The Early Years at the National Theatre: Harrison’s Molière and Racine

While Tony Harrison’s career as a poet was perhaps inevitable by the early 1970s with the publication of his award winning volume The Loiners (1970), this chapter argues that it was not a given that a significant portion of Harrison’s poetic output would be for the stage, nor that the British Theatre would readily welcome a contemporary poet writing verse plays. I argue that Harrison’s career in the theatre was fostered by his early commissions from the National Theatre and the collaborators he worked with in those early years, especially director John Dexter. Their work together on Harrison’s translations/adaptations of two seventeenth-century French plays—Molière’s Le Misanthrope (1666) and Racine’s Phèdre (1677), staged as The Misanthrope (1973) and Phaedra Britannica (1975)—allowed Harrison to bring to bear on his theatrical translations for the modern stage the ideas that he had been exploring in his doctoral thesis on Vergil and translation. Moreover, the close involvement of Harrison from commission to production served to reinforce his belief that writing for the stage and the page are very different things, with theatrical texts needing to facilitate a three dimensional performance. This would shape the nature of Harrison’s dramatic verse for decades to come. The success of The Misanthrope, which critics praised for the brilliance of its translation, was essential in establishing the claim of contemporary poets to a place on the modern British stage.

Retrieving Fin-de-Siècle Women Poets: The Transformative Myths, Fragments and Voices of Webster, Blind and Levy

The critical recuperation of late nineteenth-century women poets is due significantly to the renewed interest in and study of the poetical works of Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind and Amy Levy (1860-90) by postmodern readers. A major reason for this ‘salvage’ may be that they represent and embody the profound and extraordinary changes that characterize the British Fin de Siècle, in which the transition from the Victorians to the Moderns implied the transformation or reconfiguration of certain myths or (hi)stories and the critical re-use or ‘recycling’ of major literary forms. This essay seeks to demonstrate that while Webster's poetry is firmly grounded in social activism and the exploration and dramatization of the nature of female experience, Blind's epic and dramatic verse creates new myths of human destiny, reclaiming the Poet's role as the singer of the age's scientific deeds, while Levy's lyrics signal the New Woman poet's role as victim of the pressures of emancipation. Through these hybrid and fragmentary forms, Webster, Blind and Levy literally give voice to unspeakable feelings and situations, in which the anomalous and the marginal are made central.

Ennius, Quintus, epic and dramatic poet, 239–169 BCE

Ennius was the most prolific poet in the early period of Latin literature and is particularly known for his epic and his dramas. He composed plays for public festivals down to the year of his death, a major narrative epic, a large amount of non-dramatic verse, and at least one work in prose. While Ennius’ entire output only survives in fragments, his life and writings are better documented than those of most other early Republican writers, which is partly the result and an indication of his esteem among the Romans.

Ants Oras and the Analysis of Early Modern English Dramatic Verse

Ants Oras’s contribution to the study of early modern English dramatic verse is of enduring value. In 1956 his article on extra monosyllables in Henry VIII gave much needed support to the view that both this play of the Shakespeare First Folio (1623) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (first published in a quarto of 1634) were works in which Shakespeare had collaborated with John Fletcher. Oras’s Pause Patterns in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (1960), with its huge amount of quantitative data and readily intelligible graphs, greatly enhanced understanding of how blank verse developed from the 1580s to the closing of the London theatres in 1642. Moreover, use of Oras’s techniques of analysis has continued to throw light on questions of chronology and authorship surrounding Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights. Among plays illuminated in this way have been The Revenger’s Tragedy, Pericles, Thomas of Woodstock, Sir Thomas More, and Arden of Faversham.

Shakespeare’s Late Style

‘Shakespeare’s Late Style’ explores stylistic aspects of Shakespeare’s dramatic verse (and a little of the prose) in plays composed after Hamlet. It suggests that Dryden was among the first to recognize that Shakespeare’s style changed over time and seems to have thought that the style became less ‘pestered’ with ‘figurative expressions’ as the career advanced. Like most early commentators, however, Dryden left little detailed analysis to support his larger, often metaphorical, claims. The purpose of this chapter is to identify the features of Shakespeare’s style in the second half of his professional career, to explore the imaginative effect of those features, and to speculate on why these changes from his earlier plays might have occurred. One principal claim made in this chapter concerns the degree to which the dramatic verse is rooted in dramatic events and characters’ motivations and designs. Increasing abstraction in both thought and expression combine to create the distinctive quasi-allegorical qualities especially visible in the four or five plays last written by Shakespeare alone or in collaboration.

Shakespeare’s Dramatic Verse Line

Using examples from Shakespeare’s early, middle, and late plays and from his Tragedies, Comedies, and Histories, this chapter charts developments and explores patterns in Shakespeare’s dramatic verse line across the genres and time span of his writing career. It examines incidences of end-stopping and enjambment, mid-line breaks, shared, short, and long verse lines, considering the ways in which these relate to the subject matter of scenes and may function as a means of reflecting a character’s emotional or mental state. The chapter draws on evidence from Renaissance prosodic accounts, printed texts, theatrical papers, and evidence relating to early modern theatre practice and considers the ways in which the features of the dramatic line are interpreted by modern theatre practitioners.