Classical Monologues for Women by Marina Calderone

Author:Marina Calderone [Calderone, Marina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781854598707
Publisher: Nick Hern Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

GLOSSARY

state estate

grant concede

thrust into one scale loaded onto one side of a set of scales

allow concede

conceive readily supply

French and Spanish Golden Age

The golden era of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama was matched by a similarly rich Golden Age on the continent.

Spain was a country only recently defeated in war – and this had a notable effect on the writing of the time. It was nationalistic, principled and preoccupied with conduct, morality and integrity.

In Catholic France, actors were social outcasts, even denied a Christian burial. But its accomplishments between 1630 and 1680 lifted French theatre to an unrivalled pre-eminence in Europe, and kept it there throughout the eighteenth century. The comedies deal broadly with urban hypocrisy and smalltime domestic villainy, drawing from the physical comedy and stereotypes of the Commedia dell’Arte. Rather than provoking belly laughs, these comedies, especially Molière’s, are described by one contemporary critic as ‘rire dans l’âme’ – or laughter in the soul.

The tragedies also deal with archetypes but on a grander scale, with the epic and timeless issues that underpin the very lives and aspirations of the pre-Republic French: honour, truth and faithfulness to the ruler. Many of the plots go back to Greek drama for inspiration, and the genre is truly neo-classical in its aspiration. Unlike Molière’s verse, Racine’s is lofty, grand and morally elevating, in both tone and form.

Like much of the English work, this period of European writing was characterised by a particularly vivid – almost physical – lyricism, a poetic language. Much of the verse was written in rhyming couplets. Today, this form carries little weight in the theatre and is best encountered in pantomimes or Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. In Golden Age France and Spain, the couplet carried the linguistic and emotional weight of the iambic pentameter, and shouldn’t be ignored.

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