Masques of difference presents an annotated edition of four seventeenth-century entertainments written by Ben Jonson for the court of James I. These masques reflect both the confidence and the anxieties of the English aristocracy at a time when notions of monarchy, empire, and national identity were being radically redefined. All four masques reflect the royal court's self-representation as moral, orderly, and just, in contrast to stylised images of chaotically (and exotically) 'othered' groups: Africans, the Irish, witches, and the homoeroticised figure of the Gypsy. This edition presents two masques that have received recent attention in the classroom - The Masque of Blackness and The Masque of Queens - and two that have never before been anthologised for the student reader - The Irish Masque at Court and The Masque of the Gypsies Metamorphosed. This anthology offers students the latest in scholarship and critical theory and essential clues for understanding the ideologies that shaped many of the modern structures of English culture. -- .

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. This volume collects Euripides' Electra (translated by Janet Lembke and Kenneth J. Reckford), an exciting story of vengeance that counterposes suspense and horror with comic realism; Orestes (John Peck and Frank Nisetich), the tragedy of a young man who kills his mother to avenge her murder of his father; Iphigenia in Tauris (Richmond Lattimore), a delicately written and beautifully contrived Euripidean "romance"; and Iphigeneia at Aulis (W. S. Merwin and George E. Dimock, Jr.), a compelling look at the devastating consequence of "man's inhumanity to man." This volume reprints the informative introductions and notes of the original editions, and adds a single combined glossary and Greek line numbers.

The Aulularia is a comedy by the early poet Plautus (about 200 BCE) who transformed plays of Greek New Comedy, especially Menander, into typical Roman plays. Great interest lies in the imaginative metre and the archaic language of Plautus' work, whose 20 plays are the oldest substantial surviving documents in this language. This book focuses on the Aulularia, a brilliant piece of writing, containing comic scenes of great variety and one character (the old man Euclio), unmatched in surviving Latin drama for vivid presentation and effective development. The play raises very interesting questions about the relation of Roman comedy to the Greek theatrical tradition which lies behind it and its unfinished state has provoked much discussion about how it could have been completed. The Aulularia has given inspiration to a host of works in later European literature from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, yet no new edition or commentary has been published in English since 1913. With an introduction that will be of interest to students of literature and classics, there is also a substantial chapter on the rich reception of the play in modern literature as well as a chapter on the Greek original.

In this radical and deliberately controversial re-reading of Brecht, first published in 1989, Elizabeth Wright takes a new view of the playwright, giving us a more 'Brechtian' reading than so far achieved and making his work historically relevant here and now. The author discusses in detail Brecht's principle theories and concepts in the light of poststructuralist theory, and reassess the aesthetics and politics with regard to Marxist critics of his own day. Wright includes a re-reading of Brecht's early works, which presents them in relation to a postmodern theatre, and gives critical analyses of the work of Pina Bausch, Robert Wilson, and Heiner Muller, who use the techniques of performance theatre, showing how they deconstruct Brecht's distinction between illusion and reality and point to a postmodern understanding of their dialectical relation.

Comprehending tragedy has been a major philosophical and critical preoccupation in Western thought. Whether concerned with the generic problem of definition or with tragedy in the context of specific writers or periods, books with multiple and often conflicting perspectives abound. In an effort to bring order to the explanations over two millennia, "Tragedy and Tragic Theory" lucidly analyzes the principal ideas about tragedy from Plato to the present.

Critically surveying the similarities and differences among major theories, Palmer analyzes features associated with tragedy, such as the tragic hero, katharsis, and self-recognition; develops a working definition of tragedy; and applies these ideas to a sampling of plays that present special interpretive problems. He incorporates and explores the ideas of such eminent thinkers as Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzche, Schopenhauer, Schiller, Kierkegaard, and Freud, as well as contemporary theorists, who also appear with biographical blurbs in an appendix to the volume along with an extensive bibliography. By examining both tragedy and the theoretical responses to tragedy, this study demonstrates that the definition of tragedy depends on the meaning perceived by an audience rather than on a structured stimulus independent of response; yet, it does not abandon the possibility of isolating fixed defining characteristics. The audience response approach provides a framework for analyzing earlier theories. Systematically developed, the study is equally valuable as a text in drama and criticism or as a convenient reference tool to drama theory and theorists.

