, established in Opole, Pol., in 1959, triumphantly toured Europe and the United States during the mid-1960s. His
influence was further enhanced by the publication of his theoretical pronouncements in Towards a Poor Theatre (1968).
Grotowski shared many ideas with Artaud (though the connection was initially coincidental), especially in the conception
of the performer as a "holy actor" and the theatre as a "secular religion." Theatre was to go beyond mere entertainment or
illustration; it was to be an intense confrontation with the audience (usually limited to fewer than 60). The actors sought
spontaneity within a rigid discipline achieved through the most rigorous physical training. Rejecting the paraphernalia of
the "rich theatre," Grotowski stripped away all nonessential scenery, costumes, and props to create the so-called poor
theatre, where the only focus was the unadorned actor. His productions included adaptations of Calderón's Príncipe
constante (1629; The Constant Prince) and the Polish writer Stanislaw Wyspianski's Akropolis (1904; Acropolis ).
The poor theatre became a worldwide fashion during the late 1960s and early 1970s, even though most groups who
attempted it produced only self-indulgent imitations that tended to exclude the audience. Significantly, this sense of
reduction was evident in Grotowski's own work: from 1976 he excluded the audience altogether, preferring to work
behind closed doors. The spirit of poor theatre has been more theatrically conveyed by Peter Brook. After leaving
England in 1968 to establish the International Centre of Theatre Research in Paris, Brook created a series of vivid
productions that included Ubu roi (1977), a scaled-down version of Georges Bizet's opera Carmen (1982), and Le
Mahabharata (1985), a nine-hour version of the Hindu epic MahabhaIata.
Rattigan, Sir Terence (Mervyn)
b. June 10, 1911, London, d. Nov. 30, 1977, Hamilton, Bermuda
English playwright, a master of the well-made play.
Educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Oxford, Rattigan had early success with two farces, French Without Tears
(performed 1936) and While the Sun Shines (performed 1943). The Winslow Boy (performed 1946), a drama based on a
real-life case in which a young boy at the Royal Naval College was unjustly accused of theft, won a New York Critics
award. Separate Tables (performed 1945), perhaps his best known work, took as its theme the isolation and frustration
that result from rigidly imposed social conventions. Ross (performed 1960) explored the life of T.E. Lawrence (of
Arabia) and was less traditional in its structure. A Bequest to the Nation (performed 1970) reviewed the intimate, personal
aspects of Lord Nelson's life. His last play was Cause Celebre (performed 1977).
Rattigan's works were treated coldly by some critics who saw them as unadventurous and catering to undemanding,
middle-class taste. Several of his plays do seriously explore social or psychological themes, however, and his plays
consistently demonstrate solid craftsmanship. Rattigan was knighted in 1971 for his services to the theatre. He had many
screenplays to his credit, including the film versions of The Winslow Boy (1948) and Separate Tables (1958), among
others, and The Yellow Rolls Royce (1965) and Goodbye Mr. Chips (1968).
Reinhardt, Max
b. Sept. 9, 1873, Baden, near Vienna, Austria, d. Oct. 31, 1943, New York, N.Y., U.S.
Original name MAX GOLDMANN, one of the first theatrical directors to achieve widespread recognition as a major
creative artist, working in Berlin, Salzburg, New York City, and Hollywood. He helped found the annual Salzburg
Festival.
Discovery Of The Theatre
Reinhardt was the oldest of the seven children born to Wilhelm and Rose Goldmann, an Orthodox Jewish couple. With
his equally introverted only brother, Edmund, young Max played long hours with puppets and from their balcony
watched the real puppets in the streets.
Though his parents were remote from theatrical life, they were sympathetic to his fascination with the actors of the
Vienna Burgtheater, and, at the urging of one of these, they allowed their son to exchange his boredom as a bank clerk for
the excitement of drama school. Although he proved to be an inhibited actor, needing a beard and heavy makeup to
release his talents, Reinhardt won local fame and friends in Salzburg. In 1894 he succumbed to an invitation from Otto
Brahm, who had brought the drama of Henrik Ibsen to Germany, to join his Deutsches Theater in Berlin. He had assumed
the stage name Reinhardt some time prior to moving to Berlin.
Reinhardt learned much from Brahm but was never wholeheartedly committed to the naturalism of his productions. He
tired of "sticking a beard . . . and eating noodles and sauerkraut on stage every night," which latter activity was required
by Brahm's notion of realism, in which nothing was to be simulated. This was not to be his direction in theatre. Quick to
make friends despite his shyness, he met other young artists in cafés. From their gatherings there emerged a lighthearted
revue, Schall und Rauch (Sound and Smoke), to which Reinhardt contributed sketches. Playing before invited audiences,
it was so successful that it was transformed into a serious work and settled into the Kleines Theater in 1902. He planned a
full season and directed his first play, Oscar Wilde's Salome.
