A Census of the Provincial Theatre in Eighteenth-Century Spain

1979 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-123
Author(s):  
Heinrich Richard Falk

The recorded history of the Spanish theatre has been, in large measure, a history of the Madrid stage. Madrid, like London and Paris, was not only the political center of its nation, but also its cultural capital. Performers and playwrights may have served enforced periods of apprenticeship in the provinces (the example of Molière comes to mind), but success in the capital remained a constant goal. Historians of the theatre in Spain have tended to follow the lead of the actors in fixing their attention almost exclusively on Madrid. N. D. Shergold's A History of the Spanish Stage becomes primarily a history of the Madrid stage after his chronicle moves from medieval times to the establishment of the first public theatres in late sixteenth-century Madrid. René Andioc's study of the eighteenth-century Spanish theatre, Sur la querelle du théâtre au temps de Leandro Fernández de Moratín (Theatrical Polemics in the Time of Moratin), is almost entirely about the theatre in Madrid, a fact recognized in the title of the Spanish version, Teatro y sociedad en el Madrid del siglo XVIII (Theatre and Society in Eighteenth-Century Madrid). Many additional examples could be cited from the Golden Age to the present of historians purporting to study the Spanish theatre, but in reality considering only the Madrid theatre.

Author(s):  
Jonathan Israel

This chapter describes how, politically, as in other ways, the period 1650–1713 marked the culmination of a distinctive Jewish culture within Europe. While Jews, at least in many parts of Europe, had always tended to congregate in their own quarters, the changes of the sixteenth century — the vast expansion of Jewish life in Poland–Lithuania and in the Ottoman lands and the compulsory subjection to the ghetto system in Italy — combined to propagate a much more developed and intricate pattern of Jewish self-government than had existed previously. In the political as in the cultural sphere, perhaps the most striking feature of the general transformation was the large measure of conformity and cohesion applying across the continent. This is not to say that there were no significant divergences as between diverse parts of Europe, but by and large the essential similarities in the institutions of Jewish organized life held true everywhere. Moreover, there was a particularly notable uniformity regarding the chronology of the evolution of Jewish self-rule: practically everywhere the system reached its fullest development after 1650 and then gradually waned as from the early years of the eighteenth century.


1961 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. M. Holt

The period of nearly three centuries which lies between Selīm I's overthrow of the Mamluk sultanate in 1517, and Bonaparte's landing at Alexandria in 1798 is one of the most obscure in the history of Muslim Egypt. For the latter part of the period, from the early twelfth/eighteenth century, there are ample materials for the reconstruction of the political history in the famous chronicle by Jabartī. The Ottoman invasion, and the years which immediately succeeded it have also received some attention, thanks to the detailed information provided by the chronicler Ibn Iyās. In contrast, there has been virtually no investigation of the last seventy-five years of the sixteenth century and the whole of the seventeenth.


1959 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marshall Smelser

InTheFolklore of our national past the Federalist Period is often thought of as a golden age of demigods, who were almost infallible. The noisy dissent from the program of the Federalist administrations has been regarded as only a temporary deviation from the true American tradition.The most frequently read accounts of the period — especially in college textbooks and other short works of synthesis — have generally tended to reduce the political events of that age to a chapter in the history of the “Age of Reason” and have thereby done some damage to our understanding. Casual readers of the story of this age seem to finish their reading with a mental summary in which the emphasis is on the intellect and logic — in short, on reason. An excellent example of this image as it occurs in the lore of even the learned is a recent comment on Senator J. William Fulbright by Senator Paul Douglas: “He's a child of the eighteenth century, a throwback to that age of enlightenment, trust in reason, temperate argument, and slightly aristocratic tendencies. That, I think, explains why he seems a little aloof, a little different from the rest.”


Author(s):  
Rembert Lutjeharms

This chapter introduces the main themes of the book—Kavikarṇapūra, theology, Sanskrit poetry, and Sanskrit poetics—and provides an overview of each chapter. It briefly highlights the importance of the practice of poetry for the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition, places Kavikarṇapūra in the (political) history of sixteenth‐century Bengal and Orissa as well as sketches his place in the early developments of the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition (a topic more fully explored in Chapter 1). The chapter also reflects more generally on the nature of both his poetry and poetics, and highlights the way Kavikarṇapūra has so far been studied in modern scholarship.


Aschkenas ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Lucia Raspe

AbstractShimʻon Günzburg’s Yiddish collection of customs, first brought to press in Venice in 1589 and reprinted dozens of times over the following centuries, is often considered a mere translation of the Hebrew Minhagim put together by Ayzik Tyrnau in the 1420s. Another claim often made about the book is that, although it was first printed in Venice, it was intended less for the Italian book market than for export. This article sets out to test these assumptions by examining Günzburg’s compilation from the perspective of minhag, or prayer rite. Drawing on Yiddish manuscripts preserved from sixteenth-century Italy, as well as early printed editions overlooked by scholars, it argues that Günzburg’s Minhogim are, in fact, more Italian than has been recognized. It also points up their potential for a comparative history of Ashkenazic book culture across the political and linguistic borders of Europe.


