Journal articles on the topic 'The Greek ancient theater of Filippi'

There are some common features between opera (film-opera and theater-opera) and the Greek tragedy. Hereafter a question arises: why theoreticians and artists try to revive tragedy - what is so important in ancient drama that remains actual up to date? The author argues, that musical drama (opera) is the successor to the Greek tragedy, whereas cinema exposes musical and ancient nature of the opera clearer, than theater. The author dwells upon new possibilities of opera: different ways ofcooperation between musical and visual constituents, differences between stage and screen operas; advantages of the film-opera. The screen adaptation of opera is very actual and has special aspects. It is obvious, that opera enriches cinema language and cinema reforms traditional theatrical musical drama. There is a number of works, which are devoted to the problem of the opera- film (mostly written by music experts), but there are no special research on the part of cinema theoreticians. Cinema-opera differs from theater-opera. Cooperation between image and music is defined by specific features of the camera. The opportunities of cinema are wider in some aspects and may advance reform of stage. Integration of arts in opera-film is connected with integration of arts in the Greek tragedy. The Athenian drama, grown up from ancient cults, is connected with ancient rituals. Since the ancient sources of drama find their reflection in film-opera, the latter reaches out these cults.

Abstract The twenty-four papers delivered at the graduate conference entitled “Sounds on Stage: Musical and Vocal Languages and Experiences” (L’Aquila, 14-16 November 2018) investigated the relationship between music and theatrical performances from a comparative perspective. The presentations dealt with the role of music in several theatrical genres from different cultures and times: ancient Greek drama, musical theater (especially opera), modern and contemporary theater and ancient ritual Sanskrit drama.

The article examines the early stage of development of the classic Greek theater and its tragic basis in close correlation with the ancient culture’s specific features and the ancient Greeks’ worldview. The two best-known interpretations of antiquity elaborated by F. Nietzsche and O. Spengler are emphasized here particularly. While analyzing the roots of tragedy, the author pays special attention to its close relation with rituals and sacrifices. In the context of the subjectness problem, the article raises the question of a specific status of the Greek theater’s spectator, who can be reasonably called an active participant of the spectacle, representing a subject.

To prevent any misunderstanding, I first would like to clarify that I am not a historian dealing with classical studies; my main disciplines are philosophy and law. However, following a seminar I gave dealing with several philosophical-legal aspects of Greek tragedy, and an article I wrote about the relationship between the concept of guilt in Oedipus Tyrannus and the principle of strict liability in modern criminal law, I have found myself in recent years becoming increasingly interested in the unique culture which emerged in Athens during the classical period, particularly in the 5th century BCE. In the course of that century, Athens was involved in many wars – against the Persians in the early decades, against Sparta (the Peloponnesian War) in the latter decades, and other “minor” wars. And yet despite these wars, during the 5th century BCE Athens was in a state of cultural-social-political ferment that left its mark on the whole history of western culture. In the course of that century, there was in Athens a burgeoning of independent-critical thought in the philosophical domain, nature and medicine were systematically studied, tragedies by the Athenians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were written and performed, and the democratic regime took shape.

Vitruvius' legacy points to the importance of music in architecture for enhancing the acoustics of ancient theaters. In particular, he described in detail the sounding vessels, or ηχεια – “echea”, the effectiveness of which has not been proven. The effect of “echeas” on the acoustic parameters of a small classical Greek theater is investigated using computer modeling methods. The theater models developed take into account Vitruvius' recommendations and published research and measurements of ancient theater acoustic parameters reconstructed in our time. The descriptions of Vitruvius and the musical theories of Aristoxenus and Pythagoras were considered when developing the “echeas” models. Using the standard algorithm of the EASE4.4 program, the parameters of a small theater were calculated and the C50, C80, STI acoustic parameters of the theater’s sound field were found to benefit from the “echeas” or sounding vessels.

The article is devoted to the consideration of the pedagogical content of Seneca’s tragedy. The article provides a solution for the problem, which is contained in the controversy – on the one hand, Seneca as other Stoics believes that the passions negatively affect the soul of human being, on the other hand, his tragedies portray plots overrun with passions involving murder, perfidy, betrayal and other crimes. The author suggests that this feature of the plot of dramatic works of Seneca cannot be explained by simple respect of the tradition, according to which the passion is the main driving force of both the ancient Greek and ancient Roman tragedies. The author shows that Seneca intentionally uses certain artistic techniques to achieve the pedagogical effect.

Ancient Greek tragedies of the 5th century BC are considered as double texts (texts for scenic incarnation and texts for reading) that ensured the development of school institutions and mentoring apprenticeship and reflected the pedagogical positions of playwrights on these institutions. Texts of tragedies as texts for scenic incarnation were aimed at adult students - townspeople, who continued their education in the theater as a special educational landscape – school on the stage. Texts of tragedies as texts for reading were texts for schoolchildren who used them as notebooks with prescriptions for rewriting or as text-exercises for reading aloud, reciting, memorizing.

The article deals with the history of development of the antique theatrical architecture in the context of the environment that forms the territory acquiring the status of a cultural landscape. The material of antiquity is interpreted in the aspect of the formation evolution of theater buildings, ranging from ancient Greek to ancient Roman, which, despite being in ruins, amaze us with their large-scale and unspoiled architecture. The article attempts to systematize the valuable evidence of the past, material (theater architecture) and non-material (theater art), since the repertoire is alive as long as it is performed, and the theater architecture remains to posterity. There is considered their relationship in space and time. The study’s methods (descriptions of the phenomena under study, field observation, problem-historical analysis) made it possible to focus on the construction specifics of the theater buildings located in open spaces representing cultural landscapes — vast areas of co-creation of man and nature. Over the epochs, the theater architecture, designed for spectacular performances and connected with the environmental factor and acting art, was transforming, just as the theater itself was changing, sometimes within a single performance on a single stage. Fragments of the lost cultural experience are today open systems in associative, semantic, historical aspects, as well as in terms of objects reconstruction. They form an attractive and popular place that goes beyond the limits of urban planning conditions and has the property of an important public space. The composition of theater construction and the principles of shaping that formed in the ancient period had a great influence on their subsequent development and have been preserved in modern design solutions. In this context, the experience of interpreting the architectural monuments belonging to the theatrical art has a great cultural and educational value, not only in terms of reconstructing the lost stratum of cultural heritage, but also, to a greater extent, in modeling a new vision of the emerging architectural culture of the world.

The exiled character in need of asylum is a recurrent theme in ancient Greek tragedy. In many of these plays, we see uprooted and homeless persons seeking sanctuary, and for the ancient Greeks, hospitality was an important issue. Many of these plays have been updated to comment on the current social and political conditions of refugees and often reflect on the notion of hospitality, something which both Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida considered to be fundamental to ethics. Recently there has been a series of demonstrations and occupations of public spaces by asylum seekers that has gained considerable news coverage. In Austria a group of about sixty refugees (from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area) occupied the famous Votiv church in the middle of Vienna in 2012 and went on hunger strike. In Germany a large group of asylum seekers marched from various parts of the country to Berlin where they occupied the square at the Brandenburg Gate before being allowed to establish a tent community in Kreuzberg. In Hamburg a group of 80 asylum seekers who came to Germany via Lampedusa found refuge in St Pauli church, and it was there that Nicholas Stemann presented a first reading of Elfriede Jelinkek’s play Die Schutzbefohlenen in September 2013. More recently right-wing groups have mounted weekly marches through Dresden to call for a halt to immigration, and these have been contested by simultaneous counter-demonstrations in favour of immigrants and refugees. In this paper I will consider several adaptations of Greek tragedy that highlight cultural encounters between the local population and those arriving from abroad who are looking for asylum. In particular I will examine Stemann’s production that has been running at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg since September 2014, and features asylum seekers from Lampedusa on stage who beg the audience for the right to remain in Germany.

