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Finite jest: Performance, authorshi...

Preiss, Richard Mark.

Finite jest: Performance, authorship and the assimilations of the stage clown in early modern English theater, 1588--1673.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Finite jest: Performance, authorship and the assimilations of the stage clown in early modern English theater, 1588--1673.
Author:	Preiss, Richard Mark.
Description:	283 p.
Notes:	Adviser: Stephen Orgel.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-08, Section: A, page: 2941.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International66-08A.
Subject:	Literature, English.
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3186375
ISBN:	9780542286513

Finite jest: Performance, authorship and the assimilations of the stage clown in early modern English theater, 1588--1673.
Preiss, Richard Mark.

Finite jest: Performance, authorship and the assimilations of the stage clown in early modern English theater, 1588--1673. - 283 p.

Adviser: Stephen Orgel.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2005.

An eccentric sidelight in the dramatic record, the Elizabethan stage-clown is often analyzed in terms that predictably recapitulate this marginality. As bumpkin, servant, or rogue, he is for us a transgressive species of mimesis; as a broader theatrical function, though, he transcended the mimetic altogether. A polyvalent, interactive persona, the clown was expected to speak not just "more than is set down" but as well when nothing was set down, to improvise interludes, poetic jousts with the crowd, and the raucous finale of the jig. The star of a show our texts occlude, he catalyzed a counterdrama that rendered every performance irreproducible and blurred the line between its producers and consumers. Yet precisely because he personified the defining crisis of late-Tudor theater---the new, anarchic patronage of a paying public---he proved vital to the reformation it demanded. This dissertation takes clowning as a means of redescribing the emergence of dramatic authorship, more problematic than other kinds of literary production because it involved collaborative performance---not just that of the actors but, especially in the early modern playhouse, that of the audience, whose participation was constitutive of the theatrical experience. If dramatic authorship marks the terminus of a process whereby this experience starts to become textually determined, then performance itself has to be complicit in such a process; clowning, whose improvisation structured the relationship with the audience, is thus paradoxically advanced as the site where "scriptedness" correspondingly began. Finite Jest looks at the ways in which clowns became---and had to become---"authors" before playwrights themselves could, and subsequently at how playwrights used precisely the existing conventions of popular performance as a means of defining and privileging their own authority.

ISBN: 9780542286513Subjects--Topical Terms:

212435
Literature, English.

Finite jest: Performance, authorship and the assimilations of the stage clown in early modern English theater, 1588--1673.
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245 1 0 $a Finite jest: Performance, authorship and the assimilations of the stage clown in early modern English theater, 1588--1673.
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502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2005.
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