Hvar City Theatre Days, Vol. 50 No. 1, 2024.
Original scientific paper
The Genre Characteristics of Komedija od Juditi
Divna Mrdeža Antonina
; Sveučilište u Zadru, Odjel za kroatistiku
Abstract
Handwritten Chakavian drama Komedija od Juditi (NSK, R 5256) by an anonymous author, damaged at the end and with a truncated beginning, by theme is a biblical drama focused on the most striking dramatic elements from the story of the Bethulian widow (Book of Judith) who frees her hometown from the siege by decapitating the Assyrian general Holofernes. In literary history, it is linked to the Zadar islands of the second half of the 17th century by its linguistic characteristics, and in terms of genre, it is held to be the popular church performances. Unlike its related medieval church performances, the drama is arranged in three parts divided into sections according to the model of the Renaissance dramatic text. The folk lexicon and phraseology of certain sentential sequences in the speech of the characters, freed from narrating the hypotext, support the genre qualification of this text. The bulk of the text, however, belongs to the higher stylistic register of dialogue, which points to an educated author. Furthermore, the dramaturgical structure of the text and the metrical forms of its dialogues make it simila r to the more contemporary, 17th century genre models.
Keywords
drama; Judith; 17th century dramatic genres
Hrčak ID:
316971
URI
Publication date:
8.5.2024.
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