Theatre History Notes

Theatre History Notes

Restoration Period

  • Most popular Spanish play during the restoration: Cape and Sword plays.
  • Famous woman playwright: Aphra Behn.
  • Aphra Behn:
    • Acted as a spy.
    • Was not celebrated due to being a woman pursuing her own career.
    • Also a poet and novelist.

Chinese Theatre

  • Popular play in Chinese northern theatre: Unjust to Nodal.
  • Southern Chinese style acts often consisted of 4-5 acts.

Classical Playwrights and Theatre

  • Lysistrata: A comedy about women going on strike.
  • Aeschylus: Best known for introducing two characters to the stage.
  • Terence: Best known for double plots and sympathetic characters.

Japanese Theatre

  • Styles of Japanese theater: Kabuki, Noh, and Bunraku.

French Theatre

  • Most popular French playwright: Moliere.

Roman Theatre

  • Plautus: Known for farce plays.

Early Theatre

  • First known performance: Abydos Passion Play in Egypt.

Seneca's Innovations

  • Monologues and soliloquies.
  • Ruminations about humanity.
  • Horrific acts depicted on stage.
  • Obsessive characters.
  • Seneca was a Roman playwright who rewrote some Greek plays

Thespis

  • Known for the idea of having one character (the first actor).

Medieval Theatre

  • Three Marys at the Tomb and Three Kings were liturgical plays.
  • Best-known play of the Dark (Middle) Ages: Everyman.
  • Three types of religious plays produced: Liturgical, Vernacular, and Morality plays.

Beijing Opera

  • Training duration: 6-12 years.

GOTE

  • Goals, Obstacles, Tactics, and Expectations.

Italian Theatre

  • Two types: Opera and Commedia dell'Arte.

Rediscovery

  • Roman author Plautus was rediscovered in 1429.

Play Types

  • Sanskrit play types: Rogue and social dramas.
  • Indian folk theatre elements: Music, stylized, ignoring realistic elements.

Japanese Cultural Events

  • Advent of Buddhism and the shogunate led to the rise of samurai culture.

Commedia dell'Arte Features

  • Unmasked main characters.
  • Masked side characters, including stock characters like masters and servants.
  • Harlequin character.
  • Slapstick comedy.
  • Improvised scripts.

Shakespearean Play Structure

  • Early Point of Attack
  • Chronological Organization
  • All Important Episodes are Shown on Stage
  • The Short Scene as the Basic Structural Unit
  • Time and Place Often Shift Rapidly
  • Tone Varies from Serious to Comic
  • A Moral Order Under Which Humans are Free to Make Their own Choice

Noh Theatre

  • Typical plot: Ghosts, demons, people who are obsessive, the divide between the physical realm and spiritual realm.
  • Noh plays were about: gods, deranged human beings, ghosts.

Kabuki Theatre

  • Innovation to kabuki theatre in the west: procedural arch

Chinese Theatre Actors

  • Actors in China were: Children of the Garden.

Common Themes in Noh Plays

  • Ghosts, demons or obsessed human beings whose souls cannot find rest because in life, they have been too much devoted to worldly honor love or some other goal that keeps drawing the spirit back to the physical world.

Historical Figures in Theatre

  • Ben Jonson was more highly regarded than Shakespeare at the time.

Comparison

  • Differences between Natyasastra and Poetics: Natyasastra is divinely inspired, whilst Poetics (Aristotle) is not.