During the 1960s and 1970s, the women’s movement and experimental theatre were vital forces in providing women a public space to challenge patriarchal values and to dramatize the rare, unseen inner life of woman. Beginning in the late 1970s, as the two major bibliographical works on women dramatists and theatre, Steadman’s Dramatic Re-Visions: An Annotated Bibliography of Feminism and Theatre 1972-1988, and my own American Women Playwrights, 1964-1989 will attest, scholars began responding to women’s plays - uncovering neglected writers, discovering new ones, and developing theories to evaluate playwrights and performance.

Reclaiming the presence of women playwrights

Four notable volumes document the formation of the canon of women playwrights and feminist theatre: Chinoy and Jenkins’ sourcebook, Women in American Theatre; Notable Women in the American Theatre: A Biographical Dictionary; Betsko and Koenig’s landmark Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights; and, especially welcome, Burke’s American Feminist Playwrights: A Critical History, which places women playwrights within a critical and historical context.

The bow has a far longer history than the cello, but the instrument's rapid development made new demands on the existing bows of the sixteenth century. Although it appeared in many forms before 1500, the bow is most often depicted as a simply curved stick with a skein of horsehair stretched between the ends (see Fig. 2.1). The hair was kept in permanent tension, and the deep curve of the stick gave it a high centre of gravity, making it difficult to control. The curve was made flatter during the sixteenth century with the addition of the frog, a wedge which kept the hair clear of the stick at the handle. Early bow makers remain anonymous, and it is not clear whether instrument makers made and supplied their own bows. Only from the eighteenth century did bows begin to appear with the maker's name branded on the stick or the frog.

Nowadays, the craft of the ‘archetier’, or bow maker, is entirely separated from that of the ‘luthier’, or instrument maker. The major innovations in bow making during the Baroque period are associated with musicians rather than craftsmen; violinists generally set the pace for development, while cellists were able to make good use of the designs produced for viol players. The bow-type named after the violinist and composer Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713) has a longer and straighter stick and a down-turned tip to raise the end of the stick away from the hair, matching the frog and increasing the usable length of hair.

Reynolds Price has distinguished himself as a writer of short stories, as a playwright, as a poet, as a biblical translator, as an essayist and critic, and as a memoirist, but it is on his novels that his reputation hangs. Because the middle 1990s are the peak of his career, it is hazardous to make claims about the shape of his work, but his twenty-seven books over the last thirty-odd years have shown a powerful consistency in their aesthetic and in their governing concerns. Whether Price will be the last of the great novelists of the Southern Renascence tradition depends chiefly on who follows him, but his proudly old-fashioned practice of the Southern novel, always traditional but never derivative, places his work squarely and unapologetically in Southern fiction’s main line of descent. The inheritance of Southern fiction’s in some way resembles the inheritance of the burdened and entangled family histories it so often describes, but if Price is the last of a dynasty, he never, perhaps uncharacteristically in Southern dynastic stories, thinks of himself as the troubled and ironic heir of a legacy he both loves and fears. Walker Percy, like his own Will Barrett, and Peter Taylor, like his own Phillip Carver, see themselves as comically or wistfully belated. Neither Price nor his own Hutchins Mayfield, however, proud as they are of their ability to render keen and complex judgements, think of themselves as latecomers in any way; indeed, both rather hardheadedly insist that the traditional resources at their disposal are fully up to the exigencies of the present day.

Both Intruder in the Dust (1948) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) set out to be stories about race and turn into stories about class. Because To Kill a Mockingbird is in some ways a stripped-down revision of Intruder in the Dust, it shows its hand more starkly and thus makes a clearer statement about the price of its central strategies. Written with the Emmett Till case in mind and with the Scottsboro Boys case in the background, To Kill a Mockingbird turns on the unsuccessful attempt of a widowed, slightly eccentric, morally decent small-town lawyer, Atticus Finch, to defend a young African American man, Tom Robinson, who has been falsely accused of rape in the south Alabama town of Maycomb during the Depression.

