Biblical Violence in Catholic and Calvinist Tragedy

This chapter analyzes biblical violence in Catholic and Calvinist tragedy by examining dramatic adaptations of the stories of Cain and Abel and David and Goliath. Thomas Lecoq’s Tragédie de Cain (1580) imitates the early sixteenth-century Mistére du Viel Testament and uses Cain’s murder of Abel as a counterexample of virtuous behavior at the peak of the religious wars, encouraging spectators to behave peacefully toward their neighbors despite differing beliefs. The chapter then considers how the Calvinist tragedies by Joachim de Coignac (La Desconfiture de Goliath, c.1551) and Louis Des Masures (David combattant, 1563/1566) use violence as a positive, liberating force. David’s defeat of Goliath mirrors the Reformed Church’s hopeful victory against the Roman Catholic Church. This chapter argues that Coignac and Des Masures depict David’s violence as a morally good act, yet their plays raise theological, moral, and epistemological questions of when and why it is acceptable to kill.

Comparing the Reception of Quo vadis and Ben-Hur in the United States, 1896–1913

Shortly after the Boston publisher Little, Brown and Company issued Jeremiah Curtin’s English translation of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel Quo Vadis: A Tale of the Time of Nero, it was soon compared in American newspapers to Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. The plot of Wallace’s novel, published in 1880 and by 1896 the most commercially successful American novel of its generation, concluded before the reign of Nero, so Sienkiewicz’s novel was widely perceived as a chronological sequel or historical comparandum to Ben-Hur. Comparisons ranged from publication announcements to advertising to literary analyses in contemporary newspapers. Similarly, when large-budget dramatic adaptations of both Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur were in development and production during the first decade of the twentieth century, there was a perceived head-to-head competition. This chapter reviews the contrasting backgrounds of the authors—Wallace being an American evangelical, Sienkiewicz a Polish Catholic—and the parallel successes of Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur during this period (mostly before the American premier of Guazzoni’s film) in the arenas of literature, drama, film, and business commerce. Its source material consists mostly of reviews, advertising, and analyses published in contemporary American newspapers.

“Materia conveniente modis”: Early Modern Dramatic Adaptations of Ovid

This chapter takes up various modes of Ovidian adaptation. The poet and his poems operate not only as sources for later works but also as models for structure. The essay looks at the way that Jonson’s play about writing — Poetaster — uses Ovid as a character while also considering his poetic legacy by using a slight revision of Marlowe’s translation of Amores 1.15 to stand in for the Ovidian poetic corpus. Ovid works as both a source and a problem in the play. In Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, Ovid is an important presence but more as a source of structure than of content. I argue that the way the play defers narrative has much to do with Ovidian techniques of narrative deferral that produce a desire to hear the deferred tale. In both cases, Ovid gets adapted in ways that go beyond retelling stories from the Metamorphoses.

Performing the Identity of the Medium: Adaptation and Television Historiography

This article focuses on how histories of television construct narratives about what the medium is, how it changes, and how it works in relation to other media. The key examples discussed are dramatic adaptations made and screened in Britain. They include early forms of live transmission of performance shot with multiple cameras, usually in a TV studio, with the aim of bringing an intimate and immediate experience to the viewer. This form shares aspects of medial identity with broadcast radio and live television programmes, and with theatre. The article also analyses adaptations of a later period, mainly filmed dramas for television that were broadcast in weekly serialized episodes, and shot on location to offer viewers a rich engagement with a realized fictional world. Here, film production techniques and technologies are adapted for television, alongside the routines of daily and weekly scheduling that characterize television broadcasting. The article identifies and analyses the questions about what is proper to television that arise from the different forms that adaptations took. The analyses show that television has been a mixed form across its history, while often aiming to reject such intermediality and claim its own specificity as a medium. Television adaptation has, paradoxically, operated as the ground to assert and debate what television could and should be, through a process of transforming pre-existing material. The performance of television’s role has taken place through the relay, repetition, and remediation that adaptation implies, and also through the repudiation of adaptation.

Roman Tribune Cola di Rienzo (1347), Res Gestae Divi Augusti and Lex de Imperio Vespasiani

The anonymous and fragmentarily preserved Romance-dialect Chronicle describing the history of Rome in 1325–1360, the extensive correspondence between Cola di Rienzo (1313–1354) and rulers, nobles, Church dignitaries, and intellectuals (especially Petrarch) in Italy and abroad, as well as various documentary sources allow us to trace Rienzo’s career in considerable detail. A papal notary, a scholar in Classical literature, an exceptional orator and a copyist and translator of Ancient Roman inscriptions, Rienzo, aided by a group of followers, overthrew the baron rule in Rome in May 1347, assumed the title of ‘Roman Tribune’ and seized power with the aim of reuniting Italy under a common emperor, a concept modelled on the first Roman emperor, Augustus. After undertaking a number of more or less successful measures, public manifestations and diplomatic activities, he was forced to retreat by a clash with the barons’ army even before the end of the year. After years of exile, he returned triumphant in the middle of 1354 to seize power, but the first few weeks of tyranny and arbitrary measures led to his tragic demise at the hands of an infuriated mob. Later he grew into the subject of myth, portrayed in numerous literary, musical, and dramatic adaptations. The present paper examines two ancient documents crucial to the formation of the principate (the renewal of which was Cola’s objective), i.e. Augustus’ account of his own deeds (Res gestae divi Augusti), which is mentioned by Suetonius and known from three epigraphically attested copies from Asia Minor, and a bronze plaque bearing a law on the conferment of powers on Emperor Vespasian, the so-called Lex de imperio Vespasiani. The plaque was used as propaganda by Cola during his preparations for the coup. The inconsistencies between the parts of the law preserved on the plaque (it must have been preceded by at least one other plaque) and the account of Cola’s interpretation as given in the anonymous Chronicle raise a number of questions, which resist definitive answers.

Shakespeare’s Tragedies on the Operatic Stage

Shakespeare has inspired almost four hundred operas, among which many are based on the tragedies. Best known are those works, composed from the beginning of the nineteenth century on, by Rossini (Otello), Gounod (Roméo et Juliette), Thomas (Hamlet), and Verdi (Macbeth, Otello), which together placed Shakespearean tragedy squarely on the operatic stage. But the history of operatic (as well as other musical-dramatic) adaptations of Shakespeare stretches from the seventeenth century to the present day, tracing a complex history of musical and theatrical responses to the tragedies, a history that enriches and complicates our sense of what it means to create music-drama.

The fabliaux as popular literature

In addition to the well-known scholarly editions and translations of fabliaux, there are over a hundred other selections which bear witness to a enduring popular interest in the fabliaux over the last two centuries. They express attitudes which mirror the development of critical approaches to the Middle Ages in general and to the fabliaux in particular. By contrast, the choice of texts in smaller selections reveals an unchanging dominance of a small group of fabliaux which share certain characteristics. A further constant is the ‘heritage’ approach, manifested in a local focus, dramatic adaptations and bibliophile editions.