In the Name of God

Literary Terms for the course of Introduction to Literature II Absurd, literature of the (1) :The term is applied to a number of works in drama and prose fiction which have in common the view that the human condition is essentially absurd, and this condition can be adequately represented only in works of literature that are themselves absurd. Both the mood and dramaturgy of absurdity were anticipated as early as 1896 in Alfred Jarrys French play Ubiroi(Ubu the King). The literature has its roots also in the movements of expressionism and surrealism, as well as in the fiction, written in the 1920s, of Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis). The current movement, however, emerged in France after the horrors of World War II (1939-45) as a rebellion against basic beliefs and values in traditional culture and literature. This tradition had included the assumptions that human beings are fairly rational creatures who live in an at least partially intelligible universe, that they are part of an ordered social structure, and that they may be capable of heroism and dignity even in defeat. After the 1940s, however, there was a widespread tendency, especially prominent in the existential philosophy of men of letters such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, to view a human being as an isolated existent who is cast into an alien universe; to conceive the human world as possessing no inherent truth, value, or meaning; and to represent human life in its fruitless search for purpose and significance, as it moves from the nothingness where it came toward the nothingness where it must end-as an existence which is both anguished and absurd. As Camus said in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), In a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile . . . . This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity. Or as Eugene Ionesco, French author of The Bad Soprano (1949), The Lesson (1951), and other plays in the theater of the absurd, has put it: Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, anduseless. Samuel Beckett (1906-89), the most eminent and influential writer in this mode, in such plays as Waiting for Godot (1954) and Endgame (1958), project the irrationalism, helplessness, and absurdity of life in dramatic forms that reject realistic settings, logical reasoning, or a coherently evolving plot. Waiting for Godot, presents two tramps in a waste place, fruitlessly and all but hopelessly waiting for an unidentified person, Godot, who may or may not exist and with whom they sometimes thing they remember that they may have an appointment; as one of them remarks, Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, its awful.

Act and Scene (2) An act is a major division in the action of a play. In England this division was introduced by Elizabethan dramatists, who imitated ancient Roman plays by structuring the action into five acts. Late in the nineteenth century a number of writers followed the example of Chekhov and

Ibsen by constructing plays in four acts. In the twentieth century the most common form for traditional nonmusical dramas has been three acts. Acts are often subdivided into scenes, which in modern plays usually consist of units of action in which there is no change of place or break in the continuity of time.In the conventional theater with a proscenium arch that frames the front of the stage, the end of a scene is usually indicated by a dropped curtain or a dimming of the lights, and the end of an act by a dropped curtain and in intermission.

Alienation effect (6) In his epic theater of the 1920s and later, the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht adapted the Russian formalist concept of defamiliarization into what he called the alienation effect. The German term is also translated as estrangement effect or distancing effect; the last is closest to /Brechts notion, in that it avoids the negative connotations of jadedness, incapacity to feel, and social apathy that the word alienation has acquired in English. This effect, Brecht said, is used by the dramatist to make familiar aspect of the present social reality seem strange, so as to prevent the emotional identification or involvement of the audience with the characters and their actions in a play. His aim was instead to evoke a critical distance and attitude in the spectators, in order to arouse them to take action against, rather than simply to accept, the state of society and behavior represented on the stage. Antihero Antihero is the chief person in amodern novel or play whose character is widely discrepant from that of the traditional protagonist, or hero, of a serious literary work. Instead of manifesting largeness, dignity, power, or heroism, the antihero is petty, ignominious, passive, clownish, or dishonest. Example: The heroine of Moll Flanders by Defoe, Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for

Godotby Samuel Beckett.

Chorus (45) Among the ancient Greeks the chorus was a group of people, wearing masks, who sang or chanted verses while performing dancelike movements at religious festivals. A similar chorus played a part in Greek tragedies, where they served mainly as commentators on the dramatic actions and events who expressed traditional moral, religious, and social attitudes. Chronicle Plays (47) Chronicle plays were dramatic works based on the historical materials in the English Chronicles by Raphael Holinshed and others. They achieved high popularity late in the sixteenth century,

when the patriotic fervor following the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 fostered a demand for plays dealing eith English history. The early chronicle plays presented a loosely knit series of events during the reign of an English king and depended for effect mainly on a bustle of stage battles, pageantry, and spectacle. Example: Shakespeares Henry VIII, Richard II Historical plays: This term is often applied more broadly to any drama based mainly on historical materials, such as Shakespeares plays Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra, Arthur Millers The Crucible (1953).

