Published alongside The Japan Foundation, this collection features five creative and bold plays by some of Japan's most prolific writers of contemporary theatre. Translated into English for the first time, these texts explore a wide range of themes from dystopian ideas of the future to touching domestic tragedies. Brought together in one volume, introduced by the authors and The Japan Foundation, this collection offers English language readers an unprecedented look at some of Japan's finest works of contemporary drama by writers from across the country. The plays include: The Bacchae-Holstein Milk Cows by Satoko Ichihara (Translated by Aya Ogawa) This play takes themes of the ancient Greek tragedy Bacchae by Euripides to examine various aspects of contemporary society, from love and sex, man and woman, intermixture of different species, discrimination and abuse, to artificial insemination, criticism of anthropocentricism and more. It was the winner of the 64th Kishida Drama Award. One Night by Yuko Kuwabara (Translated by Mari Boyd) The setting is a small taxi company run out of the home of its owner in a country town. One night the mother, Koharu Inamura, decides to leave the home in order to protect her children from her husband's domestic violence, promising them that she will come back in 15 years. The play depicts the family's reunion after having to live with the burden of that one night's (hitoyo) incident and how they restarted their lives after it. Isn't Anyone Alive? by Shiro Maeda (Translated by Miwa Monden) This laid back, absurdist work examines death through a goofy lens. In the play, strange urban legends abound in a university hospital where young people die one after another, all with mobile phones in their hands. The Sun by Tomohiro Maekawa (Translated by Nozomi Abe) Depicts young people torn apart in a near future setting where humanity has split into two forms: Nox humans who can only go out at night, and Curios, the original type of humans that can live under the sun. Carcass by Takuya Yokoyama (Translated by Mari Boyd) This play takes its name from the Japanese word for dressed carcasses of beef and pork that have been halved along the backbone for meat . It deals with the dignity of being alive as seen through the lives of workers in the meat industry based on interviews and research. It won the Japan Playwrights Association's 15th New Playwright Award in 2009.

In 1928, Hilton Edwards and Micheal mac Liammoir founded the Dublin Gate Theatre, which quickly became renowned for producing stylistically and dramaturgically innovative plays in a uniquely avant-garde setting. While the Gate's lasting importance to the history of Irish theater is generally attributed to its introduction of experimental foreign drama to Ireland, Van den Beuken shines a light on the Gate's productions of several new Irish playwrights, such as Denis Johnston, Mary Manning, David Sears, Robert Collis, and Edward and Christine Longford. Having grown up during an era of political turmoil and bloodshed that led to the creation of an independent yet in many ways bitterly divided Ireland, these dramatists chose to align themselves with an avant-garde theater that explicitly sought to establish Dublin as a modern European capital. In examining an extensive corpus of archival resources, Van den Beuken reveals how the Gate Theatre became a site of avant-garde nationalism during Ireland's tumultuous first post-independence decades.

Published in 1988: Mercurius Rusticans is one in a long series of academic plays, generally in Latin, but occasionally in English, which were performed at the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Sophocles' play, first staged in the fifth century B.C., stands as a timely exploration of the conflict between those who affirm the individual's human rights and those who must protect the state's security. During the War of the Seven Against Thebes, Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, learns that her brothers have killed each other, having been forced onto opposing sides of the battle. When Creon, king of Thebes, grants burial of one but not the "treacherous" other, Antigone defies his order, believing it her duty to bury all of her close kin. Enraged, Creon condemns her to death, and his soldiers wall her up in a tomb. While Creon eventually agrees to Antigone's release, it is too late: She takes her own life, initiating a tragic repetition of events in her family's history.
In this outstanding new translation, commissioned by Ireland's renowned Abbey Theatre to commemorate its centenary, Seamus Heaney exposes the darkness and the humanity in Sophocles' masterpiece, and inks it with his own modern and masterly touch.

This book argues that Shaw was a masterful reader of Ibsen's plays both as texts and as the cornerstone of the modern theatre. Dismantling the notion that Shaw distorted Ibsen to promote his own view of the world, and establishing Shaw's initial interest in Ibsen as the poet of Peer Gynt, it chronicles Shaw's important role in the London Ibsen campaign and exposes the falsity of the tradition that Shaw branded Ibsen as a socialist. Further, this study shows that Shaw's famous but maligned The Quintessence of Ibsenism reflects Ibsen's own anti-idealist notion of his work and argues that Shaw's readings of Ibsen's plays are pioneering analyses that anticipate later criticism. It offers new readings of Shaw's "Ibsenist" plays as well as a comprehensive account of Ibsen's importance for Shaw's dramatic criticism, from his early journalism to Our Theatres of the Nineties, both as a weapon against the inanities of the Victorian stage and as the standard bearer for modernism.

