Preface - Acknowledgements - Verse and Prose - Imagery and Spectacle - Shakespeare's Expositions - Plays within Plays - Parallel Actions - The Treatment of Character - The Use of the Soliloquy - Art and Artifice - Conclusion: Discovering Shakespeare's Meaning - Index

Oscar Wilde was a major influence on the culture of his time, and remains relevant today, as a model of wit and style, a sexual icon, and a moral example. In a sequence of detailed and imaginative chapters on Wilde and his times, John Stokes shows how in the 1880s and 1890s Wilde played a vital part in the development of modern culture, inspiring others to carry his ideas on into the twentieth century. Stokes offers studies of Wilde's place in the Romantic tradition, and of his relationships with such legendary figures of the fin de siecle as Aubrey Beardsley, Alfred Jarry and Arthur Symons. And always, as part of the process of historical enquiry, Stokes considers those who came after: humanitarian disciples who kept Wilde's memory sacred, performers in his plays, actors who impersonated the man himself. Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles and Imitations explains why Wilde, a 'material ghost', haunts us still.

This study revaluates the work of the scientist and radical, poet and dramatist and English exile in Germany Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849). While his writing has elicited high praise from poets ranging from Robert Browning through Ezra Pound to John Ashbery, scholars have frequently neglected it on grounds of its purportedly morbid and opaque eccentricity. Countering this scholarly perception, this book deftly relocates Beddoes's poetry, drama and prose at the centre of Anglo-German debates on aesthetics and life science, politics and theatre in an early nineteenth-century European context. Aided by his letters from Germany, the book re-creates the intercultural discursive universe in which Beddoes easily moves from Shakespeare's plays or the aesthetic experiments of Shelley and his circle to Goethe and to topics debated among Heinrich Heine and the Jungdeutschen, from the most advanced contemporary scientific research to the post-Napoleonic politics of the German radical students' organisations, and from Byron, Baillie and London's illegitimate theatre to Schiller's and Tieck's highly charged reflections on male-male friendship. The study combines historicist strategies with theories of performance, performativity, and visuality as it focuses, in particular, on Beddoes's major and defining work, Death's Jest-Book, first completed in 1829 and published posthumously after much revision in 1850. This study shows how Death's Jest Book, as both drama and poetry, devises complex perspectives on scientifically inspired notions of 'life' and history, how it forges a radical vision for post-Napoleonic Europe and how it links this vision to a daring conception of desiring, gendered selves. The book pays close attention to the dialogue Beddoes's writing maintains with Early Modern literature, and it highlights the proto-modernist features that link his work to that of Buchner, Grabbe and a European theatre avant-garde. This innovative study of Beddoes's work, cutting across current investigations into politics, gender, and science in intercultural Romantic Studies should be of interest to scholars and students of British Romantic and Victorian studies as well as of German Vormarz studies, and to students and scholars of drama and theatre as well as Queer studies.

The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After offers a series of sophisticated and powerful readings of tragicomedy from Shakespeare's late plays to the drama of the Interregnum. Rejecting both the customary chronological span bounded by the years 1603-42 (which presumes dramatic activity stopped with the closing of the theatres) and the negative critical attitudes that have dogged the study of tragicomedy, the essays in this collection examine a series of issues central to the possibility of a politics for the genre. Individual essays offer important contributions to continuing debates over the role of the drama in the years preceding the Civil War, the colonial contexts of The Tempest, the political character of Jonson's late plays, and the agency of women as public and theatre actors. The introduction presents a strong challenge to previous definitions of tragicomedy in the English context, and the collection as a whole is characterized by its rejection of absolutist strategies for reading tragicomedy. This collection will prove essential reading for all with an interest in the politics of Renaissance drama; for specialists in the work of Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson; for those interested in genre and dramatic forms; and for historians of early Stuart England.

In this major reassessment of his subject, Richard Rowland restores Thomas Heywood-playwright, miscellanist and translator-to his rightful place in early modern theatre history. Rowland contextualizes and historicizes this important contemporary of Shakespeare, locating him on the geographic and cultural map of London through the business Heywood conducts in his writing. Arguing that Heywood's theatrical output deserves the same attention and study that has been directed towards Shakespeare, Jonson, and more recently Middleton, this book looks at three periods of Heywood's creativity: the end of the Elizabethan era and the beginning of the Jacobean, the mid 1620s, and the mid to late 1630s. By locating the works of those years precisely in the political and cultural conflicts to which they respond, Rowland initiates a major reassessment of the remarkable achievements of this playwright. Rowland also pays attention to Heywood in performance, seeing this writer as a jobbing playwright working in an industry that depended on making writing work. Finally, the author explores how Heywood participated in the civic life of London in his writings beyond the playhouse. Here Rowland examines pamphlets, translations, and the sequence of lord mayor's pageants that Heywood produced as the political crisis deepened. Offering close readings of Heywood that establish the range, quality and theatrical significance of the writing, Thomas Heywood's Theatre, 1599-1639 fits a fascinating piece into the emerging picture of the 'complete' early modern English theatre.