ABSTRACT In 1841, Sophocles's Antigone was performed at the Prussian court theater with staging by Ludwig Tieck and music by Felix Mendelssohn. Commissioned by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, this production aimed to re-create aspects of Greek tragedy by, among other things, using J. J. Donner's 1839 metrical translation and having an all-male chorus sing the odes. Mendelssohn initially experimented with imitating the purported sound of ancient music by composing primarily unison choral recitative and limiting the accompaniment to flutes, tubas, and harps; but he quickly abandoned this approach in favor of a more traditional one. Yet despite his overall adherence to modern convention, he did employ several strategies to evoke ancient Greek practice and thus to meet the unique demands of the Prussian court production. Highlighting important distinctions between verse-types in the original poetry, Mendelssohn retained a vestige of his initial approach by composing unison choral recitative to indicate the presence of anapestic verse while turning to melodrama for the lyric verse of the play's two main characters. In addition, he reproduced the poetic meter by shaping the rhythm of the vocal line to reflect both the accentual pattern of Donner's translation and, in some cases, the long and short syllables of Sophocles's Greek verse. Owing largely to the irregular line lengths characteristic of Donner's text, the music is marked by conspicuously asymmetrical phrases, which serve to defamiliarize the otherwise straightforward choral styles being employed to convey the various moods of Sophocles's choruses. In the opening chorus, Mendelssohn alludes to the familiar sound of a Mäännerchor accompanied by a wind band, thereby suggesting the ode's celebratory and martial associations while recalling his own Festgesang written for the 1840 Leipzig festival commemorating the 400th anniversary of Gutenberg's printing press. The listener is thus presented with a thoroughly recognizable musical idiom and yet simultaneously distanced from it in a way that underscores the historical remoteness of ancient Greek tragedy.

Classical civilization represents the foundation upon which rests all of modern-day Western society. The English language, in particular, is larded with allusions to the Greeks and Romans of yesteryear, from “Achilles’s heel” to “deus ex machina” to “Trojan Horse,” which make reference to the many influences that these cultures have had on our art, literature, theater, and, unfortunately, war and military (mis)adventures. For all these reasons, it behooves the modern reader to have at least a passing familiarity with what transpired all those thousands of years ago. The editors would appear to agree with this assessment, as they state in the “Preface” that this three-volume work “is intended to fill a gap in current reference works. It meets the need for a standard reference work on Greek and Roman military history and related institutions that is accessible to nonspecialists” (xxiii). Just what criteria the editors used in framing this statement is unknown; however, a literature search reveals many well-regarded titles covering this subject matter. From the topic-specific, such as John Warry’s Warfare in the Classical World: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Weapons, Warriors, and Warfare in the Ancient Civilizations of Greece and Rome (University of Oklahoma Press 1995) to the more general, such as the venerable Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford University Press 2012), now in its fourth edition, there is certainly no shortage of print reference materials concerning warfare during the time of the Greek and Roman empires.

Theatre in the German Democratic Republic was an essential part of the state propaganda machine and was strictly controlled by the cultural bureaucracy and by the party. Until the early sixties, ancient plays were rarely staged. In the sixties, classical Greek drama became officially recognised as part of cultural heritage. Directors free to stage the great classical playwrights selected ancient plays, on one hand, to escape the grim socialist reality, on the other to criticise it using various forms of Aesopian language. Two important dramatists and three examples of plays are presented and discussed: an adaptation of an Aristophanic comedy (Peter Hack’s adaptation of Aristophanes’ Peace at the Deutsche Theater in Berlin in 1962), a play based on a Sophoclean tragedy (Heiner Müller’s Philoktet, published in 1965, staged only in 1977), and a short didactic play (Lehrstück) based on Roman history (Heiner Müller’s Der Horatier, written in 1968, staged in 1973 in Hamburg in West Germany, and in the GDR only in 1988). At the end there is a brief look at a production of Aeschylus Seven against Thebes at the BE in 1969.

In his discussion-piece for NTQ 28 (1991), Graham Ley raised questions about the self-determination of the avant-garde, drawing on analogies from dance and design to explore the problem of the post-modern in the theatre. He also outlined a critique of what he called an ‘alternative establishment in theatrical endeavour’: here, he extends that critique into an analysis of the techniques of persuasion to be found in one of the most influential texts in post-war theatrical theory, Peter Brook's The Empty Space, arguing for an enhanced attention to be given to the language and textuality of theory. Graham Ley is a writer and researcher who has taught in the Universities of London and Auckland. As Australian Studies Fellow in Theatre at the University of New South Wales in 1984, he compiled jointly with Peter Fitzpatrick of Monash University the survey of new developments in Australian theatre published in NTQ5 (1986). Among his numerous publications on ancient performance, A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater appeared from the University of Chicago Press in 1991. He is currently working on a book on theatrical theory.

In the purview of theater history, as on the theatrical stage itself, performers' and writers' command on attention is almost complete. Ancient Greek gave a word to its mask builders (skeuopoio), but apart from distinct vocabulary, history leaves few traces of theatrical laborers. A glance through any number of theatrical books, periodicals, bibliographies, biographical guides, and encyclopedias reveals the predominance of performers in the public eye, though managers, directors, designers, and critics occasionally attract scholarly studies. Even among novels, journalism, and theatrical guidebooks—genres that venture behind the scenes—the personnel that dress, light, paint, and build shows are rarely present. Their identity and labor is marginalized in the annals because it is marginalized in the conceptualization of what is important in theater production. Susan Todd takes unusual measures to challenge this tradition by documenting the experience of women stage managers in the contemporary theater, but in the historical realm this has not been attempted. Writers devote attention to how the stage actually worked (how stage effects were achieved and how the creative chain of command functioned), but to date no one has examined the structures and traditions of backstage labor by asking basic questions about the sociopolitical organization of the work.Only in highly esoteric treatises or the lightest of literature do theatrica jewelers, armorers, weavers, hosiers, basket makers, shoemakers, furnishers, cosmeticians, perruquiers, costumiers, seamsters, dressers, property makers, carpenters, gas fitters, printers, or ticket takers usually appear. These are all specialized trades and occupations indispensable to the building and running of nineteenth-century theatrical entertainment.

The article deals with the phenomenon of Entertainment in the historic and cultural dimensions. Entire image-concept of Entertainment in traditional, universalistic-modern, postmodern, transcultural discourses is determined. Entertainment is a specific existential concept, it is a fundamental principle of philosophical knowledge revealing a person's relations with oneself and other people. Since ancient times, the phenomenon of Entertainment has basically been one of the ways of human existence, an element through which a person understands his place in the world and his relationship with other people. The gods create entertainment in Greek mythology. The phenomenon of entertainment is a divine way to purify the soul; the phenomenon of entertainment is a way to honor the gods; the phenomenon of entertainment is a way of forming social and political thought with the help of theater, a social utopia, a way of mastering the knowledge necessary for a certain professional activity. In the Middle Ages, the Entertainment is a form of protest against the church's monopoly on culture and art. The article also considers the phenomenon of entertainment in the days of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. In the context of the socio-cultural life of the 19th century, the phenomenon of Entertainment is considered in the concepts of J. Ruskin, J. Maritain, A. Bergson, F. Nietzsche.

