The Samarites by Petrus Papeus offers an effective blending of gospel narrative and ancient Roman comedy, combining manner of Plautus and Terence with the didacticism of medieval allegory and morality plays and the poetic diction of Renaissance humanism. In the Samarites they are the ingredients that present both moral and doctrinal teachings related to the gospel parables of the Prodigal Son and Good Samaritan. Papeus' work is an excellent example not only of the early modern school play, but also of the shifting conceptions of drama in Europe at that time. Daniel Nodes presents a critical edition and translation of the play together with a humanist commentary produced in Toledo by Alexius Vanegas three years after the play's first printing in Antwerp.

Readers and acolytes of the vital early 1950s-mid 1960s writers known as the Beat Generation tend to be familiar with the prose and poetry by the seminal authors of this period: Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima, and many others. Yet all of these authors, as well as other less well-known Beat figures, also wrote plays-and these, together with their countercultural approaches to what could or should happen in the theatre-shaped the dramatic experiments of the playwrights who came after them, from Sam Shepard to Maria Irene Fornes, to the many vanguard performance artists of the seventies. This volume, the first of its kind, gathers essays about the exciting work in drama and performance by and about the Beat Generation, ranging from the well-known Beat figures such as Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, to the "Afro-Beats" - LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Bob Kaufman, and others. It offers original studies of the women Beats - Di Prima, Bunny Lang - as well as groups like the Living Theater who in this era first challenged the literal and physical boundaries of the performance space itself.

For a brief period in the late Elizabethan Era an innovative company of players dominated the London stage. A fellowship of dedicated thespians, Lord Strange's Men established their reputation by concentrating on "modern matter" performed in a spectacular style, exploring new modes of impersonation, and deliberately courting controversy. Supported by their equally controversial patron, theater connoisseur and potential claimant to the English throne Ferdinando Stanley, the company included Edward Alleyn, considered the greatest actor of the age, as well as George Bryan, Thomas Pope, Augustine Phillips, William Kemp, and John Hemings, who later joined William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage in the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Though their theatrical reign was relatively short lived, Lord Strange's Men helped to define the dramaturgy of the period, performing the plays of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, and others with their own distinctive flourish.
Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean offer the first complete account of the troupe and its enormous influence on Elizabethan theater. Seamlessly blending theater history and literary criticism, the authors paint a lively portrait of a unique community of performing artists, their intellectual ambitions and theatrical innovations, their business practices, and their fearless engagements with the politics and religion of their time.

Through an examination of a range of performance works ranging from Jean Cocteau's ballet The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party (1921) to Julie Taymor's monumental production of Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark (2010) and Mexican playwright Isaac Gomez's La Ruta(2018), Staging Technology asks what becomes visible when we encounter plays, operas, and musicals that are themselves about fraught human/machine interfaces. What can theatrical production tell us about the way technology functions as an element of ideology and power in narrative drama? About the limits of the human? Staging Technology bridges the divide between the technical practices of theatre production and critical, theoretical approaches to interpreting drama to examine the way dramatic theatre's technologies are shaped by larger historical, ideological, and economic forces. At the same time, it examines how those technologies themselves have influenced 20th and 21st-century playwrights', composers', and librettists' choice of subject matter for staged representation. Examining performance works from the modernist and post-modern European and American canon of drama, opera, and performance art including works by Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Heiner Muller, Sophie Treadwell, Harold Pinter, Tristan Tzara, Jean Cocteau, Arthur Miller, Robert Pinsky, John Adams and Alice Goodman, Staging Technology transforms how we think about the interrelationship between theatre practice, performance, narrative drama, and text. In it Craig N. Owens synthesizes approaches to interpretation and practice from disparate realms, offering insights into over-arching ways of making meaning that are illustrated through focused and innovative readings of individual works for the dramatic stage. Staging Technology provides a new and transformative paradigm for thinking about dramatic literature, the practices of representational theatre production, and the historical and social contexts they inhabit.

