Artaud And His Doubles

DIVA radical re-thinking of one of the most canonized figures in theater history, theory, and practice/div

A collection of manifestos originally published in 1938, in which the French artist and philosopher attacks conventional assumptions about the drama, and calls for the influx of irrational material - based on dreams, religion, and emotion - in order to make the theater vital for modern audiences.

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"Artaud remains one of the significant and influential theorists of modern theatre."—Gerald Rabkin, Rutgers University

The work of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) is among the most seminal, shattered and inspirational of the twentieth century, extending across literature, film, performance, manifesto, sound art, drawing and a sequence of exploratory journeys. His body of work is still able to anatomise and negate all compromised cultures, and engender new theories, images and texts of the body, revolution, madness and the creative act. Now Stephen Barber's intensively researched work on Artaud has revealed Artaud's work to English- language readers in all of its intricacy.

This book examines the influence of the early modern period on Antonin Artaud’s seminal work The Theatre and Its Double, arguing that Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and their early modern context are an integral part of the Theatre of Cruelty and essential to its very understanding. The chapters draw links between the early modern theatrical obsession with plague and regeneration, and how it is mirrored in Artaud’s concept of cruelty in the theatre. As a discussion of the influence of Shakespeare and his contemporaries on Artaud, and the reciprocal influence of Artaud on contemporary interpretations of early modern drama, this book is an original addition to both the fields of early modern theatre studies and modern drama.