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"This powerful and lively package of primary materials and historical context will demonstrate how historical 'forces' play themselves out on the ground. Kierner's collection offers a fresh lens on a new world struggling into being and will inspire teachers and students of all ages alike."
--Catherine Allgor, author of "A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation"

aThe Contrast makes a real contribution to the existing scholarship on this period, it has great appeal for classroom use, and it puts back in print an amusing play that is instrumental in understanding critical issues in the new nation. The play aThe Contrasta centers on gender roles, relations, and expectations, mocking the gender stereotypes of the day and is a rich source for understanding a host of political and social issues in the Early Republic. It is funnyaeven to a modern audienceaand replete with literary references.a
--Charlene M. Boyer Lewis, author of "Ladies and Gentlemen on Display: Planter Society at the Virginia Springs, 1790-1860"

aI can think of no other text of the period that lays out the drive toward transparency more clearly or denigrates coquettes and libertines more entertainingly. The play is a pivotal piece of American cultural history.a
--Norma Basch, author of "Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians"

"The Contrast," which premiered at New York City's John Street Theater in 1787, was the first American play performed in public by a professional theater company. The play, written by New England-born, Harvard-educated, Royall Tyler was timely, funny, andextremely popular. When the play appeared in print in 1790, George Washington himself appeared at the head of its list of hundreds of subscribers.

Reprinted here with annotated footnotes by historian Cynthia A. Kierner, Tyler's play explores the debate over manners, morals, and cultural authority in the decades following American Revolution. Did the American colonists' rejection of monarchy in 1776 mean they should abolish all European social traditions and hierarchies? What sorts of etiquette, amusements, and fashions were appropriate and beneficial? Most important, to be a nation, did Americans need to distinguish themselves from Europeans -- and, if so, how?

Tyler was not the only American pondering these questions, and Kierner situates the play in its broader historical and cultural contexts. An extensive introduction provides readers with a background on life and politics in the United States in 1787, when Americans were in the midst of nation-building. The book also features a section with selections from contemporary letters, essays, novels, conduct books, and public documents, which debate issues of the era.

The first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, Suzan Lori-Parks has received international recognition for her provocative and influential works. Her plays capture the nightmares of African Americans endangered by a white establishment determined to erase their history and eradicate their dreams. This collection of twelve original essays addresses Lori-Parks' plays, their historical and philosophical roots, her novel and her screenplays, as well as a production chronology of her plays. Of particular note are an interview with Lori-Parks and another with her long-time director Liz Diamond. This text represents a valuable addition not only to the work of Lori-Parks, but to the extensive history of African American playwrighting.

Colonial Women is the first comprehensive study to explore the interpenetrating discourses of gender and race in Stuart drama. Hutner argues that in drama, as in historical accounts, the symbol of the native woman is used to justify and promote the success of the English appropriation, commodification, and expoitaion of the New World and its native inhabitants, Hutner analyzes the figure of the native woman in the plays of Shakespeare, Fletcher, Davenant, Dryden, Behn and other playwrights, Furthermore, Hutner suggests that representation of native women function as a means of self-definition for the English, and the seduction of the native woman is, in this respect, a symbolic strategy to stabilize the turbulent sociopolitical and religious conflicts in Restoration England under the inclusive ideology of expansion and profit.

Engaging and stimulating, this Introduction provides a fresh vista of the early modern theatrical landscape. Chapters are arranged according to key genres (tragedy, revenge, satire, history play, pastoral and city comedy), punctuated by a series of focused case studies on topics ranging from repertoire to performance style, political events to the physical body of the actor, and from plays in print to the space of the playhouse. Julie Sanders encourages readers to engage with particular dramatic moments, such as opening scenes, skulls on stage or the conventions of disguise, and to apply the materials and methods contained in the book in inventive ways. A timeline and frequent cross-references provide continuity. Always alert to the possibilities of performance, Sanders reveals the remarkable story of early modern drama not through individual writers, but through repertoires and company practices, helping to relocate and re-imagine canonical plays and playwrights.

