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The History Of European Theatre
The Case is Altered: ‘It Is the Pleasure of Our Fates That We Should Thus Be Wracked on Fortunes Wheel’
Episode 174:
Ben Jonson's erliest play. Here we have the bricklayer’s son trying to make his way in the theatre and with the court. Until James came to the throne, he was pretty unsuccessful in the latter and as far as we can tell more of less from the off his life writing for the public theatre was controversial. I recounted the events surrounding Johnson and Nashe’s play ‘The Isle of Dogs’ as part of Jonson’s life story and ‘The Case Is Altered’ probably pre-dates those events. What we can be sure of is that by 1597, the most likely date for ‘The Case Is Altered’ Jonson was working for Pembroke’s Men and that they probably performed the play in May or June that year.
The complications of the printing history of the play
The origins of the title
Jonson borrows from Plautus to create a romantic comedy
The satire of Anthony Munday
A brief summary of both strands of the plot
The structural issues with the play and purely comic scenes
The theory of the Humors
The character of Count Ferneze
The character of Jacques the miser
The concealment of the gold
The slight characters of the three female roles
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1. Prologue and Pre History
25:26||Season 1, Ep. 1Episode 1An Introduction to the podcast and your host.Pre-history and how the urge to mimic and present might have been the start of theatre.Religious ritual and Shamanism.The Abydos Passion play and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.The beginning of Greek Theatre.A note on dates and the nature of translations.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy1. Trailer
03:52||Ep. 1An introduction to The History Of European Theatre PodcastThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy2. Dionysus and the beginning of Greek Theatre
26:53||Season 1, Ep. 2Episode 2An overview of the history of Greece to the 5th Century BCE including Minoan and Mycenaean periods, the Greek dark age and the rise of the city state.The development of the religious festivals and their main featuresAn overview of the main playwrights and their plays:AeschylusSophoclesEuripidesAristophanesMenanderThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy3. The Place Of Seeing
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