They've got a name for the winners of the world, I want a name when I lose They call Alabama the Crimson Tide, Call me deacon blues The title of this study is deliberately ambiguous. “Fool's gold” is known to be false gold; gold for fools, gold that fools. However, with an emphasis on gold rather than on fool, “fool's gold” means gold from a fool, my intended meaning. I am deliberately ambiguous, however, because, for his readers, Paul's use of the word “fool” is just plain folly; they miss the point, and cannot get beyond the plain meaning. Furthermore, Paul himself was ambiguous in his self-portrayal as fool. In one breath he says “Let no one take me for a fool.” In another he states just the opposite: “we are fools for Christ” and “God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom.” He also states, “you should become fools so that you may become wise (2 Cor 11:16, 17; 1 Cor 4:10; 1 Cor 1:25; 1 Cor 3:18). Paul reinforces his self-description of “fool” for Christ (4:9) with ancient Greek theater imagery. Most notable is: “spectacle” ( theatron); “be imitators” ( mimetai — the verbal form of the mime); and “fool” ( môros, or “moron”) — a bit part, low class actor in the mime. Through theater imagery, Paul weaves together theological, sociological, and political themes that lie at the heart of his missiological engagement with the world. Paul's nuances of ‘fool’ reveal the secret of humility and suffering in the context of discipleship. His assertion, “imitate me” in the “ways of the Lord” (4:16.17), speaks to issues that divide the Corinthian community: imitate me, the low class fool, the team player, rather than the wise of the world that set themselves above others. Paul's use of ‘fool’ is examined in 1 Corinthians 4, satirically, ironically, historically, theologically, and missiologically. This opens up windows to the contemporary emerging church and its inverted nature as a contrast to traditional church structures and hierarchies.

Who was andré Jolles? born in den helder in 1874; raised in amsterdam; in his youth a significant player in the literary Movement of the Nineties (Beweging van Negentig), whose organ was the Dutch cultural weekly De Kroniek; a close friend of Aby M. Warburg's and Johan Huizinga's—Jolles studied art history at Freiburg beginning in 1902 and then taught art history in Berlin, archaeology and cultural history in occupied Ghent during World War I, and Netherlandic and comparative literature at Leipzig from 1919 until shortly before his death, in 1946. A man of extraordinary intellectual range—his publications include essays on early Florentine painting, a dissertation on the aesthetics of Vitruvius, a habilitation thesis on Egyptian-Mycenaean ceremonial vessels, literary letters on ancient Greek art, and essays in German and Dutch on folklore, theater, dance, Boccaccio, Dante, Goethe, Zola, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Provençal and Renaissance Italian poetry—he was also an amateur playwright and an outspoken champion of modern trends in dramatic art and stage design. To his friends, he could be something of an intellectual midwife, helping Warburg to formulate what would become a signature notion, the “pathos formula,” and Huizinga to conceive The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919). Jolles's chief work, the one for which he is best known, is Einfache Formen (1930; “Simple Forms”), a collection of lectures he had delivered in German at Leipzig in 1927-28 and revised.

To avoid misinterpretation, the term “art-and-technology” should be hyphenated because we are looking at an integrated art form which developed, roughly, during the past 70 years (since Naum Gabo's virtual volume, Kinetic Construction, Berlin, 1920). Art-and-technology results from “incorporated” contributions of art, science, and technology or, better, from artists, scientists, and engineers (plus industry, business, government, etc.). Although art-and-technology has frequently been bad-mouthed or even pronouned “dead” by advocates and practitioners of pure art as well as science and technology, it is alive and well and enjoying more vitality, variety, and expansion than ever before. It is currently the only expanding field in the arts; it feeds vitally into technology and industry—most visibly in entertainment but it also provides stimulus beyond fun to areas of science and engineering where “art applications” have abounded since the advent of photography and its vast consequent uses in science.We can claim an eloquent tradition for art-and-technology in ancient historic, cultural manifestations such as the Egyptian pyramids and their “environmental” scale or the Greek theater with its elaborate stage machines. We are aware of elements of that tradition when we observe contemporary art-and-technology such as sky and space art (Figures 1 and 2), computer-generated virtual reality, performance with medical inquiry and medical apparatus, and art concepts inspired by molecular biology (Figure 3). Emphasis of search—whether artistic/expressive, conceptual/philosophical, or inquisitive/scientific—depends on taste and motivation. However, Leonardo is an undisputed idol to both artists and scientists.

A Medeia de Eurípides é uma das mais importantes peças do teatro antigo. A complexidade do texto e a fertilidade das possibilidades interpretativas tem despertado grande interesse dos estudiosos. Neste artigo, pretendo analisar algumas noções que compõem o núcleo do irracional tipificado na protagonista (Medeia). Trata-se de demonstrar a insuficiência do emprego do termo pathos para qualificar o comportamento da personagem no drama. O problema consiste nas parcas ocorrências do referido vocábulo para sustentar o sentido do que seja agir pelo irracional. A fim de ampliar a compreensão do que rege as cenas marcadas por forças irracionais, serão levadas em consideração as noções de ódio e cólera/ira, entre outros. Para proceder a análise textual, foram utilizadas três traduções em português, a saber, a tradução de Mário da Gama Kury, a tradução de Jaa Torrano e a tradução de Maria Helena da Rocha Pereira, além do texto grego publicado pela editora ateniense Kaktoz.PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Medeia. Tragédia. Irracional. Ira.ABSTRACTEuripides’ Medea is one of the most important plays of ancient theater. The complexity of the text and the fertility of interpretive possibilities has aroused great interest among scholars. In this article, I intend to analyze some notions that make up the core of the irrational typified in the protagonist (Medea). This is to demonstrate the inadequacy of the use of the term pathos to qualify the behavior of the character in the drama. The problem consists in the few occurrences of pathos to sustain the meaning of what is to act by the irrational. In order to broaden the understanding of what governs scenes marked by irrational forces, notions of hatred and anger, among others, will be taken into account. To proceed with the textual analysis, three Portuguese translations are used. They are: the translation of Mário da Gama Kury, the translation of Jaa Torrano and the translation of Maria Helena da Rocha Pereira, and also, the Greek text published by the Athenian Kaktoz publisher.KEYWORDS: Medea; Tragedy; Irrational; Anger.