Edward Albee as Theatrical and Dramatic Innovator offers eight essays and a major interview by important scholars in the field that explore this three-time Pulitzer prize-winning playwright's innovations as a dramatist and theatrical artist. They consider not only Albee's award-winning plays and his contributions to the evolution of modern American drama, but also his important influence to the American theatre as a whole, his connections to art and music, and his international influence in Spanish and Russian theatre. Contributors: Jackson R. Bryer, Milbre Burch, David A. Crespy, Ramon Espejo-Romero, Nathan Hedman, Lincoln Konkle, Julia Listengarten, David Marcia, Ashley Raven, Parisa Shams, Valentine Vasak

Jez Butterworth is the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful new British dramatist of the 21st century: his acclaimed play "Jerusalem "has had extended runs in the West End and on Broadway. This book is the first to examine all of Butterworth's writings for stage and film and to identify how and why his work appeals so widely and profoundly. It contains interviews with those who have worked on Butterworth's plays in production, and examines the way that he weaves suspenseful stories of eccentric outsiders, whose adventures echo widespread contemporary social anxieties, and involve surprising expressions of both violence and generosity. This book reveals how Butterworth unearths the strange forms of wildness and defiance lurking in the depths and edges of England: where unpredictable outbursts of wry and bawdy humour highlight the poignant intensity of life; and characters discover links between their haunting but ominous past and the uncertainties of the present, to create a meaningful future. This is a clear, detailed primary source of reference for a new generation of theatre audiences, practitioners and directors who wish to explore the work of this seminal dramatist.

A practical, accessible and thorough guide to identifying and using rhetorical devices in drama, using examples from both classical and contemporary plays. An unprecedented reference and handbook for actors, directors, playwrights and teachers; written by practitioners for practitioners. Little has been written about how dramatists draw on rhetorical devices, and how a study of these can unlock a text for a performer or director, or indeed inspire contemporary playwrights. This book addresses in detail - yet in straightforward terms - the many different rhetorical forms used in drama, and enables the reader to identify and analyse them. Dramatic Adventures in Rhetoric may be read cover to cover, or it may be dipped into; it is both an analytic tool and a reference aid for use in the classroom or rehearsal room, revealing how careful study of language is one of the best ways of accessing the richness of texts both classical and contemporary.

More than one million people from all walks of life have been uplifted and entertained by Heaven Bound, the folk drama that follows, through song and verse, the struggles between Satan and a band of pilgrims on their way down the path of glory that leads to the golden gates. Staged annually and without interruption for more than seventy years at Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Atlanta, Heaven Bound is perhaps the longest running black theater production. Here, a lifelong member of Big Bethel with many close ties to Heaven Bound recounts its lively history and conveys the enduring power and appeal of an Atlanta tradition that is as much a part of the city as Coca-Cola or Gone with the Wind.

Modernists and the Theatre examines how six key modernists, who are best known as poets and novelists, engaged with the realm of theatre and performance. Drawing on a wealth of unfamiliar archival material and fresh readings of neglected documents, James Moran demonstrates how these literary figures interacted with the playhouse, exploring W.B. Yeats's earliest playwriting, Ezra Pound's onstage acting, the links between James Joyce's and D.H. Lawrence's sense of drama, T.S. Eliot's thinking about theatrical popularity, and the feminist politics of Virginia Woolf's small-scale theatrical experimentation. While these modernists often made hostile comments about drama, this volume highlights how the writers were all repeatedly drawn to the form. While Yeats and Pound were fascinated by the controlling aspect of theatre, other authors felt inspired by theatre as a democratic forum in which dissenting voices could be heard. Some of these modernists used theatre to express and explore identities that had previously been sidelined in the public forum, including the working-class mining communities of Lawrence's plays, the sexually unconventional and non-binary gender expressions of Joyce's fiction, and the female experience that Woolf sought to represent and discuss in terms of theatrical performance. These writers may be known primarily for creating non-dramatic texts, but this book demonstrates the importance of the theatre to the activities of these authors, and shows how a sense of the theatrical repeatedly motivated the wider thinking and writing of six major figures in literary history.

As a playwright, a dissident, and a politician, Vaclav Havel was one of the most important intellectual figures of the late twentieth century. Working in an extraordinary range of genres - poetry, plays, public letters, philosophical essays, and political speeches - he left behind a range of texts so diverse that scholars have had difficulty grappling with his oeuvre as a whole. In Reading Vaclav Havel, David S. Danaher approaches Havel's remarkable body of work holistically, focusing on the language, images, and ideas which appear and reappear in the many genres in which Havel wrote. Carefully reading the original Czech texts alongside their English versions, he exposes what in Havel's thought has been lost in translation. A passionate argument for Havel's continuing relevance, Reading Vaclav Havel is the first book to capture the fundamental unity of his vast literary legacy.

Since it was written by tragedians and employed a number of formal tragic elements, satyr drama is typically categorized as a sub-genre of Greek tragedy. This categorization, however, gives an incomplete picture of the complicated relationship of the satyr play to other genres of drama in ancient Greece. For example, the humorous chorus of half-man, half-horse satyrs suggests sustained interaction between poets of comedy and satyr play. In Satyric Play, Carl Shaw notes the complex, shifting relationship between comedy and satyr drama, from sixth-century BCE proto-drama to classical productions staged at the Athenian City Dionysia and bookish Alexandrian plays of the third century BCE, and argues that comedy and satyr plays influenced each other in nearly all stages of their development. This is the first book to offer a complete, integrated analysis of Greek comedy and satyr drama, analyzing the details of the many literary, aesthetic, historical, religious, and geographical connections to satyr drama. Ancient critics and poets allude to comic-satyric associations in surprising ways, vases indicate a common connection to komos (revelry) song, and the plays themselves often share titles, plots, modes of humor, and even on occasion choruses of satyrs. Shaw's insight into this evidence reveals the relationship between satyr drama and Greek comedy to be much more intimately connected than we had known and, in fact, much closer than that between satyr drama and tragedy. Satyric Play brings new light to satyr drama as a complex, artful, inventive, and even cleverly paradoxical genre.

Volume of new essays investigating Kleist's influences and sources both literary and philosophical, their role as paradigms, and the ways in which he responded to and often shattered them. Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) was a rebel who upset canonization by employing his predecessors and contemporaries as what Steven Howe calls "inspirational foils." It was precisely a keen awareness of literary and philosophical traditions that allowed Kleist to shatter prevailing paradigms. Though little is known about what specifically Kleist read, the frequent allusions in his enduringly modern oeuvre indicate fruitful dialogues with both canonical and marginal works of European literature, spanning antiquity (The Old Testament, Sophocles), the Early Modern Period (Shakespeare, De Zayas), the late Enlightenment (Wieland, Goethe, Schiller), and the first eleven years of the nineteenth century (Mereau, Brentano, Collin). Kleist's works also evidence encounters with his philosophical precursors and contemporaries, including the ancient Greeks (Aristotle) and representatives of all phases of Enlightenment thought (Montesquieu, Rousseau, Ferguson, Spalding, Fichte, Kant, Hegel), economic theories (Smith, Kraus), and developments in anthropology, sociology, and law. This volume of new essays sheds light on Kleist's relationship to his literary and philosophical influences and on their function as paradigms to which his writings respond.

Essential for students of theatre studies, Methuen Drama's Decades of Modern British Playwriting series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1950s to 2009 in six volumes. Each volume features a critical analysis and reevaluation of the work of four/five key playwrights from that decade authored by a team of experts, together with an extensive commentary on the period . Edited by Dan Rebellato, Modern British Playwriting: 2000-2009 provides an authoritative and stimulating reassessment of the theatre of the decade, together with a detailed study of the work of David Greig (Nadine Holdsworth), Simon Stephens (Jacqueline Bolton), Tim Crouch (Dan Rebellato), Roy Williams (Michael Pearce) and Debbie Tucker Green (Lynette Goddard). The volume sets the context by providing a chronological survey of the decade, one marked by the War on Terror, the excesses of economic globalization and the digital revolution. In surveying the theatrical activity and climate, Andrew Haydon explores the response to the political events, the rise of verbatim theatre, the increasing experimentation and the effect of both the Boyden Report and changes in the Arts Council's priorities. Five scholars provide detailed examinations of the playwrights' work during the decade, combining an analysis of their plays with a study of other material such as early play drafts and the critical receptions of the time. Interviews with each playwright further illuminate this stimulating final volume in the Decades of Modern British Playwriting series.

Murder, Mayhem, and Madness-- Collected here are five of William Shakespeare's greatest tragedies Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear. These are the plays that made Shakespeare's reputation. Murder, deceit, treachery, and madness play out on the grand stage. Stories for the ages Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle moves across the landscape of European performance in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, recounting performance in circulation across national borders and across the itinerant bodies of spectators who travel to meet performances that travel. Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle suggests spectating is a practice - an act of interpretation engaged in more than simply receiving the affects of a performance, a companion practice to the making of performance. The work forms a part of Skantze's ongoing explorations of what she terms the 'epistemology of practice as research.' IS/IS theorizes spectating as a practice that extends beyond the theatre, as a practice of writing as recollecting (and recollecting as writing) at the center of what has been called "criticism." The book grounds spectatorship in the subjective, embodied, differenced practice of spectating not from a fixed location or standpoint but from a ground that constantly shifts, that is, from the ground of the roving positionalities of the "itinerate spectator." Following Walter Benjamin, for example, Skantze importantly adopts the privileges of the flaneur as a feminist and rather queer project, one that refuses to be tied to the minor position, to that of the impossible "flaneuse." The methodology of the book takes inspiration from the writings of W.G. Sebald and his employment of something Skantze describes as "a staging of memory," a way to offer the reader an example of how memory works in the midst of a description of a particular recollection. This construction invites the reader/participant to 'discover, ' to 'remember' alongside the writer. Further, this methodology invites the reader to incorporate her/his own ideas and memories of the practice of spectating through an openness in the language of remembering and description. Individual sections of the book demonstrate spectating as itinerant 'on the job training' in various modes of reception. Topics include: the idea of reparation in performance about nations, the past and injustice; the power of sound and the intricacies of seeing/hearing performance in many languages; the architectural information absorbed by the spectator and its role in fashioning story; the shifts made in spectating at festivals between theatre and dance; and the political consequences and traps of mobility and immobility.

Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

The Victorian classical burlesque was a popular theatrical genre of the mid-19th century. It parodied ancient tragedies with music, melodrama, pastiche, merciless satire and gender reversal. Immensely popular in its day, the genre was also intensely metatheatrical and carries significance for reception studies, the role and perception of women in Victorian society and the culture of artistic censorship. This anthology contains the annotated text of four major classical burlesques: Antigone Travestie (1845) by Edward L. Blanchard, Medea; or, the Best of Mothers with a Brute of a Husband (1856) by Robert Brough, Alcestis; the Original Strong-Minded Woman (1850) and Electra in a New Electric Light (1859) by Francis Talfourd. The cultural and textual annotations highlight the changes made to the scripts from the manuscripts sent to the Lord Chamberlain's office and, by explaining the topical allusions and satire, elucidate elements of the burlesques' popular cultural milieu. An in-depth critical introduction discusses the historical contexts of the plays' premieres and unveils the cultural processes behind the reception of the myths and original tragedies. As the burlesques combined spectacular effects with allusions to contemporary affairs, ambivalent and provocative attitudes to women, the plays represent an essential tool for reading the social history of the era.

While large bodies of scholarship exist on the plays of Shakespeare and the philosophy of Heidegger, this book is the first to read these two influential figures alongside one another, and to reveal how they can help us develop a creative and contemplative sense of ethics, or an 'ethical imagination'. Following the increased interest in reading Shakespeare philosophically, it seems only fitting that an encounter take place between the English language's most prominent poet and the philosopher widely considered to be central to continental philosophy. Interpreting the plays of Shakespeare through the writings of Heidegger and vice versa, each chapter pairs a select play with a select work of philosophy. In these pairings the themes, events, and arguments of each work are first carefully unpacked, and then key passages and concepts are taken up and read against and through one another. As these hermeneutic engagements and cross-readings unfold we find that the words and deeds of Shakespeare's characters uniquely illuminate, and are uniquely illuminated by, Heidegger's phenomenological analyses of being, language, and art.

The shift in temporal modalities of Romantic Theatre was the consequence of internal as well as external developments: internally, the playwright was liberated from the old imperative of "Unity of Time" and the expectation that the events of the play must not exceed the hours of a single day; externally, the new social and cultural conformance to the time-keeping schedules of labour and business that had become more urgent with the industrial revolution. In reviewing the theatre of the Romantic era, this monograph draws attention to the ways in which theatre reflected the pervasive impact of increased temporal urgency in social and cultural behaviour. The contribution this book makes to the study of drama in the early nineteenth century is a renewed emphasis on time as a prominent element in Romantic dramaturgy, and a reappraisal of the extensive experimentation on how time functioned.

Fortune's Fool Here is William Shakespeare's brilliant play the Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, set in Verona during a feud between the Capulets and the Montagues. Romeo, a Montague, falls desperately in love with Juliet, a Capulet, and the two secretly marry. Lyrical and poignant, this immortal play of star-crossed lovers will stay with you long after the play ends. 'Tis but thy name that is my enemy. Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.