In this valuable book, Hanna M. Roisman provides a uniquely comprehensive look at Euripides' Hippolytus. Roisman begins with an examination of the ancient preference for the implicit style, and suggests a possible reading of Euripides' first treatment of the myth which would account for the Athenian audience's reservations about his Hippolytus Veiled. She proceeds to analyze significant scenes in the play, including Hippolytus' prayer to Artemis, Phaedra's delirium, Phaedra's 'confession' speech, and the interactions between Theseus and Hippolytus. Concluding with a discussion of the meaning of the tragic in Hippolytus, Roisman questions the applicability in this case of the idea of the tragic flaw. Nothing Seems as It Is includes extensive comparisons of Euripides' play with the Phaedra of Seneca. This is a very important book for students and scholars of Greek tragedy, literature, and rhetoric.

In this new edition of the widely-acclaimed Modern American Drama Christopher Bigsby completes his survey of postwar theater and brings the reader up to 2000. While retaining the key elements of the first edition, including surveys of major figures such as Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, David Mamet, and Sam Shepard, Bigsby also explores recent works by established dramatists.

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG --------------------- Enter BERTRAM, the COUNTESS OF ROUSILLON, HELENA, and LAFEU, all in black COUNTESS. In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband. BERTRAM. And I in going, madam, weep o'er my father's death anew; but I must attend his Majesty's command, to whom I am now in ward, evermore in subjection. LAFEU. You shall find of the King a husband, madam; you, sir, a father. He that so generally is at all times good must of necessity hold his virtue to you, whose worthiness would stir it up where it wanted, rather than lack it where there is such abundance.

Errol John wrote Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (1958) after becoming disillusioned about the lack of good roles for black actors on the British theatre scene. While this situation has only slightly improved since, his response has become the most revived black play in Britain, from its original production at the Royal Court in 1958, to the National Theatre in 2012. It depicts the lives of a black community living in poverty in a shared tenement yard in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in the mid-1940s, showing how each of the characters carries dreams of escaping to create better lives for themselves and their families. Lynette Goddard focuses on how the play articulates the narratives of migration that prompted many Caribbean people to uproot from their homes on the islands and move to the England in the post-war era. For some of them, these dreams of a new life became a reality, but they were experienced differently across genders and generations.

Published on the eve of the philosopher-play-wright's centenary, this study offers a wide-ranging re-appraisal of Sartre's complete dramatic opus, from the inaugural 'nativity' play, Bariona (1940), to the swan-song chorus of Armageddon, Les Troyennes (1965). It draws on a close reading of Sartre's writings in philosophy, literature and criticism, and provides an extensive survey of journalistic and academic reception. Each play is situated in relation both to Sartre's intellectual evolution and to the broader historical context. This is the first full-length study in English, for more than thirty years, covering the whole of Sartre's theatre, and it will interest students of twentieth-century European drama, as well as those of modern French literature and ideas.

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and productions. Since 1948, the Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of that year's textual and critical studies and of the year's major British performances. The theme for Volume 67 is 'Shakespeare's Collaborative Work'. The complete set of Survey volumes is also available online at http://www.cambridge.org/online/shakespearesurvey. This fully searchable resource enables users to browse by author, essay and volume, search by play, theme and topic, and save and bookmark their results.

