Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘[S]elling old lamps for new ones’: D. G. Rossetti’s Restructuring of Oriental Schemas
- 2 Toward a Corporeal Orientalism: Foregrounding Arabian Erotic Figures in Algernon Swinburne and Aubrey Beardsley
- 3 The Cognitive Process of Parable: John Ruskin, William Morris and the Oriental Lure of the Forbidden
- 4 Consumers of Intoxicating Fruits and Elixirs: The Cognitive Grammar of Christina Rossetti’s and Ford Madox Ford’s Oriental Fairy Tales
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘[S]elling old lamps for new ones’: D. G. Rossetti’s Restructuring of Oriental Schemas
- 2 Toward a Corporeal Orientalism: Foregrounding Arabian Erotic Figures in Algernon Swinburne and Aubrey Beardsley
- 3 The Cognitive Process of Parable: John Ruskin, William Morris and the Oriental Lure of the Forbidden
- 4 Consumers of Intoxicating Fruits and Elixirs: The Cognitive Grammar of Christina Rossetti’s and Ford Madox Ford’s Oriental Fairy Tales
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The following appendix is intended as a supplement to the critical text, in order to provide the reader with significant examples from the primary texts being discussed.
D. G. Rossetti, Aladdin, or The Wonderful Lamp (2008: 26–7)
D. G. Rossetti's Aladdin, or The Wonderful Lamp is a play-picture appearing in the holograph manuscript entitled ‘The Slave’ (1835). By turning a narrative text into a play, Rossetti remediates the tale of the Arabian Nights in order to achieve immediacy of presentation. The scene is characterised by various sketches interconnected with the Oriental schemas of the Arabian Nights and representing warriors wielding swords, a bird flying by a tree and a stylised crown. The list of characters playing roles in the Arabian Nights is highly significant, since they attest to Rossetti's fondness for theatre. He assigns the roles of Aladdin and the African magician to great performers such as John Philip Kemble and Edmund Kean. Kemble was an English actor, born into a theatrical family, who enjoyed success on the stage playing Shakespearean characters along with his sister Sarah Siddons, the best-known tragedienne of the eighteenth century. Edmund Kean, whose life Rossetti deeply admired, thanks to F. W. Hawkins's published biography (1869), was considered one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of the nineteenth century, able to restore authenticity to the Bard's works. Cognitively speaking, Rossetti's Aladdin, or The Wonderful Lamp recreates and extends the same Oriental world of the Arabian Nights into a theatrical piece that lifts characters, plots, settings and themes out of their original texts and places them in a new blended space.
Sultana. Mrs Siddons.
Aladdin. – Mr. Kemble.
Sultan. Mrs Cobham.
African Magician. Mr Kean
Princess Badroulboudour. Mrs Kemble
Aladdin's Mother. Mrs. Bland.
Grand Vizier. Mr. King.
African Magician's Brother. Mr. Hart.
Genius of the Lamp. Mr. Fiers
Genius of the Ring. Mr. Johnson.
Fatima. Mrs. Powell.
Grand Vizier's Son. Mr. Elton
Officers, Eunuchs, Guards, Slaves, Servants, Jewellers,
Heralds, Soldiers, Grooms, Genii, Attendants,
Cupbearers, Musicians &c. &c. &c. &c.
Act 1st. Scene 1st.
Enter African Magician & Aladdin.
Al. Where will you lead me?
Mag. Into a bea[u]tiful garden, where all sorts of fruits grow. Al. Is't this?
Mag. Nay, it is not. Al. What is't then?
Mag. A much more beautiful garden than this.
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- Information
- The Pre-Raphaelites and OrientalismLanguage and Cognition in Remediations of the East, pp. 138 - 202Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018