Ubu Roi - Development

Development

"The beginnings of the original Ubu," wrote Taylor, "have attained the status of legend within French theatre culture." It was as a student in 1888, at the age of fifteen, that Jarry perused Les Polonais, a brief teacher-ridiculing farce by the brothers Henri (of whom he was a good friend) and Charles Morin. This, one of many plays created around the character of Père Ubu (or Hébé, as he was known at the time), is long lost, so the true and complete authorship of Ubu Roi can never be known. It is clear, however, that Jarry considerably revised and expanded the play, endowed it with the marionette concept and gave its protagonist the handle under which he became famous.

While his schoolmates lost interest in the Ubu legends when they left school, Jarry continued adding to and reworking the material for the rest of his short life. His plays were widely and wildly hated for their scant respect to royalty, religion and society, their vulgarity and scatology, their brutality and low comedy, and their perceived utter lack of literary finish.

Read more about this topic:  Ubu Roi

Famous quotes containing the word development:

    “Dissonance between family and school, therefore, is not only inevitable in a changing society; it also helps to make children more malleable and responsive to a changing world. By the same token, one could say that absolute homogeneity between family and school would reflect a static, authoritarian society and discourage creative, adaptive development in children.”
    —Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)

    “If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
    —Arthur Miller (b. 1915)

    “Women, because of their colonial relationship to men, have to fight for their own independence. This fight for our own independence will lead to the growth and development of the revolutionary movement in this country. Only the independent woman can be truly effective in the larger revolutionary struggle.”
    —Women’s Liberation Workshop, Students for a Democratic Society, Radical political/social activist organization. “Liberation of Women,” in New Left Notes (July 10, 1967)