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  • Dramaturgy in Shakespeare and Brecht
  • R. B. Parker (bio)
R. B. Parker

Assistant Professor of English, Trinity College, University of Toronto

notes

1. This paper was read at the annual meeting of the Humanities Association of Canada, June 11, 1962. The first epigraph is from Brecht’s obituary in the Observer, quoted by Charles H. Shattuck, “The first book on Brecht.” Accent (Winter, 1959); the second is a remark of Eugene Ionesco, in “The World of Ionesco,” New York Times (June 1, 1958).

2. Bertolt Brecht, Plays I (Methuen, 1960), 344.

3. Cited by Gerhard Nellhaus, “Puntila: 2 episodes,” Accent (Winter, 1954), 123.

4. “On Shakespeare’s Play Hamlet,” trans. John Willet, The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht (London, 1959), 120.

5. Willet, 124.

6. Eric Bentley, Seven Plays by Bertolt Breche (New York, 1961), xxxiv.

7. See Martin Esslin, Brecht: a choice of evils (London, 1959), 101.

8. J. R. Brown, “S. Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Survey 15 (1962), 148–9.

9. This is a difference of emphasis between Brecht and Stanislavski, not a complete divergence. Their actual methods are very similar, but whereas Stanislavski emphasizes emotional identification, Brecht emphasizes deliberate copying of externals.

10. See Ronald Gray, Brecht (London, 1961), 100.

11. Joyce’s musings on a “language of gesture” in Stephen Hero are concerned solely with che aesthetic beauty of subtle rhythms and the possibility of conveying this beauty by gesture, while the theories of R. P. Blackmur and Kenneth Burke are much more fundamental than Brecht’s approach.

12. Bernard Beckermann, Shakespeare and the Globe (New York, 1962), ch. iv.

13. Plays I, 179.

14. Notes to Die Mutter (1933). cited by Willet, 176.

15. Since this article was written, Anne Righter’s Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play has appeared, which examines in detail “the equilibrium of involvement and distance characteristic of the Shakespearean attitude towards the audience.”

16. See Gray, 62–3.

17. Trans. John Willet, in Toby Cole, ed., Playwrights and Playwriting (New York, 1961), 19.

18. Beckermann, 46.

19. Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art (Madison, 1954); Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History (New York, 1932); Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762).

20. See Cole, 99.

21. Willet, 153.

22. Willet, 100.

23. Shakespeare Survey 15, 150.

24. Willet, 154.

25. Seven Plays by Bertolt Brecht, 103.

26. Cf. Esslin, ch. x, “Reason versus Instinct.”

27. Cole, 87.

28. See Esslin, 126–9.

29. Bertolt Brecht, Plays I, 182.

30. Beckermann, 34.

31. Beckermann, 57.

32. In production, I would have Lear’s entrance made at as great a distance from the other characters and from the audience as possible. The fourfold “howl” first warns us that something is happening to Lear which we are not yet in a position to share; then his “O, you are men of stone” emphasizes this distance between him and the other characters (and the audience).

33. Seven Plays by Bertolt Brecht, xx.

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