History of European Drama and Theatre

Front Cover
Psychology Press, 2002 - 396 pages

This major study reconstructs the vast history of European drama from Greek tragedy through to twentieth-century theatre, focusing on the subject of identity. Throughout history, drama has performed and represented political, religious, national, ethnic, class-related, gendered, and individual concepts of identity.

Erika Fischer-Lichte's topics include:

* ancient Greek theatre
* Shakespeare and Elizabethan theatre by Corneilli, Racine, Molière
* the Italian commedia dell'arte and its transformations into eighteenth-century drama
* the German Enlightenment - Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, and Lenz
* romanticism by Kleist, Byron, Shelley, Hugo, de Vigny, Musset, Büchner, and Nestroy
* the turn of the century - Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Stanislavski
* the twentieth century - Craig, Meyerhold, Artaud, O'Neill, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Müller.

Anyone interested in theatre throughout history and today will find this an invaluable source of information.

 

Contents

Theatre and the polis
8
The magic body
33
The frail and tortured body
40
the suppression of popular culture
46
1
72
23
79
Honour disgraced and the forfeit of mercy
86
Popular theatre between religious and court theatre
92
THE RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES AND
146
The loving father and his virtuous daughter
155
the seducer and the mistress
161
THEATRE OF THE NEW MAN 284
165
The mutilated individual
170
Beyond the individual 298
171
The selfcastration of creative nature
176
Symbol of the species
182

From the theatrical to social roleplay
129
Theatre as a model of social reality
136
The transition from man into God
190
Copyright

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About the author (2002)

Erika Fischer-Lichte is university professor of theatre research at the Free University of Berlin, and president of the International Federation of Theatre Research. Her numerous publications include The Show and the Gaze of Theatre. A European Perspective, 1997.

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