The Introduction sets out the study’s main claims and methodological approach and explains the wide use in this study of the term ’mimetic ethical exercises’. In the process, it explains the distinction drawn in this study between ethics and religious morality. Finally, the Introduction addresses the question of genre and theatricality when studying early modern examples of English revenge plays and explains what is unique about the plays selected for analysis.

Chapter 9 explores Goethe’s development as a dramatist, from the works of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) era, through the classical period to his last plays, and the associated shifts in style. It considers both the dramas that have entered the canon and those – such as the fragments, masques and Singspiele – that have now largely been forgotten. The chapter also emphasises the importance of seeing Goethe not only as a playwright but also as a practitioner, whose involvement in the Weimar court theatre helped to shape his writing.

This chapter focuses on the Black body in the narrative genre of passing literature, which combines issues of embodiment with those of visuality. It begins by arguing that, whereas recent literary culture habituates us to immediacy, access, and confession, the passing plot operates on different terms. At a moment when many artists and critics are arguing for the importance of opacity to relational frameworks, the passing plot comes into focus as a special testing ground for viewing racialized embodiment and ethical sociality in fresh ways. The chapter goes on to argue that just as the passing plot proves a rich container for considering the ethics of relation, dramatic literature offers a particularly productive platform for considering passing literature today. My case study for these claims is Branden Jacob-Jenkins’s play An Octoroon (2014). A metatheatrical riff on a prominent nineteenth-century melodrama called The Octoroon (1859), the play avoids conveying some intimate truth about racial embodiment – the secret ostensibly kept by the passing figure – in order to offer new opportunities for Jacobs-Jenkins’s audience to become aware of their embodied participation in acts of racialization.

Lowell’s intense creative engagement with Herman Melville was long-standing, evident from his first published poetry (notably and specifically in "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket") to his last works, particularly his trilogy of verse dramas The Old Glory. Tracking Melville in Lowell is relatively straightforward in terms of allusion, but there are deeper and more significant traits that the two writers shared. Both are Miltonic in terms of their literary and intellectual heritage, both reflect on the legacy of New England; on guilt, violence, power and the imagining of the United States. The Old Glory includes Lowell’s dramatic verse refiguring of Benito Cereno where the 1855 novella is aligned with key public and political themes of the 1960s: racial inequality and unrest; the cold war; American nuclear capability. These have a disturbing and discomforting resonance in our own times, and usefully remind us of Lowell as a public and political poet.

This chapter explores the Hegelian context of Wagner‘s works by considering the theoretical texts authored by Wagner in advance of and in preparation for his music-dramatical works. The focus is on the philosophical foundations of The Ring of the Nibelung in the politico-philosophical works Wagner wrote in the context of the Dresden uprising of 1849, in which he took part. The first section reviews the extent and import of Wagner’s theoretical writings, including State and Revolution (1849), The Artwork of the Future (1850) and Opera and Drama (1852). The second section examines the philosophical background of the Ring of the Nibelung, moving from the overt influence of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer to its deeper shaping by Hegel‘s philosophy of world history. Special consideration is given to the agreement between Hegel and Wagner in their civico-political understanding of Greek tragedy, especially Sophocles’ Theban plays, Oedipus the King and Antigone.

The complex relationship between Wagner and Liszt has been much caricatured. Liszt is usually perceived as long-suffering, patient, and generous in his support, while Wagner appears self-serving and ruthless. This chapter unravels how their relationship was shaped by contemporary economic, political, and, artistic forces. In doing so, it observes the contrasting ways Liszt and Wagner attempted to reconcile revolutionary republican sympathies with their desire for royal patronage. It examines the advice and practical support Liszt provided Wagner through his position as Kapellmeister at the Weimar Court Theatre, Liszt’s ambitions to position his relationship with Wagner as equivalent to Goethe and Schiller within a new artistic ‘golden age’ in Weimar, and their differing responses to contemporary aesthetic debates. It highlights similarities and differences in their ideas about the future of music, the relationship between music and drama and its implications for musical form, and their compositional approaches.

