Dramatic Realism, since its birth in the hectic late years of the nineteenth century, gave theatrical and thematic energy to the interaction between a play's text and the way that it looked on the stage. Characters began to find themselves in rooms and settings that played an active and changing role in the drama, and their dialogue and reactions evolved in time with these changes. As life itself became more elaborate during the 20th Century, so these rooms were invaded and then defined by the outside world. Fred Miller Robinson's enjoyable and stimulating essays on this enduring genre tackle the dreams and anxieties of the middles classes of the Industrial Revolution - dreams of domestic comfort and refuge, and anxieties about how entrapping that comfort could be. Moving from Ibsen to Chekhov and onwards into later plays in which the reality of 'Realism' comes under scrutiny, this is a book to dip into before a performance or to study during a class.

The basis of this critical examination of Eliot's work, first published in 1973, is the investigation of his transmutation of this and other philosophical, mythological and religious motives into the textures of his verse. This book focuses on Eliot's peculiar eclectic approach to what he described as 'the Tradition'. It also recognises the fact that Eliot, for all his attempts at universality, was a product of time and place, and gives an account of the way in which his education and experience shaped his most important interests. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

This book, first published in 1985, explores the consciousness and the experience of Shakespeare's audience. First describing the stage's physical impact, Ralph Berry then goes on to explore the social or tribal consciousness of the audience in certain plays. The title finishes by examining the masque - the salient form of the Jacobean theatre. This title will be of interest to students of literature and theatre studies.

Dramatic Realism, since its birth in the hectic late years of the nineteenth century, gave theatrical and thematic energy to the interaction between a play's text and the way that it looked on the stage. Characters began to find themselves in rooms and settings that played an active and changing role in the drama, and their dialogue and reactions evolved in time with these changes. As life itself became more elaborate during the 20th Century, so these rooms were invaded and then defined by the outside world. Fred Miller Robinson's enjoyable and stimulating essays on this enduring genre tackle the dreams and anxieties of the middles classes of the Industrial Revolution - dreams of domestic comfort and refuge, and anxieties about how entrapping that comfort could be. Moving from Ibsen to Chekhov and onwards into later plays in which the reality of 'Realism' comes under scrutiny, this is a book to dip into before a performance or to study during a class.

This book establishes new information about the likely content of ten lost plays from the period 1580-1642. These plays' authors include Nashe, Heywood, and Dekker; and the plays themselves connect in direct ways to some of the most canonical dramas of English literature, including Hamlet, King Lear, The Changeling, and The Duchess of Malfi. The lost plays in question are: Terminus & Non Terminus (1586-8); Richard the Confessor (1593); Cutlack (1594); Bellendon (1594); Truth's Supplication to Candlelight (1600); Albere Galles (1602); Henry the Una (c. 1619); The Angel King (1624); The Duchess of Fernandina (c. 1630-42); and The Cardinal's Conspiracy (bef. 1639). From this list of bare titles, it is argued, can be reconstructed comedies, tragedies, and histories, whose leading characters included a saint, a robber, a Medici duchess, an impotent king, at least one pope, and an angel. In each case, newly-available digital research resources make it possible to interrogate the title and to identify the play's subject-matter, analogues, and likely genre. But these concrete examples raise wider theoretical problems: What is a lost play? What can, and cannot, be said about objects in this problematic category? Known lost plays from the early modern commercial theatre outnumber extant plays from that theatre: but how, in practice, can one investigate them? This book offers an innovative theoretical and practical frame for such work, putting digital humanities into action in the emerging field of lost play studies.

During the eighteenth century, treatises on the science of elocution, gesture and naturalness abounded. This title draws together a representative selection of the most difficult-to-access texts in the period. It helps cultural historians to examine the place of stagecraft in the eighteenth-century imagination.

During the eighteenth century, treatises on the science of elocution, gesture and naturalness abounded. This title draws together a representative selection of the most difficult-to-access texts in the period. It helps cultural historians to examine the place of stagecraft in the eighteenth-century imagination.

During the eighteenth century, treatises on the science of elocution, gesture and naturalness abounded. This title draws together a representative selection of the most difficult-to-access texts in the period. It helps cultural historians to examine the place of stagecraft in the eighteenth-century imagination.

During the eighteenth century, treatises on the science of elocution, gesture and naturalness abounded. This title draws together a representative selection of the most difficult-to-access texts in the period. It helps cultural historians to examine the place of stagecraft in the eighteenth-century imagination.

William Godwin is one of the most important figures of the Romantic period. He wrote four plays at the end of the 18th/beginning of the 19th centuries. This book has two main objectives: to provide the first comprehensive discussion of these four plays, and to consider the notion of theatricality in relation to Godwin's political project.

