Any attempt to consider medieval saints' plays as a genre is fraught with difficulty because of the paucity of extant examples, the ambiguity or incompleteness of records relating to auspices and to lost plays and the inherent difficulty of arriving at some sort of definition of form. A number of theorists have attempted to define this drama. J. M. Manly, in presenting a challenge to the evolutionary theory of drama, saw the saint's play as a spontaneous coming together of the drama and the saint's legend, which was a regular feature of the church sevice (32, pp. 585-6). legend was defined by G. H. Gerould as:

During the last few decades, the 'new theme' of medieval English theatre may be said to have swelled beyond all expectation. In the place of the modest harmonious arias of a few soloists we now confront a mighty but not totally co-ordinated anthem issuing from a many-throated chorus. In the past thirty years the status of medieval plays has been transformed, not merely through the advocacy of academics, but by the enthusiastic response of students and, even more remarkably, spectators. Much of the main repertory is accessible on the shelves of libraries and bookshops; civic and county archives are being scrutinised for practical details of local organisation and presentation. Periodicals and volumes replete with competing theories are announced frequently; live performances of medieval plays now seem as predictable a feature of the British summer as rain-threatened stagings of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Today there is probably greater awareness of the existence, nature and appeal of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English drama than at any time since its creation.

Almost certainly the most anthologised of all medieval English dramatic pieces is the so-called Second Shepherds' Play, containing the double story of Mak the sheep-stealer and the visit of the shepherds to Bethlehem. Through this public exposure, not only the play but the 'name' of the author also has become familiar – 'The Wakefield Master'. Not everyone who knows of the Second Shepherds', however, will automatically connect it with the thirty-two short plays (better called 'pageants') that together make up the Towneley cycle, or realise that it is not so much the 'second' as an alternative Shepherds' pageant: Alia eorundem (another of the same). Even knowing the relationship between the pageant, the Wakefield Master and the Towneley cycle does not, however, take you very far; why, for example Wakefield Master, but Towneley cycle?

'Wakefield' refers to the smallish industrial town in what used to be the West Riding of Yorkshire, once the centre of the extensive medieval manor of Wakefield. Since early in this century it has been claimed, with varying degrees of certainty, as the original home and place of performance of this cycle of pageants (76, p. xxxv; 75, p. xxviii). As the York play was to York, so, it was said, the Towneley cycle was to Wakefield. The name 'Wakefield Master' was hence created as a convenient reference name for the anonymous author of a strikingly original group of pageants within the cycle.

The predominance of East Anglia over all other regional theatrical traditions in late medieval England, as evidenced by the sheer number of recorded performances and by the variety of associated play texts, has been apparent since the time of Chambers. This fact, however, has ordinarily been obscured by the critical and historical attention (not undeserved) lavished upon the great civic cycle plays that flourished elsewhere in the country. Chambers, drawing together 'Representations of Mediaeval Plays' in Appendix W to his monumental The Mediaeval Stage, (23, vol. 11, pp. 329-406), listed all known towns and villages sponsoring or partaking in some kind of dramatic performance. Forty-eight of his total of 127 locations, spread over thirty-four counties of England, Ireland and Scotland - that is, nearly forty per cent - were located in the four counties, or parts of counties, that comprised East Anglia. More recent scholarship has of course identified many other such theatrically inclined towns and villages since Chambers compiled his data at the beginning of this century, and the total for East Anglia, now easily double or triple the number he turned up, simply reaffirms its primary position (252). Chambers himself puzzled over his figures, noting that although 'a vigorous and widespread dramatic activity throughout the length and breadth of the land ... naturally finds its fullest scope in the annually repeated performances of several amongst the greater cities, yet it is curious to observe in what insignificant villages it was from time to time found possible to organize plays'. (23, vol. 11, p. 109).

The question of Ibsen's relationship to feminism, whether one is referring specifically to the turn-of-the-century women's movement or more generally to feminism as an ideology, has been a vexed one. The view supporting Ibsen as feminist can be seen to lie along a spectrum of attitudes with Ibsen as quasi-socialist at one end and Ibsen as humanist at the other. Proponents of the first stance might point to an amateur performance of A Doll's House (1879; dates following plays refer to publication) in 1886 in a Bloomsbury drawing room in which all the participants were not only associated with the feminist cause but had achieved or would achieve prominence in the British socialist movement: Eleanor Marx, the daughter of Karl, in the role of Nora; her common-law husband Edward Aveling, who played Helmer; William Morris's daughter May, portraying Mrs Linde; and, as Krogstad, none other than Bernard Shaw. Together with Aveling, Eleanor Marx (who learned Norwegian to enable her to translate Ibsen) also produced The Lady from the Sea (1888) in London in 1891. Looking at Ibsen's advocates in terms of political groups, one may safely claim that his strongest supporters were found in socialist circles.

