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Classical Comedy by Aristophanes,Menander,Plautus,Terence Pdf
From the fifth to the second century BC, innovative comedy drama flourished in Greece and Rome. This collection brings together the greatest works of Classical comedy, with two early Greek plays: Aristophanes' bold, imaginative Birds, and Menander's The Girl from Samos, which explores popular contemporary themes of mistaken identity and sexual misbehaviour; and two later Roman comic plays: Plautus' The Brothers Menaechmus - the original comedy of errors - and Terence's bawdy yet sophisticated double love-plot, The Eunuch. Together, these four plays demonstrate the development of Classical comedy, celebrating its richness, variety and extraordinary legacy to modern drama.
Classical Comedy- An Armoury of Laughter, Democracy's Bastion of Defence repudiates Aristotle's claim in Poetics, that tragedy was the jewel of fifth century democracy, arguing that the claim belongs to comedy, as a brilliantly entertaining defense of social values and standards. Tom Rothfield examines every aspect of classicism, analyzing comedy's origins, and structure, to demonstrate the reasons for classical comedy's universal and continued significance. He breaks down theatrical mechanisms, including the playhouse, masks, costumes, a comedian's comic skills, the playwright's inventive genius in plot development, character development, and effective jokes. Through his analysis, Rothfield demonstrates the classical framework, and classical comic criteria that provides an unrivalled model for contemporary theater.
Classical Hollywood Comedy by Kristine Brunovska Karnick,Henry Jenkins Pdf
Applies the recent `return to history' in film studies to the genre of classical Hollywood comedy as well as broadening the definition of those works considered central in this field.
First published in 1939, the original blurb reads: We have learned much lately concerning theories of laughter, yet laughter is only what we do about comedy. What is comedy itself? In this work the history of comic instances is combed in the search for the truth about comedy. Today, when laughter is stifled in so many countries, an exposition of comedy shows it to have a universal and necessary character. Comedy, as its natures reveals, is one criterion of the state of human culture; it is highly contemporary and requires freedom – but freedom for adventure, not for routine. After a chapter devoted to the explanation of a logical theory of comedy, the modern comedians are examined, and the humour of every one, from the Marx Brothers to surrealism, from Gertrude Stein to Mickey Mouse, from James Joyce to Charlie Chaplin, is shown to be a constant, inherent in the same set of unchanging conditions.
Classical Comedy: Greek and Roman by Robert W. Corrigan Pdf
Rich anthologies of dramatic art and critical insight ä varied stimulating broad in its view and deep in its perceptions...exciting variety of translations...enlightening essays from some of the most stiumlating minds of the century. ä Leonard C. Pronko author ÊTheatre East and WestÊ Chair Dept. of Theatre Pomona College. Includes: Aristophanes: Lysistrata translated by Donald Sutherland; The Birds translated by Walter Kerr; Menander: The Grouch translated by Sheila D'Atri; Plautus: The Menaechmi translated by Palmer Bovie; The Haunted House translated by Palmer Bovie; Terence: The Self-Tormentor translated by Palmer Bovie.
This comprehensive guide to The Comedy of Errors brings together the most significant and authoritative insights on this early Shakepearean comedy. The texts, presented chronologically, represent the best writings on the play - from a 1594 review of a performance at Gray's Inn to contemporary feminist and new historicist interpretations. Important textual analyses by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Bernard Shaw, and Harry Levin, among others, are included with five previously unpublished essays by leading Shakespeare experts.
Classical Literature: An Introduction provides a series of essays on all the major authors of Greek and Latin literature, as well as on a number of writers less often read. An introductory chapter provides information on important general topics, such as poetic metres, patronage and symposia. The literature is put in historical context, and the material is organized chronologically, but also by genre or author, as appropriate; each section or chapter has suggestions for further reading. The book ranges from Homer to the writers of the later Roman Empire, and includes a glossary, a chronology of literary and political events, and useful maps showing the origins of ancient writers. The collection will be essential for students and others who want a structured and informative introduction to the literature of the classical world.