To Kill a Mockingbird is narrated by Atticus’s daughter Scout, a shrewd, vital, feisty, tomboy rather on the model of Mick Kelly in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. The naiveté and sensitivity of the narrator serves a political purpose, because there is no better way to make clear the irrationality of racism than to attempt to make sense of it to someone like Scout. Scout herself has to learn to make her way in a very flawed and dangerous world, and her own developing insight and courage are meant to model a younger generation that may repair some of the problems of the world they inherit.

Unlike other books in this series, the present volume is not a “companion” to a single philosopher but to the set of thinkers who collectively formed the beginnings of the philosophical tradition of ancient Greece. Most of them wrote little, and the survival of what they wrote or thought is fragmentary, often mediated not by their own words but only by the testimony of Aristotle, Theophrastus, and other much later authors. These remains are exceptionally precious not only because of their intrinsic quality but also for what they reveal concerning the earliest history of western philosophy and science. The fascination of the material, notwithstanding or even because of its density and lacunar transmission, grips everyone who encounters it. Two of our century's most influential philosophers, Heidegger and Popper, have “gone back” to the earliest Greek philosophers in buttressing their own radically different methodologies and preoccupations. Many of these thinkers are so challenging that the small quantity of their surviving work is no impediment to treating each of them at book length. Even so, there are reasons beyond our fragmentary sources and conventional practice for presenting these and other early Greek philosophers in a collective volume.

The 1920s and 1930s form an important period in our cultural history that is famous for its legacy of creative work focusing on the lives and concerns of African Americans. This flowering of art and literature is variously referred to as the Harlem Renaissance, New Negro Movement, or New Negro Renaissance. Among the many outstanding black writers associated with the period are Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston. The enduring value of the work produced by black artists from this era has prompted literary scholars to recognize the Harlem Renaissance as “the one period in black letters that stands out above all others” (Harris and Davis, Afro-American Writers, xi) and theatre scholars to acknowledge the contemporary development of a serious theatre that could “speak to and for African Americans” (Hatch and Hamalian, Lost Plays 18).

Although the Harlem Renaissance is so named because of the great number of black artists who flocked into Harlem, making it the black cultural capital of the world, significant artistic activity was also occurring in cities such as Washington DC, Chicago, and Boston. Just as the movement cannot be limited to one location, neither is it easily reducible to exact dates, but it is generally conceded that an unprecedented surge in activity among African American artists, reflecting a renewed race consciousness and pride, began around World War I and extended into the decade of the the 1930s.

DOXOGRAPHI GRAECI

Because the works of the early Greek philosophers have been lost, our knowledge of their content is entirely dependent either on sparse verbatim quotations (though less sparse than for instance those relating to the early Stoics) or on various forms of reportage in all sorts of ancient authors. It has thus become customary to begin books of this kind with a critical review of our sources of information.

What is at stake is the reliability of these sources. The ideal of an objective history of philosophy is a nineteenth-century invention. In antiquity history of philosophy was part of systematic philosophy, serving a variety of purposes. The ideas of earlier philosophers were used and interpreted in many ways, and, more often than not, served merely as springboards. This holds not only for the attitude of major thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle but also for the far humbler works consisting of collections of doctrines, with or without some biographical detail, that circulated on a fairly extensive scale. Such works were used, it would seem, in the context of a primary education in philosophy and also as quarries to be exploited whenever someone writing about a philosophical issue felt he should set off his own view against those of others, to improve upon an already existing view or to replace it with another.

THE APPROACH TO HERACLITUS

Heraclitus of Ephesus must have been active around 500 B.C. Nothing is known of the external events of his life; the later biographical reports are fiction. Of Heraclitus' book, around one hundred fragments survive. It seems to have consisted of a series of aphoristic statements without formal linkage. The style is unique. Heraclitus' carefully stylized and artfully varied prose ranges from plain statements in ordinary language to oracular utterances with poetical special effects in vocabulary, rhythm, and word arrangement. Many statements play with paradoxes or hover teasingly on the brink of self-contradiction. Many seem intended as pungently memorable aphorisms. (Translations in this chapter try to capture some of the ambiguities, where this is reasonably possible.)

