The Garden of Earthly Delights (Masterplots II: Drama, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Martha Clarke
- First Published: 1984
- Type of Plot: Surrealist
- Time of Work: The age of biblical creation and the fifteenth century
- Setting: Hieronymus Bosch landscape from his triptych, (c. 1500)
- Principal Characters: Adam, Eve, The Serpent, Angels, Demons, Coarse Peasants
- Genres: Drama, Surrealist literature
- Subjects: Creation myth, Good and evil, Ethics, Painting or painters, Hell, Fifteenth century, Bible, biblical imagery, or biblical symbolism, Pictures, Musical instruments
- Locales: Landscape painted by Hieronymus Bosch
The Play
The Garden of Earthly Delights is a series of pictorial vignettes performed without text or scenery. There are four distinct sections, dramatizing in turn Eden, the Garden of Earthly Delights, the Seven Deadly Sins, and Hell.
Part 1 begins when a smoky mist fills the blackened stage to the low sound of whistling wind. A trumpet blares as blue light illuminates a thicket of leafless tree branches held overhead by a man who trudges slowly to center stage. Six figures enter from the darkness of stage left, walking on their hands and feet, looking like...
[The entire page is 2763 words long]
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