Lysistrata is the most notorious of Aristophanes' comedies. First staged in 411 BCE, its action famously revolves around a sex strike launched by the women of Greece in an attempt to force their husbands to end the war. With its risque humour, vibrant battle of the sexes, and themes of war and peace, Lysistrata remains as daring and thought-provoking today as it would have been for its original audience in Classical Athens. Aristophanes: Lysistrata is a lively and engaging introduction to this play aimed at students and scholars of classical drama alike. It sets Lysistrata in its social and historical context, looking at key themes such as politics, religion and its provocative portrayal of women, as well as the play's language, humour and personalities, including the formidable and trailblazing Lysistrata herself. Lysistrata has often been translated, adapted and performed in the modern era and this book also traces the ways in which it has been re-imagined and re-presented to new audiences. As this reception history reveals, Lysistrata's appeal in the modern world lies not only in its racy subject matter, but also in its potential to be recast as a feminist, pacifist or otherwise subversive play that openly challenges the political and social status quo.

Performing Immanence: Forced Entertainment is a unique probe into the multi-faceted nature of the works of the British experimental theatre Forced Entertainment via the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Jan Suk explores the transformation-potentiality of the territory between the actors and the spectators, namely via Forced Entertainment's structural patterns, sympathy provoking aesthetics, audience integration and accentuated emphasis of the now. Besides writings of Tim Etchells, the company's director, the foci of the analyses are devised as well as durational projects of Forced Entertainment. The examination includes a wider spectrum of state-of the-art live artists, e.g. Tehching Hsieh, Franko B or Goat Island, discussed within the contemporary performance discourse. Performing Immanence: Forced Entertainment investigates how the immanent reading of Forced Entertainment's performances brings the potentiality of creative transformative experience via the thought of Gilles Deleuze. The interconnections of Deleuze's thought and the contemporary devised performance theatre results in the symbiotic relationship that proves that such readings are not mere academic exercises, but truly life-illuminating realizations.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

Scholars have been seeking to understand Sophocles' Antigone for over two millennia. The origins of this long tradition of the play's interpretation are now represented mainly by a series of notes that have survived in the margins of medieval manuscripts. The book offers an English introduction and an authoritative critical text, which is accompanied by a detailed apparatus criticus.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

Despite its unabated popularity with audiences, slapstick has received rather little scholarly attention, mostly by scholars concentrating on the US theater and cinema traditions. Nonetheless, as a form of physical humor slapstick has a long history across various areas of cultural production. This volume approaches slapstick both as a genre of situational physical comedy and as a mode of communicating an affective situation captured in various cultural products. Contributors to the volume examine cinematic, literary, dramatic, musical, and photographic texts and performances. From medieval chivalric romance and nineteenth-century theater to contemporary photography, the contributors study treatments of slapstick across media, periods and geographic locations. The aim of a study of such wide scope is to demonstrate how slapstick emerged from a variety of complex interactions among different traditions and by extension, to illustrate that slapstick can be highly productive for interdisciplinary research.

The Duchess of Malfi is generally regarded as John Webster's finest play, a masterpiece of tragic depth and emotional complexity. The conflict between private love and public political behaviour for a passionate but circumscribed woman is as theatrically pertinent now as when first performed. This timely Handbook: - Examines the play's sources and its cultural context - Offers a detailed theatrical commentary that aids visualisation of the underlying dynamics and structure of the play in performance, and explores performance possibilities - Analyses influential productions on stage and screen, from when it was first performed by the actors of Shakespeare's theatre company, the King's Men, to the present day - Presents key critical debates and assessments of The Duchess of Malfi

A play is written, faces censorship and is banned in its native country. There is strong international interest; the play is translated into English, it is adapted, and it is not performed.
"Censoring Translation" questions the role of textual translation practices in shaping the circulation and reception of foreign censored theatre. It examines three forms of censorship in relation to translation: ideological censorship; gender censorship; and market censorship.
This examination of censorship is informed by extensive archival evidence from the previously unseen archives of Vaclav Havel's main theatre translator, Vera Blackwell, which includes drafts of playscripts, legal negotiations, reviews, interviews, notes and previously unseen correspondence over thirty years with Havel and central figures of the theatre world, such as Kenneth Tynan, Martin Esslin, and Tom Stoppard.
Michelle Woods uses this previously unresearched archive to explore broader questions on censorship, asking why texts are translated at a given time, who translates them, how their identity may affect the translation, and how the constituents of success in a target culture may involve elements of censorship.

Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire-- King Lear is Shakespeare's brilliant play about truth, love, and madness. King Lear slowly descends into madness after dividing his kingdom between the two daughters who are willing to flatter him rather than giving it to the one daughter who actually loves him. Have more than thou showest, Speak less than thou knowest, Lend less than thou owest, Ride more than thou goest, Learn more than thou trowest.

To Die Upon a Kiss-- Othello is Shakespeare's great tragic play of love, trust, and deceit. Iago, an officer of the watch, sets out to destroy Othello by convincing him that his young bride, Desdemona, has betrayed him and is secretly in love with another man. What sense had I of her stol'n hours of lust? I saw't not, thought it not, it harm'd not me; I slept the next night well, was free and merry; I found not Cassio's kisses on her lips. He that is robb'd, not wanting what is stol'n, Let him not know't and he's not robb'd at all.

This is the first volume dedicated to Plautus' perennially popular comedy Casina that analyses the play for a student audience and assumes no knowledge of Latin. It launches a much-needed new series of books, each discussing a comedy that survives from the ancient world. Four chapters highlight the play's historical context, themes, performance and reception, including its reflection of recent societal trends in marriage and property ownership by women after the Punic Wars, and its complex dynamics on stage. It is ideal for students, but helpful also for scholars wanting a brief introduction to the play. Casina pits a husband (Lysidamus) and wife (Cleostrata) against each other in a struggle for control of a 16-year-old slave named Casina. Cleostrata cleverly plots to frustrate the efforts of her lascivious elderly husband, staging a cross-dressing 'marriage' that culminates in his complete humiliation. The play provides rich insights into relationships within the Roman family. This volume analyses how Casina addresses such issues as women's status and property rights, the distribution of power within a Roman household, and sexual violence, all within a compellingly meta-comic framework from which Cleostrata emerges as a surprising comic hero. It also examines the play's enduring popularity and relevance.

Key Features: * Study methods * Introduction to the text * Summaries with critical notes * Themes and techniques * Textual analysis of key passages * Author biography * Historical and literary background * Modern and historical critical approaches * Chronology * Glossary of literary terms

Samuel Beckett's work is littered with ironic self-reflexive comments on presumed audience expectations that it should ultimately make explicable sense. An ample store of letters and anecdotes suggests Beckett's own preoccupation with and resistance to similar interpretive mindsets. Yet until now such concerns have remained the stuff of scholarly footnotes and asides. Beckett's Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism addresses these issues head-on and investigates how Beckett's ideas about who he writes for affect what he writes. What it finds speaks to current understandings not only of Beckett's techniques and ambitions, but also of modernism's experiments as fundamentally compromised challenges to enshrined ways of understanding and organizing the social world. Beckett's uniquely anxious audience-targeting brings out similarly self-doubting strategies in the work of other experimental twentieth-century writers and artists in whom he is interested: his corpus proves emblematic of a modernism that understands its inability to achieve transformative social effects all at once, but that nevertheless judiciously complicates too-neat distinctions drawn within ongoing culture wars. For its re-evaluations of four key points of orientation for understanding Beckett's artistic ambitions-his arch critical pronouncements, his postwar conflations of value and valuelessness, his often-ambiguous self-commentary, and his sardonic metatheatrical play-as well as for its running dialogue with wider debates around modernism as a social phenomenon, this book is of interest to students and researchers interested in Beckett, modernism, and the relations between modern and contemporary artistic and social developments.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

This study originates in the observation that improv comedy or improvised theater has such a vast majority of white people practicing it, while other improvisational or comedic art forms (jazz, freestyle rap, stand up) are historically grounded in and marked as Black cultural production. What it is about improv that makes it such a white space? Can an absence be an object of study? If so, what is there to study? Where should one look?

Verbatim theatre, a type of performance based on actual words spoken by ''real people'', has been at the heart of a remarkable and unexpected renaissance of the genre in Great Britain since the mid-nineties. The central aim of the book is to critically explore and account for the relationship between contemporary British verbatim theatre and realism whilst questioning the much-debated mediation of the real in theses theatre practices.

This is the first critical edition of Exiles, Joyce's only extant play and his least appreciated work. A. Nicholas Fargnoli and Michael Patrick Gillespie contend that the play deserves the same serious study as Joyce's fiction and stands on the cutting edge of modern drama. Their introduction situates Exiles in the context of Irish history and Joyce's other works, highlighting its often-overlooked complexity. The text of the play is newly annotated and unregularized, appearing as Joyce originallyintended. Containing a variety of critical responses to the text, including an interview with a recent director of the play, this edition establishes Exiles as an important component of Joyce's canon.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.