Readings of Dickens's historical novel, Barnaby Rudge (1840–41), have typically regarded its late-eighteenth-century plot, which includes an account of the Gordon Riots, as allegorizing the civil unrest of the 1830s and early 1840s. Critics have thus tended to address the ambitious and unruly apprentice, Sim Tappertit, and his conspiracy of disaffected adolescents, in the contexts of Chartism, Trade Unionism, the revived Protestant Association of Dickens's own period, or the socio-economic conditions of Victorian London. But the name of Tappertit's secret society, “the 'Prentice Knights,” its ideology and symbolism, also gesture towards an alternative, historical framework: the seasonal festivities and chivalric fantasies associated with apprentice culture, from Mediaeval and Early Modern England to Dickens's own time. Linking Sim Tappertit both to George Barnwell, apprentice-protagonist of George Lillo's The London Merchant (1731), and back to the citizen drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages, in plays such as Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599) and Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), this article illuminates the actions and characterization of Sim Tappertit and his 'Prentice Knights with reference to the social and literary history of apprentice misrule.
This book considers plays in which self-refl exive engagements with the traditions and forms of dramatic art illuminate historical themes and aid in the representation of historical events and, in doing so, formulates a genre. Termed historiographic metatheatre, this form has been, and remains, a seminal mode of political engagement and ideological critique in the contemporary dramatic canon. Locating its key texts within the traditions of historical drama, self-refl exivity in European theatre, debates in the politics and aesthetics of postmodernism, and currents in contemporary historiography, this book provides a new critical idiom for discussing the major works of the genre and others that utilize its techniques. Feldman studies landmarks in the theatre history of postwar Britain by Weiss, Stoppard, Brenton, Wertenbaker and others that use the device of the play-withinthe-play to explore constructions of nationhood, and of Britishness in particular. He argues those plays performed within the framing works are produced in places of exile where the marginalized negotiate the terms of national identity through performance.
Daniel Berrigan’s The Trial of the Catonsville Nine is based upon the transcript of a 1968 trial, during which Berrigan himself – Jesuit priest, prolific poet, and peace activist – and eight other members of the Catholic clergy and laity were indicted after incinerating over three hundred Vietnam draft files in protest against the war. A documentary verse drama, noteworthy for its complex, allusive structure, the play is traversed by a network of quotations from texts including Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Condemned of Altona, Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo, Heinar Kipphardt’s In the Manner of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Peter Weiss’s The Investigation, Jean Anouilh’s Becket, and Sophocles’ Antigone. Berrigan’s play thus engages with, and positions itself within, a rich tradition of legal or jurisprudential drama, a trans-historical mode of dramatic expression structured around juridical performance, jurisdictional conflict, and jurisprudential enquiry. Reading these interpolated passages alongside the versified trial transcript and Berrigan’s own library, this article interrogates the function and significance of this intertextual network, both as an act of genre formation and as an alternative jurisdiction for the readjudication of the Catonsville proceedings.
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