"Look Back in Anger" is one of the few works of drama that are indisputably central to British culture in general, and its name is one of the most well-known in postwar cultural history. Its premiere in 1956 sparked off the first 'new wave' of kitchen-sink drama and the cultural phenomenon of the Angry Young Man. The play's anti-hero, Jimmy Porter, became the spokesman of a generation. Osborne's play is a key milestone in 'new writing' for British theatre, and the Royal Court - which produced the play - has since become one of the most important new writing theatres in the UK.This guide provides a comprehensive critical introduction to the play, giving students an overview of the background and context; detailed analysis of the play's structure, style, characters etc; analysis of key production issues and choices; overview of the performance history from the 1956 Royal Court premiere to recent revivals; and an annotated guide to further reading highlighting key critical approaches.This guide provides accessible, informative critical introductions to modern plays for students in both Theatre/Performance Studies and English. Offering up-to-date coverage of a broad range of key plays throughout modern drama, the guides include accounts of performance history, production analysis, screen adaptations and summaries of important critical approaches and debates.

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.

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.

This 1995 book was the first full-length survey of one of the leading playwrights of the post-war generation. Through his career as playwright, filmmaker, and director, David Hare has been at the forefront of modern theatre and his work is frequently seen as a reflection of the contemporary political and social environment of Britain. In this analysis, Carol Homden examines the work of David Hare including the screenplays of Plenty, Pravda and Wetherby, as well as the plays he has written for the Royal National Theatre. Through her study, Homden identifies the key themes which have dominated and influenced Hare's writing throughout his career and closes with a discussion of Hare's trilogy of plays, Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges and The Absence of War.

The provocative notion of a contemporary cross-cultural exchange within the medium of theatre is here imposed upon a dozen contemporary Anglo-American dramatists: Alan Ayckbourn and Neil Simon, Edward Bond and Sam Shepard, David Mamet and Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill and Maria Irene Fornes, David Hare and David Rabe, Christopher Hampton and Richard Nelson. In each pairing, Ruby Cohn unites a British with an American playwright, exploring similarities both apparent and embedded - similarities that serve as a springboard for the exposure of a more profound, culturally based difference. Cohn brings a critical eye of unusual versatility and experience to the reading of these paired playwrights. In Pinter and Mamet, for example, she notes the shared sense of linguistic play. In the plays of Bond and Shepard, on the other hand, she explores the plight of the artist in society; in those of Simon and Ayckbourn, the comic exposition of middle-class mores. Without engaging in cultural reductivism or misleading stereotypes, Cohn demonstrates how such themes lend themselves to differing interpretations in Great Britain and in the United States. A certain transatlantic double focus thus illuminates both the composition and the interpretation of dramatic works in an increasingly globally minded age.

Featuring leading scholars of British television drama and noted writers and producers from the television industry, this new edition of British Television Drama evaluates past and present TV fiction since the 1960s, and considers its likely future.

Much-needed modern critical edition. REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES

The Oxford Classical Texts, or Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis, are renowned for their reliability and presentation. The series consists of a text without commentary but with a brief apparatus criticus at the foot of each page. There are now over l00 volumes, representing the greater part of classical Greek and Latin literature.

The Oxford Classical Texts, or Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis, are renowned for their reliability and presentation. The series consists of a text without commentary but with a brief apparatus criticus at the foot of each page. There are now over 100 volumes, representing the greater part of classical Greek and Latin literature.

A scholarly edition of works by Christopher Marlowe. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

This collection of William Empson's essays on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama is the second volume of his writings on Renaissance literature. Edited with an introduction by the leading Empson scholar John Haffenden, the contents range from famous essays on The Spanish Tragedy, Volpone, The Alchemist and The Duchess of Malfi to a sprightly piece on Elizabethan spirits. In addition, there are previously unpublished essays which revisit critical controversies, and a magnificent, provocative study of A Midsummer Night's Dream which ventures a major new reading of the play. 'I am attracted by the notion of a hearty indifference to one's own and other people's feelings, when a fragment of the truth is in question,' Empson stated. The incomparable Empson here fights his own critical corner with unequalled zest, intelligence and insight.

Garcia Lorca at the Edge of Surrealism: The Aesthetics of Anguish examines the variations of surrealism and surrealist theories in the Spanish context, studied through the poetry, drama, and drawings of Federico Garcia Lorca (1898 1936). In contrast to the idealist and subconscious tenets espoused by surrealist leader Andre Breton, which focus on the marvelous, automatic creative processes, and sublimated depictions of reality, Lorca s surrealist impulse follows a trajectory more in line with the theories of French intellectuals such as Georges Bataille (1897 1962), who was expulsed from Breton s authoritative group. Bataille critiques the lofty goals and ideals of Bretonian surrealism in the pages of the cultural and anthropological review Documents (1929 1930) in terms of a dissident surrealist ethno-poetics. This brand of the surreal underscores the prevalence of the bleak or darker aspects of reality: crisis, primitive sacrifice, the death drive, and the violent representation of existence portrayed through formless base matter such as blood, excrement, and fragmented bodies. The present study demonstrates that Bataille s theoretical and poetic expositions, including those dealing with l informe the formless] and the somber emptiness of the void, engage the trauma and anxiety of surrealist expression in Spain, particularly with reference to the anguish, desire, and death that figure so prominently in Spanish texts of the 1920s and '30s often qualified as surrealist. Drawing extensively on the theoretical, cultural, and poetic texts of the period, Garcia Lorca at the Edge of Surrealism offers the first book-length study to consider Bataille s thinking within the Spanish context, examined through the work of Lorca, a singular exponent of what is here referred to as a dissident Spanish surrealism. By reading Lorca s surrealist texts (including Poeta en Nueva York, Viaje a la luna, and El publico) through the Bataillean lens, this volume both amplifies our understanding of the poetry and drama of one of the most important Spanish writers of the twentieth century and also expands our perspective of what surrealism in Spain means."