Background. The proposed research based on the librettology as the scientific direction of musicology. At the present stage, there is an increasing interest of researchers in the texts of the libretto (among authors G. Ganzburg, 2008; U. Weisstein, 2006; I. Pivovarova, 2002; M. Aleinikov, 2011; T. Gulaya, 2006; E. Rakhmankova, 2008). Librettology is gradually acquiring the status of an independent research discourse, affecting the interdisciplinary connections of musicology, philology, and cultural studies. The objective of this study is to compare the libretto of the musical «Romeo and Juliet» by G. Presgurvic in two versions – the original in French and the literary translation into Russian – from the point of view of interpretation the senses of William Shakespeare’s tragedy. Methodological basis. The problem of literary translation as a creative process of interpretation is the focus of the dissertation research of E Bogatyryova (2007). On the material of the translations of the Pushkin s poem «The Bronze Horseman” the researcher examines the process of creating a translation interpretation; the like algorithm can serve as a methodological basis when considering the translation of the libretto of «Romeo and Juliet» by G. Presgurvic. Speaking about the process of literary translation, E. Bogatyryova proceeds from the idea about a translator as a reader, researcher / critic and writer / poet. At each stage of the translation, she discovers different types of interpretation. From this we can conclude that the translator, as an elucidator and a creator of new artistic image of the first text, is a creative person whose productive activity is associated with an individual interpretation of the original opus. In our study, the text of the libretto is analyzed from the standpoint of the semantic content of the original and the translated version of the text, considered as interpretations of the literary source – the famous tragedy of W. Shakespeare, with its “eternal story” about love and hostility at the core. The word «translation» has in our work two semantic connotations in connection with the involvement of the scientific concept of Yu. Lotman (1992). The variability of meanings introduced by interpreters becomes possible due to the addressing to the creative consciousness, which perceives and processes the initial information, generating new meanings in the process of its rethinking. Preliminary acquaintance with the libretto in two versions showed that the translation by N. Olev and S. Tsiryuk is a rethinking of the artistic content of the original text by G. Presgurvic who is not only the composer, but also the author of the libretto, the interpreter of the famous play by English dramatist. Research results. The tragedy of W. Shakespeare opens with a Prologue. This principle, connected with the poetics of theatricality and indicating the conventionality of the stage action, is preserved in the musical of G. Presgurvic. In the tragedy of W. Shakespeare, the prologue is recited from the scene by Chorus; as A. Anikst (1974, p. 195) points out, this is an allegorical character, which embodies by an actor who comments on events (the idea of ancient Greek tragedies was thus rethought). In the original French version of the musical the author of the piece delivers the opening text against the background of the orchestra preamble. In the Russian production of the musical, the introduction word is presented by an actor who embodied the image of Death (N. Tsiskaridze, a dancer). Interestingly, in the French original, G. Presgurvik tunes the public to the perception of further events, arguing that there is nothing new in this world. In the Russian version of the musical, the prologue text is similar in content and style to Russian translations of the tragedy by W. Shakespeare. This, however, is not a translation of the prologue of the famous tragedy, but its own version of the opening speech differenced also from the French original by G. Presgurvik). Through the poetry of theatricality, the Russian-language version of the musical by G. Presgurvik also shows the “image of the world” as a whole. “The whole world is a theater, and the people in it – are actors”, the famous paraphrase to the text of W. Shakespeare’s comedy «As You Like It» affirms. Due to the literary translation of N. Olev, life is interpreted here as a carnival (No. 2, “Verona”), a masquerade (No. 3, “Enmity”), and Death and Destiny, Fatum, аre its integral part. Death, both in the French original of the musical and in its Russian version, is shown as hidden director managing life events. The semantic synthesis of symbols of Death and Fatum is already declared in the prologue, where the speech is about hostility, hatred and confrontation of families as a backdrop against which the story of Romeo and Juliet unfolds. In the future, Death is a constant participant in the scenic action, merging with the meaning of Fatum – the predetermined fate of man. The image of Death, thus, both in the original French performance and in the version of the Moscow Operetta Theater, is cross-cutting. This is a visual image, solved by means of choreographic plastics, a visual symbol that embodies at the same time the fate, merciless to young lovers, and the fate of the Veronians who became hostages of the Enmity. The latter, also being a symbol, is visualized in the female guise of ballet dancers – participants of the choreographic “hand-to-hand” of the representatives of the warring families – during the performance of the duet of Lady Montecci and Lady Capuletti (No. 3, «Enmity»). In the musical the symbol of Destiny is represented in two semantic connotations: 1) as fatal predestination, fate, destined for Romeo and Juliet (akin to understanding Fate in ancient Greek tragedy); 2) the Providence of God, according to which the consequence of the death of Romeo and Juliet is the reconciliation of the warring parties – a Christian theme that appears in the musical as a semantic concept. The tragic events occurring in the musical cannot overshadow the main idea of the performance, which is the happiness that Love brings and which is possible only because of this sublime feeling. Conclusions. So, the analyzed translation of the text of the libretto was an example of the interpretation carried out in semiotic projection. The translators have created their own original version / interpretation of the «eternal plot» based on the music of G Presgurvic’s work, which received world-wide recognition thanks to author’s talent. The interpretation version of the translation, in its turn, makes one recall the opening words of the French composer, written and uttered by him in the prologue of the musical, to explain them in our own way. Nothing is new in this world, but the eternal theme makes us look for new semantic facets of the plot, concluded in a story that repeats endlessly.

Frequentemente dada como evidente pela dogmática processual, a distinção entre justiça e vingança já era tema controvertido no teatro grego: na tragédia, a narrativa laudatória de Ésquilo, sobre o julgamento de Orestes, confronta-se com outra menos elogiosa, qual seja, a de Eurípides sobre a vingança de Hécuba contra o hóspede infiel. Em que pese o contributo civilizatório de Atena pela instituição do tribunal, a crônica judiciária não dá somente boas notícias sobre a obediência à tercialidade do direito; assim, resta em aberto a questão de saber se o selo do Estado por si mesmo garante que a decisão seja conforme a justiça, assim como se a inexistência desse selo nos expõe à fúria das Erínias e à sua sede de vingança. O objetivo deste trabalho será experimentar, no limite, o continuum entre essas duas práticas na literatura oral do sertão, nomeadamente no cordel e na música caipira, onde supostamente a legitimidade da decisão não está no procedimento adotado (racionalidade processual), mas na conformidade com o ethos fundante de uma específica forma de vida (racionalidade material). A fim de levar a cabo este estudo, explorarei as narrativas fundadoras da nossa tradição e que permitem conhecer como a justiça (????, dike) desde cedo se diferencia da vingança, mas também estudarei alguns relatos orais do sertão que permitem confrontar sua concepção do mundo prático com o legado cultural dos helênicos. Espero com isto despertar a atenção para a fragilidade do critério diferenciador que identifica (acriticamente) a justiça com o que é feito pelo Estado e a vingança com aquilo que escapa ao seu monopólio da jurisdição. Abstract Often seen as evident by procedural dogma, the distinction between justice and revenge was already a controversial topic in Ancient Greek theater: in tragedy, the praising narrative of Aeschylus on the trial of Orestes is confronted with another, less appreciative account. Namely, that of Euripides about Hecuba’s revenge against her unfaithful guest. Despite the civilizatory contribution of Athena to establish the first Court, Judiciary chronicles are not endowed solely with good news about the obedience to the tertiality of Law; thus lies unresolved the issue of whether the State seal alone ensures that a sentence will accord justice, or, conversely, whether its absence will expose us to the fury of the erinyes and their thirst for revenge. This work aims to experience, at its limit, the continuum between these two practices in the oral literature of the sertão, particularly in Brazilian cordel literature and country music, means in which arguably the legitimacy of a sentence lies not in its adopted procedure (procedural rationality), but in the conformity to the founding ethos of a specific mode of life (material rationality). To carry out this study, I will explore the founding narratives of our tradition, as they can show how justice (????, díke) sets itself apart, early on, from revenge; but I will also review a number of oral reports on the sertão, as they allow us to pit its concept of the practical world against the Hellenic cultural legacy. I hope, therefore, to bring attention to the fragility of a differentiating criterion that identifies (uncritically) justice with what is done by the State, and revenge with what escapes its monopoly of jurisdiction

In some ancient Greek drama plays, the stage machine used to bring the gods or the heroes of the tragedy on stage, known with the Latin term deus-ex-machina, was used for the solution of an apparently insoluble crisis. A twin-facing stone base was found in the theater of Phlius in Corinthia, Greece, behind the stage building. The existence of similar foundations in other ancient theaters indicates their use for specific purposes connected with the needs of the play. An attempt to reconstruct the mechanism is presented based on archeological evidence and literary descriptions. The reconstructed mechanism was designed for path generation and comprised a single beam with ropes controlling its planar motion and a sidle twin lifting system.

