Sourcing Misfortunes: Translation and Tragedy

From its first review to recent scholarship, critics have derided and dismissed the use made of translation in The Misfortunes of Arthur (1588). This essay reconsiders how the play approaches imitation by examining its translations from Senecan tragedy and Lucan’s De Bello Civili (ca 61-5 CE). With particular emphasis on Misfortunes’s ghost sequences and Oedipal echoes, this approach reveals the play’s engagement not just with the pedagogy and politics of Elizabethan England but also with innovations in dramatic form.

The state of the British garden: Mike Bartlett’s Albion and its Chekhovian scions

Mike Bartlett’s Albion (2017) is a highly sophisticated and illuminating instance of the diversity and complexity of adaptation. Although declaring no explicit relationship to informing source texts, amongst myriad intertextual allusions Albion manifests an engagement with Chekhov’s drama that abundantly affords adaptation’s pleasures. As well as deploying the principal hallmarks and strategies of Chekhovian dramaturgy, Bartlett reconfigures in Brexit Britain scenarios, characters and relationships from The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard. Moreover, demonstrating the thoroughness with which the English have appropriated and naturalized Chekhov, Bartlett implicitly challenges cardinal assumptions of that domestic tradition, through his nuanced subversion of both the ‘country-house’ and ‘state-of-the-nation’ play. Consequently, he reveals adaptation as a richly dialogic process, in which source and adapted texts shed light on each other. The politics of dramatic form(s) and of cultural adaptation and appropriation, to which Bartlett’s revision of a preeminent part of English dramatic heritage points, deftly parallel, and function as an analogue for, the conservative heritage enterprise that Albion portrays. Highlighting the longstanding association of the countryside and landscape with English cultural identity, the protagonist’s project of restoring an historic country garden to its former grandeur is laden with especial significance at this contemporary moment of national crisis.

Le Sous-Psychodrame : une nouvelle forme dramatique de Jean-Luc Lagarce

"The Sub-Psychodrama: a New Dramatic Form by Jean-Luc Lagarce. It is exactly by a neologism of a “sub-psychodrama” that the playwright and French director Jean-Luc Lagarce (1957-1995) defined one of his plays. The similarities between psychodramatic practices and Lagarce’s dramatic works are obvious. As in the context of psychodramatic practice, Lagarce’s characters take on roles and identify with them from a carnal as well as linguistic point of view. The situation in which Lagarce’s characters meet is very close to that which is, among others, treated by psychodramatists: the dialogue is not initialized, the individuals are stuck in their reproaches and focus only on their own points of view. Lagarce’s characters use the theatricalization, the putting in voice of a dramatic text of one of them in order to launch the speech that awaited this moment of expression. The sub-psychodrama, while being a poetic and dramatic concept of Lagarce, reveals the dialogical malaise in the contemporary society that the sub-psychodrama quotes while highlighting the complex mechanisms of the intersubjective perception as well as the mechanisms of our individual and collective memory. Both reflective self-perception, which goes from oneself to oneself, and transitive perception, which goes from oneself to the other or from the other to oneself – in the context of a speech act. The sub-psychodrama presents itself, therefore, as a dialogical and perceptive field of battle where the spoken word is in search of its answer. The sub-psychodrama invented and developed by Lagarce puts the concept of paper beings – linguistic puppets – at the same level, while promoting the coalition of puppet theater and word drama. Keywords: Lagarce, contemporary French drama, word drama, psychodrama, sub-psychodrama. "

Inscribing Textuality

In The Preface to Gondibert (1650), William Davenant proposes a new literary aesthetic predicated upon philosophical and scientific learning. Like Milton, he was concerned with poetic form, though, unlike Milton, Davenant wrote numerous plays. Milton’s minimal engagement with dramatic form could be construed as representative of him positioning himself in opposition to the aesthetics of drama and the politics of the Restoration stage. This chapter addresses how Davenant’s notions of aesthetics and how Milton’s engagement with the theatricality of ink informed their ideas of drama. By placing these two authors in dialogue with one another, we are presented with a rich cultural poetics that is underpinned by questions of authorship and continued anxieties regarding the moral and didactic space of the stage and of the page.

Od powieści filozoficznej do teatru (post)epickiego? Kosmos Witolda Gombrowicza w inscenizacji Jerzego Jarockieg?