Beckett and Badiou offers a provocative new reading of Samuel Beckett's work on the basis of a full, critical account of the thought of Alain Badiou. Badiou is the most eminent of contemporary French philosophers. His devotion to Beckett's work has been lifelong. Yet for Badiou philosophy must be integrally affirmative, whilst Beckett apparently commits his art to a work of negation. Beckett and Badiou explores the coherences, contradictions, and extreme complexities of the intellectual relationship between the two oeuvres. It examines Badiou's philosophy of being, the event, truth, and the subject and the importance of mathematics within his system. It considers the major features of his politics, ethics, and aesthetics and provides an explanation, interpretation, critique, and radical revision of his work on Beckett. It argues that, once revised, Badiou's version of Beckett offers an extraordinarily powerful tool for understanding his work.
Badiou and Beckett are instances of a vestigial or melancholic modernism; that is, in the teeth of a contemporary culture that dreams ever more ambitiously of plenitude, they commit themselves to a rigorous concept of limit and intermittency. Truth and value are occasional and rare. It is seldom that the chance event arrives to disturb the inertia of the world. For Badiou, however, it is the event and its consequences alone that matter. Beckett rather insists on the common experience of intermittency as destitution. His art is a series of limit-figures, exquisitely subtle and nuanced forms for a world whose state of seemingly rigid paralysis is also always volatile, delicately balanced.

Monsters are fragmentary, uncertain, frightening creatures. What happens when they enter the realm of the theatre? The Monster in Theatre History explores the cultural genealogies of monsters as they appear in the recorded history of Western theatre. From the Ancient Greeks to the most cutting-edge new media, Michael Chemers focuses on a series of 'key' monsters, including Frankenstein's creature, werewolves, ghosts, and vampires, to reconsider what monsters in performance might mean to those who witness them. This volume builds a clear methodology for engaging with theatrical monsters of all kinds, providing a much-needed guidebook to this fascinating hinterland.

This book offers a survey of how female and male characters in English Renaissance theatre participated and interacted in musical activities, both inside and outside the contemporary societal decorum. Wong's analysis broadens our understanding of the general theatrical representation of music, or musical dramaturgy, and complicates the current discussion of musical portrayal and construction of gender during this period. Wong discusses dramaturgical meanings of music and its association with gender, love, and erotomania in Renaissance plays. The negotiation between the dichotomous qualities of the heavenly and the demonic finds extensive application in recent studies of music in early modern English plays. However, while ideological dualities identified in music in traditional Renaissance thinking may seem unequivocal, various musical representations of characters and situations in early modern drama would prove otherwise. Wong, building upon the conventional model of binarism, explores how playwrights created their musical characters and scenarios according to the received cultural use and perception of music, and, at the same time, experimented with the multivalent meanings and significance embodied in theatrical music.

This is the first collection of plays in the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde series edited by Ian Small. It contains full-dress critical editions, at the high editorial standard of the familiar Oxford English Texts series, encompassing all surviving manuscript material and all other relevant documents, of three of Wilde's plays: The Duchess of Padua, the original French Salome, and the first English translation, by Lord Alfred Douglas. The edition contains comprehensive introductions and editorial introductions, as well as extensive annotations. The Duchess of Padua is one of two early plays by Wilde (the other being Vera; or, The Nihilists) that signify his youthful interest in making his mark on the contemporary theatre. They are imperfect works, but they show the real talent and definite promise that would be fulfilled, in the early 1890s, first with Lady Windermere's Fan (completed 1891, produced 1892) and then, almost simultaneously, with the next play in this volume, Wilde's French Salome, written also in 1891, completed in 1892, but not published until 1893: his only work written in French. Douglas's translation, which left the author of the French work disappointed by its 'schoolboy' quality, is also included here since it was issued over Wilde's name (and dedicated to Douglas, 'the translator of my play') and is indisputably part of Wilde's oeuvre.

This book investigates the complex interactions, through experiencing drama, of readers and audiences in the English Renaissance. Around 1500 an absolute majority of population was illiterate. Henry VIII's religious reformation changed this cultural structure of society. 'The Act for the Advancement of True Religion' of 1543, which prohibited the people belonging to the lower classes of society as well as women from reading the Bible, rather suggests that there already existed a number of these folks actively engaged in reading. The Act did not ban the works of Chaucer and Gower and stories of men's lives - good reading for them. The successive sovereigns' educational policies also contributed to rising literacy. This trend was speeded up by London's growing population which invited the rise of commercial playhouses since 1567. Every citizen saw on average about seven performances every year: that is, about three per cent of London's population saw a performance a day. From 1586 onwards merchants' appearance in best-seller literature began to increase while stage representation of reading/writing scenes also increased and stimulated audiences towards reading. This was spurred by standardisation of the printing format of playbooks in the early 1580s and play-minded readers went to playbooks, eventually to create a class of playbook readers. Late in the 1590s, at last, playbooks matched with prose writings in ratio to all publications. Parts I and II of this book discuss these topics in numerical terms as much as possible and Part III discusses some monumental characteristics of contemporary readers of Chapman, Ford, Marston and Shakespeare.

