A distillation of the popular and comic elements of medieval mystery plays, forged into a political and cultural weapon for the radical politics of today.

Publisher description

Joseph Farrell and Antonio Scuderi present an international collection of essays reevaluating the multifaceted performance art of Nobel laureate Dario Fo. The contributors, all of whom either have previously published on Fo or have worked with him, are the major Dario Fo scholars of three continents. Going beyond the Marxist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s, the editors and contributors try to establish an appropriate language in which to debate Fo's theater. They seek to identify the core of Fo's work, the material that will be of lasting value. This involves locating Fo in history, examining the nature of his development through successive phases, incorporating his politics into a wider framework of radical dissent, and setting his theatrical achievements in a context and a tradition. The essays cover every aspect of Dario Fo: as actor, playwright, performer, and songwriter. They also provide the historical background of Fo's theater, as well as an in-depth analyses of specific works and the contribution of Franca Rame.

Mistero Buffo is Dario Fo's one-man tour de force, in which he creates his own subversive version of Biblical stories. Infused with the rhythmic drive of a jazz improvisation, the immediacy of a newspaper headline, and the epic scope of a historical novel, Fo and his wife/collaborator Franca Rame have performed Mistero Buffo throughout the world to over 10 million people. One of the major theatrical artists of the twentieth century, Italy's Dario Fo was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature. Ron Jenkins' translations of Dario Fo have been performed across the country. He is the theater department chair at Wesleyan University.

Honorable Mention, Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies This book examines the theater of narration, an Italian performance genre and aesthetic that revisits historical events of national importance from local perspectives, drawing on the rich relationship between personal experiences and historical accounts. Incorporating original research from the private archives of leading narrators—artists who write and perform their work—Juliet Guzzetta argues that the practice teaches audiences how ordinary people aren’t simply witnesses to history but participants in its creation. The theater of narration emerged in Italy during the labor and student protests, domestic terrorism, and social progress of the 1970s. Developing Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s style of political theater, influenced by Jerzy Grotowski and Bertolt Brecht, and following in the freewheeling actor‐author traditions of the commedia dell’arte, narrators created a new form of popular theater that grew in prominence in the 1990s and continues to gain recognition. Guzzetta traces the history of the theater of narration, contextualizing its origins—both political and intellectual—and centers the contributions of Teatro Settimo, a performance group overlooked in previous studies. She also examines the genre’s experiments in television and media. The first full-length book in English on the subject, The Theater of Narration leverages close readings and a wealth of primary sources to examine the techniques used by narrators to remake history—a process that reveals the ways in which history itself is a theater of narration.

New York magazine was born in 1968 after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea.

The role of laughter and humour in the postmedieval citation, interpretation or recreation of the middle ages has hitherto received little attention, a gap in scholarship which this book aims to fill. Examining a wide range of comic texts and practices across several centuries, from Don Quixote and early Chaucerian modernisation through to Victorian theatre, the Monty Python films, television and the experience of visiting sites of "heritage tourism" such as the Jorvik Viking Museum at York, it identifies what has been perceived as uniquely funny about the Middle Ages in different times and places, and how this has influenced ideas not just about the medieval but also about modernity. Tracing the development and permutations of its various registers, including satire, parody, irony, camp, wit, jokes, and farce, the author offers fresh and amusing insight into comic medievalism as a vehicle for critical commentary on the present as well as the past, and shows that for as long as there has been medievalism, people have laughed at and with the middle ages. Louise D'Arcens is Associate Professor in English Literatures at the University of Wollongong.

The first and only full-length critical study of Dario Fo, the 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature Winner This book, now extensively rewritten and updated, remains the only full-length critical study to cover various phases of Dario Fo's theatrical career. It looks at Fo's political influences and also the influence on his work of various theatrical motifs, including the great clown traditions which stretch back to the middle ages. The political work of Dario Fo and his wife/collaborator Franca Rame is charted from the 1960s up to the present to give the reader clear insight into this playwright/performer's unique literary and theatrical strengths. Each of Fo's plays and productions is discussed at length and the author has included an extensive and updated bibliography which includes full production details, quotes and writings about Fo. Always a popular performer in his native Italy, Fo has been one of the world's most performed dramatists. In the author's words: he is the "people's court jester".

This collection of essays represents the first extended analysis of the nature and practice of modern translation into Scots. It comprises essays of two complementary kinds: reflections by translators on their practice in a given work, and critical analyses of the use of Scots in representative translations. The twelve essays cover poetry, fiction, drama and folk ballads, and translations from Greek, Latin, Chinese, Italian, French, Russian, Danish, Romanesco and Quebecois.