When the Golden Bough Breaks: Folk Drama and the Theatre Historian

dc.contributor.author	Pettitt, Tom
dc.date.accessioned	2006-02-09T12:42:39Z
dc.date.available	2006-02-09T12:42:39Z
dc.date.issued	2005-12
dc.identifier.issn	When the Golden Bough Breaks: Folk Drama and the Theatre Historian
dc.identifier.issn	1502-7694
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/2077/230
dc.description.abstract	The title of Tom Pettitt's essay alludes to the massive impact on theatre historians of Sir James Frazer's monumental work on comparative anthropology, The Golden Bough (1890). It fostered the thesis that English folk drama preserves a pre-Christian fertility ritual, which may in turn have been the point of departure for the evolutionary process culminating with Shakespeare and the Elizabethan theatre. When the anthropological bough breaks, the theatrical cradle must fall, and the essay urges a reassessment of the significance of folk drama in the appreciation of Elizabethan plays, against the background of a renegotiation of its place in theatre history freed of presuppositions about ritual origins.	eng
dc.format.extent	473599 bytes
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf
dc.language.iso	en	eng
dc.publisher	Uni-pub, Norway (hard copy)	eng
dc.subject	Tom Pettitt, Thomas Pettitt, folk drama, theatre history	eng
dc.title	When the Golden Bough Breaks: Folk Drama and the Theatre Historian	eng
dc.type	Article	eng