Career In Full Flower
Reinhardt exhibited his ability to make the right contact at the right time when he produced 14,000 marks to placate
Brahm, who was furious over his breach of contract. He took over the Neues Theater in 1903, and his career moved
ahead rapidly. By the end of 1904, he had directed 42 plays, but his early landmark of genius was the production in 1905
of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Reinhardt's staging was swift, light, and joyous, capturing for
audiences the theatrical brilliance that had been buried for so long beneath productions devoted to a ponderous, reverent
delivery of Shakespeare's words.
The young director became famous overnight. Offered the artistic directorship of the Deutsches Theater, he would settle
for nothing less than ownership. He purchased it for 1,000,000 marks, and at age 32 he had reached the pinnacle of his
profession. He completely rebuilt the theatre, introducing the latest technological innovations in scenic design, and
started a school. Purchasing a tavern next door, Reinhardt remodeled it into a small theatre for plays that needed intimacy
with the audience. He summarized his new concept in theatre with the word Kammerspiele, "chamber plays."
In his success, Reinhardt remained close to his family. He brought his brother, Edmund, who suffered from depressions,
to Berlin and acted almost as his psychiatrist, setting him to work in the theatre to regain his confidence.Beginning in
1907, the Deutsches Theater toured throughout Europe and the United States. The production of The Miracle, which
premiered in 1911 in London and played subsequently in New York City and European cities, was Reinhardt's most
spectacular work and, at the same time, probably the most characteristic. Reinhardt was fascinated by the sensuous
quality of Roman Catholic rites and Gregorian chants. The Miracle, a work involving more than 2,000 actors, musicians,
dancers, and other personnel and without dramatic dialogue, was a modern-day reunification of drama and ritual. It was
pure theatre in the most archetypal sense.
If in The Miracle he re-created an ancient unity, Reinhardt was equally important in giving new life to many of the great
dramas from the theatre's past. His staging of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex in 1910 initiated the first large-scale revival of
classical Greek drama in more than 2,000 years. During the 1913-14 season he mounted new productions of 10 of the 22
Shakespearean plays he had directed, using few or no settings and creating a major Shakespearean revival. In 1911 he
brought a modern point of view to opera with his direction of the premiere of Richard Strauss's Rosenkavalier, with a
libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. After many years he succeeded in helping to establish the Salzburg Festival, staging
Hofmannsthal's Jedermann (Everyman) in the city's cathedral square in 1920. With his support the Salzburg Festival
became an annual event, bringing about a new interest in the dramas of the Middle Ages from which Jedermann was
adapted.
Return Home And Exile
Reinhardt had continued his work throughout World War I with no lessened sense of duty toward his art and his
audience. In 1920, save for occasional engagements, he gave up direction of the Deutsches Theater. Retiring to a castle
that he had purchased in Austria, he attempted to find in his native country the regard he had been accorded abroad. His
home was a meeting place for international celebrities, but enemies prevented him from feeling at home in his hometown.
He commuted in a circuit of Berlin, Vienna, and Salzburg. When the Nazis assumed power in Germany in 1933,
Reinhardt was luckily abroad. In a letter to the Nazi government that was a typical blend of conceit, irony, rejection of
politics, and prophetic perception, he left his theatrical empire to the German people. The era of private management of
such institutions as the theatre is past, he wrote, and he foresaw that in the future it would be impossible to manage any
such cultural undertakings without state backing.
After further work in Europe, Reinhardt moved to the United States in 1938. He opened a workshop in Hollywood, where
he had made a film of A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1934-35. His staging of Everyman in modern dress was followed
by an unrealized plan for an all-black production of it. The final years of his life were filled with lesser fortunes and poor
health, and he died speechless.
Bibliography
Huntly Carter, The Theatre of Max Reinhardt (1914, reissued 1964), attempts to define the nature of Reinhardt's work. Oliver M. Sayler
(ed.), Max Reinhardt and His Theatre (1924, reprinted 1968), contains personal accounts, profusely illustrated, and a chronology of his
productions. Gottfried Reinhardt, The Genius: A Memoir of Max Reinhardt (1979; originally published in German, 1973), by his son,
offers both personal recollections and a look at the contemporary cultural milieu. J.L. Styan, Max Reinhardt (1982), surveys his work.
