History and Drama: The Pan-European Tradition

Description

Aristotles neat compartmentalization notwithstanding (Poetics, ch. 9), historians and playwrights have both been laying claim to representations of the past arguably since Antiquity, but certainly since the Renaissance. At a time when narratology challenges historiographers to differentiate their emplotments (White) from literary inventions, this thirteen-essay collection takes a fresh look at the production of historico-political knowledge in literature and the intricacies of reality and fiction. Written by experts who teach in Germany, Austria, Russia, and the United States, the articles provide a thorough interpretation of early modern drama (with a view to classical times and the 19th century) as an ideological platform that is as open to royal self-fashioning and soteriology as it is to travestying and subverting the means and ends of historical interpretation. The comparative analysis of metapoetic and historiosophic aspects also sheds light on drama as a transnational phenomenon, demonstrating the importance of the cultural net that links the multifaceted textual examples from France, Russia, England, Italy, and the Netherlands. Acknowledgments Contents Introduction Literature and Historiography in Aristotle and in Modern Times History, Myth, and Early Modern Drama King Arthur in Medieval French Literature: History and Fiction, the Sense of the Tragic, and the Role of Dreams in La Mort le Roi Artu When History Does Not Fit into Drama: Some Thoughts on the Absence of King Arthur in Early Modern Plays Machiavelli’s Soteriology and the Humanist Quattrocento Dialogue Lucretia without Poniard: Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft’s Geeraerdt van Velsen between Livy and Tacitus The Historical Writing of Catherine II: Dynasty and Self-Fashioning in The Chesme Palace (Chesmenskii Dvorets) History – Drama – Mythology Fielding’s Farces: Travestying the Historiosophical Discourse Ostrovsky’s Experience of the Creation of the European Theatrical Canon and Russian Stage Practice: Personal Preferences and General Trends The Bildungsdrama and Alexander Ostrovsky’s Plays “Sail[ing] on the Pathless Deep”: Michael Madhusudan Datta’s Dramatic Entanglements The Crystallization of Early Modern European Drama in the Folk-Theater Tradition in Tyrol: The Marienberg Griseldis from 1713, Staged in 2016 Rhetorical Ventriloquism in Application Notes on Contributors Index