The meaning and purpose of Heraclitus7 book has always been found to be problematic, even by those who read it in its entirety. The Peripatetic Theophrastus (D.L. IX.6) diagnosed Heraclitus as “melancholic” (manic-depressive), on the grounds that he left some things half-finished, and contradicted himself; later Greeks named him “the obscure.” Certainly Heraclitus did not always aim at expository order and clarity as usually understood. What remains shows that he often was deliberately unclear. Like a riddle or an oracle, he practised a deliberate half-concealment of his meanings, goading the reader to participate in a game of hide-and-seek.

The Baroque and Classical eras

Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli's Concerti per voci e stromenti musicali … (Venice, 1587), comprising sacred music and madrigals for voices and instruments, is the earliest known publication incorporating the term ‘concerto’ in its title. ‘Concerto’ then denoted simply an aggregation of performers and was applied to various musical genres, vocal and instrumental. The instrumental concerto emerged as an independent form towards the end of the seventeenth century and soon evolved into a genre in which virtuosity and textural contrast were significant elements.

Among the earliest Italian composers to exploit the cello as a concertante instrument were Jacchini, Della Bella and Dall'Abaco. Jacchini's Concerti per camera … con Violoncello Obligato Op. 4 (Bologna, 1701) comprises ten works, six of which include brief passages for a solo cello. These passages, which appear mostly in the fast outer movements (all but No. 6 are three-movement structures), are based on scales or sequential patterns and are not technically demanding. Dall'Abaco's twelve Concerti a quattro da chiesa Op. 2 (Amsterdam, 1712) reconcile their adoption of forms from the sonata with solo passages principally for a violin. But the eleventh concerto, in G major, specifies ‘con il Violoncello obligato’, which is required to play a more extensive solo role than in Jacchini's works.

The earliest true solo concertos for cello and orchestra were composed by Vivaldi, who wrote most of his twenty-seven examples (RV398–424) for the young female cellists of the Pio Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, where he was employed irregularly from 1703 to 1740. Vivaldi was the first to develop fully the formal and stylistic possibilities of the Torellian concerto model, as demonstrated in some of Torelli’s posthumously published Concerti grossi Op. 8 (Bologna, 1709). Although few of Vivaldi’s cello concertos make exceptional technical demands, they fully realise the instrument’s warm, expressive sonorities, most adopting minor keys.

By the turn of the eighteenth century, French cellists had achieved standards of performance equal to those of the Germans, who had taken over the lead from Italy. Individual characteristics were in evidence in each country; German players were renowned for a highly developed left-hand technique and a vigorous tone, while the French favoured elegance, as exemplified by the courts of Louis XV and XVI. Tone production was influenced strongly by Viotti, the Italian founder of the French school of violin playing.

The Paris Conservatoire was the main teaching centre in France. Two of its most respected professors, who contributed greatly to the improved standards, were Jean-Baptiste Bréval (see p. 55) and Jean Henri Levasseur, both of whom had studied with François Cupis. Levasseur, who had also studied with Jean-Louis Duport, was appointed first cellist of the Opéra orchestra in 1789, and later became a member of Napoleon's Private Music, continuing in that position after the defeat of the emperor. He was also one of the contributors, with Baillot, Catel and Baudiot, to the Méthode de Violoncelle et de Basse d'Accompagnement (Paris, 1805), regarded as one of the most significant instruction books for the instrument at that time.

