Edgar Allan Poe's Politian скачать в хорошем качестве

Edgar Allan Poe's Politian

Play by: Edgar Allan Poe Directed by: Misan Akuya Cast: Misan Akuya, Paulina Logan, Stephanie Dietz Politian Poe, indeed, seems never to have been happy about his play. It simply did not meet the high artistic standards he set for himself. He published five scenes in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835-36 almost surely because the magazine needed copy, and his letter of September 10, 1845, to E. A. Duyckinck makes it clear that the scenes were republished in The Raven and Other Poems somewhat against the author’s will and only “to fill a book.” That he did not plan ever to print the other scenes of the play was implied when to George W. Eveleth, who had asked him about them, Poe laconically replied on December 15, 1846, “There is no more of ‘Politian.’ ” If Poe rightly concluded that his forte was not in the composition of dramas for the stage, he nevertheless preserved most of his manuscript. And today one may well wish to read the sole effort at a full-length play by the author of that masterly prose monodrama, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Politian never was finished, and some of what was written has been lost. But it is still almost complete, since the lost lines are demonstrably less than one hundred and the general plan of the final scene is obvious. It can be and indeed has been performed and found acceptable by audiences.           Full discussion of the history of the parts Poe did not print belongs in the bibliographical and textual notes below. But it should be said at once that a major portion of the manuscript was preserved by Poe’s patroness, Sarah Anna Lewis, who gave one leaf to an obscure collector, and the rest later to John H. Ingram.  Ingram’s portion entered the famous collection of Stephen H. Wakeman, bought en bloc by the first J. P. Morgan in 1909. In 1917, when I was an undergraduate, Miss Belle da Costa Greene, director of the Pierpont Morgan Library, suggested that I edit the play; and in 1923 Politian, An Unfinished Tragedy was published at Richmond.  This is the first edition, and as such is now followed for the conventional arrangement of speakers’ names and stage directions. The text given below is based on very careful re-examination of the manuscript and of all the printings by Poe of parts of the play. The annotation has been brought up to date, and also reduced by the omission of some peripheral material.