In nineteenth-century Europe the ruling elites viewed the theater as a form of communication which had enormous importance. The theater provided the most significant form of mass entertainment and was the only arena aside from the church in which regular mass gatherings were possible. Therefore, drama censorship occupied a great deal of the ruling class's time and energy, with a particularly focus on proposed scripts that potentially threatened the existing political, legal, and social order. This volume provides the first comprehensive examination of nineteenth-century political theater censorship at a time, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when the European population was becoming increasingly politically active.

Face stage fright and self-doubt with new courage! The experience of awe has rarely been considered by psychologists, but this extraordinary book makes up for that neglect. Frightful Stages explores all the shades of that strange emotion from reverence to terror. At its heart, awe is the condition of human suffering in situations that require you to act in all the senses of that deceptively simple word, whether on stage or off, whether in the presence of many or alone. Frightful Stages provides a multifaceted view of the semiotics of awe. It deals with its manifestations in film, on stage, in poetry, in ordinary lives as well as in the more extraordinary ones, including Bessie Smith, Carl Van Vechten, Barbra Streisand, Federico Fellini, Thomas Merton, and John Ashbery. This unprecedented book delineates the experience of awe in moments of stage fright, performance anxiety, and everyday interpersonal relations. Frightful Stages takes place on and off stage, before the curtain and behind, in the audience and on the screen. It explores the mysterious experience of awe in a multitude of contexts, including: Thomas Merton's psychoanalytic showdown with Gregory Zilboorg the chronic tensions between Apollonian reason and Dionysian instinct in myth, psychoanalysis, creation, and performance the ill-fated encounter between the greatest of all blues singers and a brilliant, self-loathing literary critic the moment of awe in experiential psychotherapy as seen by both the analyst and client the differences and similarities between stage fright and social phobia the intricate interrelationships between pernicious envy, emotional awkwardness, and fear a personal diary chronicling one man's crisis of panic, anguish, and self-doubt the complexities of feeling, offering, and accepting reverence in the psychotherapeutic relationship Frightful Stages gives clinicians and lay readers a variety of approaches from the analytic to the unanalytic, from the psychodynamic to the humanistic. It will appeal to a diverse audience, including therapists, clients, social theorists, cultural anthropologists, performers, and writers. Additionally, this book is intended to help artists deal with creative blocks, therapists cope with their own terrors, and all helping professionals understand bizarre phenomena.

This book discovers within early modern revenge tragedy the surprising shaping presence of a wide array of classical philosophies not commonly affiliated with the genre.

Honoré Daumier (1808–79), who was imprisoned early on for a politically offensive cartoon, painted scenes from seventeenth-century theatre and literature at moments of stifling censorship later in his career. He continued to find form for dangerous political dissent in the face of intense and shifting censorship laws by drawing on La Fontaine, Molière, and Cervantes, masters of dissimulation and critique in a newly glorified literary past. This book reveals new connections between legal repression and subversive fine-arts practice, showing the force of Daumier’s role in the broader stories of image-text relationships and political expression.

The concept of the public sphere, as first outlined by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, refers to the right of all citizens to engage in debate on public issues on equal terms. In this book, Christopher B. Balme explores theatre's role in this crucial political and social function. He traces its origins and argues that the theatrical public sphere invariably focuses attention on theatre as an institution between the shifting borders of the private and public, reasoned debate and agonistic intervention. Chapters explore this concept in a variety of contexts, including the debates that led to the closure of British theatres in 1642, theatre's use of media, controversies surrounding race, religion and blasphemy, and theatre's place in a new age of globalised aesthetics. Balme concludes by addressing the relationship of theatre today with the public sphere and whether theatre's transformation into an art form has made it increasingly irrelevant for contemporary society.