No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
New Theatre Quarterly does not normally include purely text-based studies of plays. since it is our feeling that journals of literary criticism offer a more appropriate home for such work. However, there are certain important plays which are in danger of becoming virtually lost to the world repertoire, when non-performance or flawed first productions have seemingly closed them off from further critical attention. One such play – or, to be precise, sequence of three plays – is The Island of the Mighty, which in a condensed form was premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1972, but in a production from which the authors dissociated themselves, in a dispute they described in an article in Performance (Fall 1973). Javed Malick, who has recently been awarded his doctorate from McGill University for a study of Arden's plays, here argues that The Island of the Mighty forms an important part of the Arden canon, expressing in its fullest and most coherent form themes and attitudes discernible in the earliest plays – and that its characteristic refusal to ‘do things properly’ is essential both to the authors' view of a polarized world, and to the dramaturgy they have evolved to give expression to that view, which made The Island one of their last works for the conventional theatre. Javed Malick now teaches English at Khalsa College in Delhi University.
1. See Taylor, John Russell, Anger and After (London: Methuen, 1969), p. 84.Google Scholar
2. Malick, Shah Jaweedul, The Dramaturgy of John Arden: Dialectical Vision and Popular Tradition, Ph.D. Dissertation, McGill University, 1985.Google Scholar
3. About Nelson in The Hero Rises Up the playwrights say: ‘This play is about a man who was, by accident of birth and rearing, committed to a career governed by the old Roman “rectilinear” principles. He himself was one of asymmetrical “curvilinear” temperament to an unusually passionate degree. But the English (who have inheritied the Roman mantle) soon discovered how to handle him. He was done properly: wasted his extraordinary energy, courage, and humanity upon having men killed (in the end himself killed).‖’
4. See Arden, John, To Present the Pretence: Essays on the Theatre and Its Public (London: Methuen, 1977), p. 155.Google Scholar
5. See Jones, Geraint, The Art and Truth of the Parables (London: SPCK Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Via, Dan O., The Parables (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967)Google Scholar; and Darko Suvin, ‘On Metaphoricity and Narrativity in Fiction: the Chronotype as the Differentia Generica’, as yet unpublished.
6. See Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. Iswolsky, Helene (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968).Google Scholar
7. The ages mentioned in the list of dramatis personae as well as various references within the text show that Arthur and most of his companions are to be presented as ‘old’. Arthur is himself the oldest of them all and near his death. ‘Why you poorold man – I never guessed you were so near death’, says Balin, when he first sees Arthur's face (I, iii). ‘Old men, old men, on their horses so huge’, sings the Pictish poet (I, x). In contrast, most of the active plebeians are young.
8. See Gurvitch, Georges, The Spectrum of Social Time, trans. Korenbaum, Myrtle (Dordrecht, Holland: Riedel, 1964).Google Scholar
9. The reference is to the backcloths, which ‘should be painted in bold colours and clear lines; no perspective or naturalistic chiaroscuro’. The playwrights point out that these backcloths are ‘not to be taken as realistic scenery, indicative of particular places; they are emblems of the kind of environment, emotional and temporal as well as geographic, required for each scene’ (emphasis added). The sequences in which the plebeians predominate are usually set against the backcloths designating open, natural spaces (‘Woodland’, ‘Seascape’, ‘Snowscape’), while those in which the action is dominated by the rulers are played as the enclosed and man-made spaces of ‘Fort’ and ‘Camp’.
10. Cf. Suvin, Darko, ‘“Utopian” and “Scientific”: Two Attributes for Socialism from Engels’, Minnesota Review, VI (1976), p. 59–70.Google Scholar
11. See Bloch, Ernst, ‘The Meaning of Utopia’, in Solomon, Maynard, ed., Marxism and Art (New York: Knopf, 1973), p. 578–82.Google Scholar