Abstract
Di Ponio introduces the subject matter of the book by way of posing questions regarding the aspects of early modern culture stimulating Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty: how these cultural phenomena are presented in their early modern forms of artistic expression; how Artaud’s theories intersect with others surrounding spectacle, violence, sacrifice, and cruelty in his theatre; and how followers of Artaud have addressed the early modern context and to what end. The introduction also details the framework of the book, which mobilizes the concept of the double. The introduction closes with chapter-by-chapter synopses.
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Notes
- 1.
Artaud follows Anglophone critics of the time who used Elizabethan as a term to refer to the whole Renaissance or early modern period in England.
- 2.
Alain Virmaux, Antonin Artaud et le théâtre (Paris: Seghers, 1970); Alain et Odette Virmaux, Antonin Artaud (Paris: Le Manufacture, 1991) and Antonin vivant (Paris: Nouvelles éditions Oswald, 1980).
- 3.
De Vos also thoroughly considers the influence of Artaud and Samuel Beckett on the work of Sarah Kane in Cruelty and Desire in the Modern Theater: Antonin Artaud, Sarah Kane, and Samuel Beckett (Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011).
- 4.
David Graver and Christopher Innes consider Artaud and textuality within avant-garde performance. Their respective essays ‘Antonin Artaud and the Authority of Text, Spectacle, and Performance’ and ‘Text/Pre-text/Pretext: The Language of Avant-Garde Experiment’ appear in James M. Harding’s collection Contours of the Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2000), 43–57 and 58–75.
- 5.
Kimberly Jannarone, Artaud and His Doubles (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), p. x.
- 6.
Oriental and Occidental are Artaud’s terms on how to distinguish between the established theatre and some fantasy of ‘the other’ which is potentially problematic as its understanding comes from an outside perspective which can be interpreted as further mystifying the gestural language of the dance rather than explaining it.
- 7.
Artaud’s own rendering of the Senecan tragedy is unfortunately lost.
- 8.
While the production of Seneca’s Oedipus, adapted by Ted Hughes, would appear the logical choice, as the play opens up to the city of Thebes devastated by plague, it focuses less on the effects of plague. The production was successful, however, in penetrating its audience through laughter, prompted mainly by the use of a giant inflatable phallus at a key moment in the play’s culmination.
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Di Ponio, A. (2018). Introduction. In: The Early Modern Theatre of Cruelty and its Doubles. Avant-Gardes in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92249-2_1
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