Academic literature on the topic 'French drama (Comedy) French drama Comédie'

The article is devoted to “The Comedy about David and Galiad,” staged at the court of Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich in 1676, in the context of Western European drama of the 16th–17th centuries. The material was a mounting sheet of the comedy of 1676, plays by French playwrights of the 16th century and texts of Russian court plays of the 1670s. The paper shows that the Russian comedy based on the story of David and Goliath fit well into the context of religious drama and could be correlated with the events of the Church reform in Russia. Special attention is paid to the comparative analysis of the plays of the French Calvinist playwrights Joachim de Coignac and Louis De Masur in order to identify common typological features of the Russian play and Western drama. The play ‘Temir-Aksakov Action” by Yu. M. Givner was brought to consideration in order to put forward a hypothesis about the possible author of the play of German origin. The author presents the latest development of the reconstruction of “The Comedy about David and Galiad,” based on a comparative approach and typological analysis of the literary and historical context of the 16th–17th centuries. The analysis shows the content aspect of the Russian play about David and Goliath, which incorporated the characteristic features of the Moscow court drama of the last third of the 17th century.

This article shows the heroes of the tragicomedy “Sid” by Pierre Cornell, the great representative of the XVII the century French drama, fulfilling their duty to the family and the homeland, despite the fact that they lost their love. The patriotism of the protagonists shows that Don Rodrigo and Jimena have both fall in love and fulfilled their duty to their families.

Unlike most Southeast Asian theatres, Vietnam has created a sizeable corpus of scripted spoken dramas that continue to be popular in performance with urban audiences. Initially influenced by French classicism and Ibsenist realism, the Vietnamese spoken drama, kich noi, very quickly adapted to local social realities and survives by readily incorporating topical subjects. While keeping abreast of current social issues, the theatre nonetheless makes use of its multi-cultural heritage, and in any given modern performance one can see the layers of influence – traditional Sino-Vietnamese hat boi/tuong; Vietnamese cheo theatre, Cham dance, French realism, Soviet constructivism and socialist realism, and most recently, western performance art. The Vietnamese playwrights, set designers, directors, and actors have combined aspects of the realistic theatre with the conventions of their suppositional traditional theatre to come up with a hybrid that is uniquely Vietnamese. It is argued that these manifold layers should be regarded as a kind of palimpsest rather than just as pastiche.

The question of Shakespeare's influence on Pushkin's work in the period beginning 1824-25 has often been examined in critical works on Pushkin. This influence has generally been construed as one of the decisive factors in Pushkin's poetic and personal maturation away from his early naive Byronism. At the same time, Pushkin found in Shakespeare a release from the outworn conventions of French classical drama that had until then provided the precepts for writers for the Russian stage. For Pushkin, two specific features of Shakespearean drama were congenial: the abandonment of the three classical unities in favor of the primacy of character in dramatic action, and generic mixtures of comedy and tragedy, poetry and prose.

This article id dedicated to the issue of the genesis of literary rococo in French-Italian drama. In the following article we provide a brief review of theatrical activity of Italian troops in 1660-1720s and explore the formation of new French-Italian Stylistic concepts. Our research focuses particularly on the oeuvre of Luigi Riccoboni, a dramatist of Italian origin and Italian cultural background who wrote numerous scripts for the plays to be performed on French stage. With regard to the lack of studies of these French-Italian plays in Eastern Europe we provide an outline of Luigi Riccoboni's script for comedy "Le Libéral malgré lui" and analyze the intertwinig of Italian and French cultural elements in this play. Our study contributes to clobal research of French rococo in Eastern Europe and explores the aspect of formation of literary rococo in the process of collaboration between Italian and French authors. This article offers a new interpretation of Luigi Riccoboni's oeuvre as that of the first representative of rococo style both in Italian and French literature.

THE ORDINARY GLOSS WAS THE MOST WIDELY USED EDITION OF THE BIBLE IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES AND WELL INTO THE SIXTEENTH century. Medievalists know the commentary element as the Gloss to which theologians as diverse as Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, John Wyclif, and Martin Luther habitually referred. As the foremost vehicle for medieval exegesis, the Gloss framed biblical narratives for a wide range of vernacular religious literature, from Dante's Divine Comedy to French drama to a Middle English retelling of the Jonah story, Patience.

