Coppola, Al (Author)
The line that I take for my title, spoken by Bayes in the Duke of Buckingham's The Rehearsal (1671/5), encapsulates the enthusiasm, hope and fear of a society transformed by its attention to what Thomas Sprat, in the Royal Society's first manifesto, called "things themselves"--the new focus of the New Science. My project centers on the familiar but little-studied satiric figure of the "virtuoso," the gentleman scientist who appears in plays throughout this period and serves as a lightning rod for a host of cultural anxieties. Satires of the virtuoso, I argue, are always talking about something else: the politics of the moment, the proper ordering of sexual and domestic roles, the dangers of irrational spectatorship, or the allure of allegedly useful "projects." My study probes the complex role played by natural philosophy in a culture that by was being transformed by the emergence of mass entertainment, popular science, incipient capitalism, and party politics. As the virtuoso natural philosophy of the Restoration gave way to the Newtonian "public science" of mid-century, theatrical satires of science focused attention on the political and economic appropriations of natural philosophy, but above all made visible the vexed role that spectacle played in the manufacture and dissemination of scientific truth. With chapters that analyze Thomas Shadwell's The Virtuoso (1676) and Thomas Durfey's Madam Fickle (1677); Aphra Behn's The Emperor of The Moon (1687), Nehemiah Grew's Musaeum Regalis Societatis (1685) and Exclusion Crisis political spectacles; John Gay, Alexander Pope and John Arbuthnot's Three Hours after Marriage (1717) and Susanna Centlivre's A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718); and the Harlequin Doctor Faustus pantomimes (1723-4) and the popular Newtonian lectures, this project traces the rise and fall of virtuoso satire on stage in order to trace the far-reaching cultural effects of the seventeenth-century epistemic shift that privileged "matters of fact," a reformation of natural knowledge that was intended to drive out what Francis Bacon called the Idols of the Theatre, but which only drew science and the stage into closer relation.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 69/02 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3301434.
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Hanson, Craig Ashley;
(2008)
The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism
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Il "Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia" trecento anni dopo. Scienza, storia, arte, identità (1710-2010)
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Ciencia, Arte e Ilusión en la España Ilustrada
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Essay Review
Coppola, Al;
(2011)
Science/Spectacle
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Ambergris and Early Modern Languages of Scent
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Shanahan, John;
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The Dryden-Davenant Tempest, Wonder Production, and the State of Natural Philosophy in 1667
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Oleksijczuk, Denise;
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The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism
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A Taste for Seaweed: William Kilburn's Late Eighteenth-Century Designs for Printed Cottons
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John Theophilus Desaguliers: A Natural Philosopher, Engineer and Freemason in Newtonian England
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Dean, Dennis R.;
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Romantic Landscapes: Geology and Its Cultural Influence in Britain, 1765--1835
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Natura e artificio nell'Europa del Seicento e Settecento. Artisti, conoscitori e scienziati tra osservazione, invenzione e diffusione del sapere
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Stefano Spataro;
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"Ingannante, perché ingannato". Legittimità e limiti della raffigurazione parassitologica nelle ricerche vallisneriane
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Adam Fix;
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A Science Superior to Music: Joseph Sauveur and the Estrangement between Music and Acoustics
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Jane Goodall;
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Between Science and Supernaturalism: Mimesis and the Uncanny in Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Culture
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Marco Castellari;
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Giovanni Santucci;
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Architettura e ornamento in A tour thro' the wole island of Great Britain
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Jorink, Eric;
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Beyond the Lines of Apelles: Johannes Swammerdam, Dutch Scientific Culture and the Representation of Insect Anatomy
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Fournier-Antonini, Guenièvre;
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Giulia Peroni;
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Uno scienziato italiano nella realtà sovietica: il "Galilei" di Brecht alla Taganka di Ljubimov
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