Machines for the Suppression of Time: Statues in Suor Angelica, The Winter's Tale, and Alcestis (original) (raw)

Comparative Drama, 1990

Abstract

This essay examines the dramatic presentation of three stories based on a pattern of error, repentance, death, and resurrection: Puccini's one-act opera Suor Angelica, Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, and Euripides' Alcestis. More specifically, it examines how those dramas employ the motif of the statue-come-to-life which drives their final scenes. In The Winter's Tale, the supposedly dead woman is returned to her husband by pretending to be a statue that is magically animated. In Alcestis, a promise to make a statue is called to mind as Alcestis returns from the grave to Admetus. At the end of Suor Angelica the Virgin Mary appears in a miracle the libretto does not call for an animated statue of the Virgin, but that is one way the miracle has been staged taking an idea from popular religion and thus connecting the miracle with an established stage object. 1 I will be maintaining the aptness of that method of production for Suor Angelica, both historically and thematically, and then use

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