In a 1983 interview Michel Foucault characterized his work by connecting it with the complicated status of formalism in twentieth-century thought, claiming that the latter marked “one of the most powerful and complex forces in twentieth-century Europe” (FL, 234). Included under this rubric were a wide variety of expressions and esthetics, rational and political – all infinitely disrupting the continuities of tradition. The emergence of structuralism itself was equally aligned with this trend in an attempt to clarify its status (ibid., 235). The complicity between Michel Foucault's authorship and such formalism (like that with “structuralism,” equally itself a complex force ceaselessly claiming a mathematical base) is longstanding, and his major works attested to it from the outset (see OT, 384). It doubtless too figures Foucault's own complicity with modernism. Indeed, from the beginning to the end of his work Foucault was concerned with what he called in 1967 “the complex relations of forms” (FL, 27). Even his notorious denial of the subject for the sake of a certain authorial anonymity would not only be identified by him with the “revolutionaries” of esthetic modernism like Mallarme or Roussel but also with the discoveries of Bourbaki.

What ultimately distinguishes Michel Foucault's own commitment to formalism was doubtless its complexity: one uniting the complexity in the play between syntax and semantics, figure and constraint, discourse and event. Unlike the structuralists, who had platonized structure - and yet unlike the positivists, with whom he was, initially in any case, too often aligned — Foucault realized that were the analysis of language and language-like entities in terms of their formal properties to be carried out, the success of such projects depended upon realizing, as he had put it as early as 1967, that “discourses are unities of function” (FL, 26)

In retrospect the 1840s appear relatively undramatic in Norwegian literary history. Writers were mostly cultivating collective memories and giving written form to folk tales and popular ballads and in other ways working on the construction of a national mythology, in historical studies as well as in poetry. There was no permanent theatre established in the country, although several towns by this time had more or less appropriate theatre buildings where itinerant theatre companies, mostly Danish, could perform vaudevilles and plays according to the popular taste of the small bourgeois audiences.

Theatrical activity in Norway was nothing more than a pale reflection of a Danish tradition which seemed to be losing the vigour it had enjoyed in the early decades of the century. Under such circumstances it was understandable that practically nobody in Norway was giving much attention to the art of writing for the theatre. In Grimstad the young assistant pharmacist Henrik Ibsen had no chance to acquaint himself with the standards and techniques of professional theatrical performance, but he must have been an avid reader of classical and contemporary literature. His reading in those early years included dramatic works by Shakespeare, Schiller, Ludvig Holberg and Adam Oehlenschlager, and his literary talent and ambitions were clearly recognized by his few intimate friends. At this point it was not Ibsen's primary intention to earn his living as a writer. In his spare time he was busy preparing himself for the entrance examination to the University of Christiania, where he hoped to be accepted as a student of medicine.

The single most comprehensive reference work for the English-speaking student of Ibsen's plays is the eight-volume The Oxford Ibsen (1960-77). Edited by James McFarlane, the set comprises translations by McFarlane and others of all of Ibsen's plays, based on the Norwegian texts in the standard edition: Henrik Ibsen, Samlede Verker, Hundreårsutgave, Oslo, 1928-57 (Henrik Ibsen, Collected Works, Centenary Edition), and includes translations of extant drafts, fragments and the 'Epic Brand'. As well, each volume begins with a lengthy, authoritative critical essay by McFarlane, situating its plays in Ibsen's life and times and setting out significant lines of interpretive inquiry. Each volume concludes with appendices and a selected bibliography. The appendices include for each of the plays in that volume: discussions of dates of composition; draft manuscripts; some relevant comments by Ibsen and his contemporaries; and contemporary reception of book sales and play productions.

All of Foucault's major works are histories of a sort, which is enough to make him a historian of a sort. The challenge is to determine what sort of history he does and thus what kind of historian he is. It is fortunate that Foucault has adopted distinctive terms for his specific approaches at different phases of his career. His early works, the ones that earned him his reputation, were called “archaeologies,” the subsequent ones “genealogies”; and the volumes on the history of sexuality that appeared at the time of his death he called “problematizations.”

These approaches do not exclude each other. Rather, like successive waves breaking on the sand, each is discovered after the fact to have been an implicit interest of the earlier one, for which it served as the moving force. Thus Foucault insists that the question of power relations, which characterizes his genealogies, was what his archaeologies were really about and, subsequently, that the issue of truth and subjectivity, the explicit focus of his final works, had been his basic concern all along. Although these avowals reveal a greater desire for consistency and coherence than Foucault is supposed to have possessed, much less to have been able to warrant, they hypothesize a unity among the three approaches that enables us to present each in more than sequential order. Accordingly, after a survey of these three modes of “history” in their turn, I shall address four issues that give Foucault's approach to history its distinctive character, namely, the topics of nominalism, the historical event, the spatialization of Reason, and the nature of problematization.