Sartre, Jean-Paul
b. June 21, 1905, Paris, France, d. April 15, 1980, Paris
French novelist, playwright, and exponent of Existentialism--a philosophy acclaiming the freedom of the individual
human being. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, but he declined it.
Post-World War II Work
Having written his defense of individual freedom and human dignity, Sartre turned his attention to the concept of social
responsibility. For many years he had shown great concern for the poor and the disinherited of all kinds. While a teacher,
he had refused to wear a tie, as if he could shed his social class with his tie and thus come closer to the worker. Freedom
itself, which at times in his previous writings appeared to be a gratuitous activity that needed no particular aim or purpose
to be of value, became a tool for human struggle in his brochure L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (1946;
Existentialism and Humanism, 1948). Freedom now implied social responsibility. In his novels and plays Sartre began to
bring his ethical message to the world at large. He started a four-volume novel in 1945 under the title Les Chemins de la
liberté, of which three were eventually written: L'Âge de raison (1945; The Age of Reason, 1947), Le Sursis (1945; The
Reprieve, 1947), and La Mort dans l'âme (1949; Iron in the Soul, 1950; U.S. title, Troubled Sleep, 1950). After the
publication of the third volume, Sartre changed his mind concerning the usefulness of the novel as a medium of
communication and turned back to plays.
What a writer must attempt, said Sartre, is to show man as he is. Nowhere is man more man than when he is in action,
and this is exactly what drama portrays. He had already written in this medium during the war, and now one play
followed another: Les Mouches (produced 1943; The Flies, 1946), Huis-clos (1944; In Camera, 1946; U.S. title, No Exit,
1946), Les Mains sales (1948; Crime passionel, 1949; U.S. title, Dirty Hands, 1949; acting version, Red Gloves), Le
Diable et le bon dieu (1951; Lucifer and the Lord, 1953), Nekrassov (1955), and Les Séquestrés d'Altona (1959; Loser
Wins, 1959; U.S. title, The Condemned of Altona, 1960). All the plays, in their emphasis upon the raw hostility of man
toward man, seem to be predominantly pessimistic; yet, according to Sartre's own confession, their content does not
exclude the possibility of a morality of salvation. Other publications of the same period include a book, Baudelaire
(1947), a vaguely ethical study on the French writer and poet Jean Genet entitled Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (1952;
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, 1963), and innumerable articles that were published in Les Temps Modernes, the monthly
review that Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir founded and edited. These articles were later collected in several volumes
under the title Situations.
Last Years
From 1960 until 1971 most of Sartre's attention went into the writing of a four-volume study called Flaubert. Two
volumes with a total of some 2,130 pages appeared in the spring of 1971. This huge enterprise aimed at presenting the
reader with a "total biography" of Gustave Flaubert, the famous French novelist, through the use of a double tool: on the
one hand, Karl Marx's concept of history and class and, on the other, Sigmund Freud's illuminations of the dark recesses
of the human soul through explorations into his childhood and family relations. Although at times Sartre's genius comes
through and his fecundity is truly unbelievable, the sheer volume of the work and the minutely detailed analysis of even
the slightest Flaubertian dictum hamper full enjoyment. As if he himself were saturated by the prodigal abundance of his
writings, Sartre moved away from his desk during 1971 and did very little writing. Under the motto that "commitment is
an act, not a word," Sartre often went into the streets to participate in rioting, in the sale of left-wing literature, and in
other activities that in his opinion were the way to promote "the revolution." Paradoxically enough, this same radical
Socialist published in 1972 the third volume of the work on Flaubert, L'Idiot de la famille, another book of such density
that only the bourgeois intellectual can read it.
The enormous productivity of Sartre came herewith to a close. His mind, still alert and active, came through in interviews
and in the writing of scripts for motion pictures. He also worked on a book of ethics. However, his was no longer the
power of a genius in full productivity. Sartre became blind and his health deteriorated. In April 1980 he died of a lung
tumour. His very impressive funeral, attended by some 25,000 people, was reminiscent of the burial of Victor Hugo, but
without the official recognition that his illustrious predecessor had received. Those who were there were ordinary people,
those whose rights his pen had always defended.
Biographies include Kenneth Thompson and Margaret Thompson, Sartre: Life and Works (1984); Ronald Hayman, Sartre (1987,
reissued 1992); John Gerassi, Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century (1989- ); and Kate Fullbrook and Edward Fullbrook,
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend (1993).
