This title was first published in 2000. This book offers a wide-ranging account of tragic drama from the Greeks to Arthur Miller. It puts forward a bold and vigorously developed argument about the recurrent concerns of tragedy, and proposes to uncover the archetypal tragic plot that emerges at key points of historical transition. It traces this plot through fascinatingly diverse formations on Athens, Renaissance England and the modern world, and offers detailed analysis of over twenty plays. The needs of the first-time reader are not forgotten, while challenging new light is thrown on each period. There is substantial discussion of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Lorca and Miller, along with briefer consideration of the Senecan tradition, Yeats, Synge, O'Neill and T.S. Eliot. Felicity Rosslyn asks why tragic plays get written when they do, and why they so often dramatise the struggle to break the ties of blood for the bonds of law.

Collected Studies CS 1068 The essays selected for this volume are chosen to reflect the important and intersecting ways in which over the last forty years Meg Twycross has shifted paradigms for people reading early English religious drama. The focus of Meg Twycross's research has been on performance in its many aspects, and this volume chooses four of the most important strands of her work - the York plays; new ways of understanding acting and performance in late medieval theatre, particularly in Britain and across Europe; why scenes are staged in the ways they are, verbally and by extrapolation visually, by close reading of texts against the background of medieval theology; and the attention paid to wider contexts of medieval theatre - concentrating especially on essays that are not easily available today. These thematic strands are reflective of Meg Twycross's major contribution to the field. They also represent those areas from her wider work which will have most utility and value for those, whether students or senior specialists in areas beyond early drama, who are looking for ways into understanding English medieval plays. The crucial work that has been done here has opened new perspectives on late medieval theatre, and will allow new generations to begin their study and research from further along the road.

The three interludes in this volume come from the press of John Rastell, barrister, printer, adventurer, member of parliament, brother-in-law of Thomas More, and one of the first men in England to have a stage built at his own house. The Four Elements is unique in its genre of scientific morality play. Rastell composed it himself to expound the rudiments of natural science and to air his own frustrating experience of venturing to the New World, in 1517. The anonymous Calisto and Melebea is based on the beginning of the notorious Spanish novel, La Celestina, and has an elegance and subtlety in its satirical comedy of manners that is not found elsewhere in early English drama. Gentleness and Nobiblitycrisply debates the case of aristocracy against meritocracy in a mocking humanist vein. It is probably by John Heywood, Rastell's son-on-law. The variety of the play testifies to Rastell's enterprise as publisher and their conmon theme of social responsibility to his strength of personality.

Branding Oscar Wilde traces the development and perception of Wilde's public persona and examines the impact of interpretations of his writing. Through calculated behavior, provocative language, and arresting dress, Wilde self-consciously created a brand initially recognized by family and friends, then by the British public, and ultimately by large audiences over the world. That brand changed over the course of his public career-both in the way Wilde projected it and in the way it was perceived. Comprehending the fundamental elements of the Wilde brand and following its evolution are integral to a full understanding of his art. The study focuses on how branding established important assumptions about Wilde and his work in his own mind and in those of his readers, and it examines how each stage of brand development affected the immediate responses to Wilde's writings and, as it continued to evolve, progressively shaped our understanding of the Wilde canon.

More widely studied and more frequently performed than ever before, John Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi" is here presented in an improved, accessible and throughly up-to-date edition. Starting with the authoritative Revels Plays edition of 1964, John Russell Brown has augmented the notes and collations, and casts new light on Webster's dramatic dialogue and on the stage action. An entirely new introduction encompasses a stage history from its well-documented early performances right through to recent productions in the twenty first century. The bibliography has also been expanded.

Students, actors, directors, academics and theatre-goers will find here a reappraisal of Webster's artistry in the greatest age of English theatre.

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.

Beckett's Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism is the first study in English on the literary relation between Beckett and Dante. It is an innovative reading of Samuel Beckett and Dante's works and a critical engagement with contemporary theories of intertextuality. It is an informative intertextual reading of Beckett's work, detecting previously unknown quotations, allusions to, and parodies of Dante in Beckett's fiction and criticism. The volume interprets Dante in the original Italian (as it appears in Beckett), translating into English all Italian quotations. It benefits from a multilingual approach based on Beckett's published works in English and French, and on manuscripts (which use English, French, German and Italian). Through a close reading of Beckett's fiction and criticism, the book will argue that Dante is both assumed as an external source of literary and cultural authority in Beckett's work, and also participates in Beckett's texts' sceptical undermining of authority. Moreover, the book demonstrates that the many references to various 'Dantes' produce 'Mr Beckett' as the figure of the author responsible for such a remarkably interconnected oeuvre. The book is aimed at the scholarly communities interested in literatures in English, literary and critical theory, comparative literature and theory, French literature and theory and Italian studies. Its jargon-free style will also attract third-year or advanced undergraduate students, and postgraduate students, as well as those readers interested in the unusual relationship between one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and the medieval author who stands for the very idea of the Western canon. -- .

This volume celebrates the life and work of Federico García Lorca, Spain's greatest modern poet and dramatist. The contributors are a stimulating blend of academics, poets and theatre professionals, all responding in a variety of ways to the creative challenges of Lorca's legacy. Alan Lyddiard and other directors discuss staging Lorca's plays. The celebrated artist and stage designer Frederic Amat talks about his filming of Lorca's surrealist screenplay "Voyage to the Moon." Professor Paul Julian Smith of University of Cambridge and other academic specialists discuss the continuing vitality of Lorca's poetry, theatre and paintings. Experienced translators talk about the problems and opportunities in translating Lorca's poems and plays, and take up the creative challenge of producing adaptations of a single sonnet, "Wounds of Love." There is also a translation of an ode to Lorca by Pablo Neruda and contributions by leading poets Brendan Kennelly, Merryn Williams and John Clifford.

