1 2 (2 0 1 5) ! i! About Didaskalia Didaskalia (!"!#$%#&ί#) is the term used since ancient t... more 1 2 (2 0 1 5) ! i! About Didaskalia Didaskalia (!"!#$%#&ί#) is the term used since ancient times to describe the work a playwright did to teach his chorus and actors the play. The official records of the dramatic festivals in Athens were the !"!#$%#&ί#". Didaskalia now furthers the scholarship of the ancient performance. Didaskalia is an English-language, online publication about the performance of Greek and Roman drama, dance, and music. We publish peer-reviewed scholarship on performance and reviews of the professional activity of artists and scholars who work on ancient drama. We welcome submissions on any aspect of the field. If you would like your work to be reviewed, please write to editor@didaskalia.net at least three weeks in advance of the performance date. We also seek interviews with practitioners and opinion pieces. For submission guidelines, go to didaskalia.net.
Didaskalia (!"!#$%#&ί#) is the term used since ancient times to describe the work a playwrig... more Didaskalia (!"!#$%#&ί#) is the term used since ancient times to describe the work a playwright did to teach his chorus and actors the play. The official records of the dramatic festivals in Athens were the !"!#$%#&ί#". Didaskalia now furthers the scholarship of the ancient performance. Didaskalia is an English-language, online publication about the performance of Greek and Roman drama, dance, and music. We publish peer-reviewed scholarship on performance and reviews of the professional activity of artists and scholars who work on ancient drama. We welcome submissions on any aspect of the field. If you would like your work to be reviewed, please write to editor@didaskalia.net at least three weeks in advance of the performance date. We also seek interviews with practitioners and opinion pieces. For submission guidelines, go to didaskalia.net.
The passing of the Trump presidency has left much of the academic world in a state of PTSD. “How ... more The passing of the Trump presidency has left much of the academic world in a state of PTSD. “How could this have happened?” we ask in delayed shock. “Has the virus merely been suppressed?” It seems the right moment to ask ourselves fundamental questions, and the publication of The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography, a collection of twenty-four essays meticulously edited by Tracy Davis (Northwestern University) and Peter Marx (University of Cologne), is a handy prompt to think about what our discipline is offering to the world. If indeed discipline it be. Tom Postlewait published in 2009 a methodological Bible for theatre history, considered as a subset of the broader discipline of history, that is, “the pursuit of truths about the past within the conditions and constraints of possible knowledge.” Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson, in their 2019 Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography, were less confident, suggesting that theatre historians should abandon the term “discipline” in favor of “discourse,” provided always that rigor and self-reflexivity are maintained, because too many different kinds of knowledge are entailed. In order to lay bare the project of the Routledge Companion, I will begin by unpacking its full title. The. Not just any old companion. Will this be the Routledge companion, offering a suggested way into the subject overtly different from, say, the Methuen alternative? Or does the voice fall more authoritatively upon the last word, Historiography, saying, as it were, “Hey, students, it’s the 2020s, and this is what you now have to do?” The emphasis can perhaps be found in the Introduction in which the editors seek “to recreate wholesale what will be the next generation’s received narrative” (25).
L'art theâtral permet de concevoir et representer le mal a travers tout a la fois la traditio... more L'art theâtral permet de concevoir et representer le mal a travers tout a la fois la tradition classique et la tradition medievale, l'apport du protestantisme et du folklore
According to Oliver Taplin, “The significant stage directions are implicit in the words”. This pr... more According to Oliver Taplin, “The significant stage directions are implicit in the words”. This proposition, while allowing Taplin to make many enlightening discoveries about stagecraft in other Aeschylean plays, proved something of an obstacle when it came to Seven Against Thebes. No gates, no arming of Eteocles, no Theban warriors--because their existence is not ‘implicit in the words’. What, however, does Taplin mean by the word ‘implicit’? What reasoning leads one to conclude that a particular stage action is ‘implicit’? Taplin’s premises are basically twofold: first, all actions must be compatible with the fact that the words are spoken by actors within a circular acting area of certain dimensions, with entries and exits demanding a certain amount of time to accomplish; second and more problematically, ‘the characters in Greek tragedy say what they are doing’. For this second premise, impossible to disprove for lack of eyewitness accounts, Taplin derives moral authority from Fra...
Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century, 2018
This chapter interrogates the notion of epic acting—associated by Brecht with emotional detachmen... more This chapter interrogates the notion of epic acting—associated by Brecht with emotional detachment. Within the rhetorical tradition, Virgilian epic was a touchstone for the representation of felt emotion, and was regularly used in the training of orators. When the First Player in Hamlet renders a speech drawn closely from Virgil, in a direct adaptation of classical epic that has no precedent in Renaissance drama, he does so because Shakespeare wants to offer his audience an exemplar of emotional acting, at the opposite end of the spectrum to the detached academic style which Hamlet prescribes for ‘The Mousetrap’, based on the premise that the primary purpose of art is to represent reality rather than to touch the emotions. In the age of Shakespeare, tragedy and epic were still considered to be, in the first instance, modes of performance rather than textual genres.
This paper provides an introduction to my monograph The Players’ Advice to Hamlet, the publicatio... more This paper provides an introduction to my monograph The Players’ Advice to Hamlet, the publication of which followed a few weeks after the 2020 SFS conference, and it illustrates the argument of my book by focusing on Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”. I propose that the debate about Elizabethan acting within the domain of “original practices” or “OP” needs to escape from its present cul-de-sac by focusing upon rhetoric as accessed through the Latin sources, for these give more serious attention to questions of performance than English recensions. Ciceronian rhetoric was an approach to reading and performance in which the whole body was invested. Modern practitioners have been reluctant to move beyond the literary concept of rhetoric as a tool for constructing figures of speech, and to think how it relates to questions of character and identity. I demonstrate how the soliloquy in the Second Quarto, derived from Shakespeare’s autograph, is strategically punctuated (probably building on i...
1 2 (2 0 1 5) ! i! About Didaskalia Didaskalia (!"!#$%#&ί#) is the term used since ancient t... more 1 2 (2 0 1 5) ! i! About Didaskalia Didaskalia (!"!#$%#&ί#) is the term used since ancient times to describe the work a playwright did to teach his chorus and actors the play. The official records of the dramatic festivals in Athens were the !"!#$%#&ί#". Didaskalia now furthers the scholarship of the ancient performance. Didaskalia is an English-language, online publication about the performance of Greek and Roman drama, dance, and music. We publish peer-reviewed scholarship on performance and reviews of the professional activity of artists and scholars who work on ancient drama. We welcome submissions on any aspect of the field. If you would like your work to be reviewed, please write to editor@didaskalia.net at least three weeks in advance of the performance date. We also seek interviews with practitioners and opinion pieces. For submission guidelines, go to didaskalia.net.
Didaskalia (!"!#$%#&ί#) is the term used since ancient times to describe the work a playwrig... more Didaskalia (!"!#$%#&ί#) is the term used since ancient times to describe the work a playwright did to teach his chorus and actors the play. The official records of the dramatic festivals in Athens were the !"!#$%#&ί#". Didaskalia now furthers the scholarship of the ancient performance. Didaskalia is an English-language, online publication about the performance of Greek and Roman drama, dance, and music. We publish peer-reviewed scholarship on performance and reviews of the professional activity of artists and scholars who work on ancient drama. We welcome submissions on any aspect of the field. If you would like your work to be reviewed, please write to editor@didaskalia.net at least three weeks in advance of the performance date. We also seek interviews with practitioners and opinion pieces. For submission guidelines, go to didaskalia.net.