Among numerous critical works on Sartre's writings and thought are Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953, reissued 1989);
Maurice William Cranston, Sartre (1962, reissued 1970); Norman N. Greene, Jean-Paul Sartre: The Existentialist Ethic (1960, reprinted
1980); R.D. Laing and D.G. Cooper, Reason & Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy, 1950-1960 (1964, reissued 1983); Philip
Thody, Jean-Paul Sartre: A Literary and Political Study (1960), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1992), on his novels; Michel Contat and Michel
Rybalka (compilers), The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, 2 vol. (1974; originally published in French, 1970); Joseph H. McMahon,
Humans Being: The World of Jean-Paul Sartre (1971); Dominick La Capra, A Preface to Sartre (1978); Thomas C. Anderson, The
Foundation and Structure of Sartrean Ethics (1979), and Sartre's Two Ethics: From Authenticity to Integral Humanity (1993); Hugh J.
Silverman and Frederick A. Elliston (eds.), Jean-Paul Sartre: Contemporary Approaches to His Philosophy (1980); Michael Scriven,
Sartre's Existential Biographies (1984); and David Detmer, Freedom as a Value: A Critique of the Ethical Theory of Jean-Paul Sartre
(1988). Christina Howells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Sartre (1992), covers his work chronologically.
Saxe-Meiningen (George II)
b. April 2, 1826, Meiningen, Saxe-Meiningen [now in Germany], d. June 25, 1914, Bad Wildungen, Waldeck
Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, theatrical director and designer who developed many of the basic principles of modern acting
and stage design.
A wealthy aristocrat and head of a small German principality, Saxe-Meiningen early studied art and in 1866 established
his own court theatre group, which he served as producer, director, financial backer, and costume and scenery designer.
Influenced by the contemporary English theatre, he insisted on realistic lighting, speech, and stage mechanics and
historically accurate costumes and sets. He also replaced virtuoso solo performances on a flat stage with ensemble acting
on a multilevel stage that greatly facilitated the handling of crowd scenes. When the group was disbanded in 1890, it had
toured 36 European cities. The Meiningen troupe's methods had their effect upon the younger generation of European
stage directors, particularly André Antoine, who founded the first theatre of naturalism (Théâtre-Libre, Paris, 1887), and
Konstantin Stanislavsky, an influential proponent of realism in the Russian theatre.
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus
b. c. 4 BC, Corduba, Spain, d. AD 65,, Rome
Byname
SENECA
THE
YOUNGER
http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?asmbly_id=24921Roman philosopher, statesman, orator,
and tragedian. He was Rome's leading intellectual figure in the mid-1st century AD and was virtual ruler with his friends
of the Roman world between 54 and 62 during the first phase of the emperor Nero's reign.
Philosophical Works And Tragedies
The Apocolocyntosis divi Claudii (The Pumpkinification of the Divine Claudius) stands apart from the rest of Seneca's
surviving works. A political skit, witty and unscrupulous, its theme is the deification--or "pumpkinification"--of
Claudius. The rest divide into philosophical works and the tragedies. The former expound an eclectic version of "Middle"
Stoicism, adapted for the Roman market by Panaetius of Rhodes (2nd century BC), and developed by his compatriot
Poseidonius in the 1st century BC. Poseidonius lies behind the books on natural science, Naturales quaestiones, where
lofty generalities on the investigation of nature are offset by a jejune exposition of the facts. Of the Consolationes, Ad
Marciam consoles a lady on the loss of a son; Ad Helviam matrem, Seneca's mother on his exile; Ad Polybium, the
powerful freedman Polybius on the loss of a son but with a sycophantic plea for recall from Corsica. The De ira deals at
length with the passion of anger, its consequences, and control. The De clementia, an exhortatory address to Nero,
commends mercy as the sovereign quality for a Roman emperor. De tranquillitate animi, De constantia sapientis, De vita
beata, and De otio consider various aspects of the life and qualities of the Stoic wise man. De beneficiis is a diffuse
treatment of benefits as seen by giver and recipient. De brevitate vitae demonstrates that our human span is long enough
if time is properly employed--which it seldom is. Best written and most compelling are the Epistulae morales, addressed
to Lucilius. Those 124 brilliant essays treat a range of moral problems not easily reduced to a single formula.
Of the 10 "Senecan" tragedies, Octavia is certainly, and Hercules Oetaeus is probably, spurious. The others handle
familiar Greek tragic themes, with some originality of detail. Attempts to arrange them as a schematic treatment of Stoic
"vices" seem too subtle. Intended for playreadings rather than public presentation, the pitch is a high monotone,
emphasizing the lurid and the supernatural. There are impressive set speeches and choral passages, but the characters are
static, and they rant. The principal representatives of classical tragedy known to the Renaissance world, these plays had a
great influence, notably in England. Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and Cyril
Tourneur's Revengers Tragaedie, with their ghosts, witches, cruel tyrants, and dominant theme of vengeance, are the
progeny of Seneca's tragedies.
