The author examines comedies based on a structure first used by Menander in the fourth century B.C. and brought to its precise formulations and brilliance by Marivaux in the eighteenth century A.D.

This book focuses on how we perceive, know and interpret culture across disciplinary boundaries. The study combines theoretical and critical contexts for close readings in culture through discussions of literature, philosophy, history, psychology and visual arts by and about men and women in Europe, the Americas and beyond.

William D Howarth sets Le Mariage de Figaro and Beaumarchais's other dramatic works in the broad historical context of pre-revolutionary France, providing a unique and authoritative study of the dramatist and his plays. He presents detailed analyses of the plays themselves, discussing their critical receptions, their influence on drama of the period and their legacy. Included is a discussion of the operatic adaptations: Mozart's Mariage de Figaro and Rossini's Le Barbier de Seville. The author also provides analyses of sketches and fragments only recently re-discovered. Beaumarchais and the Theatre is a comprehensive and much needed study of one of the most significant playwrights of the turbulent eighteenth century. It is invaluable reading for students of theatre history.

Volume 10, dedicated to 'Comedy, Irony, Parody', celebrates the first decade of Comparative Criticism in a light-hearted vein. Michael Silk opens with a wide-ranging essay asserting the primacy of comedy and declaring its independence of tragedy. T. L. S. Sprigge explores philosophers who dared to write on laughter: Schopenhauer and Bergson. Bernard Harrison looks at the twentieth century's favourite comic novel, Tristram Shandy, in the light of Locke's views on 'the particular'. Peter Brand pursues the theatrical arts of disguises, masking, and gender-swapping through Renaissance Europe, from Ariosto to Shakespeare. Jane H. M. Taylor traces the danse macabre in modern 'black humour'. Christine Brooke-Rose, distinguished novelist and critic, reads from and comments on her own witty fictions. Michael Wood describes how Lolita outwitted her seducer.

Richard A. Brooks, general editor, v.

This study explores the evolution of Molière's comedy as a careful amalgamation of comedy and philosophical satire.

In this interdisciplinary exploration of the cultural and social history of early 19th-century France, Patricia Mainardi focuses on what was considered a major social problem of the time - adultery. In a period when expectations about marriage were changing, the problems of husbands, wives and lovers became a major theme in theatre, literature and the visual arts. The author demonstrates that this intense interest was historically grounded in the post-revolutionary collision between the new concept of the individual's right to happiness and the traditional prerogatives of family and state. duty or happiness more important? Are arranged marriages doomed to be empty of love and poisoned by adultery? Should adulterous wives and their lovers be punished while husbands may commit adultery with impunity? Out of such legal, social and cultural debates ultimately emerged modern bourgeois family values, Mainardi argues. And she illuminates how art, in all its varieties, both influences and is influenced by social change.

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It is widely accepted that English Renaissance drama owes its extraordinary richness and variety to the blending of elements originating from the medieval heritage and classical and Italian dramatic traditions. This grafting of the "Italian world" onto the English Renaissance goes far beyond the conventional research of the literary sources. The articles in this collection explore English Renaissance drama through new and challenging aspects of influence and through investigations into classical and Italian theater. The volume moves from early Elizabethan to late Jacobean drama. The area of research ranges from New Classical Comedy to commedia erudita, from the Renaissance theory of tragedy and tragicomedy to the birth of pastoral drama and beyond.

Applying recent developments in new historicism and cultural materialism - along with the new perspectives opened up by the current debate on intertextuality and the construction of the theatrical text - the essays collected here reconsider the pervasive influence of Italian culture, literature, and traditions on early modern English drama. The volume focuses strongly on Shakespeare but also includes contributions on Marston, Middleton, Ford, Brome, Aretino, and other early modern dramatists. The pervasive influence of Italian culture, literature, and traditions on the European Renaissance, it is argued here, offers a valuable opportunity to study the intertextual dynamics that contributed to the construction of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical canon. In the specific area of theatrical discourse, the drama of the early modern period is characterized by the systematic appropriation of a complex Italian iconology, exploited both as the origin of poetry and art and as the site of intrigue, vice, and political corruption. Focusing on the construction and the political implications of the dramatic text, this collection analyses early modern English drama within the context of three categories of cultural and ideological appropriation: the rewriting, remaking, and refashioning of the English theatrical tradition in its iconic, thematic, historical, and literary aspects.