Abstract
The ambivalence of texts about expansion, the rhetoric of inside and outside, the sympathy, alienation, and supplement of romance, and the exploration of the ends of comedy all suggest the ways representation works. Prose texts and plays both show the intricacies of relations between form and content. Showing and telling can seem like separate arts between prose works and plays, but in drama, including comedy, characters and narrators tell stories while being part of the show. Narrative in drama deserves close attention in theory and practice. Once more, past and present meet, so that the theory and criticism of the era after the Second World War especially comes to terms with the estranged but generative world of the Renaissance. And the early modern period also included a double vision of ancients and moderns, so there is more than one movement of looking backward and forward.1
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Notes
Thornton Wilder, Three Plays: Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Matchmaker (1957; New York: Avon Books, 1976), viii, 5–7, 29–31, 49–52, 64.
Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 3–4.
Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 58–60.
See also Mieke Bal, De theorie van vertellen en verhalen (Muiderberg: Coutinho, 1980), and her Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, trans. Christine van Boheemen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985).
Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980), 3; see Shakespeare’s Universe of Discourse: Language Games in the Comedies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 37–111.
Miguel de Cervantes, Obras Completas, ed. Angel Valbuera Prat, 6 vols. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1917).
Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981)
Margaret W. Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 137–62
Philip Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry,” English Critical Texts, ed. D. J. Enright and Ernst de Chickera (1962; London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 3–49
George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys D. Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
See Harry Levin, Playboys and Killjoys: An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). For New Comedy, see Plautus, Plautus, ed. and trans. Paul Nixon, 5 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1916) and Terence, Ter-ence, ed. and trans. John Sargeaunt, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1912).
See Robert R. Wilson, “Narratives and Narrators in Hamlet,” Hamlet Studies 6 (1984): 30–40.
See Jonathan Hart, “Temporality and Theatricality in Shakespeare’s Lancastrian Tetralogy,” Studia Neophilogica 63 (1991): 69–88
Hart, Theater and World: The Problematics of Shakespeare’s History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992).
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© 2011 Jonathan Locke Hart
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Hart, J. (2011). Narrative, Theory, Drama. In: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118140_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118140_6
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