Rebecca, Ellida, Hedda: the three heroines of Ibsen's plays from this period, Rosmersholm (1886), The Lady from the Sea (1888) and Hedda Gabler (1890), have names which have a similar ring to them; all sound slightly unfamiliar to a Norwegian ear, have an air of 'otherness' which marks them off from convention. The centrality of the heroines in these plays is underlined by the fact that two of them give the plays their titles, the only Ibsen plays where this occurs apart from the early Lady Inger (1857) - whereas as many as ten plays refer to the names or functions of male characters in their titles (Catiline, OlafLiljekrans, The Pretenders, Brand, Peer Gynt, Emperor and Galilean, An Enemy of the People, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman).

The otherness of these heroines is apparent from the beginning of the action; all are outsiders in their society, at odds with the mores of the community in which they find themselves, unhappy with an environment which forces them to live inauthentically. They have all to a greater or lesser extent tried to conform, but at the cost of the repression of their 'wild side'. They are pagans living in a Christian society. All are passionate women who, it could be argued, have got themselves involved with the wrong man. Neither Rosmer, Wangel nor Tesman are as their partners would have them be; they lack the passion to respond to their women's needs. As a result all three women have focused their sensuality on a substitute figure. Rebecca has invented for herself an idealized 'Rosmer' who bears little resemblance to the actual man, Ellida recalls her dream lover from the past and Hedda turns her energies to rekindling her highly charged relationship with Lovborg. The clash between aspiration and reality drives them all to breaking point.

'I have to keep working - creating one work after another - until the day I die.' When Ibsen gave these words to Arnold Rubek, to define what it means being an artist, he did not know, nor intend, that When We Dead Awaken was to be his last play - the Epilogue to the whole long row of 'one work after another' created over fifty years. To us the irony is twofold: Rubek is to die that very night, in his attempt to awaken, as a man and as an artist, from the 'dead'; Ibsen was to become too ill or frail to keep working until the day he died. For all that, Rubek's words may serve as a paradigm of the extraordinary drive which was an essential part of Ibsen's creativity, which had resulted in a regular output of 'contemporary' plays from Pillars of Society (1877) onwards, and which did not slacken when he returned to live in Norway in 1891, there to produce that series of plays which he somewhat grudgingly admitted to having had in mind when he used the term 'A Dramatic Epilogue': The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899).

Many commentators have noted a marked change of emphasis in Foucault's later thinking about issues of truth, ethics, and social responsibility. For some, this change was characterized chiefly by a certain relaxation of the skeptical rigor – the attitude of extreme Nietzschean suspicion with regard to truth-claims or ethical values of whatever kind – that had hitherto played a prominent role in his work. Thus, according to Roy Boyne, the shift can be located with a fair degree of precision as occurring between Volume One of The History of Sexuality (where Foucault's genealogies of power/knowledge seem to exclude all notions of truth, enlightenment, self-understanding or effective political agency) and the later, posthumous volumes where this doctrine gives way to a sense of renewed ethical and social engagement. In this work, as Boyne reads it,

This is not to deny that there remain great problems – especially from the standpoint of present-day cultural and gender politics – with Foucault's appeal to those techniques of self-fashioning that he finds best embodied in the ethos of Classical (Graeco-Roman) sexual mores. Although it offers an escape-route of sorts from his earlier outlook of cognitive and ethical skepticism, it still leaves certain crucial questions unanswered.

Next to Shakespeare, Ibsen is undoubtedly the world's most frequently screened playwright. There are to date more than fifty film versions of Ibsen plays, and probably about twice as many television versions.

For obvious reasons, the earliest screened versions of Ibsen exist only in the medium of film; after 1950, however, when the first television broadcast of an Ibsen play took place, there was a distinct change of emphasis. Once the new medium had been introduced, the number of film productions dwindled quickly and television became the new partner to which the Ibsen play was wedded. In fact, most of the Ibsen films were produced during the 'international', silent, black-and-white era. With the arrival of the sound film around 1930 the number of film productions diminished.

Not surprisingly, the greatest number of screen versions concern A Doll's House and Ghosts, but many of the other social plays have also proved to be attractive to screen directors. As might be expected, little attention has been paid to the early plays and, as far as film is concerned, to the late ones.

