Character : acting and being on the pre-modern stage

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Character : acting and being on the pre-modern stage

Edward Burns

Macmillan, 1990

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Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

This analysis of acting and characterization on stage covers theories of character from Aristotle to Brecht and approaches from formalism to post structuralism. Parts of the book were papers given to the Liverpool University English Department's Renaissance discussion group 1985 and the Durham Seventeenth Century Conference, 1987. The Early Theatre Group have, over the last 5 years, used an experimental approach to performing some of the plays written about in this volume. Edward Burns has also written "Restoration Comedy - Crises of Desire and Identity" and "The Chester Mystery Cycle - A Modern Staging Text" published by Macmillan.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction: reading character
  • character, acting and rhetoric. Part 1 Ancient theories of character: Aristotle's poetics "Ethos Proxis" and "Pathos"
  • Greek tragedy and the "Showing" of "Ethos"
  • action, choice and recognition - tragedy in practice
  • character and rhetoric in post-classical tradition
  • characters and "Personae"
  • ethos, biography and the purpose of writing. Part 2 Rhetorical character - history and allegory: character and allegory - Scaliger's poeticae
  • Prudentius' psychomachia - allegory and subjectivity
  • allegorical drama - the Tudor interlude
  • acting, fame and the historical individual
  • character and power - Shakespeare's secondary history cycle. Part 3 Character as political proxis - three plays by Shakespeare: "Troilus and Cressida" - "common commentaries" and "Truth's Authentic Authour"
  • "Antony and Cleopatra" - triumphs and blemishes
  • "Julius Caesar" - rebellion and interiority. Part 4 Acting, interiority and empathy on the Elizabethan stage: "No theatre, No World" - acting and spectating as analogies for human being
  • actors and parts
  • watching and judging
  • mirrors and man - "Hamlet"I
  • "Hamlet" II - character, action and interiority
  • humour and melancholy - individuation and containment. Part 5 Character and the passions - acting and theory in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
  • "Common Sense" and the "Universal Mind"
  • "Unity of Character"
  • "the mind and its movements". Part 6 "Human subject is decentred" - the modern "subject" and pre-modern drama
  • Brecht and the formalists
  • substantive "character" in Soviet aesthetics and in English studies
  • character and subject - some post structuralist approaches.

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