The passing of the Trump presidency has left much of the academic world in a state of PTSD. “How ... more The passing of the Trump presidency has left much of the academic world in a state of PTSD. “How could this have happened?” we ask in delayed shock. “Has the virus merely been suppressed?” It seems the right moment to ask ourselves fundamental questions, and the publication of The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography, a collection of twenty-four essays meticulously edited by Tracy Davis (Northwestern University) and Peter Marx (University of Cologne), is a handy prompt to think about what our discipline is offering to the world. If indeed discipline it be. Tom Postlewait published in 2009 a methodological Bible for theatre history, considered as a subset of the broader discipline of history, that is, “the pursuit of truths about the past within the conditions and constraints of possible knowledge.” Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson, in their 2019 Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography, were less confident, suggesting that theatre historians should abandon the term “discipline” in favor of “discourse,” provided always that rigor and self-reflexivity are maintained, because too many different kinds of knowledge are entailed. In order to lay bare the project of the Routledge Companion, I will begin by unpacking its full title. The. Not just any old companion. Will this be the Routledge companion, offering a suggested way into the subject overtly different from, say, the Methuen alternative? Or does the voice fall more authoritatively upon the last word, Historiography, saying, as it were, “Hey, students, it’s the 2020s, and this is what you now have to do?” The emphasis can perhaps be found in the Introduction in which the editors seek “to recreate wholesale what will be the next generation’s received narrative” (25).
L'art theâtral permet de concevoir et representer le mal a travers tout a la fois la traditio... more L'art theâtral permet de concevoir et representer le mal a travers tout a la fois la tradition classique et la tradition medievale, l'apport du protestantisme et du folklore
According to Oliver Taplin, “The significant stage directions are implicit in the words”. This pr... more According to Oliver Taplin, “The significant stage directions are implicit in the words”. This proposition, while allowing Taplin to make many enlightening discoveries about stagecraft in other Aeschylean plays, proved something of an obstacle when it came to Seven Against Thebes. No gates, no arming of Eteocles, no Theban warriors--because their existence is not ‘implicit in the words’. What, however, does Taplin mean by the word ‘implicit’? What reasoning leads one to conclude that a particular stage action is ‘implicit’? Taplin’s premises are basically twofold: first, all actions must be compatible with the fact that the words are spoken by actors within a circular acting area of certain dimensions, with entries and exits demanding a certain amount of time to accomplish; second and more problematically, ‘the characters in Greek tragedy say what they are doing’. For this second premise, impossible to disprove for lack of eyewitness accounts, Taplin derives moral authority from Fra...
Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century, 2018
This chapter interrogates the notion of epic acting—associated by Brecht with emotional detachmen... more This chapter interrogates the notion of epic acting—associated by Brecht with emotional detachment. Within the rhetorical tradition, Virgilian epic was a touchstone for the representation of felt emotion, and was regularly used in the training of orators. When the First Player in Hamlet renders a speech drawn closely from Virgil, in a direct adaptation of classical epic that has no precedent in Renaissance drama, he does so because Shakespeare wants to offer his audience an exemplar of emotional acting, at the opposite end of the spectrum to the detached academic style which Hamlet prescribes for ‘The Mousetrap’, based on the premise that the primary purpose of art is to represent reality rather than to touch the emotions. In the age of Shakespeare, tragedy and epic were still considered to be, in the first instance, modes of performance rather than textual genres.
This paper provides an introduction to my monograph The Players’ Advice to Hamlet, the publicatio... more This paper provides an introduction to my monograph The Players’ Advice to Hamlet, the publication of which followed a few weeks after the 2020 SFS conference, and it illustrates the argument of my book by focusing on Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”. I propose that the debate about Elizabethan acting within the domain of “original practices” or “OP” needs to escape from its present cul-de-sac by focusing upon rhetoric as accessed through the Latin sources, for these give more serious attention to questions of performance than English recensions. Ciceronian rhetoric was an approach to reading and performance in which the whole body was invested. Modern practitioners have been reluctant to move beyond the literary concept of rhetoric as a tool for constructing figures of speech, and to think how it relates to questions of character and identity. I demonstrate how the soliloquy in the Second Quarto, derived from Shakespeare’s autograph, is strategically punctuated (probably building on i...
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Papers by David Wiles