“Sangku mencari Riang” menceritakan pertemuan antara mitos Sangkuriang dari Sunda dan Oidipus dari Yunani Kuno. Cerita ini dibuat sebagai kelanjutan dari cerita rakyat Sangkuriang dengan kisah tragedi Yunani Oidipus Raja karya Sophocles. Cerita yang diciptakan melalui pendekatan intertekstualitas dan interpretasi ini menawarkan makna baru. Cerita ini dibentuk berdasarkan konsep teater rakyat Sunda yang fleksibel dan dinamis dikombinasikan dengan elemen teater Yunani klasik yang melibatkan peran paduan suara dengan kata-kata puitis dalam dialog. Selain itu, penggunaan media dan topeng untuk menyempurnakan karakter menghasilkan estetika bagi penonton. Oleh karena itu, perpaduan konsep antara mitos Sunda dan tragedy Yunani ini memberikan perspektif baru dalam ruang kerja penciptaan seni teater. Hasil kolaborasi dua konsep akan terlihat dalam pertunjukan dengan kekuatan musik, tematik, estetika visual, dan dinamika oral. Dengan cara ini mampu menimbulkan daya tarik bagi para penonton.Kata kunci: cerita rakyat, intertext, mitos Sunda, teater Yunani.ABSTRACTSangku Looking For Riang Theatre: performances: Sangkuriang meetings and Oedipus in the fight against Destiny and Fate. “Sangku Mencari Riang” is a story which describes the meet of Sangkuriang from Sundanese and Oidipus from Ancient Greek. This story was created as a continuation story of folklore Sangkuriang of Sunda with the story of the Greek tragedy of Sophocles’s work, that is Oidipus the King. Through the intertext study, then, a new interpretation of the story was created, and finally the story of “Sangku Mencari Riang” was offered with its new meaning as well. This story will be perfomed to approach the concept of the folk theater of Sundanese which is regarded as flexible and dynamic, and has a dynamic structure. This concept will be combined with some elements found in the classical Greek theater, in which there is a choir role with poetic words in any dialogues on the performance. Moreover, the use of media which gives the impression of refinement masks of the characters and the ritualistic and aesthetic views for spectators are given to this concept as well. Therefore, these two concepts will provide a new perspective in the work space of theatrical arts creation. Then the result of the collaboration between the two concepts will be seen in the performance with musical powers, essential thematic, visual aesthetics, and oral dynamics, and afterward it will be supposed to give rise to any great attraction for the spectators.Key words: folklore, intertext, Sundanese myth, Greek Theater.