Problem play(287) Problem play is a type of drama that was popularized by the Norwegian playwright HenrikIbsen. In problem plays, the situation faced by the protagonist is put forward by the authors as a representative instance of a contemporary social problem; often the dramatist manages-by the use of a character who speaks for the author, or by the evolution of the plot, or both- to propose a solution to the problem which is at odds with prevailing opinion. This issue may be the inadequate autonomy, scope, and dignity allotted to women in the middle-class nineteenthcentury family. Example: Dolls House (1879) by Ibsen A subtype of the modern problem play is the discussion play, in which the social issue is not incorporated into a plot but expounded in the give and take of a sustained debate among the characters. Example: Bernard Shaws Getting Married Comedy In the most common literary application, a comedy is a fictional ork in which the materials are selected and managed primarily in order to interest and amuse us: the characters and their discomfitures engage our pleasurable attention rather than our profound concern, we are made to feel confident that no great disaster will occuran usually the action turns out happily for the chief characters. The term Zcomedy is customarily applied only to plays for the stage or to mo tion pictures; it should be noted, however, that the comic form, as just defined, also occurs in prose fiction and narrative poetry. Within the very broad spectrum of dramatic comedy, the following types are frequently distinguished: Romantic comedy: It was developed by Elizabethan dramatists such as As You Like It. Such comedy represents a love affair that involves a beautiful and engaging heroine (sometimes disguised as a man); the course of this love does not run smooth, yet overcomes all difficulties to end in a happy union. Northrop Frye points out that some of Shakespeares romantic comedies manifest a movement from the normal world of conflict and trouble into the green world the forest of Arden in As You Like It., or the fairy haunted wood of A Midsummer Nights Dream

in which the problems and injustices of the ordinary world are dissolved, enemies reconciled, and true lovers united. Frye regards that phenomenon as evidence that comic plots derive from primitive myths and rituals that celebrated the victory of spring over winter. Satiric comedy: ridicules political policies or philosophical doctrines, or else attacks deviations from the accepted social order by making ridiculous the violators of its standards of morals or manners. Examples: 1) The early plays of Aristophanes, 450-c, 385 BC, whose plays mocked political, philosophical, and literary matters of his age. 2) Ben Jonsons Volpone(a satiric play that is sometimes called corrective comedy). In Valpone, for example, the greed and ingenuity of one or more intelligent but rascally swindlers, and the equal greed but stupid gullibility of their victims, are made grotesquely or repulsively ludicrous rather than lightly amusing. The comedy of manners originated in the New Comedy of the GreekMenander, 342-292 BC and was developed by the Roman dramatists Plautus and Terence in the third and second centuries BC. Their plays dealt with the vicissitudes of young lovers and included what became the stock characters of much later comedy, such as the clever servant, old and stodgy parents, and the wealthy rival. The English comedy of manners was early exemplified by Shakespeares Loves Labours Lost and Much Ado about Nothing, and was given a high polish in Restoration comedy(1660-1700). The Restoration form owes much to the brilliant dramas of the French writer Moliere, 1662-73. It deals with the relations and intrigues of men and women living in a sophisticated upper-class society, and relies for comic effect in large part on the wit and sparkle of the dialogue-often in the form of repartee, a witty conversational give-and take which constitutes a kind of verbal fencing match - as well as on the violations of social standards and decorum by would be wits, jealous husbands, conniving rivals, and foppish dandies. Example: William Congreves The Way of the World Farce is a type of comedy designed to provoke the audience to simple, hearty laughter belly laughs, in the parlance of the theater. To do so it commonly employs high exaggerated or caricatured types of characters. Puts them into improbable and ludicrous situations, and often makes free use of sexual mix-ups, broad verbal humor, and physical bustle and horseplay. Farce was a component in the comic episodes in medieval miracle plays and constituted the matter of the Italian commedia dellarte in theRenaissance. Examples: Shakespeares The Taming of the Shrew and Oscar Wildes The Importance of Being Ernest A distinction is often made between high and low comedy. High comedy, as described by George Meredith in the classic essay The Idea of Comedy (1877), evokes intellectual laughter thoughtful laughter from spectators who remain emotionally detached from the action at the spectacle of folly, pretentiousness, and incongruity in human behavior. Meredith finds its highest form within the comedy of manners, in the combats of wit between such intelligent, highly verbal, and well-matched lovers as Benedick and Beatrice in Shakespeares Much Ado about Nothing (1598-99) and Mirabell and Millament in Congreves The Way of the World (1700).Low comedy, at other extreme, has little or no intellectual appeal, but undertakes to

arouse laughter by jokes, or gags, and by slapstick humor and boisterous or clownish p hysical activity; it is, therefore, one of the common components of farce.