Stature And Influence
Hostile propaganda pursued Seneca's memory. Quintilian, the 1st-century AD rhetorician, criticized his educational
influence; Tacitus was ambivalent on Seneca's place in history. But his views on monarchy and its duties contributed to
the humane and liberal temper of the age of the Antonines (Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, and Commodus; AD 138-
192). Meanwhile, the spread of Stoicism kept his philosophy alive: new horizons opened when it was found to have
Christian affinities. There was a belief that he knew St. Paul and a spurious collection of letters to substantiate it. Studied
by Augustine and Jerome, Seneca's works consoled Boethius in prison. His thought was a component of the Latin culture
of the Middle Ages, often filtered through anthologies. Known to Dante, Chaucer, and Petrarch, his moral treatises were
edited by Erasmus; the first complete English translation appeared in 1614. In the 16th to 18th century Senecan prose, in
content and style, served the vernacular literatures as a model for essays, sermons, and moralizing. Calvin, Montaigne,
and Rousseau are instances. As the first of "Spanish" thinkers, his influence in Spain was always powerful. Nineteenthcentury specialization brought him under fire from philosophers, scientists, historians, and students of literature. But later
scholarly work and the interest aroused by the bimillenary commemorations of his death in Spain in 1965 suggested that
a Senecan revival might be under way. In his 40 surviving books the thoughts of a versatile but unoriginal mind are
expressed and amplified by the resources of an individual style.
Bibliography
Text and commentaries (Dialogi): A. Bourgery and R. Walty, 4 vol. (1922-42). (Epistulae morales): L.D. Reynolds, 2 vol. (1965).
(Naturales quaestiones): P. Oltramare, 2 vol. (1929).
General works.
C.W. Mendell, Our Seneca (1941), is good on Seneca the writer. A.L. Motto, Seneca Sourcebook (1970), is a guide to Seneca's thought
as reflected in his extant prose works; F.L. Lucas, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (1922), is a good introduction to the subject,
although written before recent advances in Senecan studies. C.D.N. Costa (ed.), Seneca (1974), contains seven essays by British
scholars. Miriam T. Griffin, Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics (1976), is definitive.
Shakespeare, William
Baptized April 26, 1564, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, Eng., d. April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon
Shakespeare also spelled SHAKSPERE, byname BARD OF AVON, or SWAN OF AVON, English poet, dramatist, and
actor, often called the English national poet and considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time.
Shakespeare occupies a position unique in world literature. Other poets, such as Homer and Dante, and novelists, such as
Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens, have transcended national barriers; but no writer's living reputation can compare with
that of Shakespeare, whose plays, written in the late 16th and early 17th centuries for a small repertory theatre, are now
performed and read more often and in more countries than ever before. The prophecy of his great contemporary, the poet
and dramatist Ben Jonson, that Shakespeare "was not of an age, but for all time," has been fulfilled.
It may be audacious even to attempt a definition of his greatness, but it is not so difficult to describe the gifts that enabled
him to create imaginative visions of pathos and mirth that, whether read or witnessed in the theatre, fill the mind and
linger there. He is a writer of great intellectual rapidity, perceptiveness, and poetic power. Other writers have had these
qualities, but with Shakespeare the keenness of mind was applied not to abstruse or remote subjects but to human beings
and their complete range of emotions and conflicts. Other writers have applied their keenness of mind in this way, but
Shakespeare is astonishingly clever with words and images, so that his mental energy, when applied to intelligible human
situations, finds full and memorable expression, convincing and imaginatively stimulating. As if this were not enough,
the art form into which his creative energies went was not remote and bookish but involved the vivid stage impersonation
of human beings, commanding sympathy and inviting vicarious participation. Thus Shakespeare's merits can survive
translation into other languages and into cultures remote from that of Elizabethan England.
Shakespeare The Man
Life
Although the amount of factual knowledge available about Shakespeare is surprisingly large for one of his station in life,
many find it a little disappointing, for it is mostly gleaned from documents of an official character. Dates of baptisms,
marriages, deaths, and burials; wills, conveyances, legal processes, and payments by the court--these are the dusty details.
There is, however, a fair number of contemporary allusions to him as a writer, and these add a reasonable amount of flesh
and blood to the biographical skeleton.
