The influence of the women's movement has long been a scholarly priority in the study of British women's drama of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but previous scholarship has largely clustered around two events: the New Woman in the 1890s and the suffrage campaign in the years before the First World War. Women's Playwriting and the Women's Movement, 1890-1918 is the first designated study of British women's drama from a period of exceptional productivity and innovation for female playwrights. Both the British theatre and women's position within British society underwent fundamental changes in this period, and this book shows how female dramatists carefully negotiated their position in the heated debates about women's rights that occurred at this time, while staking out a place for themselves in an evolving theatrical landscape. Farkas also identifies the women's movement as a key influence on the development of female-authored drama between 1890 and 1918, but argues that scholarly prioritizing of the "radicalism" of work associated with the New Woman and the suffrage campaign has had a distorting effect in the past. Ideal for scholars of British and Victorian theatre, Women's Playwriting and the Women's Movement, 1890-1918 offers a new perspective which emphasizes the complexity of women playwrights' engagement with first-wave feminism and links it to the diversification of the British theatre in this period.

The Shakespearean World takes a global view of Shakespeare and his works, especially their afterlives. Constantly changing, the Shakespeare central to this volume has acquired an array of meanings over the past four centuries. "Shakespeare" signifies the historical person, as well as the plays and verse attributed to him. It also signifies the attitudes towards both author and works determined by their receptions. Throughout the book, specialists aim to situate Shakespeare's world and what the world is because of him. In adopting a global perspective, the volume arranges thirty-six chapters in five parts: Shakespeare on stage internationally since the late seventeenth century; Shakespeare on film throughout the world; Shakespeare in the arts beyond drama and performance; Shakespeare in everyday life; Shakespeare and critical practice. Through its coverage, The Shakespearean World offers a comprehensive transhistorical and international view of the ways this Shakespeare has not only influenced but has also been influenced by diverse cultures during 400 years of performance, adaptation, criticism, and citation. While each chapter is a freshly conceived introduction to a significant topic, all of the chapters move beyond the level of survey, suggesting new directions in Shakespeare studies - such as ecology, tourism, and new media - and making substantial contributions to the field. This volume is an essential resource for all those studying Shakespeare, from beginners to advanced specialists.

The Theater of Tony Kushner is a comprehensive portrait of the forty-year long career of dramatist Tony Kushner as playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and public intellectual and political activist. Following an introduction examining the influences of Kushner's development as an artist, this updated second edition features individual chapters on his major plays, including A Bright Room Called Day, Hydriotaphia, or The Death of Dr. Browne, Angels in America, Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, Homebody/Kabul, Caroline, or Change, and The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, along with chapters on Kushner's adaptations, one-act plays, and screenplays, including his two Academy Award-nominated screenplays, Munich and Lincoln. A book for anyone interested in theater, film, literature, and the ways in which the past informs the present, this second edition of The Theater of Tony Kushner explores how his writings reflect key elements of American society, from politics and economics to race, gender, and spirituality, all with the hope of inspiring America to live up to its ideals.

Golden Age departures in historiography and theory of history in some ways prepared the ground for modern historical methods and ideas about historical factuality. At the same time, they fed into the period's own "aesthetic-historical culture" which amalgamated fact and fiction in ways modern historians would consider counterfactual: a culture where imaginative historical prose, poetry and drama self-consciously rivalled the accounts of royal chroniclers and the dispatches of diplomatic envoys; a culture dominated by a notion of truth in which skilful construction of the argument and exemplarity took precedence over factual accuracy. Literature and Historiography in the Spanish Golden Age: The Poetics of History investigates this grey area backdrop of modern ideas about history, delving into a variety of Golden Age aesthetic-historical works which cannot be satisfactorily described as either works of literature or works of historiography but which belong in between these later strictly separate categories. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

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.

Why does historical memory exclude nineteenth-century women playwrights when hundreds worked prolifically across the spectrum of professional theatre, amateur theatricals, and publishing? What might it mean to adjust the collective focus of cultural historians and literary critics so that these women can come into view? This collection of essays, written by a team of leading scholars in the field, undertakes not simply to recover the names and careers of women playwrights but to call into question the whole idea of what a playwright is, and what she does, and why it matters. Gender inquiry is the start: destabilising the category of playwrights loosens the borders of theatre history, making it possible to reconceptualize theatre and drama not as a product of culture but as social processes dynamically interacting with culture.