Abstract Drama texts are characterized by the transient nature of their stage reception and their malleability. This implies a close relationship with the context of performance while it also explains why they are frequently subject to varying degrees of adaptation. This article will study variations on Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing, first revising different approaches to its performance in the original language, and then analysing two adaptations which involve translation: a Spanish play, Jacinto Benavente’s Los favoritos, and a French opera, Hector Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict, both inspired by the two most attractive and witty characters in the bard’s text, Beatrice and Benedick, who have been the object of a number of versions and adaptations and therefore encourage exploration in different contexts. Slightly different ways of dealing with the main elements in the play will be observed in these two target texts, for instance regarding the general tone, or issues such as the concepts of marriage and love; ultimately, these aspects also highlight the suppleness of drama texts, particularly of classic works, which tend to move easily between languages and cultures, historic periods or artistic genres.

This article reviews gradual development of the literary canon of French theater of the Renaissance Era, which in many ways predetermined the emergence and further evolution of classicistic dramaturgy. The subject of this research is the principles of dramaturgical art formulated by the poets and theoreticians of the XVI century within the framework of poetic texts and treatises. The goal consists in description of the stages in establishment of the theatrical canon in France of the Renaissance Era, juxtapose its principles to the medieval theater, determine to which stage is attributed the emergence of representations on the classical theater, and highlight the factors that influenced its development. The novelty of this research lies in the attempt of comprehensive analysis of the poetic texts and treatises that allow reconstructing the processes unfolded in the XVI century in French theater, as well as comparing them to medieval tradition, as well as to gradually forming classicism. The relevance is substantiated by the need that occurred in literary studies to understand the formation of classical principles of French dramaturgy based on the materials of poetic works of the Renaissance Era. The author delineates three staged in the process of formation of the canon of French theatre of the Renaissance Era. The first is associated with the publication of Joachim du Bellay's manifesto, which indicates the “gap” in French literature in the area of drama and appeals to fill it. For realization of the second stage, pivotal becomes the figure of Étienne Jodelle, the author of tragedy “Cléopâtre Captive”, which epitomized an attempt to revive of antique tragedy, and comedy “Eugène”.. So in France of the XVI century. This led to the emergence of French national theatrical tradition that can be considered a literary canon. The third stage of its formation became the recognition of Jodelle's achievements in the theory of poetry. In 1555, Jacques Peletier in “Art Poétique” cited both compositions as the examples of tragedy and comedy, which contributed to consolidation of the canon.

Julia Marlowe's career, 1887–1924, came at an awkward point in the history of the American theatre, a transitional period when old traditions were fading and new ones had not yet been established. During her thirty years as an actress, a heterogeneous mixture of plays was seen on the American stage: Shakespeare and other old classics, emotional dramas adapted from the French and German, melodramas old and new, early attempts at realism, problem plays. Most strikingly innovative in this period were the dramas of Ibsen, Shaw, and O'Neill (his early plays), which questioned conventional values and often presented a disturbing view of human life and relationships. The range of plays was varied for performers, and the acting styles employed by the actors revealed a comparable diversity. According to Garff Wilson's classification, players like Helena Modjeska performed in the classic style characterized by grace, symmetry, and poetic grandeur; Clara Morris and Fanny Davenport perfected a highly emotional style, both specialists in the art of stage weeping; Otis Skinner abandoned the classics of Shakespeare and Restoration drama and became famous in sentimental comedy and romantic costume drama such as Kismet; Ada Rehan and Viola Allen, part of the “sisterhood of sweetness and light,” achieved popularity as actresses of the “personality school”; Richard Mansfield, a thoroughly transitional figure, clung to the classics in his repertoire but also produced and performed in the modern plays of Shaw and Ibsen; Minnie Maddern Fiske championed the works of Ibsen and a style of acting called the school of psychological naturalism.

