Abstract
In order to make sense of the modern “history play,” the Introduction presents the three central assertions of this book. First, this Introduction explores the argument that the narration of the past is largely an act of translation. Second, given that the three chapters in this book are concerned with the historical timeframe related to the telos (which will be explained in more detail), I argue that we must understand these playwrights acting as “modern” historical translators who fuse the past with the future and, like a translation, say something about their moment in time, bringing past, present, and future together in the tense of always: discussing each play’s synchronic limitation to a strict time and place (related to its specific historical moment) as well as its diachronic timelessness (speaking to the human condition). And third, modern history plays depart from, especially, early modern history plays in that these modern reincarnations of the form focus not on commemoration (like those in the early modern period) but use history as a means of critique and a way to look at and act in the future.
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Notes
Rokem, Performing History, xi.
Ibid. xiii.
Carlson, The Haunted Stage, 1, 3.
“Again,” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989.
Ibid.
“Anew,” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989.
“Again.”
I am quoting Joseph Donohue’s conception of the tense of drama, which he repeated in many “Modern American Drama” lectures at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
“Translate,” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989.
Bennett, “Minoritarian Linguist in Translation.”
In “Performing Translation in Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul,” presented at the University of Massachusetts, April 2004, Jenny S. Spencer noted the absolute centrality of translation to any understanding of Kushner’s play. See also Spencer, “Performing Translation in Contemporary Anglo-American Drama,” 389–410.
Bennett, “ Minoritarian Linguist in Translation.”
Richardson, “‘Time Is Out of Joint,’” 308. For an article about contemporary theatre’s sense of dramatic time, see Fischer, “Dramatic Time,” 241–256.
White, Content of the Form, 14.
Ibid. 27.
Ibid.
Canning and Postlewait, “Representing the Past,” 12.
Ibid. 18.
White, Content of the Form, 1.
“Translator,” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989.
Robyns, “Translation and Discursive Identity,” 405.
Ibid. 408.
Tony Crowley discusses memory and forgetting in relation to Brian Friel’s Translations and Making History. Crowley examines memory and forgetting in a different manner than I do, contemplating the following questions: “Is there an obligation to remember? Is there a duty to commemorate? Does peace depend on forgetting?” (Crowley, “Memory and Forgetting,” 73).
Qtd. in Griffin, “Birth of the History Play,” 221.
“The past, Blau asserts, riffing on Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, may or may not replay itself as farce, but it will always need fresh actors—blood donors—because it is always under construction. The theatre—and the theatre’s literature—is not only a means of transfusion, it is the means of transfusion, for what is resuscitated is what had to be invented in the first place” (Diamond, “Modern Drama,” 5).
Griffin, “Birth of the History Play,” 217.
Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 67.
G. K. Hunter has an interesting take on how the past meets the future in history plays (particularly history plays by Shakespeare)
[Shakespeare] seeks to create specific though complex interrelations out of the narrative evasiveness of their “real life” stories, turning parataxis into hypotaxis and in all cases requiring the events to implicate a future that will explain their meaning … [the history play’s] future keeps opening up new possibilities instead of closing them down: “the king is dead; long live the king.” (“Notes on the Genre of the History Play,” 237–238)
In another article, Hunter states a similar idea in an interesting fashion
History plays are not shaped by the formal closures of death and marriage; they allow the open-endedness of history itself to appear—when one king dies another king emerges; time and politics grind on with a degree of indifference to the life-cycles of individuals. (“Truth and Art,” 20)
Think of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards (2009) when many moviegoers had trouble letting go of the fact that Tarantino drastically changed historical events.
Lorenz, “Unstuck in Time. Or: The Sudden Presence of the Past,” Tilmans et al., Performing the Past, 75. For a more philosophical, specifically ontological, approach to history and time, see Bentley, “Past and “Presence,” 349–361.
Lorenz, “Unstuck in Time,” 75.
Ibid. 82.
Ibid. 83.
Ibid. 84.
The following, since this book examines the modern history play, is meant only as an overview of the classical conceptions of the history play, which is mostly connected to early modern drama. For more on the subject of the history play, see Shortslef, “Acting as an Epitaph,” 11–24; Dillon, “The Early Tudor History Play,” 32–57; Ullyot, “Seneca and the Early Elizabethan History Play,” 98–124; Kewes, “The Elizabethan History Play,” 170–193; Cavanagh, Language and Politics,; Hattaway, “The Shakespearean History Play,” 3–24; Hoenselaars, “Shakespeare and the Early Modern History Play,” 25–40; Robinson, Writing the Reformation; Kurtz, “Rethinking Gender,” 267–287.
Griffin, “The Birth of the History Play,” 217.
Ibid.
Ibid. 218.
Ibid. 220.
Ibid. 217.
Ibid. 225.
“Never before had the ‘particulars’—the historical individual characters—been worth treating in terms of their anagogic significance … the particulars are treated as derivable from universals” (ibid. 229).
Ibid. 232.
Hunter, “Truth and Art in History Plays,” 20.
Ibid. 18.
Ibid. 18.
Ibid. 19.
“The medieval drama derives its formal stability from its recognition that human time has a fixed beginning and end (the Creation and Judgment). The shape of the Shakespearean history play, however, is denied this stability because, although time is felt as a linear process as in the Cycles, the ends of this process are nowhere in sight. Individual actions may be brought to completion, but the history play recognizes the impossibility of isolating the action from its place on the temporal continuum” (Kastan, “The Shape of Time,” 263, 270).
Weineck, “Sex and History,” 353. “Though his work is constantly read in terms of his own revolutionary politics, Büchner seems to have been equally interested in writing Rankean history. Perhaps as much as one-sixth of Danton’s Tod (1835) was transcribed from the histories Büchner used as sources. His title deliberately evokes the last play of Schiller’s trilogy, suggesting that Büchner is both responding to and refuting Schiller’s historiography” (Favorini, Memory at Play, 67).
Diamond, “Modern Drama,” 10.
de Certeau, The Writing of History, 10.
Ibid. 8.
Ibid. 11.
Ibid. 3–4.
Favorini, Memory in Play, 62.
Ibid. 62–63.
Ibid. 63.
Ibid.
Ibid. 64.
Ibid. 62.
Ibid. 67.
Ibid. 69.
Assmann, Cultural Memory, 24.
Ibid. 36.
Ibid. 55–56.
Ibid. 66–71.
Ibid. 42.
Ibid. 25.
Ibid. 90–92.
Ibid. 91.
Nietzsche, Use and Abuse of History, 3.
Ibid. 7.
Ibid. 11.
Ibid. 12–22.
Ibid. 72.
Ibid. 22.
Ibsen: “Speech to the Norwegian Students,” 49.
For a similar angle on modern historical drama, see Fischer, “Playwrights Playing with History,” 249–265.
For three articles on modern history plays (more about specific plays rather than the “genre”), see Crowley, “Memory and Forgetting,” 72–83; Hammond, “‘Is everything history?’” 1–23; and Carson, “Transformation of History into Drama,” 7–21.
Runia, “Burying the Dead,” 314.
Ibid. 321.
Bhabha, Nation and Narration, 3.
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© 2013 Michael Y. Bennett
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Bennett, M.Y. (2013). Introduction: Modern Drama and the Translation of History’s Narratives. In: Narrating the Past through Theatre: Four Crucial Texts. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137275424_1
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