Justice, Women, and Power in English Renaissance Drama is a collection of essays that explores the relationship of gender and justice as represented in English Renaissance drama. Many of the essays are concerned with interrogating the ways that women relied upon and/or reacted to the legal (and overarching political) systems in early modern England. Other essays examine issues involving the role of narrative, evidence, and gendered expectations about justice in the plays of this time period. An implicit concern of these essays is whether women were empowered or disempowered in this interaction with the legal/political system.

Human sacrifice, a spirited heroine, a quest ending in a hairsbreadth escape, the touching reunion of long-lost siblings, and exquisite poetry-these features have historically made Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris one of the most influential of Greek tragedies. Yet, despite its influence and popularity in the ancient world, the play remains curiously under-investigated in both mainstream cultural studies and more specialized scholarship. With Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris, Edith Hall provides a much-needed cultural history of this play, giving as much weight to the impact of the play on subsequent Greek and Roman art and literature as on its manifestations since the discovery of the sole surviving medieval manuscript in the 1500s. The book argues that the reception of the play is bound up with its spectacular setting on the southern coast of the Crimean peninsula in what is now the Ukraine, a territory where world history has often been made. However, it also shows that the play's tragicomic tenor and escape plot have had a tangible influence on popular culture, from romantic fiction to Hollywood action films. The thirteen chapters illustrate how reactions to the play have evolved from the ancient admiration of Aristotle and Ovid, the Christian responses of Milton and Catherine the Great, the anthropological ritualists and theatrical Modernists including James Frazer and Isadora Duncan, to recent feminist and postcolonial dramatists from Mexico to Australia. Individual chapters are devoted to the most significant adaptations of the tragedy, Gluck's opera Iphigenie en Tauride and Goethe's verse drama Iphigenie auf Tauris. Richly illustrated and accessibly written, with all texts translated into English, Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris argues elegantly for a reappraisal of this Euripidean masterpiece.

A scholarly edition of the letters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

A guide to the contemporary London stage as well as an argument about its future, the book walks readers through the city's performance spaces following the Brexit vote. Austerity-era London theatre is suffused with the belief that private ownership defines full citizenship, its perspective narrowing to what an affluent audience might find relatable. From pub theatres to the National, Michael Meeuwis reveals how what gets put on in London interacts with the daily life of the neighbourhoods in which they are set. This study addresses global theatregoers, as well as students and scholars across theatre and performance studies-particularly those interested in UK culture after Brexit, urban geography, class, and theatrical economics.

Portraits in Early Modern English Drama studies the complex web of interconnections that grows out of the presentation of portraits as props in early modern English drama. Emanuel Stelzer considers this theory from the Elizabethan age up to the closing of the theatres. This book examines how the dramatic text and the subjectivities of the dramatis personae are shaped and changed through the process of observation and interpretation of pictures in the dramatic actions and dialogues. Unlike any previous study, it confronts when a portrait is clearly meant not to be a miniature. This also has bearings on the effect of the picture on the audience and in terms of genre expectation. Two important questions are interrogated in the book: What were the price and value of these portraits? and What were the strategies deployed by the playing companies to show women's portraits in a theatre without actresses? This book will be of interest to different areas of research dealing with the history of drama and literature, material and visual culture studies, art history, gender studies, and performance studies.

Let down by the uncertainties of memory, language, and their own family units, the characters in Harold Pinter's plays endure persistent struggles to establish their own identities. Eroding the Language of Freedom re-examines how identity is shaped in these plays, arguing that the characters' failure to function as active members of society speaks volumes to Pinter's ideological preoccupation with society's own inadequacies. Pinter described himself as addressing the state of the world through his plays, and in the linguistic games, emotional balancing acts, and recurring scenarios through which he put his characters, readers and audiences can see how he perceived that world.

Closet Drama: History, Theory, Form introduces the emerging field of Closet Drama Studies by featuring twelve original essays from distinguished scholars who offer fresh and illuminating perspectives on closet drama as a genre. Examining an unusual mix of historical narratives, performances, and texts from the Renaissance to the present, this collection unleashes a provocative array of theoretical concerns about the phenomenon of the closet play-a dramatic text written for reading rather than acting.

