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Subject Area: Comedy
Cairns, Christopher1996 0-7734-8821-9 452 pages
This volume offers newly-translated texts of three established classics of Italian Renaissance comedy, with scholarly introductions and bibliographies for each: Ariosto's seminal second play, The Supposes; Machiavelli's Mandrake; and the composition of the Sienese Intronati, The Deceived. The works are linked by documentable bond of influence, and also represent a solid chapter in the history of theatrical staging, since there are traces of evidence of idealised cityscape perspective sets for early performances of both The Supposes and The Deceived. These plays embody distinctive traditions and contributions to the genesis of European comedy.
Cairns, Christopher
1989 0-88946-080-9 472 pages
Kort, Eva
2015 1-4955-0287-2 116 pages
This book opens a new dialogue for philosophical treatments of humor and comedy. It traces their history from the Dionysian Performance Tradition and brings a fresh perspective to the issue as it recasts standard interpretations of the Aristotelian theory in broader terms that offer new grounds for distinguishing ‘humor’, ‘comedy’ and ‘mirth’.
Almeida, Diane M.
2000 0-7734-7693-8 120 pages
Valle-Inclán’s esperpentos are a particularly Spanish style of black comedy. This work analyses Valle-Inclán’s works, defines precisely what the term esperpento means, and what technique Valle-Inclán used to achieve his aesthetic. These techniques are demonstrated by examples from the plays themselves. The second part examines the manner in which Valle-Inclán’s esperpento blends with Buñuel’s surrealistic films, particularly Un Chien andalou, L’age d’or and Tierra Sin Pan. This book serves as a study of Spanish literature and film at the beginning of the 20th century, and as a demonstration of the great and often unacknowledged debt that the cinema owes to the theatre.
Ritchie, Chris
2007 0-7734-5439-X 216 pages
This book follows the progress of the Greek parasite figure through his various interpretations by different poets as seen in the remaining fragments. On the Roman stage of Plautus, the parasite became a key comic figure in proceedings, later replaced by the wily slave. In medieval comedy he can be seen as the vice of morality plays, in mummers plays and he emerges as a type in early Tudor theatre. On the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage the chancing rascal was a frequent feature, most notably Falstaff. Throughout the Restoration dissipated gallants and workshy fops became well established and their behaviour reached the outer limits of the bawdy. In 18th century sentimental comedy the fascination with such roguery, ageing dandyism and peripheral scavengers remained, but modified. Rogues, idlers, skivers, flatterers and the work-shy: all chisellers.