The aim of the article is to present the way in which Jerzy Jarocki transforms Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos into a theatrical script. The director does not try to extract a purely dramatic form from the novel, but creates a dramatization that takes into account the epic elements of the work. He proves with his realization Od powieści filozoficznej do teatru (post)epickiego that the producer does not have to deconstruct the work or even modernize it in order to introduce a discussion about the work and its readings to the stage. The scenography (created by Jerzy Juk-Kowarski) is extremely important in the context of the realization of the Cosmos, which allows the creators to place the staging in a specific philosophical context, enlivens the recipient’s imagination and, in a way, forces an active reception of the work.

Dramat i romantyczne „Ja": Studium podmiotowości w dramaturgii polskiej doby romantyzmu

THE DRAMA AND ROMANTIC “I”. A STUDY OF SUBJECTIVITY IN THE POLISH DRAMATURGY OF THE ROMANTIC EPOCH The book presents studies concerning subjectivity in the Polish dramaturgy of the romantic and postromantic epochs. Its topic comprises an issue in research on the romantic drama which has not been analysed yet, although this issue is necessary for adequate characteristics of the romantic drama. The context of detailed analyses is formed by the views of philosophers and art theoreticians as well as dramaturgists, indicating that an idea of the subject constituted, beginning from the turn of 19th century, an important and deeply strengthened element of anthropological and aesthetical discourse, which is confirmed by Uwagi wstępne [Introductory Remarks]. In this context, subjectivity has been treated in the thesis as an immanent trait of the drama, but such perception is connected with confidence that the poetics and aesthetics of the drama constitute at the same time an artistic version of anthropology of the creative individual and philosophy of the subject. The book aims at tracing different manifestations of the subject presence in the romantic drama, distinct not only for particular authors but also for historically and aesthetically determined phases of the Romanticism. The centre of considerations is constituted by “I” analysed as a source of the drama creation (author’s subject) and by “I” as an object of the performance both in the subject of a hero and the holistic structure of a drama (“I” as a compositional principle of the dramatic work, performance “I” in the dramatic form, drama “I”).

THE PROBLEM OF GENRE IDENTIFICATION OF THE CLOSET DRAMA OF 18TH-19TH CENTURIES

The article analyzes the genre features and preconditions for the development of non-stage drama in romantic literature at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries. Closet drama is understood as a persistent literary form that inherits dramatic and epic generic features and is a kind of dramatic genre that is not intended to be staged. The author also analyzes the literary and non-literary factors that influenced the formation of the genre, and raises the question of its legitimacy. The author assigns a decisive role in the liberalization of the dramatic form and transformation of its understanding to the novel and the tendency of romanization associated with it.

Great Patriotic War in School Literature: Features of Political Socialization of Students

The author of article reviews relevant setbacks of modern school education. Russian youth faces a «dissolution of history» due to gaps in school subjects, where historical events and individuals are losing their significance, but which was mentioned in soviet school program. Author underlines that new studying courses limit the list of authors and their works, which truly reflect a picture of Great Patriotic War. Moreover, digital technologies are filling up kids and youth’s spare time, that is why historical and fictional works are being replaced away. The author of article focuses on Russian and foreign contemporary movies as well, which have played its role in creating “historical content” in knowledge of youth. Nowadays, modern movies are replacing wartime and historical literature because of its interactive and dramatic form of impact, and for some time its fake facts, which are more acceptable for screenplays and have more commercial success. Author concludes that modern school program is needed to be corrected. These new corrections must include creating of new culture of reading, socialization of youth and popularization of reading.

Possession

This chapter addresses the appearance of demonic possession in seventeenth-century Muscovite witchcraft trials. Klikushestvo, usually translated as “shrieking” or “possession,” was a particularly dramatic form of magical affliction, one that horrified Russian communities and fascinated onlookers by its nightmarish manifestations. As recorded in both miracle tales and court records, possession was often, but not always, attributed to the malevolent acts of witches and sorcerers. Another disturbing condition in Muscovy and imperial Russia, often but not always observed alongside the other characteristics of klikushestvo and sometimes thrown into general symptomology of possession, was ikota — literally, hiccupping. With their dramatic manifestations, klikushestvo and ikota in the Russian lands and the less dramatic (but no less frightening) forms of demonic possession in the Ukrainian lands involved families and communities in shared collective performances. Performance in this sense does not connote any falsehood; rather it underscores the extent to which possession can never be a truly solitary act. It is theatrical in its essence, a public performance. Collective consensus, a shared assessment between afflicted and witnesses, completed and validated possession cases.