Critics have long argued over Beatrice Cenci’s guilt and moral responsibility in relation to her murder of her father and rapist, as Shelley himself anticipated they would. Far less attention has been paid, however, to Count Cenci’s program for corrupting his daughter and turning her, at least in part, into a mirror version of himself. Count Cenci engineers a perverse kind of empathic identification, one that Shelley calls, in Prometheus Unbound, “loathsome sympathy.” This chapter presents “loathsome” sympathy in turn as an extreme or inverted form of the sympathy that plays so crucial a role in Shelley’s poetic and ethical theories, theories he develops from passages in various eighteenth-century moral philosophers including Hume, Rousseau, Burke, and Adam Smith. Twenty-first-century research on empathy and “mirror neurons” provides a number of partial and provocative analogies with eighteenth-century sympathy theory that are used heuristically to provide a novel perspective on the tradition that leads from Hume to Shelley. The chapter looks especially at how mirror neuron research emphasizes the embodied, visual, intersubjective, and unconscious workings of empathy. Shelley, the chapter argues, develops a comparable sense of sympathy, one that, in its “perverse” version, informs The Cenci.

This chapter opens with a consideration of the parallels in the careers of Puccini and Rachmaninoff, both disparaged as conservative throwbacks to an earlier era and purveyors of a cloying sentimentality who reached larger audiences than any of their contemporaries. The author shows, however, that these stereotypes have been reconsidered in recent years, before proceeding to consider Puccini’s influence on the composers who followed him, including both composers of art music and the creators of mid-twentieth-century musical theatre. He argues that Puccini’s works came to be seen as having established the dominant rhetorical conventions of how music expresses human emotion, and argues that in Puccini’s hands, music rather than text becomes the primary driver of storytelling (an approach the author contrasts with that of Richard Strauss). The emotions in Puccini’s works have a universality to them, which has been a key factor in their global success. The author argues, however, that Puccini’s hegemony is now under threat, partly because contemporary popular music now diverges so sharply from the classical tradition and partly because the idea of universal human emotions and experience is being challenged in an era of identity politics.

This chapter explores Puccini’s relationship with the Italian spoken theatre of his time. Stage plays were often adapted as operas during this period and there are plentiful examples in Puccini’s oeuvre. Puccini preferred to adapt foreign plays, rather than Italian ones (even sometimes, as in the case of Madama Butterfly, selecting a subject whose original text was in a language he did not understand), and he ranged across a wide variety of different theatrical genres. The chapter considers developments in Italian theatre during the nineteenth century, and the emergence of key native playwrights, as well as the national penchant for foreign works in translation, such as the plays of Shakespeare. The author examines changes in acting technique that took place in Italy and more broadly during this period and considers the careers of leading actors of the time such as Eleonora Duse. Puccini’s choice of dramatic subjects – the sorts of themes that attracted him and stimulated his musical imagination – is discussed in detail, as is the range of dramatic devices that he borrowed from a variety of different theatrical traditions.

The expulsion and defeat of demonic forces is integral to Pentecostal practice. This chapter, Demons and Deliverance: Discourses on Pentecostal Character, uses close readings of fictional performances allied to the Pentecostal movement to lay out Pentecostalism’s history and its preoccupation with power. Understanding Pentecostal performance of power identity entails not just looking at the practices conducted in the church or the structure of their religious activities, but also at theatrical activities and drama productions about demonic encounters staged to boost Pentecostal faith. The mediatized accounts of spiritual warfare narrated by Pentecostal drama ministers are strategic to the reading of the Pentecostal social history and ritual actions. This chapter chronicles the Pentecostal trajectory and their demonstrated desire for power through two television dramas about deliverance from satanic attacks, Agbara Nla (The Ultimate Power) and Abejoye (The Kingmaker). Both were produced by the same Christian film company, the Mount Zion Faith Ministry, across about three decades. The differences in how both dramas capture the performance of exorcism are instructive in understanding how far the Pentecostal faith has traveled as a social practice and how they have achieved their power identity through a drawn-out period of time.

Chapter 3 turns to the stage, and to plays that transform stages into dining rooms and dining rooms into stages in ways that reveal the heightened theatricality inherent in the dinner party. Beginning with the failed courtship of Jim and Laura in The Glass Menagerie, it traces a recursive path through a set of dinner party plays that dramatize interpersonal processes of constructing a family, from courtship to marriage (Jane Bowles’s In the Summer House) to raising children (Thornton Wilder’s The Long Christmas Dinner). This chapter, “Commensality and Temporality at the Dinner Party,” intervenes in a discourse of commensality that understands the table simply as a space where genuine connection is made possible by the shared activity of eating, and demonstrates why the dinner party has become the exemplary subject of modern drama.