By comparing the literary works of two of the greatest playwrights of our time, Onder Cakirtas reveals the similarities and contrasts between their political views and the political backdrop of their respective nations. In Britain, George Bernard Shaw, the leading British dramatist for the first half of the twentieth century, wrote his plays to explicitly reflect his socialist political and economic views, and highlight the need for equal rights for women. In Turkey, decades later, Orhan Asena confronted similar issues with plays that challenged the dominant political powers of his time - a stance which ultimately led to his political exile from Turkey. Reviews "Comparing Shaw with a Turkish playwright in the second half of the century not only gives the later dramatist a solid basis for discussion, it also demonstrates the continuing significance of Shaw's plays." Christopher Innes, Distinguished Research Professor, York University "It is quite a challenging task for an author to write about G.B. Shaw and Orhan Asena from such a fresh perspective. But Onder Cakirtas has succeeded with an arresting portrait of both playwrights" Omer Sekerci, Associate Professor, Suleyman Demirel University About the Author Onder Cakirtas is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at BingOl University, Turkey. His major areas of study and research include Modern British, Turkish and Comparative Drama, and Political Drama.

Richard Hillman applies to tragic patterns and practices in early modern England his long-standing critical preoccupation with English-French cultural connections in the period. With primary, though not exclusive, reference on the English side to Shakespeare and Marlowe, and on the French side to a wide range of dramatic and non-dramatic material, he focuses on distinctive elements that emerge within the English tragedy of the 1590s and early 1600s. These include the self-destructive tragic hero, the apparatus of neo-Senecanism (including the Machiavellian villain) and the confrontation between the warrior-hero and the femme fatale. The broad objective is less to "discover" influences - although some specific points of contact are proposed - than at once to enlarge and refine a common cultural space through juxtaposition and intertextual tracing. The conclusion emerges that the powerful, if ambivalent, fascination of the English for their closest Continental neighbours expressed itself not only in but through the theatre. -- .

Published in 1993: The first modern scholarly edition of the author's play, not published until 1778. Sebastian reclaims his betrothed from Antonio; the Duchess avenges herself on the Duke for making her drink from her father; and Abberzanes and Francesca have an illicite affair. The witches are credible forces of evil.

Originally published in 1984, this book contains the full text of I, Sir John Oldcastle, alongside critical and textual notes, including an examination of the authors and the theatrical background and assessment. For such an obscure play, I Sir John Oldcastle has had a varied printing history and has been printed eighteen times since its original 1600 publication date. The text here is a modern-spelling version and archaic forms are only presered where rhyme or metre requires them, or when modernization obscres rather than clarifies the required sense of the word.

Published in 1985: The main plot portrays the bachelor Octavio, Marquis of Siena, and his establishment of his "Bower of Fancies," something like a Platonic academy for those he calls the "fancies" - Clarella, Silvia, and Floria, three young women who are, or are said to be,"young, wise, noble, fair, and chaste.

This volume critically analyses and theorises Asian interventions in the expanding phenomenon of Global Shakespeare. It interrogates Shakespeare's 'universality' from Asian perspectives: how this has been modified or even replaced by the 'global bard' as a recognisable brand, and how Asian Shakespeares have contributed to or subverted this process by both facilitating the worldwide dissemination of the bard's plays and challenging and resisting the very templates through which they become globally legible. Critically acclaimed Asian productions have prominently figured at premier Western festivals, and popular Asian appropriations like Bollywood, manga and anime have created new kinds of globally accessible Shakespeare. Essays in this collection engage with the emergent critical issues: the efficacy of definitions of the 'local', 'global', 'transnational' and 'cosmopolitan' and of the liminalities and mobilities in between. They further examine the politics of 'West' and 'East', the evolving markers of the 'Asian' and the equation of the 'glocal' with the 'Asian'; they attend to performance and archiving protocols and bring the current debates on translation, appropriation, and world literature to speak to the concerns of global and transnational Shakespeare. These investigations analyse recent innovative Asian theatre productions, popular cinematic and manga appropriations and the increasing presence of Shakespeare in the Asian digital sphere. They provide an Asian standpoint and lens in rereading the processes of cultural globalisation and the mobilisation of Shakespeare.