Comedy of Humours: A type of comedy developed by Ben Jonson, the Elizabethan playwright, based on the ancient physiological theory of the four humours that was still current in Jonsons time. The humours were held to be the four primary fluids blood, phlegm, choler (or yellow bile), and melancholy (or black bile) whose temperament (mixture) was held to determine both a persons physical condition and type of character. Example: Everyman in His Humour (1598) by Jonson Comic relief: Comic relief is the introduction of comic characters, speeches, or scenes in a serious or tragic work, especially a drama. Such elements were almost universal in Elizabethan tragedy. Sometimes they occur merely as episodes of dialogue or horseplay for purposes of alleviating tension and adding variety. Example: gravediggers in Hamlet (V. i) Commedia dellarte: Commedia dellarte was a form of comic drama developed about the midsixteenth century by guilds of professional Italian actors. Playing stock characters, the actors largely improvised the dialogue around a given scenario a term that still denotes a brief outline of a drama, indicating merely the entrances of the main characters and the general course of the action. In a typical play, a pair of young lovers outwit a rich older father (Pantaloon), aided by a clever and intriguing servant (Harlequin), in a plot enlivened by the buffoonery of Punch and other clowns. Example: Shakespeares The Taming of the Shrew Deus ex machine: Deus ex machine is Latin for a god from a machine. It designates the practice of some Greek playwrights (especially Euripides) to end a drama with a god, lowered to the stage by a mechanical apparatus, who by his judgment and commands resolved the dilemmas of the human characters. The phrase is now used for any forced and improbable device a telltale birthmark, an unexpected inheritance, the discovery of a lost will or letter by which a hard pressed author resolves a plot. Example: Tess of the DUrbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Drama (84): The form of composition designed for performance in the theater, in which actors take the roles of the characters, perform the indicated actions, and utter the written dialogue. (The common alternative name for adramatic composition is a play.) In poetic drmathe dialogue is written in verse, which in English is usually blank verse and in French is the twelve-syllable line called an alexandrine. Almost all the heroic dramas of the English Restoration Period, however, were written in heroic couplet (iambic pentameter lines rhyming in pairs). A closet

drama is written in dramatic form, with dialogue, indicated settings, and stage directions, but is inended by the author to be read rather than to be performed. Example: Prometheus Unbound and Miltons Samson Agonistes(1971)

Epic Theater: Epic theateris a term that the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, in the 1920s, applied to his plays. By the word epic, Brecht signified primarily his attempt to emulate on the stage the objectivity of the narration in Homeric epics. By employing a detached narrator and other devices to achieve akienation effects, Brecht aimed to subvert the sympathy of the audience with the actors, and the identification of the actor with his role, that were features of the theater of bourgeois realism. His hope was to encourage his audience to ciriticize and oppose, rather than passively to accept, the social conditions and modes of behavior that the plays represent.

Folklore (124) Folklore, since the mid-nineteenth century, has been the collective name applied to sayings, verbal compositions, and social rituals that have been handed down solely, or at least primarily, by word of mouth and example rather than in written form. Folklore developed, and continues to flourish among literate populations, in the form of oral jokes, stories, and varieties of worldplay. Folklore included legends, superstitions, songs, tales, proverbs, riddles, spells, and nursery rhymes; pseudoscientific ore about the weather, plants, and animals; customary activities at births, marriages, and deaths; and traditional dances and forms of drama performed on holidays or a t communal gatherings. Example: three caskets in Shakespeares Merchant of Venice Folk drama (124) Originated in primitive rites of song and dance, especially in connection with agricultural activities, which centered on vegetational deities and goddesses of fertility. Some scholars maintain that Greek tragedy developed frm such rites, which celebrated the life, death, and rebirth of the vegetational god Dionysus. Folk dramas survive in England in the forms of the St. George play and the mummers play (a mummer is a masked actor). Example: Thomas Hardys The Return of the Native (Book II, chapter 5) Heroic drama:Heroic drama was a form mainly specific to the Restoration Period, though instances continued to be written in the early eighteenth century. As John Dryden defined it: An heroic play ought to be an imitation, in little, of an heroic poem; and consequently love and valour ought to be the subject of it. By heroic poem he meant epic, and the plays attempted to emulate the epic by employing as protagonist a large-scale warrior whose actions inolve the fate of an empire, and by having all the characters speak in an elevated style, usually cast in the epigrammatic form of the closed heroic couplet. A noble hero and heroine are typically represented in a situation in which their passionate love conflicts with the demands of honor and with the heros patriotic duty to his country; if the conflict ends in disaster, the play is called anheroic tragedy.