2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (55-56) ◽  
pp. 23-40
Author(s):  
Joseph Margolis

The “Hobbesian turn” is an invention out of whole cloth, a device by which to oppose the usually supposed autonomy of the aesthetic, the moral, the political, and the factual; to recover the collective holism of civilizational (or enlanguaged cultural) life; to feature the existential historicity of the human career, which is incompatible with any strict universalism and all the forms of transcendentalism; hence, also, to feature the adequacy of a contingent Lebensform in collecting the affinities of creative expression and agentive commitment within the terms of human solidarity; to abandon strict universality and necessary synthetic truths; and to favour the fluxive world of pragmatist construction rather than the indemonstrable fixities of rationalism and transcendentalism. The article proceeds largely by examining aspects of Picasso’s career and the history of Western politics spanning the sixteenth century to the present.


PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (5) ◽  
pp. 1264-1278
Author(s):  
Susan Cannon Harris

This essay investigates the conditions and consequences of Thomas Sheridan's attempt to bar spectators from behind the scenes at the Theatre-Royal in Dublin's Smock Alley. Sheridan succeeded in revoking the “freedom of the scenes”—a privilege by which aristocratic men were allowed to roam the green room, dressing rooms, and stage during the performance—because Dublin was the cultural and political center of a colonial society whose members were struggling for control over the spaces outside the theater. The reform provoked a conflict known as the Kelly riots, which began with a spectator's attempted rape of an actress in Sheridan's production of John Vanbrugh's Aesop. Contextualizing the Kelly riots in the political and cultural situation of eighteenth-century Ireland, this article illuminates the role that the theater plays in the construction of subjectivity and in the interrelation among gender, class, and national identities.


Author(s):  
Stephen Menn ◽  
Justin E. H. Smith

The life of Anton Wilhelm Amo is summarized, with close attention to the archival documents that establish key moments in his biography. Next the history of Amo’s reception is considered, from the first summaries of his work in German periodicals during his lifetime, through his legacy in African nationalist thought in the twentieth century. Then the political and intellectual context at Halle is addressed, considering the likely influence on Amo’s work of Halle Pietism, of the local currents of medical philosophy as represented by Friedrich Hoffmann, and of legal thought as represented by Christian Thomasius. The legacy of major early modern philosophers, such as René Descartes and G. W. Leibniz, is also considered, in the aim of understanding how Amo himself might have understood them and how they might have shaped his work. Next a detailed analysis of the conventions of academic dissertations and disputations in early eighteenth-century Germany is provided, in order to better understand how these conventions give shape to Amo’s published works. Finally, ancient and modern debates on action and passion and on sensation are investigated, providing key context for the summary of the principal arguments of Amo’s two treatises, which are summarized in the final section of the introduction.


Babel ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-38
Author(s):  
Eterio Pajares

Abstract Britain’s involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession was such a heavy burden for this country that many essays were written against prolonging the struggle. To this, John Arbuthnot (this satire was wrongly attributed to Swift for many years) contributed with The History of John Bull, a collection of fine satirical pamphlets designed to put and end to the campaign, and advocating a return to peace and common sense. It was soon translated into French and, from this language, Juan Ignacio de Ayestaran tried to produce a Spanish version. However, this version was not authorised by the harsh and voracious Spanish censorship of the period. This essay offers a comparative critical study of the translation and analyses the censors’ reasons for rejecting it. The close reading of this fine satirical work makes the arguments for rebuffing the authorisation so obvious that one wonders to what extent some eighteenth century translators were really aware of the time they were living in and the aesthetic distance between two countries so geographically near but so alien in freedom and tradition. Résumé Le rôle de la Grande-Bretagne dans la guerre de succession espagnole a été un tel fardeau pour ce pays que de nombreux essais ont été écrits contre la poursuite de la lutte. John Arbuthnot y a contribué avec L’histoire de John Bull (pendant de nombreuses années, cette satire a été attribuée à tort à Swift). Cette collection de superbes pamphlets satiriques, conçus pour mettre fin à la campagne et préconisant le retour à la paix et au bon sens, a rapidement été traduite en français. En partant de cette langue, Juan Ignacio de Ayestaran a tenté de produire une version espagnole. Toutefois, cette version n’a pas été autorisée par la censure espagnole, dure et dévorante, de l’époque. Cet essai propose une étude critique comparative de la traduction et analyse les raisons pour lesquelles le censeur l’a rejetée. Une lecture attentive de cette belle oeuvre satirique rend tellement évidents les arguments invoqués pour l’interdire qu’on se demande dans quelle mesure certains traducteurs du dix-huitième siècle étaient vraiment conscients de l’époque où ils vivaient et de la distance esthétique entre deux pays, si proches géographiquement parlant et pourtant si distants sur le plan de la liberté et de la tradition.


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