THE MOCK HEROIC, AN INTRUDER IN ARCADIA: GIROLAMO GIGLI, ANTONIO CALDARA AND L'ANAGILDA (ROME, 1711)

2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-62
Author(s):  
AYANA SMITH
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Structural Requirements ◽  
Basic Goal ◽  
Classical Models ◽  
Antonio Caldara ◽  
Arcadian Academy ◽  
Papal States

ABSTRACTIn 1711 the opera L'Anagilda was performed in the private theatre of Francesco Maria Ruspoli, an important Roman patron of the Arcadian Academy. L'Anagilda's librettist (Girolamo Gigli) and composer (Antonio Caldara) were both associated with this society, but the opera contrasts with the basic goal of Arcadian aesthetics – namely, to reform literature and opera by imitating the structure of ancient Greek tragedy and the stylistic purity of Italian renaissance poets. Rather, Gigli and Caldara created an opera infused with comedy, interspersed with fantastic intermezzos and formulated according to a genre not endorsed by Arcadian literary critics, the mock heroic. This article explores topics related to one central question: why would Gigli and Caldara openly flout the literary precepts of Arcadia? Gigli was a career satirist whose works eventually caused him to be exiled from his native Siena, all of Tuscany and the Papal States, and to be expelled from three major literary academies, the Intronati, the Cruscanti and the Arcadians. Since he continually criticized the organizations to which he belonged for their narrow-mindedness, prejudice and hypocrisy, I contend that L'Anagilda represents a critique of Arcadia. Yet in the process, Gigli also shows the Arcadians that there is more than one path to verisimilitude and the imitation of classical models. Despite the mock-heroic characteristics of the libretto, Gigli adheres to some Arcadian structural requirements, and Caldara's score heightens the characterizations and the overall verisimilitude of the opera.

The Living Art of Greek Tragedy. By Marianne McDonald. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003; pp. 224. $15.95 paper.

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-168
Author(s):  
Edmund P. Cueva
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Indiana University

Marianne McDonald's book provides a solid introduction to ancient tragedy and theatre. The author examines the works by the three major ancient Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and supplies for each playwright biographies, synopses of their works, and modern and ancient translations and adaptations of their plays. The listing of the translations and adaptations is selective and spans from the classical period up to the twentieth century.

Introduction

Ladies' Greek ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yopie Prins
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Collective Identification ◽  
Victorian Women ◽  
Greek Alphabet ◽  
Women Of Letters

This book examines why Victorian women of letters such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sara Coleridge, and Virginia Woolf self-consciously performed collective identification with Greek letters and showed literary interest in their translations of with Greek tragedy. It considers how these women engaged with ideas about classical antiquity, and how much they contributed to the idealization of all things Greek. It discusses the ways in which women learned to read the Greek alphabet, to discover all the letters between alpha and omega, and how they turned ancient Greek into a language of and for desire. The book argues that nineteenth-century women writers turned to tragedy in particular as a literary genre for the performance of female classical literacy, and that their passionate reading of Greek led them into various forms of translation. Five tragedies are analyzed to elucidate the legacy of Ladies' Greek: Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound, Electra, Hippolytus, and Bacchae.

The Narrative Imperative in the Films of Theo Angelopoulos

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Eades
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Artistic Heritage

This chapter examines the development of what it calls the ‘narrative imperative’ in Theo Angelopoulos' films such as Eternity and a Day, Megalexandros and Ulysses' Gaze. Throughout Angelopoulos' career as a filmmaker, the place and nature of literary references progressively superseded references to other forms of the ancient Greek artistic heritage and contributed to establishing a progressive drive towards a narrative imperative in his creative process. This imperative in Angelopoulos' most recent films consists in subjecting the function and signification of images, mise en scène, even music, to the advancement of the plot, the characterisation of its protagonists and the construction of a diegetic world. The chapter argues that the narrative imperative in Angelopoulos' modernist cinema is a driving force behind the numerous explicit references to Greek tragedy and Homeric epic.

The Vengeful Lioness in Greek Tragedy: A Posthumanist Perspective1

2018 ◽  
pp. 203-220
Author(s):  
Alessandra Abbattista
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Hybrid Nature ◽  
Human Male ◽  
Female Hybrid

This chapter reinterprets the animal metaphors used in ancient Greek tragedy to describe revenging women from a posthumanist perspective. Whereas critics have commonly regarded such metaphors as indicating the female revenger’s inhuman savagery and otherness (whereby a woman’s attempt to assume a male heroic role transforms her instead into a monstrous beast), posthumanism challenges conventional distinctions between animal and human, male and female. Drawing on the work of Rosi Braidotti, it argues that female revengers similarly challenge these distinctions. The metaphorical metamorphosis of Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra and Euripides’ Medea into lionesses reveals their complex figuration as male-female hybrid beings, recalling the tragic suffering and protective violence of the Homeric lion within a new context of interfamilial conflicts. These transformations engender terror but also compassion, evoking new ways of conceptualising humans-as-animals that invite recognition of our own unstable and hybrid nature.

