Typescript. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1975. / Bibliography: leaves [197]-204. / vii, 204 leaves ill

During the eleven years of Margaret Thatcher's administrations in Britain, playwright Caryl Churchill had perhaps the most productive period in her career to date and achieved an unprecedented degree of success. This phenomenon is unusual since Churchill is a self-described socialist-feminist and these were times of increasing conservatism in the theatre, as in society as a whole. This dissertation seeks to explain this apparent contradiction. It begins with a survey of changes in British society during the Thatcher years, including the effects which Thatcher's policies and attitudes had on women, feminists, the left, and artists (especially theatre workers). Next, it examines Churchill's collaborative writing strategies against the context formed by an ideology of radical individualism. Three specific plays from the Thatcher Years are then considered in terms of the society's influences on them and their potential impact on contemporary culture. Top Girls (1982) is discussed as an attempt to reclaim the term "feminism" from a new breed of conservative business women and return it to the materialist-feminists who were once the core of the British women's movement. Fen (1983) is examined in terms of regional policy, class and gender issues, and the reconfiguration of "family" in Britain in the 1980s. Serious Money (1987) was Churchill's greatest commercial success, and the reasons for its popularity form the basis for the discussion of this play. In each case, considerable attention is given to issues of critical and public reception.

The conceptions of Julius Caesar in the English Renaissance were complex and contradictory, and the four surviving plays about Caesar from the period--the anonymous Caesar's Revenge (c. 1595), Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1599), George Chapman's Caesar and Pompey (c. 1604), and Sir William Alexander's The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (1607)--negotiate these conceptions in distinct ways. The views of Caesar current in the Renaissance were diverse in both their sources and content. The medieval tradition glorified Caesar, but classical sources were mixed in their assessments. Caesar was lauded for his virtues and the authoritarian stability he brought to Rome, but was also condemned for his vices and his subversion of the Republic. In the Renaissance, therefore, Caesar was an ambiguous figure who was regarded as both an ambitious usurper and as a legitimate monarch. Renaissance drama imposed didactic lessons on historical subject matter, and, thus, Caesar's Revenge illustrates how ambition and revenge cause civil discord. Caesar and Pompey espouses Stoic independence, and The Tragedy of Julius Caesar both condemns ambition and counsels Stoic transcendence of the vagaries of Fortune. The three plays, however, cannot simplify Caesar and the events of his life to fully complement their didactic aims because of two primary factors. First, the plays were composed within disciplinary paradigms that promote ambiguity. These paradigms--historiographical in Caesar's Revenge, philosophical in Caesar and Pompey, and rhetorical in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar--resist reductive, didactic appropriations of Caesar by acknowledging opposing viewpoints and perspectives. Secondly, the multiple and conflicting conceptions of Caesar in the Renaissance defied simplification. The number of accounts of Caesar and their contradictory nature produced an intertextual web of references and interpretations that undermined unequivocal portrayals of Caesar. Shakespeare avoided these difficulties by focusing Julius Caesar on ambiguity itself. His play demonstrates the manner in which assessments and judgments of character are the product of the perceiver's perspective and how identity is thus shaped to appeal to the perceived judgments of those perceivers. These insights are applicable to the operations, specific to the Renaissance, of the other three plays, and to the means of interpretation today.

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In seventeenth-century France a new type of theatre was established to correspond to the ideals and taste of the dominant social group. As part of the process a particular ideal was forged for the new-style actor. Moulded by classical writings on acting and actors which suggested that the; style of serious, cultured acting operated within the same aesthetic as that of oratorical delivery, this ideal similarly identified refined acting with principles of pronuntiatio and the bienséance acceptable in contemporary formal discourse As a result of this identification no separate art of acting was considered necessary in seventeenth-century France, the rules and principles of expression of emotion in oratorical delivery being accepted as valid for serious acting. It is to these rules and. principles therefore that recourse must be made if the style of seventeenth-century acting and the approach of the actor at this period are to be appreciated. Study of seventeenth-century French treatises on oratorical delivery indicates the extent to which expression of emotion was considered to require study and practise of basic principal which would enable the speaker to evoke a particular passion by appropriately moving tones and accompanying gesture, and yet at the same time remain within a socially-acceptable range. Interpretation of seventeenth-century writings Oil actors and acting in light of these principles highlights the declamatory nature of serious acting of this period. The actor was understood to approach his role with a view to representing and thus exciting passions through effective vocal variation and suitably decorous accompanying gesture (body-language). Attention was focused upon the actor's voice, upon his moving tones and cadences, and upon the grace with which he used his body to reinforce such emotional portrayal. During the eighteenth century this conception-of acting and the style it had produced were called into question. Acting began to evolve its own aesthetic, an aesthetic based upon impersonation of character through personal identification and experience of the effects of emotion in real life. Study of rules to regulate emotional expression and imitation of the best models were abandoned in favour of cultivation of artistic sensibility: recourse to the imagination and personal sensitivity. In the process emphasis shifted from the voice to non-linguistic ways of showing feeling on the stage, and gestural expression released itself from subjection to social bienséance and enriched its range and potential. Evidence of these trends as well as fidelity to or reaction against principles of bienséance may be traced in writings on acting and delivery of the first half of the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the century acting theory was still rooted in and patterned on the model of pronuntiatio. By 1750 it had established its worth as an independent art with principles more directly based upon the dramatic experience.