During the eighteenth century, treatises on the science of elocution, gesture and naturalness abounded. This title draws together a representative selection of the most difficult-to-access texts in the period. It helps cultural historians to examine the place of stagecraft in the eighteenth-century imagination.

This is the new paperback edition of the first fully annotated volume of Ben Jonson's "The Magnetic Lady" written in 1632. It contains textual and explanatory notes and the text is modernized for student use. The introduction places the play in the context of Jonson's later dramatic and poetic works and discusses the political context of the Caroline court. A performance history of the play and fresh material relating to its seventeenth-century reception are also provided. This edition by Peter Happè critically reappraises Jonson's much-neglected play and argues for its recognition as a work of real distinction.

Modern plays are strikingly diverse and, as a result, any attempt to locate an underlying unity between them encounters difficulties: to focus on what they have in common is often to overlook what is of primary importance in particular plays; to focus on their differences is to note the novelty of the plays without increasing their accessibility. In this study, first published in 1985, Austin E. Quigley takes as his paradigm case the relationship between the world of the stage and the world of the audience, and explores various modes of communication between domains. He asks how changes in the structure of the drama relate to changes in the structure of the theatre, and changes in the role of the audience. Detailed interpretations of plays by Pinero, Ibsen, Strindberg, Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett and Pinter question principles about the modern theatre and establish links between drama structure and theatre structure, theme, and performance space.

First published in 1951, The People of Aristophanes provides a sociological account of Athens in the period of its greatest glory. Drawing upon Old Attic Comedy and the plays of Aristophanes, the author recreates, for the reader, the life of Athens at that time. He writes extensively about social structure, family, religion and political relationships within the state, and discusses the far-reaching changes which took place within Athenian society.

In Dialogue with Godot: Waiting and Other Thoughts, Ranjan Ghosh puts together thirteen new essays on Beckett's most popular and widely read play, Waiting for Godot. Chapters are envisaged as dialogues with Godot, keeping in mind the event of waiting and other issues related to this Godot-Waiting phenomenon. The merit of this book lies in exploring this play from thirteen fresh perspectives introducing some important themes that have not been dealt previously. Contributors explore the play in reference to topics as varied as Hindu philosophy, Agamben, Kristeva, Derrida, the absence of women in the play, Aristotleanism in structural reading, and anti-existentialism. Essays ask, can we make claims to read this play outside the "absurd tradition?" Is it an anti-existential play? Can Beckett possibly be "Indianized?" How can the dialectic between "waiting" and "delay" be problematized? If Beckett was up to de-structure conventional modes of drama-writing, what connection could he possibly have with Aristotle and his normative modes? Can the Vladimir-Estragon relationship be critiqued psychoanalytically? Can questions of political commitment be challenged anew, resisting easy propositions to considering it a Resistance play? Can the Godot / Resistance collocation be examined through torture (the series of beatings that structures the play), through relationship (the pseudo-couple), and finally through language (the insistent coupling of violence and meaning)? In Dialogue with Godot offers a refreshingly new and varied approach to Samuel Beckett's most popular play.

This study of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus demonstrates the applicability of narrative models to drama. It presents a major contribution not only to Sophoclean criticism but to dramatic criticism as a whole. For the first time, the methods of contemporary narrative theory are thoroughly applied to the text of a single major play. Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus is presented as a uniquely rich text, which deftly uses the figure and history of the blind Oedipus to explore and thematize some of the basic narratological concerns of Greek tragedy: the relation between the narrow here-and-now of visible stage action and the many off-stage worlds that have to be mediated into it through narrative, including the past, the future, other dramatizations of the myth, and the world of the fifth-century audience.

Praised as one of the finest American playwrights of the 20th century, Tennessee Williams left a legacy of theater classics, including The Glass Menagerie, Sweet Bird of Youth, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and A Streetcar Named Desire. Though a winner of two Pulitzer prizes for drama, Williams fell out of favor in the early 1960s and after The Night of the Iguana, his subsequent works suffered both critical and commercial failure. Even worse, several of his plays failed to get produced in his lifetime. William Prosser directed six productions of Williams's plays, five of which the playwright saw, criticized, and quite often praised. In The Late Plays of Tennessee Williams, Prosser reassesses the playwright's later works. Determined to liberate them from the literary purgatory to which they had been condemned by the critics, Prosser examines the works Williams produced from the early 1960s until the playwright's death in 1983. In several thoughtful essays, Prosser discusses such works as The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, Slapstick Tragedy, Kingdom of Earth, The Red Devil Battery Sign, and Clothes For a Summer Hotel, a portrait of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Besides offering reevaluations of these works, each chapter may be seen as research and analysis for potential productions. Throughout the book, Prosser contends that Williams' talent was not destroyed, but rather went on in different directions to produce extraordinary, if misunderstood, works.

