Melodrama

“song drama”, “music drama”, first performed in France. It is a standard Hollywood model. Elements of melodrama: music, heroine, happy ending, mixture of suspense and comedy, physical conflict, animal acts, exotic location.

The Well-Made Play

Is a dramatic genre from the 19^th century theatre. It had already entered into common use as a derogatory term. The plot is based on a secret that reveals at the climate of the action. Battles of wise people, centre upon stage prop, letter, fan.

The Irish Renaissance

Irish Humour

Irish humor developed out of the oral tradition (the telling of jokes and stories in Irish pubs). Irish humor developed out of pain and tragedy that came from the Irish diaspora. Irish humor contains much wordplay, and much of Irish wordplay is bilingual and/or bicultural, relating to both the Gaelic/Celtic and to the English language and culture. There are many Irish people around the world who are trying to reestablish their roots, and it is the humor in Irish written and oral literature that is helping them do so.

Folklore

County Mayo in the Gaeltacht is remote from tourism. “There are the remains of prehistoric forests and fairy mounds in the peat-bogs (tőzeg-láp). People talk of ancestors as if they were neighbors, and of three-hundred-year-old events as if they happened yesterday.”

Irish Blarney

Irishmen have the “gift of gab (fecsegés).” This comes from kissing the Blarney stone at Blarney Castle in County Cork. It is said that Queen Elizabeth tried to get Cormac MacCarthymore (occupier of Blarney Castle at the time) to surrender his castle to the English. He said he would do so, but he kept giving her reasons that he couldn’t do it yet. The queen is said to have exclaimed, “It’s all Blarney—he says he will do it, but he never means to do what he says.”

Kissing the Blarney Stone

To kiss the Blarney stone you must climb to the top of Blarney Castle. In order to kiss the Blarney stone, the visitor has to lie on his back and be lowered head downwards over the edge of the wall. Someone has to hold onto the ankles of the visitor so that they won’t slip off the edge of the castle. It’s hard to know whether kissing the stone gives someone the gift of eloquence, the entire process is “a bit of the blarney.”