This new study of the major prose and plays of Oscar Wilde argues that his dominant aesthetic category is not art but style. It is this major emphasis on style and attitude which helps mark Wilde so graphically as our contemporary. Beginning with a survey of current Wilde criticism, the book demonstrates the way his own critical essays anticipate much contemporary cultural theory and inform his own practice as a writer.

Clyde Fitch (1865-1909) was the most successful and prolific dramatist of his time, producing nearly sixty plays in a twenty-year career. He wrote witty comedies, chaotic farces, homespun dramas, star vehicles, historical works, stark melodramas, and adaptations of European successes, but he was best known for his society plays, mirroring themes found in the novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton. In fact, Fitch collaborated with Wharton on a stage adaptation of her House of Mirth. He was also a gay man, although that gentler adjective was not the term of his time. He was bullied in school and baited by critics throughout his career for what they supposed of his private life. He responded with impressive strength and integrity. He was, at least for a short time, Oscar Wilde's lover, and Wilde influenced his early plays, but Fitch's study of Ibsen and other European dramatists inspired him to pursue the course of naturalism. As he became more successful, he took greater control of the staging and design of his plays. He was a complete man of the theatre and among the first names enrolled in New York's theatrical hall of fame.

Strindberg - Other Sides: Seven Plays presents fresh translations based upon the new national Swedish edition of Strindberg's works, hewing close to Strindberg's techniques of "scoring" his scripts for actors and directors. The plays are illuminated in introductory essays revaluating Strindberg's role in transforming theatre (and art) with his extraordinary new forms. The Ghost Sonata is a keystone in the construction of the expressionist theatre; in The Pelican Strindberg goes "over the top" with his own form of psychological drama until it soars beyond the realm of realism; The Dance of Death is a battle of the sexes rendered absurd, as a series of games played against the void; and Carl XII is an epic play portraying the last months of the king who brought Sweden's history as a great power to an end. Three one-acts from the late 1880s foreshadow the striking ambiguity of Strindberg's later works.

Few plays have generated more controversy or had a more extraordinary performance history than Moliere's Don Juan. David Whitton's study examines ways in which this enigmatic masterpiece has been interpreted in performance through the vision of different directors and in a variety of cultural and social contexts ranging from pre-revolutionary St Petersburg to post-revolutionary Prague. In a series of critical studies, key productions are reconstructed using prompt books, production notes, photographs, contemporary reviews, memoirs and the author's own experience as a spectator. Among the interpretations discussed are those of Meyerhold, Brecht, Ingmar Bergman, Jouvet, and Chereau. Each of these productions, in addition to shedding new light on a familiar text, is a theatrical landmark in its own right. The book is illustrated with numerous photographs and contains a geographical-chronological table of productions.

Wooden Os is a study of the presence of trees and wood in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries - in plays set within forests, in character dialogue, and in props and theatre constructions. Vin Nardizzi connects these themes to the dependence, and surprising ecological impact, of London's commercial theatre industry on England's woodlands, the primary resource required to build all structures in early modern England. Wooden Os situates the theatre within an environmental history that witnessed a perceived scarcity of wood and timber that drove up prices, as well as statute law prohibiting the devastation of English woodlands and urgent calls for the remedying of a resource shortage that was feared would result in eco-political collapse. By considering works including Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, the revised Spanish Tragedy, and The Tempest, Nardizzi demonstrates how the "trees" within them were used in imaginative ways to mediate England's resource crisis.