Example: The Conquest of Granada by John Dryden

Masque: The masque (a variant spelling of mask) was inaugurated in Renaissance Italy and flourished in England during the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I. In its full development, it was an elaborate form of court entertainment that combined poetic drama, music, song, dance, splendid costuming, and stage spectacle. A plot often slight, and mainly mythological and allegorical served to hold together these diverse elements. The speaking characters, who wore masks were often played by amateurs who belonged to courtly society. The play concluded with a dance in which the players doffed their masks and were joined by the audience. Example: Shakespeares The Tempest

Antimasque: It was a form developed by Ben Jonson. In it the characters were grotesque and unruly, the action ludicrous, and the humor broad; it served as a foil and countertype to the elegance, order, and ceremony of the masque proper, which preceded it in a performance.

Melodrama: Melos is Greek for song, and the term melodrama was originally applied to all musical plays, including opera. The term melodrama is now often applied to some of the typical plays, especially during the Victorian Period, that were written to be produced to musical accompaniment. The Victorian melodrama can be said to bear the relation to tragedy that farce does to comedy. Typically, the protagonists are flat types: the hero is great hearted, the heroine pure as the driven snow, and the villain a monster of malignity.The plot revolves around malevolent intrigue and violent action, while the credibility of both character and plot is often sacrificed for violent effect and emotional opportunism. Example: Under the Gaslight (1867)

Miracle Plays, morality plays, and interludes Miracle plays, morality plays, and interludes are types of late-medieval drama, written in a variety of verse forms. The miracle play had as its subject either a story from the Bible, or else the life and martyrdom of a saint. In the usage of some historians, however, miracle play denotes only dramas based on saints lives, and the term mystery lay is applied only to dramas based on the Bible.

Morality plays were dramatized allegories of a representative Christian life in the plot form of a quest for salvation, in which the crucial events are temptations, sinning, and the climactic

confrontation with death. The usual protagonist represents Mankind, or Everyman; among the other characters are personifications of virtues, vices, and Death, as well as angels and demons who contest for the prize of the soul of Mankind. A character known as the Vice often played the role of the tempter in a fashion both sinister and comic; he is regarded by some literary historians as a precursor both of the cynical, ironic villain and of some of the comic figures in Elizabethan drama, including Shakespeares Falstaff. The best known morality play is the fifteenth -century Everyman, which is still given an occasional performance. Interlude (Latin, between the play) is a term applied to a variety of short stage entertainments, such as secular farcesand witty dialogues with a religious or political point. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, these little dramas were performed by bands of professional actors; it is believed that they were often put on between the courses of a feast or between the acts of a longer play.

Pantomime and dumb show: Pantomime is acting on the stage without speech, using only posture, gesture, bodily movement, and exaggerated facial expression to mime (mime) a characters actions and to express a characters feelings. Mimed dramas enjoyed a vogue in eighteenth-century England, and in the twentieth century the silent movies encouraged a brief revival of the art and produced a superlative pantomimist in Charlie Chaplin.

Three unities: In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, critics of the drama in Italy and France added to Aristotles unity of action, which he describes in his Poetics, two other unities, to constitute one of the so-called rules of drama known as the three unities. On the assumption that verisimilitude the achievement of an illusion of reality in the audience of a stage play requires that the action represented by a play approximate the actual conditions of the staging of the play, these critics imposed the requirement of the unity of place and the requirement of the unity of time. Tragedy (370) The term is broadly applied to literary, and especially to dramatic, representations of serious actions which eventuate in a disastrous conclusion for the protagonist (the chief character). More precise and detailed discussions of the tragic form properly begin with Aristotles classic analysis in the Poetics (fourth century BC). Aristotle based his theory on induction from the only examples available to him, the tragedies of Greek dramatists such Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Aristotle defined tragedy as the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself, in the medium of poetic language and in the manner of dramatic rather than of narrative presentation, involving incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish the catharsis of such emotions. Catharsis: Aristotles catharsis which in Greek signifies purgation, or purification, or both is much disputed. On two matters, however, many commentators agree. Aristotle in the first place sets out o account for the undeniable, though remarkable, fact that many tragic