Tennessee Williams created characters who set the stage for their own dramas. Examples include Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire, arriving at her sister's apartment with an entire trunk of costumes and props, and Amanda Wingfield from The Glass Menagerie, who directs her son on how to eat and tries to make her daughter act like a Southern Belle. This book argues for the persistence of one metatheatrical strategy running throughout Williams's entire oeuvre. It demonstrates that Williams's plays always stage the process through which they came into being and that this process consists of a variation on repetition combined with transformation. Each chapter revolves around a detailed, close reading of one play and analyzes its particular variation on repetition and transformation. Specific topics addressed include reproduction in Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), mediation in Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981), and how the playwright frequently recycled previous works of art, including his own.

Using close readings of Shaw's plays and letters, as well as archival research, David Clare illustrates that Shaw regularly placed Irish, Irish Diasporic, and surrogate Irish characters into his plays in order to comment on Anglo-Irish relations and to explore the nature of Irishness.

By concentrating on Sam Shepard's visual aesthetics, Emma Creedon argues that a consideration of Shepard's plays in the context of visual and theoretical Surrealism illuminates our understanding of his experimental approach to drama.

Terence's Eunuchus (The Eunuch) was his most successful play in his lifetime but has been surprisingly neglected by modern commentators. In this first ever full-scale commentary in English, Professor Barsby provides a thorough examination of the play in terms of its literary and dramatic qualities, its staging, and its relationship to the two plays of Menander's on which it is based. The commentary includes scene-by-scene discussions which bring out the development of character and plot, and the notes offer a close study of Terence's language in comparison with that of his predecessor Plautus. A full introduction puts Terence in his historical and literary context, and there are two appendices, one on metre and the other giving text and translation of the remains of Menander's Eunouchos and Kolax.

Fools and clowns were widely popular characters employed in early modern drama, prose texts and poems mainly as laughter makers, or also as ludicrous metaphorical embodiments of human failures. Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England: Folly, Law and Medicine, 1500-1640 pays full attention to the intellectual difference of fools, rather than just their performativity: what does their total, partial, or even pretended 'irrationality' entail in terms of non-standard psychology or behaviour, and others' perception of them? Is it possible to offer a close contextualised examination of the meaning of folly in literature as a disability? And how did real people having intellectual disabilities in the Renaissance period influence the representation and subjectivity of literary fools? Alice Equestri answers these and other questions by investigating the wide range of significant connections between the characters and Renaissance legal and medical knowledge as presented in legal records, dictionaries, handbooks, and texts of medicine, natural philosophy, and physiognomy. Furthermore, by bringing early modern folly in closer dialogue with the burgeoning fields of disability studies and disability theory, this study considers multiple sides of the argument in the historical disability experience: intellectual disability as a variation in the person and as a difference which both society and the individual construct or respond to. Early modern literary fools' characterisation then emerges as stemming from either a realistic or also from a symbolical or rhetorical representation of intellectual disability.

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.

Friend and rival of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson was one of the most learned and interesting men of his age. Throughout his fascinating life, he served not only as a bricklayer but also a soldier, an adventurer, an actor, a poet, and a playwright. The breadth of his experiences, acquaintances, friends, and enemies was legendary, and his literary canon is equally as diverse. The Ben Jonson Encyclopedia covers in detail the works, life, and times of this seminal figure of the English Renaissance. The cross-referenced entries include summaries of all Jonson's plays, masques, and entertainments, as well as sketches of Jonson's friends, enemies, patrons, disciples, actors, and fellow writers. In addition, the book identifies historical figures, mythological characters, and classical authors, as well as Jonson's contemporaries and London place names mentioned in the works. Individuals who danced or participated in the masques and entertainments or tournaments for which Jonson wrote speeches are noted, as are the main actors known to have acted in the plays. All major scholars-from Jonson's own day until the twenty-first century-who have commented on Jonson or his works are also included. An extensive bibliography completes this invaluable scholarly reference tool. Because of Jonson's centrality to-and influence in and beyond-his age, this encyclopedia provides a dynamic, unparalleled vision of the English Renaissance literary scene. Capturing the depth and breadth of Jonson's understanding of early Modern England, The Ben Jonson Encyclopedia will be especially useful for students, librarians, and academics interested in the literary and cultural scene from 1500 to 1650.

