Antonin Artaud Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jane Goodall

Critical Essay by Jane Goodall

“Artaud's Revision of Shelley's The Cenci: The Text and its Double,” in Comparative Drama, Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer, 1987, pp. 115-26.

In the following essay, comparing Artaud's version of The Cenci to Shelley's, Goodall pays particular attention to showing how Artaud reframes a narrative dependent on language into a play of forces realized by the language of movement and gesture.

The plague takes images that are dormant, a latent disorder, and suddenly extends them into the most extreme gestures; the theater also takes gestures and pushes them as far as they will go: like the plague it reforges the chain between what is and what is not, between the virtuality of the possible and what already exists in materialized nature.

(Antonin Artaud's The Theater and its Double, p. 27)

This image represents the theater as a bridge from the virtual to the actual, a convergence of physical and metaphysical...
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