Biography and Autobiography in the Italian Renaissance

Mapping Lives ◽  
2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin McLaughlin
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Classical Models ◽  
The Subject ◽  
De Viris Illustribus ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Middle Ages

During the period of 1300–1600, autobiography and biography flourished in Italy despite the controversial thesis of the ‘rise of the individual’ during the Italian Renaissance. In the same period, a typology of biographical works emerged distinguishing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Italy. These three strands of biography are: collection of lives, a De viris illustribus tradition, revived in Petrarch's work of the same name and inspired by Classical lives of famous rulers, by medieval Viri illustres, and by famous writers and artists; individual biographies, again either of a single ruler or of an individual, and once more derived from Classical models, such as Boccaccio's De vita et moribus Francisci Petrarcchi and Trattatello in laude di Dante; and autobiography, which was pioneered by Petrarch through his Secretum, a purportedly secret dialogue in which St. Augustine was the subject. This chapter discusses distinctive examples of the three strands of biography, with emphasis on the biographies and autobiographies of the writers. It charts the rise and principal developments of these genres during 1350 to 1550.

Whose Idea of Tragedy? Mrs Dalloway and the Ancient Greek Tradition

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gourd
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Classical Scholar ◽  
Narrative Tradition ◽  
Ancient Literature ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
Previous Scholarship ◽  
Commit Suicide

As Septimus Smith prepares to commit suicide by throwing himself out of the window and ‘vigorously, violently down onto Mrs Filmer’s area railings,’ he comments on the narrative tradition of his own tragic demise. ‘It was their idea of tragedy,’ he reflects with bitter irony – ‘Holmes and Bradshaw liked that sort of thing.’ This paper addresses the wider implications of this sentiment in Mrs Dalloway, by positioning Septimus’ death as the tragic climax and dramatic focus of the novel. Previous scholarship has failed to recognise the significance of this allusion to Greek tragedy, though Woolf was an accomplished classical scholar and a voracious reader of ancient literature. This detail would repay attention, as the author’s self-conscious engagement with the literary and intellectual tradition of tragedy, demonstrated through the narrative and suicide of Septimus Smith, impacts upon our understanding of the novel as a whole. It raises several important questions which this paper seeks to address: to what extent does Woolf intend for us to sympathise with Septimus as the tragic protagonist? How does Woolf’s appropriation and manipulation of the tragic genre reflect her views on war, mental illness, and her relationship with her doctors? And finally, what does it tell us about Woolf’s idea of tragedy, and what she considers to be tragic?

Civic Humanism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Kallendorf
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
The Political ◽  
Civic Humanism ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Renaissance Studies ◽  
Classical Models ◽  
The Republic

Civic humanism is one of the more interesting and important concepts in Renaissance studies, in part because of its unusually long afterlife, and in part because almost everything pertaining to it is controversial. There is general agreement that it involves a commitment to the active political life under the influence of classical models, but from that point on, scholarship divides. Are its origins in the political life of Florence at the turn of the 15th century or in the political thought of the 14th century? Does civic humanism predicate a commitment to the republic as we understand the term today, or only to active political engagement in general? When did it end: In Italy, in the 16th century? In England, in the 17th century? In the ideological debates of the American revolution? Or later? Since large blocks of postwar scholarship on the Italian Renaissance are a reaction to civic humanism, either directly or indirectly, any selection from among this much material becomes at least somewhat arbitrary, but the bibliography that follows should provide a basic orientation to the major issues involved, with an emphasis on how ideas about civic humanism have evolved rather than on restatements of earlier positions.

Greek Tragedy as a Window on the Dispossessed

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Wilmer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Professor Emeritus ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Political Controversy ◽  
Theatre Studies

In this article Steve Wilmer discusses adaptations of Greek tragedy that highlight the plight of the displaced and the dispossessed, including Janusz Glowacki's Antigone in New York, Marina Carr's Hecuba, and Elfriede Jelinek's Die Schutzbefohlenen, which is notably emblematic among appropriations of ancient Greek plays in referencing the problems facing refugees in Europe. He considers how this latter play has been directed in a variety of ways in Germany and Austria since 2013, and how in turn it has been reappropriated for new dramatic performances to further investigate the conditions of refugees. Some of these productions have caused political controversy and one of them has even been physically attacked by a right-wing group. Steve Wilmer is Professor Emeritus of Drama at Trinity College Dublin. He is the co-editor of ‘Theatre and Statelessness in Europe’ for Critical Stages (2016), Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political, and Performative Strategies (Routledge, 2016), and Deleuze and Beckett (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He also edited a special issue of Nordic Theatre Studies in 2015 titled ‘Theatre and the Nomadic Subject’.

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