Early Life In Stratford
The parish register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon shows that Shakespeare was baptized there on April
26, 1564, but his birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23. His father, John Shakespeare, was a burgess of the
borough, who in 1565 was chosen an alderman and in 1568 bailiff (the position corresponding to mayor, before the grant
of a further charter to Stratford in 1664). He was engaged in various kinds of trade and appears to have suffered some
fluctuations in prosperity. His wife, Mary Arden, of Wilmcote, Warwickshire, came from an ancient family and was the
heiress to some land. (Given the somewhat rigid social distinctions of the 16th century, this marriage must have been a
step up the social scale for John Shakespeare.)
Stratford enjoyed a grammar school of good quality, and the education there was free, the schoolmaster's salary being
paid by the borough. No lists of the pupils who were at the school in the 16th century have survived, but it would be
absurd to suppose the bailiff of the town did not send his son there. The boy's education would consist mostly of Latin
studies--learning to read, write, and speak the language fairly well and studying some of the classical historians,
moralists, and poets. Shakespeare did not go on to the university, and indeed it is unlikely that the tedious round of logic,
rhetoric, and other studies then followed there would have interested him.
Instead, at the age of 18 he married. Where and exactly when are not known, but the episcopal registry at Worcester
preserves a bond dated November 28, 1582, and executed by two yeomen of Stratford, named Sandells and Richardson,
as a security to the bishop for the issue of a license for the marriage of William Shakespeare and "Anne Hathaway of
Stratford," upon the consent of her friends and upon once asking of the banns. (Anne died in 1623, seven years after
Shakespeare. There is good evidence to associate her with a family of Hathaways who inhabited a beautiful farmhouse,
now much visited, two miles from Stratford.) The next date of interest is found in the records of the Stratford church,
where a daughter, named Susanna, born to William Shakespeare, was baptized on May 26, 1583. On February 2, 1585,
twins were baptized, Hamnet and Judith. (The boy Hamnet, Shakespeare's only son, died 11 years later.)
How Shakespeare spent the next eight years or so, until his name begins to appear in London theatre records, is not
known. There are stories--given currency long after his death--of stealing deer and getting into trouble with a local
magnate, Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, near Stratford; of earning his living as a schoolmaster in the country; of going
to London and gaining entry to the world of theatre by minding the horses of theatregoers; it has also been conjectured
that Shakespeare spent some time as a member of a great household and that he was a soldier, perhaps in the Low
Countries. In lieu of external evidence, such extrapolations about Shakespeare's life have often been made from the
internal "evidence" of his writings. But this method is unsatisfactory: one cannot conclude, for example, from his
allusions to the law that Shakespeare was a lawyer; for he was clearly a writer, who without difficulty could get whatever
knowledge he needed for the composition of his plays.
Career In The Theatre
The first reference to Shakespeare in the literary world of London comes in 1592, when a fellow dramatist, Robert
Greene, declared in a pamphlet written on his deathbed:
There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide supposes he is
as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own
conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.
It is difficult to be certain what these words mean; but it is clear that they are insulting and that Shakespeare is the object
of the sarcasms. When the book in which they appear (Greenes, groats-worth of witte, bought with a million of
Repentance, 1592) was published after Greene's death, a mutual acquaintance wrote a preface offering an apology to
Shakespeare and testifying to his worth. This preface also indicates that Shakespeare was by then making important
friends. For, although the puritanical city of London was generally hostile to the theatre, many of the nobility were good
patrons of the drama and friends of actors. Shakespeare seems to have attracted the attention of the young Henry
Wriothesley, the 3rd earl of Southampton; and to this nobleman were dedicated his first published poems, Venus and
Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
One striking piece of evidence that Shakespeare began to prosper early and tried to retrieve the family fortunes and
establish its gentility is the fact that a coat of arms was granted to John Shakespeare in 1596. Rough drafts of this grant
have been preserved in the College of Arms, London, though the final document, which must have been handed to the
Shakespeares, has not survived. It can scarcely be doubted that it was William who took the initiative and paid the fees.
The coat of arms appears on Shakespeare's monument (constructed before 1623) in the Stratford church. Equally
interesting as evidence of Shakespeare's worldly success was his purchase in 1597 of New Place, a large house in
Stratford, which as a boy he must have passed every day in walking to school.
It is not clear how his career in the theatre began; but from about 1594 onward he was an important member of the Lord
Chamberlain's Company of players (called the King's Men after the accession of James I in 1603). They had the best
actor, Richard Burbage; they had the best theatre, the Globe; they had the best dramatist, Shakespeare. It is no wonder
that the company prospered. Shakespeare became a full-time professional man of his own theatre, sharing in a
cooperative enterprise and intimately concerned with the financial success of the plays he wrote.
Unfortunately, written records give little indication of the way in which Shakespeare's professional life molded his
marvellous artistry. All that can be deduced is that for 20 years Shakespeare devoted himself assiduously to his art,
writing more than a million words of poetic drama of the highest quality.