This essay examines medieval women dramatists, from Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim in tenth-century Germany, through Hildegard of Bingen and her Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues) in the twelfth century, to Katherine Sutton, Abbess of Barking in the late fourteenth century, who composed liturgical dramas for Holy Week. The essay locates these women dramatists within the wider context of medieval convent performances in England and Europe, and shows that religious women were not only authors but also actors, directors, and costume makers; their convents provided the play space, while laywomen sometimes also contributed. Niebrzydowski also explores the often speculative or conjectural evidence for womenߣs participation in drama outside the convents. Although there is only one definitive English example of women as associated with a Corpus Christi production, a lost Chester pageant of ߢour Lady thassumpcionߣ, other fragmentary evidence suggests lay womenߣs involvement in a range of dramatic forms from saintsߣ lives, interludes, and morality plays to processions and pageants.

A brief summary of Collins’s activities as as Victorian author in multiple modes

What has the Black feminine body meant to literary study? What might it mean in the twenty-first century? This essay argues that African diaspora feminist literary study has often been contained by national boundaries and prescribed readings of the feminine subject “stuck” in masculinist routes and plots. Instead, this chapter turns to the materiality of the body in the work of African feminist writers and artists such as Theresa Ikoko, T. J. Dema, and Wangechi Mutu. The chapter shows how their work moves the labor of constructing, perceiving, and living through feminine embodied experience to the center of theories of diaspora. Focusing on poetry, drama, and visual art, this chapter pushes against the novel’s centrality in formulating theories of the self, nation, and diaspora identity in the field. This body of new writing and expressive culture that centers on the material body offers new routes for feminist diaspora literature and its futures across continents, genres, and contexts.

What were the characteristics of a cultivated man and woman during the Song? Calligraphy, painting, and poetry comprised the visible and audible elements of cultivation that distinguished cultured persons from commoners. These art forms were often individualistic expressions of emotion and personal life, but they could also be used to convey veiled political and social commentary. How did public and private life find expression through cultural forms? How did visual and literary arts convey cultural, social, and even geographical identities? Women as well as men were painters and poets whose works can be used as sources for capturing features of social and cultural life otherwise absent from the historical record. Theater, opera, and storytelling were modes of cultural expression that extended across social boundaries and exhibited regional and ethnic differences as well. The development of drama during the Jin and Yuan eras provides a new source for understanding the intersection of elite and nonelite culture. Tomb artifacts representing theaters and performers as well as the texts of plays are sources that can be used to reconstruct elements of nonelite cultural forms. How did the spread of print technology contribute to the blurring of boundaries between elite and popular culture?

This chapter examines the common forms and themes of American dramatists and theater practitioners in the early twentieth century. The primary visual characteristic of plays by the Provincetown Players, Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, Zora Neal Hurston, and Thornton Wilder is a realistically depicted dwelling-place precariously nested within a larger, stylized evocation of the natural world. While the dwelling is most often a house, it can also be a boat, a back garden, a Pullman car, a wooded clearing, or even a street corner.  In these dwelling-places, what is social and natural, or artificial and real, remains distinct, but merges at the borders of both the stage and the stage dwelling. By depicting a domestic interior vainly fortified against a natural yet also theatrical exterior, American dramatists make compelling drama and theater out of the boundary between human and inhuman. I call this genre of American drama “fragile realism.”

In many ways, the entire Cadbury’s enterprise was rooted in a commitment to the ongoing education and development of all staff. Education programmes created and sponsored by the firm sought to do more than secure accrual of knowledge, and that recreational activities that foregrounded learning new skills were understood to be as important as the content of more formal educational curricula. Both were viewed as self-development opportunities. As 1926’s Work and Play asserted, ‘the worker acquires in himself sharpened faculty and fuller capacities derived from his experience [in participating] in those activities, and a larger knowledge of men and affairs’. Chapter 6 details the range of educational opportunities on offer to employees, alongside those that the firm supported that were not exclusively for their own staff – including the Day Continuation Schools and Fircroft and Woodbrooke Colleges, and considers the use of drama as an innovative pedagogic tool at Bournville and performances staged for, and as, learning.