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 is an analysis of sexual themes in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, both in the context of the Jacobean theatre and in the light of modern readings of sexuality and gender during the English Renaissance. Sandra Clark challenges commonly-held perceptions of Beaumont and Fletcher's work. The book is intended for undergraduate and graduate courses on Renaissance literature, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, tragicomedy, gender and genre in the Renaissance.

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.

This ground-breaking study analyzes Beckett's television plays in relation to the history and theory of television. It argues that they are in dialogue with innovative television traditions connected to Modernism in television, film, radio, theatre, literature and the visual arts.

Using original research from BBC archives and manuscript sources, the book provides new perspectives on the relationships between Beckett's television dramas and the wider television culture of Britain and Europe. It also compares and contrasts the plays for television with Beckett's Film and broadcasts of his theatre work including the recent Beckett on Film season. Chapters deal with the production process of the plays, the broadcasting contexts in which they were screened, institutions and authorship, the plays' relationships with comparable programs and films, and reaction to Beckett's screen work by audiences and critics.

It will be essential reading in literature and drama studies, television historiography and for devotees of Beckett's work.

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.

Offering new and theatrically informed readings of plays by a broad range of Renaissance dramatists--including Marlowe, Jonson, Marston, Webster, Middleton and Ford--this new book addresses the question of pleasure: both erotic pleasure as represented on stage and aesthetic pleasure as experienced by readers and spectators. Some of the issues raised (the distribution of pleasure by gender, the notion of consent) intersect with feminist reinterpretations of Renaissance culture.

This is the most complete chronological account of Samuel Beckett's life and work, with full details of how, when, and where each work by him came to be written, many details of which have only recently come to light and are often not known to scholars working in the field.

This book investigates the contemporary conceptions of the Jewish figure on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. Taking on what has been said about Shakespeare's Shylock and Marlowe's Barabas in the last centuries, the author analyses seven other, largely ignored plays to enhance the image we have today of the early modern stage-Jew. In tracing the image of Jewish figures in medieval literature and in early modern travel reports, the foundation of the Elizabethan idea of 'Jewishness' is laid out. Further, the author challenges some arguments which have become axiomatic over time, such as the notion of the red-haired, hook-nosed comical villain. The book also contains a first edition of the Latin university play "Machiavellus" by Nathaniel Wiburne, accomplished by Michael Becker and Saskia Zinsser-Krys.

In Renaissance Drama, the bastard is an extraordinarily powerful and disruptive figure. We have only to think of Caliban or of Edmund to realise the challenge presented by the illegitimate child. Drawing on a wide rage of play texts, Alison Findlay shows how illegitimacy encoded and threatened to deconstruct some of the basic tenets of patriarchal rule. She considers bastards as indicators and instigators of crises in early modern England, reading them in relation to witch craft, spiritual insecurities and social unrest in family and State. The characters discussed range from demi-devils, unnatural villains and clowns to outstanding heroic or virtuous types who challenge officially sanctioned ideas of illegitimacy. The final chapter of the book considers bastards in performance; their relationship with theatre spaces and audiences. Illegitimate voices, Findlay argues, can bring about the death of the author/father and open the text as a piece of theatre, challenging accepted notions of authority. -- .

The first book-length study devoted to this topic, Mendacity and the Figure of the Liar in Seventeenth-Century French Comedy offers an important contribution to scholarship on the theatre as well as on early modern attitudes in France, specifically on the subject of lying and deception. Unusually for a scholarly work on seventeenth-century theatre, it is particularly alert to plays as performed pieces and not simply printed texts. The study also distinguishes itself by offering original readings of Moliere alongside innovative analyses of other playwrights. The chapters offer fresh insights on well-known plays by Moliere and Pierre Corneille but also invite readers to discover lesser-known works of the time (by writers such as Benserade, Thomas Corneille, Dufresny and Rotrou). Through comparative and sustained close readings, including a linguistic and speech act approach, a historical survey of texts with an analysis of different versions and a study of irony, the reader is shown the manifest ways in which different playwrights incorporate the comedic tropes of lying and scheming, confusion and unmasking. Drawing particular attention to the levels of communicative or mis-communicative exchanges on the character-to-character axis and the character-to-audience axis, this work examines the process whereby characters in the comedies construct narratives designed to trick, misdirect, dazzle, confuse or exploit their interlocutors. In the different incarnations of seducer, parasite, cross-dresser, duplicitous narrator/messenger and deluded mythomaniac, the author underscores the way in which the figure of the liar both entertains and troubles, making it a fascinating subject worthy of detailed investigation.

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 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.

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.

Staged Transgression in Shakespeare's England is a groundbreaking collection of essays that draws together leading and emerging scholars to investigate performances of transgression on the early modern English stage. Building on recent scholarship in studies of performance, politics, gender, sex, and race, this collection seeks to assess, respond to, and look beyond the last concentrated critical discussion of transgression in the 1980s. This collection explores areas of study that have been previously neglected in scholarly discussion and seeks to challenge critical orthodoxies and assumptions about the power and effect of onstage performances of illicit, deviant and disorderly behaviour. Contributors examine a wide range of onstage activities - from drunkenness and spitting to murder and rebellion - and offer fresh insights into the cultural work of theatre in Shakespeare's England.