Private Life
Shakespeare had little contact with officialdom, apart from walking--dressed in the royal livery as a member of the King's
Men--at the coronation of King James I in 1604. He continued to look after his financial interests. He bought properties
in London and in Stratford. In 1605 he purchased a share (about one-fifth) of the Stratford tithes--a fact that explains why
he was eventually buried in the chancel of its parish church. For some time he lodged with a French Huguenot family
called Mountjoy, who lived near St. Olave's Church, Cripplegate, London. The records of a lawsuit in May 1612, due to a
Mountjoy family quarrel, show Shakespeare as giving evidence in a genial way (though unable to remember certain
important facts that would have decided the case) and as interesting himself generally in the family's affairs.
No letters written by Shakespeare have survived, but a private letter to him happened to get caught up with some official
transactions of the town of Stratford and so has been preserved in the borough archives. It was written by one Richard
Quiney and addressed by him from the Bell Inn in Carter Lane, London, whither he had gone from Stratford upon
business. On one side of the paper is inscribed: "To my loving good friend and countryman, Mr. Wm. Shakespeare,
deliver these." Apparently Quiney thought his fellow Stratfordian a person to whom he could apply for the loan of £30--a
large sum in Elizabethan money. Nothing further is known about the transaction, but, because so few opportunities of
seeing into Shakespeare's private life present themselves, this begging letter becomes a touching document. It is of some
interest, moreover, that 18 years later Quiney's son Thomas became the husband of Judith, Shakespeare's second
daughter.
Shakespeare's will, which was made on March 25, 1616, is a long and detailed document. It entailed his quite ample
property on the male heirs of his elder daughter, Susanna. (Both his daughters were then married, one to the
aforementioned Thomas Quiney and the other to John Hall, a respected physician of Stratford.) As an afterthought, he
bequeathed his "second-best bed" to his wife; but no one can be certain what this notorious legacy means. The testator's
signatures to the will are apparently in a shaky hand. Perhaps Shakespeare was already ill. He died on April 23. No name
was inscribed on his gravestone in the chancel of the parish church of Stratford-upon-Avon. Instead these lines, possibly
his own, appeared:
Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.
Early Posthumous Documentation
Shakespeare's family or friends, however, were not content with a simple gravestone, and, within a few years, a
monument was erected on the chancel wall. It seems to have existed by 1623. Its epitaph, written in Latin and inscribed
immediately below the bust, attributes to Shakespeare the worldly wisdom of Nestor, the genius of Socrates, and the
poetic art of Virgil. This apparently was how his contemporaries in Stratford-on-Avon wished their fellow citizen to be
remembered.
The Tributes Of His Colleagues
The memory of Shakespeare survived long in theatrical circles, for his plays remained a major part of the repertory of the
King's Men until the closing of the theatres in 1642. The greatest of Shakespeare's great contemporaries in the theatre,
Ben Jonson, had a good deal to say about him. To William Drummond of Hawthornden in 1619 he said that Shakespeare
"wanted art." But, when he came to write his splendid poem prefixed to the Folio edition of Shakespeare's plays in 1623,
he rose to the occasion with stirring words of praise:
Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!
Besides almost retracting his earlier gibe about Shakespeare's lack of art, he gives testimony that Shakespeare's
personality was to be felt, by those who knew him, in his poetry--that the style was the man. Jonson also reminded his
readers of the strong impression the plays had made upon Queen Elizabeth I and King James I at court performances:
Sweet Swan of Avon, what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames
That so did take Eliza and our James!
Shakespeare seems to have been on affectionate terms with his theatre colleagues. His fellow actors John Heminge and
Henry Condell (who, with Burbage, were remembered in his will) dedicated the First Folio of 1623 to the Earl of
Pembroke and the Earl of Montgomery, explaining that they had collected the plays " . . . without ambition either of selfprofit or fame; only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare, . . . "
Anecdotes And Documents
Seventeenth-century antiquaries began to collect anecdotes about Shakespeare, but no serious life was written until 1709,
when Nicholas Rowe tried to assemble information from all available sources with the aim of producing a connected
narrative. There were local traditions at Stratford: witticisms and lampoons of local characters; scandalous stories of
drunkenness and sexual escapades. About 1661 the Vicar of Stratford wrote in his diary: "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben
Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard; for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted." On the other
hand, the antiquary John Aubrey wrote in some notes about Shakespeare: "He was not a company keeper; lived in
Shoreditch; wouldn't be debauched, and, if invited to, writ he was in pain." Richard Davies, archdeacon of Lichfield,
reported, "He died a papist." How much trust can be put in such a story is uncertain. In the early 18th century, a story
appeared that Queen Elizabeth had obliged Shakespeare "to write a play of Sir John Falstaff in love" and that he had
performed the task (The Merry Wives of Windsor) in a fortnight. There are other stories, all of uncertain authenticity and
some mere fabrications.