Between 1934 and 1938, several million workers took part in the elections, strikes, and protests that made the popular front a pivotal moment in the recent history of France. Giant street demonstrations, the General Strike of November 1938, and above all the massive sit-down strikes of June 1936 made most workers at least momentary actors in the drama of national political life. Yet, for all that has been written about these events, little is known about how labor conflict during the popular front actually affected workers' views. The problem has been in large part one of sources: the speeches, newspapers, leaflets, and memoirs of the period reveal more about trade union leaders and local militants than about the ordinary men and women who made popular protest possible but whose opinions rarely found their way into print. As a result, a number of questions remain largely unanswered: How much of the ethos of the popular front, and how much of the ideology of the Socialist and Communist parties, did rank-and-file workers come to embrace? Which slogans spoke most poignantly to lathe operators at Renault, textile workers in Lille, or sales clerks at the Galeries Lafayette? Were the euphoria of June 1936 and the crushing defeat of the General Strike in November 1938 as important in the lives of these people as they were for labor leaders? How popular, in short, was the political experience of the popular front?

Critical studies on the comic drama of the seventeenth-century French playwright, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin de Moliere (1622-1673), center attention on biography, production, stylistics, and thematic development. Because of the diversity of themes, and because of the considerable productivity of this dramatist, the analyses of the style and substance of these comedies have often been focused on the use of themes or techniques employed in a single comedy or associated with one single sort of comedy. This thesis, "Farce, critique sociale, et ccm6die morale chez Moliere," proposes to deepen, in two ways, our appreciation of Moliere's combined use of themes and techniques that, in turn, create three sorts of comic modes. First, through a close reading of three of Moliere's major plays (Le medecin malgre lul, Les Precieuses ridicules, and Misanthrope), this thesis attempts to describe the techniques that develop and elucidate a particular comic focus, and thereby enhances our awareness of Moliere's recognition of the necessary relationship between theme and technique in the creation of comedy. The description of this use of comic techniques and the subsequent development of themes encourage classification of these representative plays into three sorts: farce, social comedy, and moral comedy. Such a classification thus expands the narrow perspective of criticism, and encourages a study of the necessary relationship between theme and technique and, perhaps, will suggest future study of the development of Moliere's comic artistry.
Department of Foreign Languages

L’émergence d’un « ‘esprit’ capitaliste » (Weber) en Angleterre et en France au tournant des XVIe-XVIIe siècles a favorisé la reconfiguration des rapports entre avaritia et cupiditas, qui déterminent tout le champ sémantique de l’usure et de l’intérêt. Cette thèse postule que cette évolution est sensible dans la comédie française et anglaise de l’époque, et plus particulièrement chez les grands dramaturges qui ont marqué l’imaginaire collectif en mettant en scène des personnages avares. À partir d’un type comique issu à la fois du théâtre antique et du canon religieux bien établi dans l’Occident chrétien, l’appréhension nouvelle de l’argent comme objet et comme signe permet de construire une véritable figure moderne de l’avarice. Shylock, Volpone et Harpagon sont suspendus entre un or quasi divin, et l’univers plus ou moins connu de l’argent, qu’ils pensent maîtriser grâce à leur trésor. S’ils s’intègrent parfaitement à la fluidité moderne des échanges économiques, culturels et sociaux, ils participent aussi à leur dévalorisation, par une activité et un discours proprement usuraires. Leur entourage tente de soumettre cette « labilité » (Simmel) suscitée par l’économie de l’usurier-avare à un nouvel ordre, cosmique, éthique ou politique. Le conflit se résout devant la justice, instance discriminatoire externe et prétexte à la mise en abyme du jugement social. L’analyse finale de ces dénouements permet de comprendre le travail de chaque auteur sur la forme et la fonction du comique, à travers le texte, les genres, ou une esthétique de l’espace. Elle montre que chacun s’attache à valoriser l’apport de son art au public dans une période de crise socio-économique
The emergence of a capitalist ‘spirit’ (Weber) in England and France at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries played a leading role in reconfiguring the relation between avaritia and cupiditas which determine the whole semantic field of usury and interest. This thesis postulates that this evolution is perceptible in French and British comedy at that time, in particular for some of the playwrights who staged miserly characters imprinted in our collective imagination. Starting from a comic type as common in Greek and Roman drama as it was in the well-established religious canon in the Christian West, a new understanding of money as object and as sign leads to the construction of a truly modern figure of avarice.Shylock, Volpone (Mosca) and Harpagon, hang on to a almost divine idea of gold and the more or less known world of money, medium they think they control through their treasure, and which is about to become the universal equivalent of any good. Those characters fit perfectly into this modern dynamic of economic, cultural and social exchanges, but they also contribute, with their strictly usurious speech, to its depreciation. Their entourage tries to tame this « lability » of values (Simmel) generated by the economy of the usurer-miser to a new order – a cosmic, ethical or political order. Conflicts are resolved by a court of law, external discriminatory authority and pretext for the mise-en-abyme of social judgment. The analysis of these denouements allows one to understand the work of each author in the comic form and function, through the text, the genres, or an aesthetic of space. It shows how much each author strived to value the contribution of his art to the public, in a time of socio-economic crisis