Jacques Michel Hurel Lamare, one of the most prominent of Levasseur's pupils, was born in Paris into a very poor family; but he had such outstanding musical talent that he entered the Institute of the Pages of the Royal Music as a seven-year-old, and at fifteen became a pupil of Jean-Louis Duport. At the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he left his royal employers and in 1794 was appointed principal cellist at the Théâtre Feydeau, appearing frequently as soloist; he was also a professor at the Paris Conservatoire. He relinquished both appointments in 1801 in favour of a solo career and received acclaim in Moscow and St Petersburg and in many countries throughout Europe.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the modernist division between avant-garde and traditional fiction was coming to an end. As relativism, indeterminacy, self-reflexiveness, and absurdity became generally recognizable as a description of contemporary experience, experimentalism shifted from a goal in itself to a vehicle for a redefined realism.

The normalizing of the experimentalist ethos — so important in novels by men — was equally crucial for women writers. Beginning in about 1970, an unprecedented explosion of novels by and about women appeared in print, a simple fact in itself, but one that represented a fundamental change in the meaning of women’s experience. By writing, by being published, by finding an audience receptive to their work, women de facto redefined their status in our culture. They achieved a “voice” where before they were voiceless; they wrote themselves into history — both political and literary — when previously they had been strikingly absent from it. Women writers found immediately relevant the postmodern tenet that history is a construct serving an ideology and open to varying interpretation. The problem was how to appropriate the authority to tell stories of the past, and how to structure them in such a way as to generate a different kind of future.

World War II ended in 1945, ushering in a mid-century decade of major change in the world and especially in the United States. The flowering of African American literature, known as the Harlem Renaissance, had seemed to fade as writers tried to cope with the Great Depression and a World War forcing them to a new understanding of their place in the world. While the US labor force adjusted itself in order to accommodate returning soldiers, African American soldiers returned to ambivalence at home. Women were displaced from the wartime jobs that they had taken on the domestic front, but white, not black, veterans replaced them. Segregation and discrimination still prevailed in jobs, housing, and schools. But the 1950s would herald a measure of “progress,”however conflicted. In 1954, the Supreme Court declared separate schools inherently unequal, and the Interstate Commerce Commission banned segregation in interstate travel. Later, in 1957, Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act since 1875. The world and the country settled uneasily into the new phenomenon of a Cold War in an atomic age, while Senator Joe McCarthy continued his hunt for communists and homosexuals at home. The lifestyle of American families was changing rapidly as whites fled the cities and settled into new suburban housing developments, made affordable by the GI Bill and the adaptation of the assembly line to housing construction, while blacks were kept out to a large degree. As women returned to their kitchens, the pressure increased for them to conform to traditional family expectations - those of wife and mother.

INTRODUCTION: THE POETICS OF EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY?

For some readers, the very title of this chapter will seem a paradox or a provocation. After all, while the term “Presocratics” is modern, the concept has ancient roots; and from the very beginning it has been used to distinguish philosophers who, for the most part, wrote in prose, from poets who composed in verse. Such a distinction, which establishes the largely nonphilosophical character of the early Greek poets and the largely nonpoetical character of the early Greek philosophers, may seem self-evident to us, but in fact it has not always been so. Heraclitus names Hesiod and Xenophanes, in the same breath with Pythagoras and Hecataeus (DK 22 B40); Hippias wrote a treatise paralleling the opinions of poets and philosophers (DK 86 B6); Plato does not distinguish sharply between poets and philosophers among his predecessors, and he has his Protagoras claim that ancient poets were really sophists but disguised their opinions for fear of exciting hostility [Prot. 316d-e). As far as we know, Aristotle was the first author to distinguish terminologically between what he called mythologoi and theologoi on the one hand and physikoi or physiologoi on the other. On his view, the former group were really storytellers, poets narrating myths about heroes and gods, and any views about the nature of the world that might be extracted from their works were incidental, obscure, and philosophically uninteresting; the latter group, beginning with Thales, were engaged in basically the same kind of investigation of the physical world as Aristotle himself was and, even though their theories were, unsurprisingly, deficient in comparison with his own, nonetheless they were philosophically serious, that is, they were worth studying, pillaging, and refuting.