The effects of translation have been felt in the development of most languages, but it is particularly marked in English language and literature, where it is a highly charged topic because of its fundamental connection with colonial expansion. Britain shaped a "national" literary identity through borrowing from other languages and infected and inflected other languages and literatures in the course of cultural migrations that occurred in Europe since at least the medieval period onward. As Stephen Greenblatt points out in his essay, "Racial Memory and Literary History," the discovery that English is a "mixed, impure, and constantly shifting medium" is not a new one, citing the preface to the first etymological dictionary in English, published in 1689, in which its author describes English as a hybrid tongue: a Composition of most, if not all the Languages of Europe; especially of the Belgick or Low-Dutch, Saxon, Teutonic or High-Dutch, Cambro-British or Welsh, French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin; and now and then of the Old and Modern Danish, and Ancient High-Dutch; also of the Greek, Hebrew, Arabick, Chaldee, Syriack, and Turcick. ((Skinner A3v-A4r, in Greenblatt 52) The "English" literary canon has translated material at its heart; there is the Bible, for instance, and classical works in Greek, which are read and discussed in translation by many who study them. Beowulf is a translation that has been canonized as one of the "original" texts of English literature, and Shakespeare was inspired by translations. Consider, for instance, Greenblatt's description of The Comedy of Errors, where a "Plautine character from a Sicilian city, finding himself in the market square of a city in Asia Minor, invokes Arctic shamanism – and all this had to make sense to a mixed audience in a commercial theater in London" (58), and there is a strong sense of the global cultural discourse that has been translated into a "national" and international canon of literature in English. English as a language and as a literature, however, has not been contained by national boundaries for some time, and in fact is now more comfortably conceived in the plural, or as uncountable, like a multidirectional flow. English has therefore been translated from solid, settled, and certain representations of Anglo-Celtic culture in the singular to a plurality of shifting, hybrid productions and performances which illuminate the tension implicit in cultural exchange. Translation has become a popular trope used by critics to describe that interaction within literatures defined by language rather than nation, and as a mutable and mutual process of reading and reinscription which illuminates relationships of power. The most obvious power relationship that translation represents, of course, is that between the so-called original and the translation; between the creativity of the author and the derivation of the translator. In The Translator's Invisibility (1995), Lawrence Venuti suggests that there is a prevailing conception of the author as a free and unconstrained individual who partially shapes the relationship: "the author freely expresses his thoughts and feelings in writing, which is thus viewed as an original and transparent self-representation, unmediated by transindividual determinants (linguistic, cultural, social) that might complicate authorial individuality" (6). The translation then can only be defined as an inferior representation, "derivative, fake, potentially a false copy" (7) and the translator as performing the translation in the manner of an actor manipulating lines written by someone else: "translators playact as authors, and translations pass for original texts" (7). The transparent translation and the invisibility of the translator, Venuti argues can be seen as "a mystification of troubling proportions, an amazingly successful concealment of the multiple determinants and effects of English-language translation, the multiple hierarchies and exclusions in which it is implicated" (16). That is, translation exerts its own power in constructing identities and representing difference, in addition to the power derived from the "original" text, which, in fact, the translation may resist. Recognition of this power suggests that traditional Western representations of translation as an echo or copy, a slave toiling on the plantation or seductive belle infidèle, each with its clear affinity to sexual and colonial conquest, attempts to deny translation the possibility of its own power and the assertion of its own creative identity. However, the establishment of an alternative power arrangement exists because translations can "masquerade as originals" (Chamberlain 67) and infiltrate and subvert literary systems in disguise. As Susan Stewart contends in Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation, if we "begin with the relation between authority and writing practices rather than with an assumption of authorial originality, we arrive at a quite different sense of history" (9) and, indeed, a different sense of literary creativity. This remainder of this paper will focus on Nicole Brossard's Le désert mauve and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, to exemlify how a translator may flaunts her creativity, and allow the cultural position of the translator vis à vis language, history, or gender to be critically exposed by the text itself. Québécoise feminist writer Nicole Brossard's 1987 novel, Le désert mauve [Mauve Desert], is perhaps the most striking example of how a translator foregrounds the creative process of reading and re-writing. Brossard constructed her novel by becoming her own reader and asking questions, imagining dialogues between the characters she had already created. This "interactive discourse" shaped the text, which is a dialogue between two versions of a story, and between two writers, one of whom is an active reader, a translator. Le désert mauve is a structural triptych, consisting of Laure Angstelle's novel, Le désert mauve, and Mauve l'horizon, a translation of Angstelle's book by Maude Laures. In the space between the two sites of writing, the translator imagines the possibilities of the text she has read, "re-imagining the characters' lives, the objects, the dialogue" (Interview, 23 April 96). Between the versions of the desert story, she creates a fluid dimension of désir, or desire, a "space to swim with the words" (Interview). Brossard has said that "before the idea of the novel had definitely shaped itself," she knew that it would be in a "hot place, where the weather, la température, would be almost unbearable: people would be sweating; the light would be difficult" (Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation). That site became the desert of the American southwest with its beauty and danger, its timelessness and history, and its decadent traces of Western civilization in the litter of old bottles and abandoned, rusting cars. The author imagined the desert through the images and words of books she read about the desert, appropriating the flowers and cacti that excited her through their names, seduced her through language. Maude Laures, the translator within Brossard's novel, finds the desert as a dimension of her reading, too: "a space, a landscape, an enigma entered with each reading" (133). From her first readings of a novel she has discovered in a used bookshop, Laures, confronts the "the issue of control. Who owns the meaning of the black marks on the page, the writer or the reader?" (Godard 115), and decides the book will belong to her, "and that she can do everything because she has fallen in love with the book, and therefore she's taken possession of the book, the author, the characters, the desert" (Interview). The translator is fascinated by Mélanie, the 15-year-old narrator, who drives her mother's car across the desert, and who has been captivated by the voice and beauty of the geometrician, Angela Parkins, imagining dialogues between these two characters as they linger in the motel parking lot. But she is unwilling to imagine words with l'homme long (longman), who composes beautiful equations that cause explosions in the desert, recites Sanskrit poems, and thumbs through porno in his hotel room. Le désert mauve was an attempt by Brossard to translate from French to French, but the descriptions of the desert landscape – the saguaro, senita, ocotillos, and arroyo—show Spanish to be the language of the desert. In her translation, Maude Laures increases the code switching and adds more Spanish phrases to her text, and Japanese, too, to magnify the echo of nuclear destruction that resonates in l'homme long's equations. She also renames the character l'homme oblong (O'blongman) to increase the dimension of danger he represents. Linking the desert through language with nuclear testing gives it a "semantic density," as Nicholis Entrikin calls it, that extends far beyond the geographical location to recognize the events embedded in that space through associative memory. L'homme long is certainly linked through language to J Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the original atomic bomb project in Los Alamos, New Mexico and his reference to the Bhagavad Gita after seeing the effects of the atomic bomb: "I/am/become Death—now we are all sons of bitches" (17). The translator distances herself by a translating Death/I /am/death—I'm a sonofabitch" (173). The desert imagined by Laure Angstelle seduces the reader, Maude Laures, and her translation project creates a trajectory which links the heat and light of the desert with the cold and harsh reflective glare of sunlit snow in wintry Montréal, where the "misleading reflections" of the desert's white light is subject to the translator's gaze. Laures leans into the desert peopled with geometricians and scientists and lesbians living under poisonous clouds of smoke that stop time, and tilts her translation in another direction. In the final chapter of Laure Angstelle's novel, Mélanie had danced in the arms of Angela Parkins, only to find she had run out of time: Angela is shot (perhaps by l'homme long) and falls to the dance floor. Maudes Laures is constrained by the story and by reality, but translates "There was no more time" into "One more time," allowing the lovers' dance to continue for at least another breath, room for another ending. Brossard has asserted that, like lesbian desire or the translator, the desert was located in the background of our thoughts. Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient (1992), locates the translator in the desert, linking a profession and a place which have both witnessed an averting of Western eyes, both used in linguistic and imperial enterprises that operate under conditions of camouflage. Linked also by association is the war in the Sahara and the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. As in Brossard, the desert here is a destination reached by reading, how "history enters us" through maps and language. Almásy, "the English patient," knew the desert before he had been there, "knew when Alexander had traversed it in an earlier age, for this cause or that greed" (18). Books in code also serve to guide spies and armies across the desert, and like a book, the desert is "crowded with the world" (285), while it is "raped by war and shelled as if it were just sand" (257). Here the translator is representative of a writing that moves between positions and continually questions its place in history. Translators and explorers write themselves out of a text, rendering themselves invisible and erasing traces of their emotions, their doubts, beliefs, and loves, in order to produce a "neutral" text, much in the way that colonialism empties land of human traces in order to claim it, or the way technology is airbrushed out of the desert in order to conceal "the secret of the deserts from Unweinat to Hiroshima" (295). Almásy the translator, the spy, whose identity is always a subject of speculation, knows how the eye can be fooled as it reads a text in disguise; floating on a raft of morphine, he rewrites the monotone of history in different modes, inserting between the terse lines of commentary a counternarrative of love illumined by "the communal book of moonlight" (261), which translates lives and gives them new meaning. The translator's creativity stems from a collaboration and a love for the text; to deny the translation process its creative credibility is synonymous in The English Patient with the denial of any desire that may violate the social rules of the game of love by unfairly demanding fidelity. If seas move away to leave shifting desert sands, why should lovers not drift, or translations? Ultimately, we are all communal translations, says Ondaatje's novel, of the shifting relationship between histories and personal identities. "We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience" (261). This representation of the translator resists the view of identity "which attempts to recover an immutable origin, a fixed and eternal representation of itself" (Ashcroft 4) by its insistence that we are transformed in and by our versions of reality, just as we are by our readings of fiction. The translators represented in Brossard and Ondaatje suggest that the process of translation is a creative one, which acknowledges influence, contradictory currents, and choice its heart. The complexity of the choices a translator makes and the mulitiplicity of positions from which she may write suggest a process of translation that is neither transparent nor complete. Rather than the ubiquitous notion of the translator as "a servant an invisible hand mechanically turning the word of one language into another" (Godard 91), the translator creatively 'forges in the smithy of the soul' a version of story that is a complex "working model of inclusive consciousness" (Heaney 8) that seeks to loosen another tongue and another reading in an eccentric literary version of oral storytelling. References Ashcroft, Bill. Post-Colonial Transformation. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Brossard, Nicole. Le désert mauve. Montréal: l'Hexagone, 1987. Mauve Desert. Trans. Susanne Lotbinière-Harwood. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1990. Brossard, Nicole. Personal Interview. With Beverley Curran and Mitoko Hirabayashi, Montreal, April 1996. Chamberlain, Lori. "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation." Reinventing Translation. Lawrence Venuti, Ed. 57-73. Godard, Barbara. "Translating (With) the Speculum." Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 4 (2) 1991: 85-121. Greenblatt, Stephen. "Racial Memory and Literary History." PMLA 116 (1), January 2001: 48-63. Heaney, Seamus. "The Redress of Poetry." The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures. London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995. 1-16. Jenik, Adriene. Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation. Los Angeles: Shifting Horizon Productions, 1997. Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. Toronto: Vintage Books, 1993. Stewart, Susan. Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. London, New York: Routledge, 1995.