La production dramatique de Jean-François-Louis-Népomucène Lemercier s’inscrit justement dans ce moment de transition entre ce que l’on a appelé Néoclassicisme et le Romantisme. Né en 1771 et mort en 1840, cet homme de lettres et académicien a assisté aux bouleversements qui ont caractérisé l’histoire de France du tournant des Lumières jusqu’à la Révolution de Juillet et même après. L’étendue de sa vie et surtout de son activité de dramaturge dépassent donc amplement ce « long dix-huitième siècle » que l’histoire littéraire tend à prolonger jusqu’en 1820. Ce travail s’intéresse donc à la production d’un dramaturge qui, dans son ambigüité intrinsèque, s’avère à plusieurs égards révélatrice d’une ambigüité caractérisant de manière plus générale l’ensemble de cette période de transition. Auteur de celle que l’on retient souvent comme la dernière tragédie classique – c’est le cas de son Agamemnon de 1797 – Lemercier est également considéré, déjà à partir du dix-neuvième siècle et notamment par Schlegel, comme l’un des premiers auteurs proprement romantiques, son Pinto de 1800 étant justement une protoforme de drame romantique. Ce travail se compose de deux grandes parties, la première consistant en une étude monographique sur l’ensemble de la production dramatique de Lemercier, la deuxième en une édition critique des œuvres majeures du dramaturge, son Agamemnon, qui représente un de plus grands succès tragiques de la période directoriale dont les reprises continuent jusqu’en 1826, et Pinto, une « comédie historique » qui fut en revanche un succès de scandale lors de sa création à la Comédie-Française et qui encourût par la suite la désapprobation de cinq régimes politiques
The dramatic productions of Jean-François-Louis Népomucène Lemercier (1771-1840) reveal a transition between Neoclassicism, Preromanticism and Romanticism. This writer and academician witnessed the political and social upheavals that characterized France from the twilight of the Enlightenment until the July Revolution and thereafter. The span of his life and works amply exceeds the "long Eighteenth Century" that literary historians have extended to 1820 (Claude Pichois). This dissertation includes two main parts: a monographic study of Lemercier’s dramatic production and a critical edition of the playwright’s major works, Agamemnon (1797), one of the most successful tragedies during the “Directoire” and to 1826; and Pinto, a “historical comedy” composed between 1798 and 1800, and which was seen as a “romantic” triumph in 1834. Lemercier has often been regarded as the author of one of the last classical tragedies (Agamemnon i.e.); nevertheless, in spite of being, at times, one of Romanticism’s fiercest detractors, he emerges in Nineteenth century criticism – and above all in Schlegel’s writings – as one of the most influential pioneers of romantic drama. The intrinsic ambiguity of Lemercier’s dramatic production reveals the uncertainties of this transitional age. This ambiguity thus demands a holistic approach: the context of Lemercier’s literary works will be analyzed from an esthetic, historical and political point of view, emphasizing their intricate relationships with literary and political authorities and censorship issues throughout the period
La produzione drammatica di Jean-François-Louis Népomucène Lemercier si inserisce in quel momento di transizione tra Neoclassicismo, Preromanticismo e Romanticismo che caratterizza gli ultimi anni del Diciottesimo e il primo trentennio del Diciannovesimo secolo. Nato nel 1771 e morto nel 1840, questo scrittore e accademico ha assistito agli sconvolgimenti che hanno caratterizzato la storia della Francia dal tournant des Lumières fino alla Rivoluzione di Luglio e anche oltre. La sua vita e la sua attività poetica oltrepassano ampiamente il “lungo Settecento” che la storia letteraria tende ad estendere sino al 1820 già a partire dalla periodizzazione proposta da Claude Pichois. Questo lavoro si concentra sulla produzione di un autore che, nella sua intrinseca ambiguità, è sotto molti aspetti indicativa di un’indeterminatezza che caratterizza più in generale questo periodo di transizione estetico-letteraria. Spesso considerato, in primis da Madame de Stael, come l’autore dell’ultima tragedia classica - è il caso di Agamemnon del 1797 - Lemercier è stato visto, già a partire dal XIX secolo e in particolare da Schlegel, come uno dei primi autori di drammi romantici, di cui Pinto, ou la journée d’une conspiration (1800) rappresenterebbe una protoforma. Il presente lavoro, che si focalizza sul macrotesto teatrale di Lemercier senza tuttavia negligere altri aspetti della sua variegata opera, consta essenzialmente di due sezioni, una dedicata allo studio del macrotesto teatrale dell’autore, con un’attenzione particolare al contesto-storico letterario e alla ricezione; l’altra all’edizione di due opere, Agamemnon e Pinto, che rappresentano per molti aspetti due degli esempi più significativi della sua produzione drammatica. Il rapporto conflittuale di Lemercier con l’autorità politica e con la nascente “scuola” romantica saranno inoltre oggetto di questa riflessione