When serious scholarship began in the 18th century, it was too late to gain anything from traditions. But documents
began to be discovered. Shakespeare's will was found in 1747 and his marriage license in 1836. The documents relating
to the Mountjoy lawsuit already mentioned were found and printed in 1910. It is possible that further documents of a
legal nature may yet be discovered, but as time passes the hope becomes more remote. Modern scholarship is more
concerned to study Shakespeare in relation to his social environment, both in Stratford and in London. This is not easy,
because the author and actor lived a somewhat detached life: a respected tithe-owning country gentleman in Stratford,
perhaps, but a rather rootless artist in London.
The Poet And Dramatist
The Intellectual Background
Shakespeare lived at a time when ideas and social structures established in the Middle Ages still informed men's thought
and behaviour. Queen Elizabeth I was God's deputy on earth, and lords and commons had their due places in society
under her, with responsibilities up through her to God and down to those of more humble rank. The order of things,
however, did not go unquestioned. Atheism was still considered a challenge to the beliefs and way of life of a majority of
Elizabethans, but the Christian faith was no longer single--Rome's authority had been challenged by Martin Luther, John
Calvin, a multitude of small religious sects, and, indeed, the English church itself. Royal prerogative was challenged in
Parliament; the economic and social orders were disturbed by the rise of capitalism, by the redistribution of monastic
lands under Henry VIII, by the expansion of education, and by the influx of new wealth from discovery of new lands.
An interplay of new and old ideas was typical of the time: official homilies exhorted the people to obedience, the Italian
political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli was expounding a new practical code of politics that caused Englishmen to fear the
Italian "Machiavillain" and yet prompted them to ask what men do, rather than what they should do. In Hamlet,
disquisitions--on man, belief, a "rotten" state, and times "out of joint"--clearly reflect a growing disquiet and skepticism.
The translation of Montaigne's Essays in 1603 gave further currency, range, and finesse to such thought, and Shakespeare
was one of many who read them, making direct and significant quotations in The Tempest. In philosophical inquiry the
question "how?" became the impulse for advance, rather than the traditional "why?" of Aristotle. Shakespeare's plays
written between 1603 and 1606 unmistakably reflect a new, Jacobean distrust. James I, who, like Elizabeth, claimed
divine authority, was far less able than she to maintain the authority of the throne. The so-called Gunpowder Plot (1605)
showed a determined challenge by a small minority in the state; James's struggles with the House of Commons in
successive Parliaments, in addition to indicating the strength of the "new men," also revealed the inadequacies of the
administration.
Poetic Conventions And Dramatic Traditions
The Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence were familiar in Elizabethan schools and universities, and English
translations or adaptations of them were occasionally performed by students. Seneca's rhetorical and sensational
tragedies, too, had been translated and often imitated, both in structure and rhetoric. But there was also a strong native
dramatic tradition deriving from the medieval miracle plays, which had continued to be performed in various towns until
forbidden during Elizabeth's reign. This native drama had been able to assimilate French popular farce, clerically inspired
morality plays on abstract themes, and interludes or short entertainments that made use of the "turns" of individual
clowns and actors. Although Shakespeare's immediate predecessors were known as "university wits," their plays were
seldom structured in the manner of those they had studied at Oxford or Cambridge; instead, they used and developed the
more popular narrative forms. Their subplots, for example, amplified the main action and theme with a freedom and
awareness of hierarchical correspondences that are medieval rather than classical.
Changes In Language
The English language at this time was changing and extending its range. The poet Edmund Spenser led with the
restoration of old words, and schoolmasters, poets, sophisticated courtiers, and travellers all brought further contributions
from France, Italy, and the Roman classics, as well as from farther afield. Helped by the growing availability of cheaper,
printed books, the language began to become standardized in grammar and vocabulary and, more slowly, in spelling.
Ambitious for a European and permanent reputation, the essayist and philosopher Francis Bacon wrote in Latin as well as
in English; but, if he had lived only a few decades later, even he might have had total confidence in his own tongue.
Shakespeare's Literary Debts
In Shakespeare's earlier works his debts stand out clearly: to Plautus for the structure of The Comedy of Errors; to the
poet Ovid and to Seneca for rhetoric and incident in Titus Andronicus; to morality drama for a scene in which a father