Michel Foucault wrote extensively about historical reconfigurations of knowledge in what would now be called the human sciences. During the 1970s, however, he argued (most notably in Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality) that these reorganizations of knowledge also constituted new forms of power and domination. Foucault's works from this period have often generated contradictory responses from readers. His detailed historical remarks on the emergence of disciplinary and regulatory bio-power have been widely influential. Yet these detailed studies are connected to a more general conception of power, and of the epistemic and political positioning of the criticism of power, which many critics have found less satisfactory. Foucault's discussions of the relation between truth and power have similarly provoked concerns about their reflexive implications for his own analysis.

The principal purpose of this essay is to offer a sympathetic interpretation of the understanding of power and of knowledge that informs Foucault's historical studies of prisons and of the construction of a scientific discourse about sexuality. Since Foucault discussed power in this period rather more thematically than he did knowledge, my discussion of knowledge will build extensively upon his remarks about power. The essay will proceed in three parts. First I will briefly recapitulate Foucault's account of the intertwined emergence of new forms of power and knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The second part will initiate my reflections upon the concepts of “power” and “knowledge” with a critical discussion of political and epistemic sovereignty.

The title of this chapter might seem paradoxical, even a contradiction in terms. The forbidding seriousness of Ibsen's later works has become a legend, especially to those who know them mainly by repute. Yet the earliest of his plays to deal with contemporary social realities were all classed as comedies; to understand how he developed as an artist - and as a social critic - it is essential to know something about the ways in which he approached and adapted the conventional comedy of his day.

It is as well to remember at the outset that the term 'comedy', even leaving aside its more specialized modern uses and more general older meanings, is an equivocal one. It has been used to denote a tone of voice or mode of perception (something 'light' or 'amusing'); it can indicate a special kind of dramatic plot, a 'happy end' with the blend of assurance and strain which that can imply; and it can suggest a specific subject-matter - in Jonson's words 'an image of the times' which deals 'with human follies not with crimes'. In much classic comedy - in Shakespeare or Molière or Holberg - all three of these senses may apply. But there is no logical reason why, in all circumstances, they should. The appalling may also be funny, without suggesting redemption or a happy end; human follies can also be crimes. One could read Ibsen's entire œuvre as a deconstruction of the various, always potentially divergent, elements of what is classed as comedy.

Foucault's last attempt to situate his life's work in the Enlightenment tradition presumably laid to rest any lingering doubts about the rational basis of his work. Yet, Habermas and his sympathizers remained skeptical. The rational subject, they argued, was never adequately accounted for in Foucault's work.

Explanation for this discrepancy must be sought in Foucault's original disenchantment with the Enlightenment project – above all, his critique of modern humanism and the kind of subjectivity it entails. For the purposes of this essay, it will suffice to broach this topic by contrasting Foucault's critical method with the critique of ideology undertaken by members of the Frankfurt School (Part I). As we shall see, Foucault's critical method is more radical than theirs in that it brackets the emancipatory ideals underwriting reason itself. Stronger still, it allegedly shows the impossibility of the Hegelian categories of reflection in which these ideals are cast.

I shall argue that these categories are not as paradoxical as Foucault thinks. Indeed, I shall show that, mutatis mutandis, they inform the very hermeneutic circle in which he himself reformulated his understanding of the rational, self-empowering subject. The road leading to this conclusion must pass through the difficult terrain staked out by Habermas's theory of communicative action (Part II). The latter ostensibly redeems reason from its paradoxes while simultaneously demonstrating the self-referential contradictions attending its wholesale rejection.

It is doubtless too early to assess the break introduced by Michel Foucault, who has been Professor at the College de France (he holds the Chair of the History of Systems of Thought) since 1970, in a philosophic landscape previously dominated by Sartre and by what Sartre called the unsurpassable philosophy of our time, Marxism. From the outset, starting with The History of Madness (1961), Michel Foucault situates himself elsewhere. It is no longer a question of basing philosophy on a new cogito, or of developing a system of things previously hidden from the eyes of the world, but rather of interrogating the enigmatic gesture – a gesture that may be characteristic of Western society – through which true discourses (thus also those of philosophy) are constituted, with their familiar power.

If Foucault is indeed perfectly at home in the philosophical tradition, it is within the critical tradition of Kant, and his undertaking could be called A Critical History of Thought. This is not meant to imply a history of ideas that would be at the same time an analysis of errors that could be measured after the fact, or a deciphering of the misunderstandings to which they are related and on which what we think today might depend. If by thought is meant the act that posits a subject and an object in their various possible relations, a critical history of thought would be an analysis of the conditions under which certain relations between subject and object are formed or modified, to the extent that these relations are constitutive of a possible knowledge.