Engl 227
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Contents |
Creative Writing: Drama I
Readings
The Dialectic of Farce
- By Eric Bentley
- Farce is simple because it goes right at things
- It might the unmediated vision that characterizes farce
- Acceptance of everyday appearances
- Everyday Interpretation of things
- Brings together the interplay between direct, wild fantasies and everyday, drab realities.
- This is the farcical dialectic
- Farce can be grave
- unsmiling actors in serious roles
- The amateur tries to act the gaiety
- unsmiling actors in serious roles
- The surface of farce is grave and gay at the same time
- Harlequin acts his gay antics with poker-faced gravity
- They are both visible and part of the style
- mask/face, symbol/symbolized, appearance/reality
- They both have orderliness and mildness
- Double dialectic comes because there is disorder and violence underneath
- gay/grave and surface/beneath
- Harlequin acts his gay antics with poker-faced gravity
- specializes in keeping up appearances
- Unmasking in comedy is usually a single character in a climactic scene
- Unmasking in farce occurs all along.
- All coverings exist to be stripped off
- Violence itself is not the essence of farce.
- gentleness and delicacy is to heighten the effect of violence (and vice-versa)
- Dramatic art is not an art of extreme, but farce is.
- extreme case of the extreme
- exploits the widest possible contrast between tone and content, surface and substance
- If it is ever missing, there is a weakening in the drama
- "If it is dangerous to attempt a compromise between the two conflicting opposites of a dialectic, it is disastrous to accept one and forget the other."
- The dialectic relation is one of active conflict and development
- A dialogue has to be established between aggression and flippancy, between hostility and lightness of heart.
- The dialectic relation is one of active conflict and development
Dialectic of Tragedy
- By Eric Bentley
- In terms of disturbance and transcendence of disturbance
- Three patterns of tragic action
- Suffering and endurance
- Destruction and renewal
- Sacrifice and Expiation
- Each consists of a duality
- the negative elements being suffering, destruction and sacrifice
- the positive elements being endurance, renewal and expiation
- Suffering and endurance is included in the two others
- Seems to present the minimum demand of tragedy
- renewal and expiation are transcendence of suffering, but endurance is not
- Aristotle's two principal parts are Reversal and Recognition, and then added Disturbance (or Perturbation) of the spectator's spirit.
- Shakespeare might have written King Lear as a Christian justification of Evil
- But he might also be lost
- (How this bears on tragedy, I have no idea)
- Tragedy cannot be contained within any philosophy
- Sense is exactly what Shakespeare's play does not have
- (Ah I see)
- Sense is exactly what Shakespeare's play does not have
- Should we generalize and say that great tragedy disturbs but does not transcend?
- Not as "optimistic" and "positive" as we think it is
- (How can it be other than what we think it is?)
- Not as "optimistic" and "positive" as we think it is
- Tragedy embodies chaos, and the cosmos it offsets is that of the plot, characters, dialog and ideas
- "Song of despair"
- Singing is transcending despair
- "Song of despair"
- We learn how unequipped we are to learn very much about anything
- Teaching of human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself
- "The sympathies and antipathies of a tragic play defines the self of the playwright, and can therefore help to define the self of any spectator who enters into them."
Homework
Writing Exercise - Dec. 8th
- Write a short act based on a (fairy) tale or classical myth of your choice. (5-10 pages). Choose one of the genres above and apply it to the adaptation.
- Zelda?
- Red Riding Hood?
- Little Match-Seller?