Thesis (MDram (Drama))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009. / In this thesis I examine the way in which fictionalised and dramatised narratives in theatre have the potential to create significant alternative narratives that can potentially be regarded as a crucial part of history writing. This is done through a critical analysis of three historically orientated dramatic texts, Ubu and the Truth Commission by Jane Taylor (1998), Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (1998) and Ghetto by Joshua Sobol (1984). I investigate how these playwrights narrativised history by fictionalising and dramatising events and people of historical importance, and how each of these plays individually contributes to the debate on narrative in historiographical discourse. Drawing on Hayden White’s theory on the poetic and narrative nature of history writing, as represented by his definitive work, Metahistory, I explore different theories and works on the philosophy of history to determine the precise nature of narrative itself as well as the historical work. Chapter Two is therefore an exploration of White’s philosophy on the ‘historical imagination’ as he describes his theory on the narrative and poetic nature of the historical document. In addition, this chapter provides an introduction to narrative in a theatrical text. This is done in order to examine how we can apply White’s theory to investigate narrative in theatre that focuses on historical events for the purpose of possibly including the dramatic narrative in the broader discourse on narrative in history writing. In this I highlight the theatrical narrative as a specific practice of language beginning with an interlude on representation in theatre. This is applied as the basis for examining the three texts in subsequent chapters. There are both general and more specific advantages in pursuing these arguments. Firstly, it may generate an understanding of some of the broad claims and problems bearing on the impact that literary theory is said to have on a subject which is not normally considered to fall within its domain, namely history writing. The work of Hayden White has been singled out to represent these claims, as he challenges the traditional distinction between history and literature. As a result, we are made aware of those arguments which set out to show that there are aspects of historical writing which are often ignored or which we generally overlook. An example of such an aspect that serve as the focus of this study is the narrative in historical explanation, representing the “ineluctably poetic nature of the historical work” (White 1983:xi). As such theatre can be an important tool in the process of constructing memory and alternative narratives, arguing that these narrativised histories could provide a “countermemory to the dominant narrative of the official histories” (Hutchison 1999:3). The theatrical texts singled out demonstrate that these alternative narratives in the theatrical texts function as a discourse of multi-levelled stories that engage with the complexities of the society and the complexities present in the context of the plays, making a contribution to the practice of historiography itself.

This thesis is a historical account of left-wing theatre in Japan from its early beginnings in the 1910s to the collapse of the organised proletarian drama movement in 1934. It is set within the context of the general history of shingeki from the earliest attempts to reform existing traditional theatre soon after the Meiji restoration. The choice of this subject was encouraged by several factors. The Japanese classical theatre has much of interest to the foreign scholar and several substantial studies of its various forms have boon published. Shingeki, on the other hand, has as yet not been studied seriously by any Eastern scholar and it was at least portly a curiosity concerning the problems that would have confronted a modern drama in Japan that prompted this study of left-wing drama. The subject was limited to left-wing drama for several reasons. Firstly some limitation was required. The history of shingeki can now be said to extend over approximately one hundred years and such have been its vicissitudes and the volume of work contributed to it by its practitioners that only a very choral history would be possible in the limited scope of a thesis. Within the one hundred years of shingeki five separate periods can be discerned: the Meiji period, when the idea of a new drama for the new state was discussed and developed; the late Heiji and early Taisho periods, when the first experiments at a practical realization of new drama took place; the 1920s and early 1930s, when shingeki became an exciting new cultural form in the eyes of young intellectuals and when it became left-wing, as they did; the later 1930s, when a more sober approach to drama was taken by socialists and a more self-confident attitude was observable in those theatre people who were not left-wing; and the post-war period, with its complex mixture of self-examination and experiment. The 1920s and early 1930s - the left- wing period - were chosen because this can be confidently described as the formative period of modern Japanese drama. The struggle with the past was mainly over and the legacy left to future shingeki artists by these years was greater than that of any other period. [continued in text ...]