This Master's diploma thesis deals with the work of French playwright Molière, to be more precise, with types of characters in his plays. The thesis is not only based on Molière's main works Don Juan, Tartuffe or The Miser but it also studies characters in comedies like The Bourgeois Gentleman, Scapin's Deceits and others. It distinguishes two categories, major and minor characters. Nevertheless the attention is particularly focused on the minor characters. The goal of the thesis is to show what importance the characters have in Molière's plays and what is their role. Keywords: Classicism, Comedy, Molière, Character, French Drama, French Literature, Secondary Character

The thesis is divided into two parts, one theoretical and one empirical. The first one presents origin and different perception of the boulevard comedy genre in France, Czech Republic, Germany, United Kingdom and USA. Afterwards, a brief characteristic of the boulevard comedy is presented in terms of content and subject matter. Four kinds of comedy are presented - comedy of manners, comedy of situation, comedy of intrigue and interactive comedy. The translatological analysis of the Czech translation of the French humorist Laurent Baffie's contemporary play Toc toc by the director and translator Jaromír Janeček constitutes the second main part of the thesis. The analysis is based on the theoretical studies of Jiří Levý and Jan Mukařovský, which are dealing with the translation of drama, and also on the theory of so-called Manipulation school of André Lefevere. Several problems have arised from the detailed analysis of the original text. The comparison of the translation and the original text is made on the ground of these problems. Subsequently, there is an evaluation of the translation. In some cases, a different solution is proposed. The work is supplemented by insights into the translation practice, which are drawn from personal interviews with translators and experts on drama.