A fresh look at the critical reception of Schiller's early dramas such as The Robbers and Don Carlos. The interpretation of the works of Friedrich Schiller, with Goethe one of the co-founders of German classicism, has long been a central concern of German critics. In a country known as 'the land of poets and thinkers,' the achievements of great writers have been a matter of national pride and identity. But special problems are raised by Schiller, whose dramas address political questions more directly than those of his fellow-classicist Goethe, yet tend toend in a manner that shifts the focus to a general moral or metaphysical level, leaving politically engaged readers dissatisfied. The reception of Schiller's works is thus not only a topic in the history of criticism, but forms achapter in the history of German political and national consciousness. Given this situation, Professor Pugh's study of the plays' fortunes at the hands of the various schools of German literary scholarship is useful both to literary scholars seeking orientation in the field and also to readers with a wider interest in German intellectual traditions. David V. Pugh is associate professor in the Department of German, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and is the author of Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller's Aesthetics.

The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500-1700 offers readers a large and fully annotated collection of primary source texts addressing the grotesque in the English Renaissance. The sources are arranged chronologically in 120 numbered items with accompanying explanatory Notes. Each Note provides clarification of difficult terms in the source text, locating it in the context of early modern English and Continental discourses on the grotesque. The Notes also direct readers to further English sources and relevant modern scholarship. This volume includes a detailed introduction surveying the vocabulary, form and meaning of the grotesque from its arrival as a word, concept and aesthetic in 16th century England to its early maturity in the 18th century. The Introduction, Items and Notes, complemented by illustrations and a comprehensive bibliography, provide an unprecedented view of the evolving complexity and diversity of the early modern English grotesque. While giving due credit to Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin as masters of grotesque theory, this ground-breaking book aims to provoke new, evidence-based approaches to understanding the specifically English grotesque. The textual archive from 1500-1700 is a rich and intriguing record that offers much to interested readers and researchers in the fields of literary studies, theatre studies and art history.

These essays of Sarah Carpenter have been selected to reflect her career's close focus on the relationship of performance and audience. They are drawn from the last 25 years of her writing, and this has enabled the editors to organise them not chronologically but rather to develop her central theme through a range of genres, including morality plays, the interlude, court entertainments, international political spectacle, and the public 'performances' of natural and maintained fools. As a scholar who also has experience of acting and of production, Carpenter is particularly sensitive to the implications of location for creating meaning and generating audience reaction. The essays are focused on a relatively short time-span of 120 years, from the late fifteenth to the turn of the seventeenth century, and thus nuance a period traditionally divided between the late medieval and the early-modern, and between Catholicism and Protestantism. Carpenter shows how the dynamics of theatrical engagement in which the roles of audience and performer are frequently mixed or even reversed offer a more creative route to understanding how the individual and society respond to change. (CS1090)

An exploration of the way English literature has interacted with architectural edifices and the development of landscape as a national style from the Middle Ages to the 19th Century. Analyzing texts in relation to cultural artefacts, each chapter demonstrates the self-conscious production of English consciousness as its most enduring history.

Published in 1988: The Story of Meriadoc, King of Cambria is about a prince of the kingdom of Cambria (pre-Saxon Wales) who after surviving an attempted assassination by his uncle, fights as a young Knight in the cause of royal justice.

Shakespeare is a towering presence in English and indeed global culture. Most readers in the English-speaking world, and many beyond, know his name and have at least a passing familiarity with his work. Yet considered alongside his contemporaries he was not an isolated phenomenon, but the product of a period of astonishing creative fertility. This was an age when new media - popular drama, and print - were seized upon avidly and inventively by a generation of exceptionally talented writers. In her sparkling new book, Helen Hackett explores the historical contexts of English Renaissance drama by situating it in the wider history of ideas. She traces the origins of Renaissance theatre in communal religious drama, civil pageantry and court entertainment and vividly describes the playing conditions of Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses. Examining Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson in turn, the author assesses the distinctive contribution made by each playwright to the creation of English drama. She then turns to revenge tragedy, with its gothic poetry of sex and death; city comedy, domestic tragedy and tragicomedy; and gender and drama, with female roles played by boy actors. The book places Renaissance drama in the exciting and vibrant cosmopolitanism of sixteenth-century London.

This book takes performance studies in exciting new directions, exploring the ways in which ethics can be used to understand the complex questions facing contemporary spectators. Engaging with five key performances, the book reflects on the emotional and intellectual impacts of politically inflected performance on spectators, critics and theorists.