A comprehensive advanced introduction to and scholarly commentary on the work of the Swiss writer Max Frisch, one of the leading German-language dramatists and novelists of the late twentieth century. One of the most influential German-language writers of the late twentieth century, Max Frisch (1911-1991) not only has canonical status in Europe, but has also been well received in the English-speaking world. English translationsof his works are available in multiple recent editions. Frisch was a recipient of both the Buchner Award (1958), and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (1976); his body of work explores questions of identity, alienation, and ethics in modern society. He is best known for the plays Andorra (1961), a seminal drama that examines indifference and mass psychology in the context of the Shoah and continues to be produced by theaters around the world, and Biedermann und die Brandstifter (1958), another worldwide success and one of the most frequently used texts in advanced undergraduate German courses in the United States, as well as for his novels Stiller (1954), Homo Faber (1957), and Mein Name sei Gantenbein (1964). Yet Frisch has only recently begun to receive the sustained scholarly attention he deserves: neither a comprehensive introductory volume to nor a collaborative handbook on the works of Frisch is available in English, a situation that this volume redresses. Contributors: Regine Battiston, Klaus van den Berg, Olaf Berwald, Amanda Charitina Boyd, Celine Letawe, Walter Obschlager, John D. Pizer, Beatrice Sandberg, Caroline Schaumann, Frank Schaumann, Walter Schmitz, Margit Unser, Daniel de Vin, Ruth Vogel-Klein, Paul A. Youngman. Olaf Berwald is Professor of German and Chair of the Departmentof Foreign Languages at Kennesaw State University.

In this wide-ranging and original study, Margaret Tudeau-Clayton examines how Virgil--the poet as well as his texts--was mediated in early modern England. She analyzes what was at stake in the reproduction and circulation of these mediations of Virgil, focusing specifically on the works of Ben Jonson and on one of Shakespeare's most resonantly Virgilian plays, The Tempest. She argues that the play offers a complex model of cultural and socio-political resistance by engaging critically not only with contemporary mediations of Virgil, but with the ways they were used, especially by Jonson, to reproduce structures of authority (in relation to nature and language as well as to the socio-political order). She also shows how instructive comparisons may be drawn between the ways Virgil was constructed and used in early modern England and the ways Shakespeare has been constructed and used, especially as national poet, from the early modern period until our own time.

Greg Walker provides a new account of the relationship between politics and drama in the turbulent period from the accession of Henry VIII to the reign of Elizabeth I. Building on ideas first developed in Plays of Persuasion (1991), he focuses on political drama in both England and Scotland, exploring the complex relationships among politics, court culture and dramatic composition, performance and publication. This interdisciplinary analysis will find a market among Tudor historians as well as students of medieval and Renaissance drama.

This book analyzes the interaction of crimes, punishments, and Bernard Shaw in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It explores crimes committed by professional criminals, nonprofessional criminals, businessmen, believers in a cause, the police, the Government, and prison officials. It examines punishments decreed by judges, juries, colonial governors, commissars, and administered by the police, prison warders, and prison doctors. It charts Shaw's view of crimes and punishments in dramatic writings, non-dramatic writings, and his actions in real life. This book presents him in the context of his contemporaries and his world, inviting readers to view crimes and punishments in their context, history, and relevance to his ideas in and outside his plays, plus the relevance of his ideas to crimes and punishments in life.

The Theatre of García Lorca offers radical new readings of his major plays, drawing on cultural studies, women's and gay studies, psychoanalysis, and previously unexamined archival material. It also juxtaposes Lorca with major figures such as Gregorio Marañón, Langston Hughes, André Gide, and Lluis Pasqual, enabling us to see his theater in a new light. In addition, the book presents a new psychoanalytic reading of the plays, which returns to Freud's early clinical texts.

This original work redefines and broadens our understanding of the drama of the English-speaking African diaspora. Looking closely at the work of Amiri Baraka, Nobel prize-winners Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott, and Ntozake Shange, the author contends that the refashioning of the collective cultural self in black drama originates from the complex intersection of three discourses: Eurocentric, Afrocentric, and Post-Afrocentric.

From blackface minstrelsy to the Trinidad Carnival, from the Black Aesthetic to the South African Black Consciousness theatres and the scholarly debate on the (non)existence of African drama, Olaniyan cogently maps the terrains of a cultural struggle and underscores a peculiar situation in which the inferiorization of black performance forms is most often a shorthand for subordinating black culture and corporeality.

Drawing on insights from contemporary theory and cultural studies, and offering detailed readings of the above writers, Olaniyan shows how they occupy the interface between the Afrocentric and a liberating Post-Afrocentric space where black theatrical-cultural difference could be envisioned as a site of multiple articulations: race, class, gender, genre, and language.

To this day, Salem, Massachusetts, is synonymous with the witch trials of 1692. Their unique pace and structure has not only made the infamous town a strong cultural metaphor, but has generated countless novels, short stories, and plays over the past 200 years. This book marks the first comprehensive analysis of literary Salem and its historical as well as contemporary significance, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's literature of the 19th century to Arthur Miller's The Crucible to a growing corpus of contemporary fiction.

