Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre

Erscheinungsjahr 2000
ISBN: 978-0-19-815977-3
Verlag: OUP Oxford

Buch, Englisch, 280 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 145 mm x 222 mm, Gewicht: 535 g

This is a study of one of theatre's quietest but most radical innovators. The playwright, poet, and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) has been called the prodigal father of the Theatre of the Absurd. Admired by writers as diverse as Mallarmé and Yeats, Artaud and Strindberg, Chekhov and Jarry, Maeterlinck was the most celebrated avant-garde playwright of his day. By 1900 he had given theatre a new set of bearings: 'static theatre', 'the theatre of the unexpressed', and 'the tragic of the everyday'. He had, according to Rilke, relocated theatre's centre of gravity, replacing action with inaction, events with the eventless, and dialogue with a semantics of silence as expressive as any of Symbolism's most sophisticated poetic constructions.

The author of the supreme Symbolist play, Pelléas and Mélisande, and of haunting, minimalist dramas of waiting (L'Intruse, Les Aveugles, Intérieur), Maeterlinck laid the foundations for the most revolutionary theatre of the twentieth century. Opening with a chapter on Maeterlinck's Symbolist and decadent beginnings, and proceeding by way of comparative readings of Maeterlinck and contemporary Symbolist dramatic theory (with particular attention to Mallarmé), Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre provides close readings of the one-act plays, and his seminal theories of static theatre and the theatre of waiting.

Autoren/Hrsg.

McGuinness, Patrick

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Dramen und Dramatiker
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Introduction

- Symbolist Beginnings

- La Princesse Maleine and Symbolist Theatre

- Maeterlinck, Mallarmé, and Symbolist Dramatic Theory

- Theatre and the Invisible Principle: Pelléas and Mélisande

- Using the Stage: the One-act Plays

- The Fecund Interval: 'Le Tragique quotidien'

- Conclusion

- Bibliography

- Index