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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

This volume offers a new theoretical approach to cultural production inspired by the metaphor of culture as a virtual network. Following a thorough outline of this approach, the theoretical framework is elucidated in a second part through examples drawn from early modern European drama. A third and final part then presents a critical discussion of the concept of "national" culture and literature, from its first formulation by Johann Gottfried Herder to its current developments, including postcolonial studies.

South Africa has a uniquely rich and diverse theatre tradition which has responded energetically to the country's remarkable transition, helping to define the challenges and contradictions of this young democracy. This volume considers the variety of theatre forms, and the work of the major playwrights and theatre makers producing work in democratic South Africa. It offers an overview of theatre pioneers and theatre forms in Part One, before concentrating on the work of individual playwrights in Part Two. Through its wide-ranging survey of indigenous drama written predominantly in the English language and the analysis of more than 100 plays, a detailed account is provided of post-apartheid South African theatre and its engagement with the country's recent history. Part One offers six overview chapters on South African theatre pioneers and theatre forms. These include consideration of the work of artists such as Barney Simon, Mbongeni Ngema, Phyllis Klotz; the collaborations of William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company; the work of Magnet Theatre, and of physical and popular community theatre forms. Part Two features chapters on twelve major playwrights, including Athol Fugard, Reza de Wet, Lara Foot, Zakes Mda, Yael Farber, Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom, Mike van Graan and Brett Bailey. It includes a survey of emerging playwrights and significant plays, and the book closes with an interview with Aubrey Sekhabi, the Artistic Director of the South African State Theatre in Pretoria. Written by a team of over twenty leading international scholars, The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary South African Theatre is a unique resource that will be invaluable to students and scholars from a range of different disciplines, as well as theatre practitioners.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

This book explores the role of wax as an important conceptual material used to work out the nature and limits of the early modern human. By surveying the use of wax in early modern cultural spaces such as the stage and the artist's studio and in literary and philosophical texts, including those by William Shakespeare, John Donne, Rene Descartes, Margaret Cavendish, and Edmund Spenser, this book shows that wax is a flexible material employed to define, explore, and problematize a wide variety of early modern relations including the relationship of man and God, man and woman, mind and the world, and man and machine.

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.

Situated on the intersection of comparative literary criticism, political history and theory, and cultural analysis, Terror and Pity: Aleksandr Sumarokov and the Theater of Power in Elizabethan Russia offers an in-depth reading of early Russian tragedy as a political genre. Imported to Russia by Aleksandr Sumarokov around 1750, tragedy reenacted and shaped the symbolic economy and the often disturbing historical experience of "absolutist" autocracy. Addressing half-forgotten texts and events, this study engages with literary and cultural theory from Walter Benjamin to Foucault and "new historicism" in order to contribute to a broader discussion of early modern "poetics of culture."

The author considers the Elizabethan playwright Ben Jonson a realist and an acute observer of the transformation from feudalism to capitalism. Many of the forms and purposes of Jonson's realism resulted from the social dynamics of the London theater audience. In this book, Haynes presents a detailed literary historical argument about the sources and consequences of Jonson's realism. He examines the entanglements of life and art in Jonson's time both through a look at the life of that period and through insightful readings of Jonson's plays. The book polemicizes against the moral and formal pre-occupations of the last two generations of Jonson criticism proceeding it; it is instead informed by the social history and by the sociology of Pierre Bordieu and Norbert Elias.

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.

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.

This new collection of essays on Richard Brinsley Sheridan brings the most important British playwright of the eighteenth century back to the forefront of literary and cultural studies of the era. While his pyrotechnic life as a romantic hero, playwright, Member of Parliament, and theatre manager has generated a number of recent biographies, it is Sheridan's works-not just plays but also poetry and orations-that endure. These essays reclaim the legacy of the man of letters and partisan bon vivant who burst from obscurity to become a powerful cultural force in Georgian London. This collection covers the many lives of Sheridan, taking into account both his variegated career and the competing accounts of the man, as well as his early verse, which lays the foundation for his success as a playwright. Chapters are devoted to Sheridan's theatre, and provide innovative readings of his most famous dramatic pieces: The Rivals, The Duenna, The School for Scandal, The Critic, and Pizarro. The volume also includes extensive discussion of the dramatic highs of Sheridan's long political career, thus placing the playwright-politician firmly in the world in which performance and politics were inextricably entwined. Contributors: Mita Choudhury, Jack E. DeRochi, Marianna D'Ezio, Daniel J. Ennis, Emily Friedman, Steven Gores, David Haley, Robert W. Jones, Daniel O'Quinn, Glynis Ridley, John Vance, David Francis Taylor

In this book, Jeanette Malkin considers a broad spectrum of postwar plays in which characters are created, coerced, and destroyed by language. The playwrights examined are diverse and include Handke, Pinter, Bond, Albee, Mamet and Shepard, as well as Vaclav Havel and two of his plays: The Garden Party and The Memorandum. These playwrights portray language's manipulation of our political, social, and interpersonal worlds. Writing in a variety of idioms and styles, the playwrights all reveal the link between language and power.

Sivakotyacarya's Vaddaradhane (Veneration to the Elders) is the earliest extant prose work in Kannada language written by Sivakotyacarya during 940 CE. This classical text reflects the oral tradition of narrating stories of legendary religious ascetics based on the gahas which were taken from Bhagavati Aradhana. This is a peculiar but commendable way of present ing stories of the senior and respectable ascetics combining oral and written styles of narration. Thus, Vaddaradhane stands as an excellent example for an ancient classical text, fit for linguistic and cultural study. Each story in this collection, is wonderful in its own way. Generally, religious stories do not evoke interest but present a series of dull events. However, this text is full of incidents depicting human values, ways of wicked people, self-imposed vows, violence and non-violence and human life with all types of experiences. Another distinguishing feature of Vaddaradhane is that there is not a whiff of intolerance towards other religions or faiths or sects and this is most remarkable when we recall that most of our early writings indulge in belittling doctrines of faiths other than their own. This positive attitude, in a sense, makes this religious text absolutely liberal and almost secular. Vaddaradhane is now rendered into contemporary English by a team of writers and linguists. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

This is the first book-length study of the collaboration between Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan. Their intense creative relationship, fuelLed by a deep personal affinity that endured until Williams’s death, lasted from 1947 until 1960. The production of A Streetcar Named Desire established Williams as America’s greatest playwright and Kazan as its most important director; together they created some of the most influential theatrical events of the post-War era. In this book Brenda Murphy analyses this artistic partnership and the plays and theatrical techniques the artists developed collaboratively in their productions of A Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Sweet Bird of Youth. In addition, Murphy suggests new ways to examine the working relationship between playwright and director which can be applied to other practitioners in twentieth-century drama. The book contains numerous illustrations from important productions.

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.