This collection of essays and reviews represents the most significant and comprehensive writing on Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors .This volume of critical essays also features a comprehensive critical history, a full bibliography, and photographs and reviews of major productions of the play around the world.
In this short but stimulating work, Peter Leithart draws upon insights from history, theology, philosophy, and literature to connect two of the most glorious and unique truths of Christianity its hopeful eschatology and its doctrine of a dynamic, personal Trinity. First, Leithart shows that the biblical view of history is essentially comic and hopeful, in contrast to the classical Greco-Roman view, which is essentially and irredeemably tragic. Then he develops the same point by examining Greek philosophy and its descendants (including postmodernism) in contrast to orthodox Trinitarian theology. Finally, he shows how the tragic and comic worldviews have been reflected in literature, with discussions of Greek epics and two Shakespearean plays. The result is a tour through three thousand years of intellectual history that celebrates the living power of orthodoxy."
Shakespeare & the Uses of Comedy by Joseph Allen Bryant Pdf
In Shakespeare's hand the comic mode became an instrument for exploring the broad territory of the human situation, including much that had normally been reserved for tragedy. Once the reader recognizes that justification for such an assumption is presented repeatedly in the earlier comedies -- from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night -- he has less difficulty in dispensing with the currently fashionable classifications of the later comedies as problem plays and romances or tragicomedies and thus in seeing them all as manifestations of a single impulse. Bryant shows how Shakespeare, early a.
This contribution by Gesine Manuwald provides an introduction to all varieties of ‘Roman comedy’, including primarily fabula palliata (‘New Comedy’, as represented by Plautus and Terence) as well as fabula togata, fabula Atellana, mimus and pantomimus.
Recent critics have affirmed the difficulty—perhaps the impossibility—of defining modern comedy; at the same time, some feminist scholars are seeking to understand the special comedy often present in literature written by women. Comedy and the Woman Writer responds to both these concerns of recent criticism: feminist literary theory and theories of comedy. Judy Little develops a critical apparatus for identifying feminist comedy in recent fiction, especially the radical political and psychological implications of this comedy, and then applies and tests her theory by examining the novels of Virginia Woolf and Muriel Spark. Despite recent scholarly attention to Woolf, the profound comedy of her work has been largely overlooked, and the comic fiction of Spark has seldom had the responsible and attentive criticism that it deserves. The introductory chapter draws upon anthropology and sociology, as well as literary criticism and the fiction of feminist writers such as Woolf, Doris Lessing, and Monique Wittig, to define a modern feminist comedy. Four central chapters then explore the implications of this comedy in the novels of Woolf and Spark. Little distinguishes between, on the one hand, several varieties of traditional comedy and satire and, on the other, the festive or “liminal” comedy to which feminist comedy belongs. Both Woolf and Spark mock centuries-old mythic patterns and behaviors deriving from basic social norms, as well as the values emerging from these norms. It is one thing, the author points out, to find “manners” amusing, to scourge vices, or to mock the follies of lovers; it is a much more drastic act of the imagination to mock the very norms against which comedy has traditionally judged vices, follies, and eccentricities. While the comedy of Woolf and Spark has some precedent in festive or liminal celebrations, during which even basic values and behavior are abandoned, feminist comedy displays its radical nature by implying that there is no resolution to the inverted overturned world, the world in revolutionary transition. The final chapter considers briefly, in the light of the critical model of feminist comedy, the work of several other twentieth-century writers, including Jean Rhys, Penelope Moritmer, and Margaret Drabble. The presence of radical comedy in the fiction of these and other writers suggests the need for continuing attention to the theory of feminist comedy proposed in this study.
First published in 1938. This is a survey of Shakepeare's comedies which illustrates the playwright's increasing grasp on the art and idea of comedy. Themes, characters and plays covered include: Romanticism in Shakespearian comedy; Shakespeare's Jew, Falstaff, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Dark Comedies.