Full Description
The Play about the Antichrist (Ludus de Antichristo) was composed around 1160 at the imperial Bavarian abbey of Tegernsee, at a critical point in the power-struggle between the papacy and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. This new translation, with accompanying Latin edition, reveals this drama to be strikingly representative of the role that theatrical performance played in shaping contemporary politics, diplomacy, and public opinion. It also shows how drama functioned as an integral component of the educational curricula of elite monastic institutions like Tegernsee, where political administrators and diplomats were trained.
In this new translation, Carol Symes provides the first full and faithful rendering of the play's dynamic language, maintaining the meter, rhyme scheme, and stage directions of the Latin original and restoring the liturgical elements embedded in the text. Kyle A. Thomas, whose dedicated research provides the foundation for an analysis of the play's broader contexts, also brings perspectives from the first fully staged modern production that tested the theatricality of the translation and provides a new historical and dramaturgical analysis of the play's rich interpretive and performative possibilities.
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Part I: The Play: Historical, Literary, and Performance Contexts
Introduction
1. A Performance Dramaturgy
2. History, Eschatology, and Educations: Contextual Frameworks for "The Play about the Antichrist"
3. Liturgies, Æsthetics, and Symbolic Meaning-Making
Part II: The Play about the Antichrist/Ludus de Antichristo
Introduction
Dramatis Personæ
A New Verse Translations and Diplomatic Edition
Bibliography
