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IMC 2011: Sessions

Session 1516: Poverty, Wealth, and the Theatre

Thursday 14 July 2011, 09.00-10.30

Moderator/Chair:Margaret Rogerson, Department of English, University of Sydney
Paper 1516-aThe Root of Evil in Representations of Judgment Day
(Language: English)
Thomas L. Long, School of Nursing, University of Connecticut
Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Rhetoric, Sermons and Preaching, Theology
Paper 1516-b'Rich' and 'Poor', 'Giants' and 'Pigmies' in The Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissil (1599): An Onstage Renaissance Criticism of the Griselda Legend
(Language: English)
Chi-Fang Sophia Li, Department of Foreign Languages & Literature, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan
Index terms: Art History - Painting, Language and Literature - Middle English, Performance Arts - Drama, Women's Studies
Abstract

Paper -a:
This paper serves as the background for a paper I will present at the Bible in the 17th-Century Conference in York the week prior to IMC 2011. This paper performs a rhetorical analysis of literary representations of the soul's judgment after death (either individual judgment or general judgment at Doomsday) in morality plays, mystery plays, sermons and other texts in order to determine how their catechetical purposes are served through a critique of wealth and its use or abuse. In teaching medieval listeners and readers about virtues and vices, to what extent do these texts represent the love of money as the root of evil?

Paper -b:
This paper examines the language of 'high' and 'low', 'rich' and 'poor', 'king' and 'clown', 'giants' and 'pigmies' in Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton's Patient Grissil (1599), terms the play sets up for character re-visions, social re-construction, and hierarchical reversal of the medieval Griselda legend. Citing from the Sienese painting of the story of patient Griselda (c. 1493) the iconic moments and the scenes paradoxically left unpainted and distanced in the background, this paper revisits the play's iconographic moments and its highlighted vernacular subject matter in conjunction with Chaucer's Clerk's Tale. This paper aims to create a dialogue between art and theatre arts, literature and performance, workshop practices and theatrical collaboration, performance theatre and theatre of domestic trials in relation to the medieval and Renaissance traditions of carnival and theatre.