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Literatur
Quotes from non-English texts are, unless otherwise indicated, in my translation. The parenthetical page references are to the following editions: Jean Anouilh,L'Alouette (Paris: La Table ronde, 1953). Bertolt Brecht,Gesammelte Werke. 20 vols (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967). Vol. 3 includesLeben des Galilei (pp. 1229–1345).Collected Prose, ed. Ralph Manheim and John Willett (New York: Vintage, 1972). Includes the final version ofLife of Galileo, trans. Wolfgang Sauerlander and Ralph Manheim (pp. 1–98), “Notes and Variants” to the play (pp. 213–305), and Charles Laughton's American version (pp. 402–67). T. S. Eliot,Murder in the Cathedral (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963). This printing is based on the 4th edition of the play (1938). Friedrich Dürrenmatt,Komödien, 7th ed. (Zurich: Arche, 1965). IncludesRomulus der Grosse, “new version 1964” (pp. 7–9). [George] Bernard Shaw,Saint Joan, ed. Stanley Weintraub (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971). The long list of authors of post-Shavian Joan plays includes Maxwell Anderson, Paul Claudel, Max Mell, and Jean Anouilh. Since Eliot'sMurder in the Cathedral, Jean Anouilh, Christopher Fry, and others have tried their hand at Thomas Becket.
Elida Maria Szarota,Künstler, Grübler und Rebellen: Studien zum europäischen Martyrerdrama des 17. Jahrhunderts (Bern: Francke, 1967) devotes individual chapters to each of more than a dozen Baroque martyr plays. Two additional books offer important general insight into the genre: Walter Benjamin,The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977, esp. pp. 68–76 and Herbert Linderberger,Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature and Reality (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975). In his chapter on “Tyrant and Martyr Plays” (pp. 38–53) Lindenberger makes brief but often incisive remarks about more than twenty pertinent texts, many of them modern.
Cf. Michael Polanyi,The Tacit Dimension (New York: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 3–25 on tacit knowing; Jonathan Culler,Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 113–30 on literary competence; Hans Robert Jauss,Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 3–45 on horizon of expectations.
Paul Hernadi, “Entertaining Commitments: A Reception Theory of Literary Genres,”Poetics 10 (1981): 195–211.
Paul Hernadi,Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 178–83 andInterpreting Events: Tragicomedies of History on the Modern Stage (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 41–43 et passim.
Susanne K. Langer,Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner, 1953), pp. 326–66.
Cf. Peter Szondi,Versuch über das Tragische (Frankfurt: Insel, 1961), pp. 50–52, 60–61.
Cf. Harold Watts, “Myth and Drama,”Cross Currents 5 (1955): 154–70 and Northrop Frye,Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 163–86 on comedy, 206–23 on tragedy.
To indicate how my views of tragedy, comedy, romance, and satire differ from Northrop Frye's, to which they are of course indebted, let me quote two pertinent sentences from my article cited above, “Entertaining Commitments: A Reception Theory of Literary Genres,” p. 197: “A particular work can be seen as ‘tragic’ or ‘comic’ to the extent that it affords us entertainment through thrill or gratification; and it can be seen as ‘satirical’ or ‘romantic’ to the extent that it fills us with indignation or admiration, thereby committing us to change the world or to change ourselves. Far from being generically ‘pure,’ some of the greatest works of literature have sufficient energy to move their responsive readers in more than one direction—toward tragic thrill, comic gratification, satirical indignation, or romantic admiration.”
Cf. Martin Esslin,Brecht: The Man and His Work, new revised ed. (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1971), p. 112.
To some extent, the martyr's part is usually modeled after Jesus as the most familiar prototype, in Western culture, of altruistic self-sacrifice. But the life and death of Socrates, as in Shaw's preface (4), or the periodic death and rebirth of a Christlike Dionysos, as in Jean Cocteau'sBacchus (1951), may also be invoked. Consciously or unconsciously, therefore, the actor or actress playing the martyr must often play a double role: the role of a historical figure (Thomas Becket, for example) and the role of that figure's quasi-mythical prototype who informs the martyr's vision of the public role to be played by his or her private self in history.
Two additional Baroque plays about martyred actors are Bidermann'sPhilemon Martyr and DesfontainesL'illustre Comédien! Cf. Szarota.
The most obvious case in point is Grotowski's 1965 adaptation of Julius Słowacki's version of Calderon'sEl Principe Constante Cf. Jerzy Grotowski,Towards a Poor Theatre (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968). Concerning Grotowski, see also Lindenberger, pp. 51–52; Timothy Wiles,The Theater Event: Modern Theories of Performance (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 137–57; Bruce Wilshire,Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1982) pp. 125–35; Bert O. States,Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985), pp 110–115
Cf. Paul Hernadi, “The Actor's Face as the Author's Mask: On the Paradox of Brechtian Staging,” inLiterary Criticism and Psychology, vol. 7 ofYearbook of Comparative Criticism, ed. Joseph P. Strelka (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 125–36 andInterpreting Events, pp. 136–47.
Cf. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann,The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Doubleday, 1967).
Erving Goffman,Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974).
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Hernadi, P. Modern martyr plays beyond genre. Neohelicon 13, 141–162 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02118118
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02118118