Staging Detection reveals how the new figure of the stage detective emerged in nineteenth-century Britain. The first book to explore the productive intersections between detection and performance across a range of Victorian plays, Staging Detection foregrounds the role of the stage detective in shaping important theatrical modes of the period, from popular melodrama to society comedy. Beginning in 1863 with Tom Taylor's blockbuster play, The Ticket-of-Leave Man, the book criss-crosses London following the earliest performances of stage detectives. Centring the work of playwrights, novelists, critics and actors, from Sarah Lane and Horace Wigan to Wilkie Collins and Oscar Wilde, Staging Detection sheds new light on Victorian acting styles, furthers our understanding of melodrama, and resituates the famous Wildean dandy as a successor to the stage detective. Drawing on histories of masculinity and gender performance as well as developing scientific theory and nineteenth-century visual culture, Staging Detection shows how the earliest stage portrayals of the detective shaped broader Victorian debates concerning fraud, omniscience and earned authority. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre history, Victorian literature and popular culture - as well as anyone with an interest in the figure of the detective.

Shakespeare's Sublime Pathos: Person, Audience, Language breaks new ground in providing a sustained, demystifying treatment of its subject and looking for answers to basic questions regarding the creation, experience, aesthetics and philosophy of Shakespearean sublimity. More specifically, it explores how Shakespeare generates experiences of sublime pathos, for which audiences have been prepared by the sublime ethos described in the companion volume, Shakespeare's Sublime Ethos. To do so, it examines Shakespeare's model of mutualistic character, in which "entangled" language brokers a psychic communion between fictive persons and real-life audiences and readers. In the process, Sublime Critical platitudes regarding Shakespeare's liberating ambiguity and invention of the human are challenged, while the sympathetic imagination is reinstated as the linchpin of the playwright's sublime effects. As the argument develops, the Shakespearean sublime emerges as an emotional state of vulnerable exhilaration leading to an ethically uplifting openness towards others and an epistemologically bracing awareness of human unknowability. Taken together, Shakespeare's Sublime Pathos and Shakespeare's Sublime Ethos show how Shakespearean drama integrates matter and spirit on hierarchical planes of cognition and argue that, ultimately, his is an immanent sublimity of the here-and-now enfolding a transcendence which may be imagined, simulated or evoked, but never achieved.

In 1642 an ordinance closed the theatres of England. Critics and historians have assumed that the edict was to be firm and inviolate. Susan Wiseman challenges this assumption and argues that the period 1640 to 1660 was not a gap in the production and performance of drama nor a blank space between 'Renaissance drama' and the 'Restoration stage'. Rather, throughout the period, writers focused instead on a range of dramas with political perspectives, from republican to royalist. This group included the short pamphlet dramas of the 1640s and the texts produced by the writers of the 1650s, such as William Davenant, Margaret Cavendish and James Shirley. In analysing the diverse forms of dramatic production of the 1640s and 1650s, Wiseman reveals the political and generic diversity produced by the changes in dramatic production, and offers insights into the theatre of the Civil War.

Although Mozart's Don Giovanni (1787) is the most analysed of all operas, Lorenzo Da Ponte's libretto has rarely been studied as a work of poetry in its own right. The author argues that the libretto, rather than perpetuating the conservative religious morality implicit in the story of Don Juan, subjects our culture's myth of human sexuality to a critical rewriting. Combining poetic close reading with approaches drawn from linguistics, psychoanalysis, anthropology, political theory, legal history, intellectual history, literary history, art history and theatrical performance analysis, she studies the Don Giovanni libretto as a radical political text of the Late Enlightenment, which has lost none of its ability to provoke. The questions it raises concerning the nature of compassion, seduction and violence, and the autonomy and responsibility of the individual, are still highly relevant for us today.

This book began with a simple question: when readers such as us encounter the term magic or figures of magicians in early modern texts, dramatic or otherwise, how do we read them? In the twenty-first century we have recourse to an array of genres and vocabulary from magical realism to fantasy fiction that does not, however, work to read a historical figure like John Dee or a fictional one he inspired in Shakespeare's Prospero. Between longings to transcend human limitation and the actual work of producing, translating, and organizing knowledge, figures such as Dee invite us to re-examine our ways of reading magic only as metaphor. If not metaphor then what else? As we parse the term magic, it reveals a rich context of use that connects various aspects of social, cultural, religious, economic, legal and medical lives of the early moderns. Magic makes its presence felt not only as a forms of knowledge but in methods of knowing in the Renaissance. The arc of dramatists and texts that this book draws between Doctor Faustus, The Tempest, The Alchemist and Comus: A Masque at Ludlow Castle offers a sustained examination of the epistemologies of magic in the context of early modern knowledge formation. This book is co-published with Aakar Books, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print versions of this book in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.