Word: commedia
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...jury of competent literati could be panelled and polled on the question "What is the world's No. 1 Poem?" they might have some difficulty in arriving at a verdict. But certainly many a vote would be cast for the Divina Commedia of Dante. Unread in these days except by amateurs of literature or professional students, this Catholic epic is one of the boasted glories of Italy. Many a schoolboy has heard of Dante and his Beatrice, could even recognize a picture of the poet, but no one knows much about his actual life. Biographer Papini, adducing no factual...
...rosy romantics who read Austin Dobson, collect bisque statuets of Pierrot & Columbine and attend lectures on the 17th Century harlequinade like to remember that there exists in the U. S. today a vivid healthy parallel of the true commedia dell' arte. Like the commedia, the Burlesque Show is extemporaneous, its libretto an assembly of long-remembered "bits" that have never been formally written down. Like the commedia, Burlesque has developed a cast of traditional characters with formalized costumes. The tramp, the Jew, the policeman, the soubrette and the straight man are as persistently unvarying as Harlequin, Pierrot, Columbine...
...glaring omissions. There was no example of the work of the late Joseph Urban, whose electric blue backdrops for the early Follies brought the first stirrings of good taste to U. S. musicomedies. In the antique section of the show there were neither settings nor costumes of the important commedia dell' arte. Most important of all there were no examples of the whole school of late 19th Century realism that reached its height in the spectacular Drury Lane melodramas in which frail heroines were pursued through burning forests and over real waterfalls, in which locomotives and galloping horses cluttered...
...commedia dell'arte, the drama hat set the patterns for Harlequin, Columbine, Pierrot and Pantaloon, is a favorite subject for romantic poets, water color painters, and lecturers on The Drama. They are apt to forget that there exists in the U. S. a lusty native parallel of the commedia to teach esthetes what a real old Harlequinade was like: the Burlesque Show. Like the commedia before the days of the great Debureau, Burlesque is vulgar entertainment catering to the masses, often frankly obscene. Like the commedia, Burlesque is based on "bits" that have been handed down from one troupe...
...Marcel Francon, to aid him in the preparation of an edition of "The Poetry of Marguerite d'Autriche"; Professor Charles H. Grandgent, (for Division of Modern Languages) for the publication of Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, for a new edition of Dante's Divina Commedia; Professor W. C. Greene, for the completion of the book "The Achievement of Rome"; C. N. Greenough, for further work on the "Bibliography of Prose Fiction"; C. B. Gulick, for Harvard Studies in Classical Philology...