The Art of John Webster, first published in 1972, is a study of the three extant plays of Webster known to be solely his work. These plays are seen as attempts to achieve in literature the effects of the baroque, a term which related Webster to the larger developments of European art. Their content is analysed in terms of a consistent opposition between evil and the law. The book seeks to re-establish a base for the claims that must be made for Webster as a serious artist. This title will be of interest to students of literature and drama.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Renaissance ideas of honour had a profound influence on the English people who formed Shakespeare's audiences. In When Honour's at the Stake, first published in 1973, Norman Council describes the increasing importance of these ideas to the themes and structure of a number of Shakespeare's major plays. The validity of the most widely approved code of honour was being challenged on a variety of fronts, yet both personal standards of behaviour and public affairs were habitually understood in terms of honour. A series of tragedies are given their basic form by dramatizing the pernicious effects of man's disobedience to the various demands of honour; in Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear honour is among the principal motives of tragedy. In this way, the modern reader's comprehension of the plays can be greatly enhanced by reference to Elizabethan honour codes.

Oliver Taplin's seminal study was revolutionary in drawing out the significance of stage action in Greek tragedy at a time when plays were often read purely as texts, rather than understood as performances. Professor Taplin explores nine plays, including Aeschylus' agamemnon and Sophocles' Oedipus the King. The details of theatrical techniques and stage directions, used by playwrights to highlight key moments, are drawn out and related to the meaning of each play as a whole. With extensive translated quotations, the essential unity of action and speech in Greek tragedy is demonstrated. Now firmly established as a classic text, Greek Tragedy in Action is even more relevant today, when performances of Greek tragedies and plays inspired by them have had such an extraordinary revival around the world.

It is a generally accepted fact that in the first half of the nineteenth century, Catherine Gore became the most prolific, if not most popular writer of fashionable novels in England. It is less well known that Mrs. Gore's 200-volume output included eleven extremely popular, if not always critically successful, plays, performed at all three of the Theatres Royal in London: Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket. While several of the plays held the stage in England and the United States well into the second half of the nineteenth century, modern critical appraisals of the works have been hampered by the lack of available texts. Gore on Stage, for the first time provides performance texts of all of Mrs. Gore's work for the stage, including original cast lists, criticial responses, illustrations, and glossaries of foreign words and nineteenth-century jargon. Students of drama and nineteenth-century literature will delight in the intricacies of plot and theatrical effects in this collection of historical melodramas, comedies of manners, and farces; and they will marvel at the contemporary nature of the plays' themes, trading on a balance of power between male and female characters.

In this updated and extended edition of The Greek Sense of Theatre, scholar and practitioner J.Michael Walton revises and expands his visual approach to the theatre of classical Athens. From the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides to the old and new comedies of Aristophanes and Menander, he argues that while Greek drama is seen now as a performance-based rather than a strictly literary medium, more attention should still be paid to the nature of stage image and masked acting as part of this conception.

According to Aristotle the main purpose of tragedy is the manipulation of emotions, and yet there are relatively few accessible studies of the precise dynamics of emotion in the Athenian theatre. In Greek Tragedy and the Emotions, first published in 1993, W.B. Stanford reviews the evidence for 'emotionalism' - as the great Attic playwrights presented it, as the actors and choruses expressed it, and as their audiences reacted to it. Sociological aspects of the issue are considered, and the whole range of emotions, not just 'pity and fear', is discussed. The aural, visual and stylistic methods of inciting emotion are analysed, and Aeschylus' Oresteia is examined exclusively in terms of the emotions that it exploits. Finally, Stanford's conclusions are contrasted with the accepted theories of tragic 'catharsis'. Greek terms are transliterated and all quotations are in translation, so Greek Tragedy and the Emotions will appeal particularly to those unfamiliar with Classical Greek.

The Polish playwright and artist Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, known as Witkacy, is now recognized as Poland's leading theatrical innovator of the interwar years and one of the outstanding creative personalities of the European avant-garde. This volume contains two of Witkacy's "tropical" plays inspired by the playwright's trip to Ceylon and Australia in 1914 with his close friend, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Mr. Price, or Tropical Madness is a drama of heightened passion and greed among British colonists in Rangoon who seem to have stepped out of Joseph Conrad's tales of the South Seas. Metaphysics of a Two headed Calf, set in New Guinea and Australia, pits savage European imperialists against a native tribal Australia and pits savage European imperialists against a native tribal chieftain whose fetish of a great golden frog offers greater insight into the mystery of existence than the Westerners' shallow rationalism. Both plays puncture the white rulers' poses of superiority and parody their images of the tropical Other. Also included in the volume are Witkacy's Foreword to Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf in which the playwright defends his concept of theatre as an autonomous art with a scenic language of its own and an appendix containing a documentary itinerary of Witkacy's journey to Ceylon.