representations of suffering and defeat leave an audience feeling not depressed, but relieved, or even exalted. In the second place, Aristotle uses this distinctive effect on the reader, which he calls the pleasure of pity and fear, as the basic way to distinguish the tragic from comic or other forms, and he regards the dramatists aim to produce this effect in the highest degree as the principle that determines the choice and moral qualities of the tragic protagonist and the organization of the tragic plot. Accordingly, Aristotle says that the tragic hero will most effectively evoke both our pity and terror if he is neither thoroughly good nor thoroughly bad vut a mixture of both; and also that this tragic effect will be stronger if the hero is better than we are, in the sense that he is of higher than ordinary moral worth. Such a man is exhibited as suffering a change in fortune from happiness to misery because of his mistaken choice of an action, to which he is led by his hamartia his error or mistake of judgment or, as it is often, although misleadingly and less literally translated, his tragic flaw. One common form of hamartia in Greek tragedies was hubris, that pride or overweening self-confidence which leads a protagonist to disregard a divine warning or to violate an important moral law.)The tragic hero, like Oedipus in Sophocles Oedipus the King, moves us to pity because, since he is not an evil man, his misfortune is greater than he deserves; but he moves us also to fear, because we recognize similar possibilities of error in our own lesser and fallible selves. Aristotle grounds his analysis of the very structure and incidents of the play on the same principle; the plot, he says, which will most effectively evoke tragic pity and fear is one in which the events develop through complication to a catastrophe in which there occurs a sudden peripeteia, or reversal in his fortune from happiness to disaster. Revenge tragedy

Senecantragedy was written to be recited rather than acted; but to English playwrights, who thought that these tragedies had been intended for the stage, they provided the model for an organized five-act play with a complex plot and an elaborately formal style of dialogue. Senecan drama, in the Elizabethan Age, had two main lines of development. One of these consisted of academic tragedies written in close imitation of the Senecan model, including the use of a chorus, and usually constructed according to the rules of the three uities, which had beenelaborated by Italian critics of the sixteenth century. The other and much more important development was written for the popular stage, and is called the revenge tragedy, or the tragedy of blood. This type of play derived from Senecas favorite materials of murder, revenge, ghosts, mutilation, and carnage, but while Seneca had relegated such matters to long reports of offstage actions by messengers, Elizabethan dramatists usually represented them n stage to satisfy the appetite of the contemporary audience for violence and horror. Example: Thomas Kyds The Spanish Tragedy (1586) The subject of this play is a murder and the quest for vengeance, and it includes a ghost, insanity, suicide, a play-within-a-play, sensational incidents, and a gruesomely bloody ending. Another Example: Shakespeares Titus Andronicus

Bourgeois or domestic tragedy:

Until the close of seventeenth century almost all tragedies were written in verse and had as protagonists men of high rank whose fate affected the fortunes of a state. A few minor Elizabethan tragedies, such as A Yorkshire Tragedy had as the chief character a man of the lower class, but it remained for eighteenth-century writers to popularize the bourgeois or domestic tragedy, which was written in prose and presented a protagonist from the middle or lower social ranks who suffers a commonplace or domestic disaster. Example: George Lillos The London Merchant, Ibsens A Dolls House, Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman Tragicomedy: A type of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama which intermingled the standard characters and subject matter and the typical plot forms of tragedy and comedy. Thus, the important agents in tragicomedy included both people of high degree and people of low degree, even though, according to the reigning critical theory of that time, only upper-class characters were appropriate to tragedy, while members of the middle and lower classes were the proper subject solely of comedy. Also, tragicomedy represented a serious action wich threatened a tragic disaster to the protagonist, yet, by an abrupt reversal of circumstance, turned out happily. Example: Merchant of Venice Soliloquy: Soliloquy is the act of talking to oneself, whether silently or aloud. In drama it denotes the convention by which a character, alone on the stage, utters his or her thoughts aloud. Playwrights have used this device as a convenient way to convy information about a characters motives and state of mind, or for purposes of exposition, and sometimes in order to guide the judgments and responses of the audience. Christopher Marlowes Dr. Faustus(first performed in 1594) opens with a long expository soliloquy, and concludes with another which expresses Faustus frantic mental and emotional state during his belated attempts to escape damnation. The best-known of dramatic soliloquies is Hamlets speech which begins To be or not to be. Aside: A related stage device is the aside in which a character expresses to the audience his or her thought or intention in a short speech which, by convention, is inaudible to the other characters on the stage.