Eugene O'Neill was the first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He completed "The Iceman Cometh" in 1939, but he delayed production until after the war, when it enjoyed a long run of performances in 1946 after receiving mixed reviews. Three years after O'Neill's death, Jason Robards starred in a Broadway revival that brought new critical attention to O'Neill's darkest and most nihilistic play. In the half century since, "The Iceman Cometh" has gained enormously in stature, and many critics now recognize it as one of the greatest plays in American drama. "The Iceman Cometh" focuses on a group of alcoholics and misfits who endlessly discuss but never act on their dreams, and Hickey, the traveling salesman determined to strip them of their pipe dreams.

Una nueva edicion de la primera historia sistematica del teatro en Espana. Esta nueva edicion de las Memorias cronologicas de Jose Antonio de Armona ofrece por primera vez un analisis pormenorizado de las fuentes documentales empleadas por el autor, que constituyen su aportacion mas fundamentlos estudios teatrales. La obra de Armona es la primera historia sistematica del teatro en Espana, desde el final de la Edad Media hasta su propia epoca. Aunque incluye una vision general de la literatura dramatica del Siglo de Oro, se centra principalmente en los aspectos institucionales del teatro. En su calidad de Corregidor de Madrid, le correspondia a Armona el cargo de Juez Protector, maxima autoridad de la administracion de los teatros publicos y los actores, y la mayor parte de sus Memorias se dedica a este tema. Habiendo reflexionado sobre su experiencia como Protector y los problemas planteados por conflictos jurisdiccionales en este ambito, Armona examino sus origenes y evolucion mediante extensas investigaciones en los archivos municipales de Madrid, reuniendo y recopilando una nutrida coleccion de documentos que aclaran multiples aspectos de la historia teatral. Por tanto, sus Memorias estan estrechamente relacionadas con la documentacion municipal publicada en tomos anteriores de las Fuentes para la Historia del Teatro en Espana, y deben situarse en este contexto. En espanol xiv+352 pp., 8 ilus.b/n Fuentes para la Historia del Teatro en Espana, XIV CHARLES DAVIS es Honorary Research Fellow de Queen Mary, Universidad de Londres.

Originally published in 1990, Medieval English Drama is an exhaustive bibliography of scholarship on medieval English drama. Each item has been annotated in the bibliography with considerable care; these annotations are descriptive rather than critical and give a clear synopsis of the content of each reference, the texts with which it deals, and a brief indication of its critical position. The bibliography is divided into two sections; editions and collections of plays, and critical works. The bibliography is exhaustive rather than selective and provides English annotations for foreign language works, as well as a list of reviews for most books. The book covers liturgical and folk drama, other forms of entertainment, and related material useful to researchers in the field. The book provides an update of sources not listed in Carl J. Stratman's comprehensive Bibliography of Medieval Drama published in 1972.

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.

The relationship between law and literature is rich and complex. In the past three and half decades, the topic has received much attention from literary critics and legal scholars studying modern literature. Despite the prominence of law and justice in Ancient Greek literature, there has been little interest among Classical scholars in the connections between law and drama. This is the first collection of essays to approach Greek tragedy and comedy from a legal perspective. The volume does not claim to provide an exhaustive treatment of law and literature in ancient Greece. Rather it provides a sample of different approaches to the topic. Some essays show how knowledge of Athenian law enhances our understanding of individual passages in Attic drama and the mimes of Herodas and enriches our appreciation of dramatic techniques. Other essays examine the information provided about legal procedure found in Aristophanes' comedies or the views about the role of law in society expressed in Attic drama. The collection reveals reveal how the study of law and legal procedure can enhance our understanding of ancient drama and bring new insights to the interpretation of individual plays.

Focusing on work by Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee, Literary Cynics explores the relationship between literature and cynicism to consider what happens when authors write themselves into their art, against the rhetoric of authority. Rose takes as his starting point three moments of aesthetic crisis in the careers of these literary cynics: Borges's parables of the 1950s, Beckett's plays of the 1980s, and Coetzee's pedagogic novels of the 2000s. In their transition to 'late style', the works reflect their writers' abiding concern with particular conceptions of rhetoric and aesthetic form. Literary Cynics combines accounts of these 'late' works with classic, lesser known, and archival texts by the three writers, from Coetzee's Disgrace to Beckett's letters, as well as detailed analysis of cynicism, both ancient and modern, as a philosophical and political movement.

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.