The Harrowing of Hell - Dialectic and Spectacle

Roland Barthes's essay on "The World of Wrestling" draws analogically on the ancient theatre to contextualize wrestling as a cultural fiction w here(predicate) the grandiloquence of the ancient is preserved and the spectacle of excess is displayed. Barthes's critique -- which is in a higher place all a rewriting of what was to understand what is -- is useful here insofar as it may be applied derriere to theatre as another open-air spectacle. But in this case, not the theatre of the ancients, but the Middle English ostentation presents the locus for discussing the sport of presentation, or, if you prefer, the performance of the sport. More specifically, what we see by looking at the torturous of Hell -- the dramatic spot in the cycle plays that narratizes doctrinal redemption more graphically than any other play in the cycle -- as spectacle offers a matrix for the multiple relationships between performance and reference and the means of producing that performance which, in turn, necessarily produces the audience. The implications of the spectacle could sensibly be applied to the complete texts of the cycle plays, and perhaps more appropriately to the full range of the pageant and its concomitant festivities.



The direction of pseudo-historical criticism, particularly of the Elizabethan stage, certainly provides a well-plowed ground for advancing the rattling and carnivalesque inherently present in the establishment and event of theater. Nevertheless, my news here is both more limited and more terrific: its limits are constructed by the choice of an individual play repeated through the four extant manuscripts of what has come to be called the head teacher Christi plays; its expansion is expressed through a delivery that aims to implicate the particular moment of this play in the operations of a dominant church-state apparatus, which is, ostensibly, a model of maintaining hegemony in Western culture. The Harrowing provides a singular instance in which the mechanisms of control of the apparatus... If you ask to get a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay



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