IntroductionThe European will to modify the natural world emerged through English landscape design during the eighteenth century. Released from the neo-classical aesthetic dichotomy of the beautiful and the ugly, new categories of the picturesque and the sublime gestured towards an affective relationship to nature. Europeans began to see the world as a picture, the elements of which were composed as though part of a theatrical scene. Quite literally, as I shall discuss below, gardens were “composed with ‘pantomimic’ elements – ruins of castles and towers, rough hewn bridges, Chinese pagodas and their like” (McGillivray 134–35) transforming natural vistas into theatrical scenes. Such a transformation was made possible by a habit of spectating that was informed by the theatrical metaphor or theatrum mundi, one version of which emphasised the relationship between spectator and the thing seen. The idea of the natural world as an aesthetic object first developed in poetry and painting and then through English landscape garden style was wrought in three dimensions on the land itself. From representations of place a theatrical transformation occurred so that gardens became a places of representation.“The Genius of the Place in All”The eighteenth century inherited theatrum mundi from the Renaissance, although the genealogy of its key features date back to ancient times. Broadly speaking, theatrum mundi was a metaphorical expression of the world and humanity in two ways: dramaturgically and formally. During the Renaissance the dramaturgical metaphor was a moral emblem concerned with the contingency of human life; as Shakespeare famously wrote, “men and women [were] merely players” whose lives consisted of “seven ages” or “acts” (2.7.139–65). In contrast to the dramaturgical metaphor with its emphasis on role-playing humanity, the formalist version highlighted a relationship between spectator, theatre-space and spectacle. Rooted in Renaissance neo-Platonism, the formalist metaphor configured the world as a spectacle and “Man” its spectator. If the dramaturgical metaphor was inflected with medieval moral pessimism, the formalist metaphor was more optimistic.The neo-Platonist spectator searched in the world for a divine plan or grand design and spectatorship became an epistemological challenge. As a seer and a knower on the world stage, the human being became the one who thought about the world not just as a theatre but also through theatre. This is apparent in the etymology of “theatre” from the Greek theatron, or “seeing place,” but the word also shares a stem with “theory”: theaomai or “to look at.” In a graceful compression of both roots, Martin Heidegger suggests a “theatre” might be any “seeing place” in which any thing being beheld offers itself to careful scrutiny by the beholder (163–65). By the eighteenth century, the ancient idea of a seeing-knowing place coalesced with the new empirical method and aesthetic sensibility: the world was out there, so to speak, to provide pleasure and instruction.Joseph Addison, among others, in the first half of the century reconsidered the utilitarian appeal of the natural world and proposed it as the model for artistic inspiration and appreciation. In “Pleasures of the Imagination,” a series of essays in The Spectator published in 1712, Addison claimed that “there is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless strokes of nature, than in the nice touches and embellishments of art,” and compared to the beauty of an ordered garden, “the sight wanders up and down without confinement” the “wide fields of nature” and is “fed with an infinite variety of images, without any certain stint or number” (67).Yet art still had a role because, Addison argues, although “wild scenes [. . .] are more delightful than any artificial shows” the pleasure of nature increases the more it begins to resemble art; the mind experiences the “double” pleasure of comparing nature’s original beauty with its copy (68). This is why “we take delight in a prospect which is well laid out, and diversified, with fields and meadows, woods and rivers” (68); a carefully designed estate can be both profitable and beautiful and “a man might make a pretty landskip of his own possessions” (69). Although nature should always be one’s guide, nonetheless, with some small “improvements” it was possible to transform an estate into a landscape picture. Nearly twenty years later in response to the neo-Palladian architectural ambitions of Richard Boyle, the third Earl of Burlington, and with a similarly pictorial eye to nature, Alexander Pope advised:To build, to plant, whatever you intend,To rear the Column, or the Arch to bend,To swell the Terras, or to sink the Grot;In all, let Nature never be forgot.But treat the Goddess like a modest fair,Nor over-dress, nor leave her wholly bare;Let not each beauty ev’ry where be spy’d,Where half the skill is decently to hide.He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds,Surprizes, varies, and conceals the Bounds.Consult the Genius of the Place in all;That tells the Waters or to rise, or fall,Or helps th’ ambitious Hill the heav’ns to scale,Or scoops in circling theatres the Vale,Calls in the Country, catches opening glades, Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,Now breaks or now directs, th’ intending Lines;Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs. (Epistle IV, ll 47–64) Whereas Addison still gestured towards estate management, Pope explicitly advocated a painterly approach to garden design. His epistle articulated some key principles that he enacted in his own garden at Twickenham and which would inform later garden design. No matter what one added to a landscape, one needed to be guided by nature; one should be moderate in one’s designs and neither plant too much nor too little; one must be aware of the spectator’s journey through the garden and take care to provide variety by creating “surprises” that would be revealed at different points. Finally, one had to find the “spirit” of the place that gave it its distinct character and use this to create the cohesion in diversity that was aspired to in a garden. Nature’s aestheticisation had begun with poetry, developed into painting, and was now enacted on actual natural environments with the emergence of English landscape style. This painterly approach to gardening demanded an imaginative, emotional, and intellectual engagement with place and it stylistically rejected the neo-classical geometry and regularity of the baroque garden (exemplified by Le Nôtre’s gardens at Versailles). Experiencing landscape now took on a third dimension as wealthy landowners and their friends put themselves within the picture frame and into the scene. Although landscape style changed during the century, a number of principles remained more or less consistent: the garden should be modelled on nature but “improved,” any improvements should not be obvious, pictorial composition should be observed, the garden should be concerned with the spectator’s experience and should aim to provoke an imaginative or emotional engagement with it. During the seventeenth century, developments in theatrical technology, particularly the emergence of the proscenium arch theatre with moveable scenery, showed that poetry and painting could be spectacularly combined on the stage. Later in the eighteenth century the artist and stage designer Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg combined picturesque painting aesthetics with theatrical design in works such as The Wonders of Derbyshire in 1779 (McGillivray 136). It was a short step to shift the onstage scene outside. Theatricality was invoked when pictorial principles were applied three dimensionally; gardens became sites for pastoral genre scenes that ambiguously positioned their visitors both as spectators and actors. Theatrical SceneryGardens and theatres were explicitly connected. Like “theatre,” the word “garden” was sometimes used to describe a collection, in book form, which promised “a whole world of items” which was not always “redeemable” in “straightforward ways” (Hunt, Gardens 54–55). Theatrum mundi could be emblematically expressed in a garden through statues and architectural fabriques which drew spectators into complex chains of associations involving literature, art, and society, as they progressed through it.In the previous century, writes John Dixon Hunt, “the expectation of a fine garden [. . .] was that it work upon its visitor, involving him [sic] often insidiously as a participant in its dramas, which were presented to him as he explored its spaces by a variety of statues, inscriptions and [. . .] hydraulically controlled automata” (Gardens 54). Such devices, which featured heavily in the Italian baroque garden, were by the mid eighteenth century seen by English and French garden theorists to be overly contrived. Nonetheless, as David Marshall argues, “eighteenth-century garden design is famous for its excesses [. . .] the picturesque garden may have aimed to be less theatrical, but it aimed no less to be theater” (38). Such gardens still required their visitors’ participation and were designed to deliver an experience that stimulated the spectators’ imaginations and emotions as they moved through them. Theatrum mundi is implicit in eighteenth-century gardens through a common idea of the world reimagined into four geographical quadrants emblematically represented by fabriques in the garden. The model here is Alexander Pope’s influential poem, “The Temple of Fame” (1715), which depicted the eponymous temple with four different geographic faces: its western face was represented by western classical architecture, its east face by Chinese, Persian, and Assyrian, its north was Gothic and Celtic, and its south, Egyptian. These tropes make their appearance in eighteenth-century landscape gardens. In Désert de Retz, a garden created between 1774 and 1789 by François Racine de Monville, about twenty kilometres west of Paris, one can still see amongst its remaining fabriques: a ruined “gothic” church, a “Tartar” tent (it used to have a Chinese maison, now lost), a pyramid, and the classically inspired Temple of Pan. Similar principles underpin the design of Jardin (now Parc) Monceau that I discuss below. Retz: Figure 1. Tartar tent.Figure 2. Temple of PanStowe Gardens in Buckinghamshire has a similar array of structures (although the classical predominates) including its original Chinese pavillion. It, too, once featured a pyramid designed by the architect and playwright John Vanbrugh, and erected as a memorial to him after his death in 1726. On it was carved a quote from Horace that explicitly referenced the dramaturgical version of theatrum mundi: You have played, eaten enough and drunk enough,Now is time to leave the stage for younger men. (Garnett 19) Stowe’s Elysian Fields, designed by William Kent in the 1730s according to picturesque principles, offered its visitor two narrative choices, to take the Path of Virtue or the Path of Vice, just like a re-imagined morality play. As visitors progressed along their chosen paths they would encounter various fabriques and statues, some carved with inscriptions in either Latin or English, like the Vanbrugh pyramid, that would encourage associations between the ancient world and the contemporary world of the garden’s owner Richard Temple, Lord Cobham, and his circle. Stowe: Figure 3. Chinese Pavillion.Figure 4. Temple of VirtueKent’s background was as a painter and scene designer and he brought a theatrical sensibility to his designs; as Hunt writes, Kent particularly enjoyed designing “recessions into woodland space where ‘wings’ [were] created” (Picturesque 29). Importantly, Kent’s garden drawings reveal his awareness of gardens as “theatrical scenes for human action and interaction, where the premium is upon more personal experiences” and it this spatial dimension that was opened up at Stowe (Picturesque 30).Picturesque garden design emphasised pictorial composition that was similar to stage design and because a garden, like a stage, was a three-dimensional place for human action, it could also function as a set for that action. Unlike a painting, a garden was experiential and time-based and a visitor to it had an experience not unlike, to cautiously use an anachronism, a contemporary promenade performance. The habit of imaginatively wandering through a theatre in book-form, moving associatively from one item to the next, trying to discern the author’s pattern or structure, was one educated Europeans were used to, and a garden provided an embodied dimension to this activity. We can see how this might have been by visiting Parc Monceau in Paris which still contains remnants of the garden designed by Louis Carrogis (known as Carmontelle) for the Duc de Chartres in the 1770s. Carmontelle, like Kent, had a theatrical background and his primary role was as head of entertainments for the Orléans family; as such he was responsible for designing and writing plays for the family’s private theatricals (Hays 449). According to Hunt, Carmontelle intended visitors to Jardin de Monceau to take a specific itinerary through its “quantity of curious things”:Visitors entered by a Chinese gateway, next door to a gothic building that served as a chemical laboratory, and passed through greenhouses and coloured pavilions. Upon pressing a button, a mirrored wall opened into a winter garden painted with trompe-l’œil trees, floored with red sand, filled with exotic plants, and containing at its far end a grotto in which supper parties were held while music was played in the chamber above. Outside was a farm. Then there followed a series of exotic “locations”: a Temple of Mars, a winding river with an island of rocks and a Dutch mill, a dairy, two flower gardens, a Turkish tent poised, minaret-like, above an icehouse, a grove of tombs [. . .], and an Italian vineyard with a classical Bacchus at its center, regularly laid out to contrast with an irregular wood that succeeded it. The final stretches of the itinerary included a Naumachia or Roman water-theatre [. . .], more Turkish and Chinese effects, a ruined castle, yet another water-mill, and an island on which sheep grazed. (Picturesque 121) Monceau: Figure 5. Naumachia.Figure 6. PyramidIn its presentation of a multitude of different times and different places one can trace a line of descent from Jardin de Monceau to the great nineteenth-century World Expos and on to Disneyland. This lineage is not as trite as it seems once we realise that Carmontelle himself intended the garden to represent “all times and all places” and Pope’s four quadrants of the world were represented by fabriques at Monceau (Picturesque 121). As Jardin de Monceau reveals, gardens were also sites for smaller performative interventions such as the popular fêtes champêtres, garden parties in which the participants ate, drank, danced, played music, and acted in comedies. Role playing and masquerade were an important part of the fêtes as we see, for example, in Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Fêtes Vénitiennes (1718–19) where a “Moorishly” attired man addresses (or is dancing with) a young woman before an audience of young men and women, lolling around a fabrique (Watteau). Scenic design in the theatre inspired garden designs and gardens “featured prominently as dramatic locations in intermezzi, operas, and plays”, an exchange that encouraged visitors to gardens to see themselves as performers as much as spectators (Hunt, Gardens 64). A garden, particularly within the liminal aegis of a fête was a site for deceptions, tricks, ruses and revelations, assignations and seductions, all activities which were inherently theatrical; in such a garden visitors could find themselves acting in or watching a comedy or drama of their own devising. Marie-Antoinette built English gardens and a rural “hamlet” at Versailles. She and her intimate circle would retire to rustic cottages, which belied the opulence of their interiors, and dressed in white muslin dresses and straw hats, would play at being dairy maids, milking cows (pre-cleaned by the servants) into fine porcelain buckets (Martin 3). Just as the queen acted in pastoral operas in her theatre in the grounds of the Petit Trianon, her hamlet provided an opportunity for her to “live” a pastoral fantasy. Similarly, François Racine de Monville, who commissioned Désert de Retz, was a talented harpist and flautist and his Temple of Pan was, appropriately, a music room.Versailles: Figure 7. Hamlet ConclusionRichard Steele, Addison’s friend and co-founder of The Spectator, casually invoked theatrum mundi when he wrote in 1720: “the World and the Stage [. . .] have been ten thousand times observed to be the Pictures of one another” (51). Steele’s reiteration of a Renaissance commonplace revealed a different emphasis, an emphasis on the metaphor’s spatial and spectacular elements. Although Steele reasserts the idea that the world and stage resemble each other, he does so through a third level of abstraction: it is as pictures that they have an affinity. World and stage are both positioned for the observer within complementary picture frames and it is as pictures that he or she is invited to make sense of them. The formalist version of theatrum mundi invokes a spectator beholding the world for his (usually!) pleasure and in the process nature itself is transformed. No longer were natural landscapes wildernesses to be tamed and economically exploited, but could become gardens rendered into scenes for their aristocratic owners’ pleasure. Désert de Retz, as its name suggests, was an artfully composed wilderness, a version of the natural world sculpted into scenery. Theatrum mundi, through the aesthetic category of the picturesque, emerged in English landscape style and effected a theatricalised transformation of nature that was enacted in the aristocratic gardens of Europe.ReferencesAddison, Joseph. The Spectator. No. 414 (25 June 1712): 67–70. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.Garnett, Oliver. Stowe. Buckinghamshire. The National Trust, 2011.Hays, David. “Carmontelle's Design for the Jardin de Monceau: A Freemasonic Garden in Late-Eighteenth-Century France.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.4 (1999): 447–62.Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.Hunt, John Dixon. Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992.———. The Picturesque Garden in Europe. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002.Marshall, David. The Frame of Art. Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.Martin, Meredith S. Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de' Medici to Marie-Antoinette. Harvard: Harvard UP, 2011.McGillivray, Glen. "The Picturesque World Stage." Performance Research 13.4 (2008): 127–39.Pope, Alexander. “Epistle IV. To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington.” Epistles to Several Persons. London, 1744. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.———. The Temple of Fame: A Vision. By Mr. Pope. 2nd ed. London, 1715. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Ed. Agnes Latham. London: Routledge, 1991.Steele, Richard. The Theatre. No. 7 (23 January 1720).