Do You Believe in Fairies
The Hiss of Dramatic License
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5115541 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tracy C Davis (0000-0003-1706-1785, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2005 |
| Volume | 57 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 57-81 |
| Publication date | 2005-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Theatre Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0192-2882 • E-ISSN: 1086-332X |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/tj.2005.0007 |
| OpenAlex | W1963479886 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 10 |
When Peter Pan asks audiences to affirm their belief in fairies in order to revive Tinker Bell, this can be interpreted as an affirmation of the willing suspension of disbelief thought to be an essential condition of theatrical spectating. However, closer analysis of the original 1904 production of Peter Pan, including its variation from conventional pantomime, reveals the intertext of two contemporaneous debates in ethnology: the idea that the last of the fairy folk were departing from Britain, and the more empirical observation that gypsy-tinkers were losing their rural way of life. This reveals Peter Pan's query as a reflection about the status of oppressed groups, and thus less an affirmation of innocence than a referendum on the desirability of modernity. This case study is postulated as an example of dramatic licenseâa previously under-theorized conceptâproposing this as a term with specific referentiality to the theatrical medium, in which a mimetic, intellectual, and ideological problem is explicitly placed before an audience in order to elicit a response
Art · Hiss · License · Nuclear physics · Physics · Political science · Visual arts · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
Gypsy Politics and Social Change
Mimesis
The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction
The Traveller-Gypsies
The Victorian Economy
The Burlesque Tradition in the English Theatre after 1660
A Note on Audience Participation and Psychical Distance
Rude Mechanicals and the Specters of Marx
The Testimony of Tradition
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |