This book explores the textured process of rewriting and revising theatrical works in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean as both a material and metaphorical practice. Deftly tracing these themes through community theater groups, ancient Greek theater, religious traditions, and national historical events, Katherine Ford weaves script, performance and final product together with an eye to the social significance of revision. Ultimately, to rewrite and revise is to re-envision and re-imagine stage practices in the twentieth-century Hispanic Caribbean.

Heinrich von Kleist has emerged as one of the great literary figures of his era. Yet, surprisingly few critical studies of his works exist in English. This book attempts to fill the gap by offering an up-to-date reading of Kleist's dramas and stories in the light of recent scholarship in German and other languages. Among the themes explored are the problematical nature of family relationships in Kleist's plays and stories; the failure of communication across a wide scale of social situations; and the theory of metaphor that may be deduced from Kleist's practice as a writer. His works are treated both as literary masterpieces and as facets of an enquiry into human nature in a historical situation in which there are few certainties.

This volume brings together nineteen important articles by Pamela M. King, one of the foremost British scholars working on Early English Drama. Unique to this collection are five articles on the 'living' traditions of performances in Spain, discussing their origins and the modes of production that are used. Several articles use modern literary theory on aspects of early drama, whilst others consider drama in the context of late medieval poetry. The volume also includes a rich collection of articles on English scriptural plays from surviving manuscripts.

Placing 'literature' at the centre of Renaissance economic knowledge, this book offers a distinct intervention in the history of early modern epistemology. It is premised on the belief that early modern practices of change and exchange produced a range of epistemic shifts and crises, which, nonetheless, lacked a systematic vocabulary. These essays collectively tap into the imaginative kernel at the core of economic experience, to grasp and give expression to some of its more elusive experiential dimensions. The essays gathered here probe the early modern interface between imaginative and mercantile knowledge, between technologies of change in the field of commerce and transactions in the sphere of cultural production, and between forms of transaction and representation. In the process, they go beyond the specific interrelation of economic life and literary work to bring back into view the thresholds between economics on the one hand, and religious, legal and natural philosophical epistemologies on the other.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

The new Early English Text Society edition of The Towneley Plays will serve as a definitive edition for many years to come. It replaces the edition by George England and Alfred W. Pollard, published nearly one hundred years ago by the Early English Text Society. Apart from the corrections of errors in the transcription of the text, the new edition offers a comprehensive introduction, body of notes, and glossary. It also presents the text in a new format, based on an examination of the manuscript, by expanding stanzas attributed to the so-called `Wakefield Master' from nine lines (with some internal rhyme) to thirteen lines. The Townley Plays manuscript dates approximately to the year 1500. The plays is contains are often considered the most interesting and stylistically intricate among all those surviving in extant cycles. By both internal and external evidence they are traceable to the city of Wakefield, where they were apparently performed over much of the sixteenth century. Most notable among the contents of the manuscript is `The Second Shepherds Play', which is widely known apart from the cycle and is included in many literary and dramatic anthologies. The cycle itself contains 32 plays on the subject of salvation history from the Creation to the Last Judgement.

How was Ted Hughes's poetry affected by Sylvia Plath? What is the importance of his early life on the Yorkshire moors with his elder brother, that he called Paradise? How did writing Birthday Letters affect his attitude to his life and career? This book attempts to answer these questions by a close study of Hughes's poetic development.

The new Early English Text Society edition of The Towneley Plays will serve as a definitive edition for many years to come. It replaces the edition by George England and Alfred W. Pollard, published nearly one hundred years ago by the Early English Text Society. Apart from the corrections of errors in the transcription of the text, the new edition offers a comprehensive introduction, body of notes, and glossary. It also presents the text in a new format, based on an examination of the manuscript, by expanding stanzas attributed to the so-called `Wakefield Master' from nine lines (with some internal rhyme) to thirteen lines. The Townley Plays manuscript dates approximately to the year 1500. The plays is contains are often considered the most interesting and stylistically intricate among all those surviving in extant cycles. By both internal and external evidence they are traceable to the city of Wakefield, where they were apparently performed over much of the sixteenth century. Most notable among the contents of the manuscript is `The Second Shepherds Play', which is widely known apart from the cycle and is included in many literary and dramatic anthologies. The cycle itself contains 32 plays on the subject of salvation history from the Creation to the Last Judgement.

The most successful woman writer of the Restoration, Aphra Behn (1640-89) became an important influence on the literature of the following century. This book examines her complex legacy to later writers, both men and women, traces the stage history of her comedy The Rover, and shows how her Surinam novel, Oroonoko, was transformed into an instrument of the anti-slavery movement.

Examining the ways in which contemporary Western theatre protests against the 'War on Terror', this book analyses six twenty-first century plays that respond to the post-9/11 military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. The plays are written by some of the most significant writers of this century and the last including Elfriede Jelinek, Caryl Churchill, Helene Cixous and Tony Kushner. Anti-war Theatre After Brecht grapples with the problem of how to make theatre that protests the policies of democratically elected Western governments in a post-Marxist era. It shows how the Internet has become a key tool for disseminating anti-war play texts and how online social media forums are changing traditional dramatic aesthetics and broadening opportunities for spectator access, engagement and interaction with a work and the political alternatives it puts forward.

Ruling Women is a two-volume study devoted to an analysis of the conflicting discourses concerning government by women in seventeenth-century France. In this second volume, Configuring the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century French Drama, Conroy analyzes over 30 plays published between 1637 and 1691, examining the range of constructions of queenship that are thrown into relief. The analysis focuses on the ways in which certain texts strive to manage the cultural anxiety produced by female rule and facilitate the diminution of the uneasy cultural reality it represents, while others dramatize the exercise of political virtue by women, explode the myth of gender-differentiated sexual ethics, and suggest alternative constructions of gender relations to those upheld by the normative discourses of sexual difference. The approach is underpinned by an understanding of theatre as fundamentally political, a cultural institution implicated in the maintenance of, and challenge to, societal power relations. Innovative and stimulating, Conroy's work will appeal to scholars of seventeenth-century drama and history of ideas, in addition to those interested in the history of women in political thought and the history of feminism.

This book compares the theatrical cultures of early modern England and Spain and explores the causes and consequences not just of the remarkable similarities but also of the visible differences between them. An exercise in multi-focal theatre history research, it deploys a wide range of perspectives and evidence with which to recreate the theatrical landscapes of these two countries and thus better understand how the specific conditions of performance actively contributed to the development of each country's dramatic literature. This monograph develops an innovative comparative framework within which to explore the numerous similarities, as well as the notable differences, between early modern Europe's two most prominent commercial theatre cultures. By highlighting the nuances and intricacies that make each theatrical culture unique while never losing sight of the fact that the two belong to the same broader cultural ecosystem, its dual focus should appeal to scholars and students of English and Spanish literature alike, as well as those interested in the broader history of European theatre. Learning from what one 'playground' - that is, the environment and circumstances out of which a dramatic tradition originates - reveals about the other will help solve not only the questions posed above but also others that still await examination. This investigation will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre history, comparative drama, early modern drama, and performance culture.

A prolific playwright, Sam Shepard (1943-2017) wrote fifty-six produced plays, for which he won many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. He was also a compelling, Oscar-nominated film actor, appearing in scores of films. Shepard also published eight books of prose and poetry and was a director (directing the premiere productions of ten of his plays as well as two films); a musician (a drummer in three rock bands); a horseman; and a plain-spoken intellectual. The famously private Shepard gave a significant number of interviews over the course of his public life, and the interviewers who respected his boundaries found him to be generous with his time and forthcoming on a wide range of topics. The selected interviews in Conversations with Sam Shepard begin in 1969 when Shepard, already a multiple Obie winner, was twenty-six and end in 2016, eighteen months before his death from complications of ALS at age seventy-three. In the interim, the voice, the writer, and the man evolved, but there are themes that echo throughout these conversations: the indelibility of family; his respect for stage acting versus what he saw as far easier film acting; and the importance of music to his work. He also speaks candidly of his youth in California, his early days as a playwright in New York City, his professionally formative time in London, his interests and influences, the mythology of the American Dream, his own plays, and more. In Conversations with Sam Shepard, the playwright reveals himself in his own words.

John Derricke's Image of Irelande, with a Discoverie of Woodkarne is a key work of English print-making, Irish and English history and cultural misunderstanding. The work attests to the complexity of English and Irish relations, colonisation, military history, imperial propaganda, poetry, art, printing and the forging of identity in the early modern British Isles. The original work comprises of a lengthy poetic narrative and twelve famous woodcuts of the highest quality produced in sixteenth-century England. They also represent some of the only contemporary views of early modern Ireland on record. The sixteen interdisciplinary essays in this collection focus on the text's political and historical meaning, print history, iconographic elements, paratexts, literary and artistic influences, and cultural archaeology. The collection will appeal to scholars of many disciplines. -- .

As the first collection of essays about Oscar Wilde's comedies, the contributors re-evaluate Oscar Wilde's society plays as 'comedies of manners" to see whether this is actually an apt way to read Wilde's most emblematic plays. Focusing on both the context and the texts, the collection locates Wilde both in his social and literary contexts.

A psychoanalytic reading of The Suppliant Women with implications extended to contemporary politics. Applies the tragic reading of politics. Considers hubris in public life.

This book takes a fresh look at theatre - including the important new genre of opera - in early modern Germany. Designed for public entertainment and improvement, these were the creations of Christian men in turbulent times. Many of their anxieties found expression in portrayals of non-Christians and women. Taking as a starting-point the importance of rhetoric in early modern boys' education, this study considers the relationship between theatre, persuasion, and social stability, and looks at how the stage helps to develop ideas about women and non-Christian peoples which have not lost their relevance today.

Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer students and academics practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Essays from leading international scholars give invaluable insight into the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making the books ideal companions for study and research. Key features include: Essays on the plays' critical and performance history A keynote essay on current research and thinking about the play A selection of new essays by leading scholars A survey of resources to direct students' further reading about the play in print and online The blockbuster Tamburlaine plays (1587) instantly established Marlowe's reputation for experimenting with subversive, outrageous and immoral material. The plays follow the meteoric rise of a Scythian shepherd-turned-warlord, whose conquests of eastern emperors soon sees him established as the most powerful man in the world. The visual tableaux featured in the plays are iconic. He uses his enemy Bajazeth as a footstool, and has other emperors pull his chariot like horses. He burns the Qur'an on stage. The plays were memorable, too, for how they sounded: they showcased the power and variability of iambic pentameter, the meter that Shakespeare would go on to perfect. No history of Shakespeare's theatre is complete without understanding the influence and significance of Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays. Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader offers the definitive introduction to these plays and new perspectives on these seminal works. It provides an overview of their reception on stage and by critics, and offers fresh insights into the teaching of these plays in the classroom.

Love's Victory by Lady Mary Wroth (1587-1651) is the first romantic comedy written in English by a woman. The Revels Plays publishes for the first time a fully-authorised, modern spelling edition of the Penshurst manuscript, the only copy of the play containing all five acts, handwritten by Wroth and privately owned by the Viscount De L'Isle. Edited by Alison Findlay, Philip Sidney and Michael G. Brennan, their critical introduction provides details of Wroth's remarkable life and work as a member of the Sidney family, tracing connections between Love's Victory, her prose and poetry and her family's extensive writings. The editors introduce readers to the influence of court drama on Love's Victory and offer a new account of the play's stage history in productions from 1999-2018. Extensive commentary notes guiding the modern reader include explanatory glosses, literary references and staging information. -- .

This volume analyzes early modern cultural representations of children and childhood through the literature and drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Contributors include leading international scholars of the English Renaissance whose essays consider asexuals and sodomites, roaring girls and schoolboys, precocious princes and raucous tomboys, boy actors and female apprentices, while discussing a broad array of topics, from animal studies to performance theory, from queer time to queer fat, from teaching strategies to casting choices, and from metamorphic sex changes to rape and cannibalism. The collection interrogates the cultural and historical contingencies of childhood in an effort to expose, theorize, historicize, and explicate the spectacular queerness of early modern dramatic depictions of children.

This book offers a fresh and challenging multi-disciplinary interpretation of Aristophanes' Frogs. Drawing on a wide range of literary and anthropological approaches, it seeks to explore how membership of Greek fifth-century society would have shaped one's understanding of the play, and, more specifically, of Dionysus as a dramatic figure.

Italian Futurist Theatre provides an overview of the theatrical activities of the Italian Futurist movement, headed by F. T. Marinetti. It analyses the theory and practice of Futurist performance, covers the theatre work of all leading artists and writers of the movement, and discusses the main aims and achievements of their theatrical experiments. The main focus of the study is directed towards reconstructing the performance history of Futurist theatre. But it also incorporates aspects of dramatic writing, stage and costume design, theatre architecture, dance and opera, and is heavily illustrated.

Authorship and Appropriation is the first full-length study of the cultural and economic status of playwriting in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and argues that the period was a decisive one in the transition from Renaissance conceptions of authorship towards modern ones. In Shakespeare's time, the creative originality and independence of voice had been little prized. Playwrights had appropriated materials from earlier writings with little censure, while the practice of collaboration among dramatists had been taken for granted. Paulina Kewes demonstrates that, in the decades following the Restoration, those attitudes were challenged by new conceptions of dramatic art which required authors to be the sole begetters of their works. This book explores a series of developments in the theatrical marketplace which increased both the rewards and the prestige of the dramatist, and shows the Restoration period to have been one of serious and animated debate about the methods of playwriting. Against that background, Kewes offers a fresh account of the formation of the canon of English drama, revealing how the moderns - Dryden, Otway, Lee, Behn, and then their successors Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar - acquired an esteem equal, even superior, to their illustrious predecessors Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a prolific playwright with more than thirty plays to his credit. He is also known for his life-long, passionate engagement with theatre, first at Jorasanko and then at Santiniketan, in multiple roles as actor, director, singer, musician. However, during his own life-time and even after his demise, his experimental plays have proved challenging for directors to stage. Time and again they have been written off as unstageable by prominent theatre makers. Further complications have arisen from the presence of a spectre of authority around Tagore and his plays often promoted by Visva-Bharati, the institution he founded and which held the copyright of his works till 2001. This book travels through time and space intending to untangle the enigma presented by Tagore's plays. The book on one hand immerses itself into the archive of Tagore's plays and his dramaturgy of them in order to problematize the ways in which they have been interpreted. On the other, it also engages with productions of Tagore's plays during and after his life-time to understand the challenges directors have faced while staging them and the strategies they have embraced to circumvent them. While performing a subjective critical reading of the Tagore theatre-archive, an underlying objective of the book remains to understand the very concept of the archive, as it manifests itself in contemporary dramatic theatre.

This volume, which completes the Oxford English Texts edition of The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, contains the two parts of Tamburlaine the Great, edited by David Fuller, and The Massacre at Paris, edited by Edward J. Esche. It is the first time that either text has been presented in an old-spelling edition with a full critical commentary and textual annotation. The introduction to Tamburlaine gives a detailed account of the plays' sources, stage history, and text. The critical discussion considers the fundamental clashes which Marlowe dramatizes; the differing interpretations - often involved with opposing views of the Renaissance - to which these have given rise; and how new critical methodologies, and recent research into occult traditions in the Renaissance, might affect our reading of Marlowe. The commentary brings together the extensive modern scholarship on the plays, offers some new suggestions about their probable stage action, and cites new material from the period to contextualize Marlowe's treatment of war, medicine, religious controversy, and many other subjects. It also draws on scholarship on Elizabethan pronunciation to clarify Marlowe's poetic rhythms, and uses the revised edition of OED to investigate more fully than has previously been possible the originality and inventiveness of Marlowe's language. The Massacre at Paris survives only in a severely mangled version, which bears many of the signs of a `reported text'; nevertheless, it provides us with the unique example of Marlowe using contemporary French history as his subject matter. The play has been edited from the copy of the Octavo once belonging to Edmund Malone, now held in the Bodleian Library. The edition also presents the single extant leaf of Massacre (Folger MS. J.b.8) in an authoritative form with apparatus, and argues for its legitimacy as a genuine playhouse document, although not Marlowe's autograph.