L'émergence d'un « 'esprit' capitaliste » (Weber) en Angleterre et en France au tournant des XVIe-XVIIe siècles a favorisé la reconfiguration des rapports entre avaritia et cupiditas, qui déterminent tout le champ sémantique de l'usure et de l'intérêt. Cette thèse postule que cette évolution est sensible dans la comédie française et anglaise de l'époque, plus particulièrement chez les dramaturges qui ont marqué l'imaginaire collectif en mettant en scène des personnages avares. À partir d'un type comique issu à la fois du théâtre antique et du canon religieux bien établi dans l'Occident chrétien, l'appréhension nouvelle de l'argent comme objet et comme signe permet de construire une véritable figure moderne de l'avarice. Les protagonistes de chaque pièce, Shylock, Volpone (Mosca) et Harpagon, sont suspendus entre un or quasi divin, et l'univers plus ou moins connu de l'argent, medium en passe de devenir l'équivalent universel de tout bien, qu'ils pensent maîtriser grâce à leur trésor. S'ils s'intègrent parfaitement à la fluidité moderne des échanges économiques, culturels et sociaux, ils participent aussi à leur dévalorisation, par une activité et un discours proprement usuraires. Leur entourage tente de soumettre cette « labilité » des valeurs (Simmel) suscitée par l'économie de l'usurier-avare à un nouvel ordre, cosmique, éthique ou politique. Le conflit se résout devant la justice, instance discriminatoire externe et prétexte à la mise en abyme du jugement social. L'analyse des dénouements permet dès lors de comprendre le travail de chaque auteur sur la forme et la fonction de la comédie, à travers le texte, les genres, ou une esthétique de l'espace. Elle montre que chacun s'attache à valoriser l'apport de son art au public, dans une période de crise socio-économique.
The emergence of a capitalist ‘spirit’ (Weber) in England and France at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries played a leading role in reconfiguring the relation between avaritia and cupiditas which determine the whole semantic field of usury and interest. This thesis postulates that this evolution is perceptible in French and British comedy at that time, in particular for some of the playwrights who staged miserly characters imprinted in our collective imagination. Starting from a comic type as common in Greek and Roman drama as it was in the well-established religious canon in the Christian West, a new understanding of money as object and as sign leads to the construction of a truly modern figure of avarice. Shylock, Volpone (Mosca) and Harpagon, hang on to a almost divine idea of gold and the more or less known world of money, medium they think they control through their treasure, and which is about to become the universal equivalent of any good. Those characters fit perfectly into this modern dynamic of economic, cultural and social exchanges, but they also contribute, with their strictly usurious speech, to its depreciation. Their entourage tries to tame this « lability » of values (Simmel) generated by the economy of the usurer-miser to a new order – a cosmic, ethical or political order. Conflicts are resolved by a court of law, external discriminatory authority and pretext for the mise-en-abyme of social judgment. The analysis of these denouements allows one to understand the work of each author in the comic form and function, through the text, the genres, or an aesthetic of space. It shows how much each author strived to value the contribution of his art to the public, in a time of socio-economic crisis.
Réalisé en cotutelle avec l'Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

While Hans-Thies Lehmann dated the postdramatic turn in performance to the 1970s, Christian Biet and Christophe Triau have argued that, on the contrary, it is a seventeenth-century construct. ‘Drama’, they argue, was fashioned in the rule books of neoclassical theorists, who sought to elevate French tragedy in order to distinguish it from both its forebears and from other (less ‘serious’) contemporary performance arts. Chapter 2 examines the divisions between theatre and narrative that have come to dominate performance thinking since the closing decades of the twentieth century. The longstanding theoretical interplay between narrative and theatre has often been agonistically cast as epic versus drama, but this is a false dichotomy, erected by neoclassical theory and practice and promulgated most successfully by Schiller and Goethe; it does not stem from Aristotle’s Poetics, where drama is pronounced to possess ‘epic’ qualities. But for Brecht, ‘dramatized epic’ is precisely what he strove to re-make in his ‘Epic Theatre’. This, in Peter Szondi’s view, was a result of a ‘crisis’ in dramatic form around 1900, when Aristotelean teleological form and its dialogic structure no longer sufficed—and it is Szondi’s privileging of Brechtian epic, and Brecht’s challenge to the perceived and longstanding opposition of epic and drama, that lies behind Lehmann’s postdramatic theatre. Yet theory, it seems, is out of step with practice because narrative and ‘stories’ appear to matter in the theatre in ways that Lehmann’s schema doesn’t allow, notwithstanding his often overlooked speculation that a ‘new narrative theatre’ may follow the postdramatic one.