Atmosphere Atmosphere is the emotional tone pervading a section or the whole of a literary work, which fosters in the reader expectations as to the course of events, whether happy or (more commonly) terrifying or disastrous. Shakespeare establishes the tense and fearful atmosphere at the beginning of Hamlet by the terse ad nervous dialogue of the sentinels as they anticipate a reappearance of the ghost. Climax

That is, an ascending sequence of importance.

Anticlimax Anticlimax is a writers deliberate drop from the serious and elevated to the trivial and lowly in order to achieve a comic or satiric effect. Binary oppositions Binary oppositions are essential structural elements in logocentric language such as speech/writing, nature/culture, truth/error, male/famle

Dramatic monologue: A monologue is a lengthy speech by a single person in a play, when a character utters a monologue that expresses his or her private thoughts, it is called a soliloquy. Dramatic monologue, however, does not designate a component in aplay, but a type of lyric poem that was perfected by Robert Browning. Example: My Last Duchess by Robert Browning Black comedy or black humor An affinity of Absurd drama is black comedy or black humor. Recent works exploit black comedy or black humor: baleful, nave, or inept characters in a fantastic or nightmarish modern world play out their roles in what Ionesco called a tragic farce, in which the events are often simultaneously comic, horrifying, and absurd. Example: Joseph Hellers Catch 22 (1961) Objective correlative: This term which had been coined by the American painter and poet Washington Allston (17791843), was introduced by T.S. Eliot, rather casually, into his essay Hamlet and His Problems (1919). The only way of expressing emotion, Eliot wrote, is by finding an objective correlative; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion, and which will evoke the same emotion from the reader. Example: The first eight lines of The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot Proscenium arch: (3) Proscenium arch frames the front of the stage, the end of a scene is usually indicated by a dropped curtain or a dimming of the lights, and the end of an ac by a dropped curtain and an intermission. Drama of sensibility or sentimental comedy

They are representations of middle-class life that replaced the tough amorality and the comic or satiric representation of aristocratic sexual license in Restoration comedy.Oliver Goldsmith remarked in his Comparison between Sentimental and Laughing Comedy (1773), the virtues of private life are exhibited rather than the vices exposed, and the distresses rather than the faults of mankind make our interest in the piece. the characters, though they want humor, have abundance of sentiment and feeling; with the result, he added, that the audience sit at a play as gloomy as at the tabernacle. Plays such as Richard Steeles The Conscious Lovers (1722) and Richard Cumberlands The West Indian (1771) present monumentally benevolent heroes and heroines of the middle class, whose dialogue abounds with elevated moral sentiments and who, prior to the manipulated happy ending, suffer tribulations designed to evoke from the audience the maximum of pleasurable tears. Travesty The travesty mocks a particular work by treating its lofty subject in a grotesquely undignified manner and style. The New Yorker once published a travesty of Ernest Hemingways novel Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) with the title Across the Street and Into the Bar, and the film Young Frankenstein is a travesty of Mary Shelleys novel Frankenstein. Burlesque Burlesque has been succinctly defined as an incongruous imitation; that is, it imitates the manner (the form and style) or else the subject matter of a serious literary work or a literary genre, in verse or in prose, but makes the imitation amusing by a ridiculous disparity between the manner and the matter. The burlesque may be written for the sheer fun of it; usually, however, it is a form of satire. The butt of the satiric ridicule may be the particular work or the genre that is being imitated, or else the subject matter to which the imitation is incongruously applied, of (often) both of these together. Burlesque, parody and travesty are sometimes applied interchangeably; simply to equate these terms. The application of these terms will be clearer if we make two preliminary distinctions: (1) In a burlesque imitation, the form and style may either lower or higher in level and dignity than the subject to which it is incongruously applied. High burlesque: A parody imitates the serious work, or the distinctive style of a particular author, or the typical stylistic and other features of a serious literary genre, and deflates the original by applying the imitation to a lowly or comically inappropriate subject. Example: Henry Fieldings Joseph Andrew and Richardsons novel Pamela (1740-41) by putting a hearty male hero in place of richardsons sexually beleaguered heroine. Low Burlesque: The travesty mocks a particular work by treating its lofty subject in a grotesquely undignified manner and style.