This volume argues against Gerard Genette's theory that there is an "insurmountable opposition" between drama and narrative and shows that the two forms of storytelling have been productively intertwined throughout literary history. Building on the idea that plays often incorporate elements from other genres, especially narrative ones, the present study theorises drama as a fundamentally narrative genre. Guided by the question of how drama tells stories, the first part of the study delineates the general characteristics of dramatic narration and zooms in on the use of narrative forms in drama. The second part proposes a history of dramatic storytelling from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century that transcends conventional genre boundaries. Close readings of exemplary British plays provide an overview of the dominant narrative modes in each period and point to their impact in the broader cultural and historical context of the plays. Finally, the volume argues that throughout history, highly narrative plays have had a performative power that reached well beyond the stage: dramatic storytelling not only reflects socio-political realities, but also largely shapes them.

This original and provocative reinterpretation of Hamlet presents the play as the original audiences would have viewed it--a much bleaker, stronger, and more deeply religious play than it has usually been assumed to be. Arthur McGee draws a picture of a Devil-controlled Hamlet in the damnable Catholic court of Elsinore, and he shows that the evil natures of the Ghost and of Hamlet himself were understood and accepted by the Protestant audiences of the day. Using material gleaned from an investigation of play-censorship, McGee offers a comprehensive discussion of the Ghost as Demon. He then moves to Hamlet, presenting him as satanic, damned as revenger in the tradition of the Jacobean revenge drama. There are, he shows, no good ghosts, and Purgatory, whence the Ghost came, was reviled in Protestant England. The Ghost's manipulation extends to Hamlet's fool/madman role, and Hamlet's soliloquy reveals the ambition, conscience, and suicidal despair that damn him. With this viewpoint, McGee is able to shed convincing new light on various aspects of the play. He effectively strips Ophelia and Laertes of their sentimentalized charm, making them instead chillingly convincing, and he works through the last act to show damnation everywhere. In an epilogue, he sums up the history of criticism of Hamlet, demonstrating the process by which the play gradually lost its Elizabethan bite. Appendixes develop aspects of Ophelia.

Among extant Greek comedies, the Frogs is unique for the light it throws on classical Greek attitudes to tragedy and to literature in general. Sir Kenneth Dover's edition, with a full introduction and extensive commentary, has been the most comprehensive edition available, drawing together the relevant scholarship that has accumulated on the subject. The general purpose and character of the abridged version remains the same: to provide a helpful guide on a difficult author for students who wish to translate the play, or need to interpret it for performance. In this edition, nothing relevant to the performance of the play on stage has been sacrificed although information on manuscripts and discussion of the history of the text have been pared to the minimum, and arguments on controversial points have been abbreviated. Where relevant, conclucions reached in the original edition have been changed in the light of work done by others since 1993. The inclusion of a vocabulary should reduce the need for students to have a recourse to a lexicon.

Giving equal space to the sanctity of script and the artistic freedom of directors, this book addresses the difficulties encountered by playwrights and directors as they bring a script to the stage. Inspired directors can help a writer of genius turn his play into exciting theatre, but playwrights find that giving directors leeway to interpret and modify text can result in directors' overriding authorial intentions. This book presents the best that has been written by literary theorists on the current definitions of text and attempts to depart from quick rule-of-thumb assessments of the problem.

Drawing from definitive articles in literary and theatre journals, part one gives the reader basic concepts and terminology. Interviews with playwrights and directors, showing the complexity of the issue, appear in part two, and part three includes case studies of playwrights and directors who faced production crises. Legal aspects of collaboration are considered in part four. The book concludes with a positive approach and possible solution to the problem.

Aeschylus' Oresteia is a tragedy of inescapable killing within one family, such that each generation must avenge it in kind. This new and close translation tries to preserve its theatrical and poetic qualities: introductory and explanatory matter emphasizes the interconnection of scenes, ideas, and language which distinguishes this unique work, the only trilogy to survive from Greek tragedy.

Fifteen distinguished scholars contribute original essays that analyze A Streetcar Named Desire, one of the most significant plays in modern theatre, from various critical or cultural stances, methods, or modalities. Represented as individual points of view or touched upon in the analysis are the theories of Lacan and Foucault and the tenets of Marxism; the approaches of Feminism, Reader Response Criticism, Deconstructionism, Chaos and Anti-Chaos Theory, Translation Theory, Formalism, Mythology, Perception Theory, and Gender Theory; and the perceptions of Popular Culture, Film History and Theory, Southern Letters, and assorted cultural and regional studies. The volume introduction charts the course of Streetcar criticism from its inception to the present. Each essay begins by articulating the theoretical principles and methods behind the critical approach pursued, then applies these to readings from Streetcar, utilizing and documenting relevant major research. Insightful and challenging, the readings, individually and collectively, advance the study of the play and Tennessee Williams's canon and reputation generally. Each essay offers a fresh, provocative view of a play that has long been discussed in simplistic and dichotomized terms: Blanche as victim/Stanley as predator; Streetcar as a play about a failed southern belle meeting a brutish Pole; or Streetcar as a work of Southern literature. Viewing the play through the lenses of cultural and critical pluralism, the contributors open up the script and expand our awareness of the problems and possibilities offered by this great modern classic.

Among the most commercially successful female playwrights of all times, Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987) is best remembered as the author of "The Women" (1936), a biting social comedy. Beginning in 1942, she spent less of her time writing plays and turned instead to the wider stage of politics and world affairs. She was the editor of Vanity Fair magazine, a congresswoman, and an ambassador to Italy during the Eisenhower administration.

This book traces her transition from playwright to politician to Catholic apologist. It uncovers for the first time plays, both early and late, that dramatize her spiritual and artistic journey. A comprehensive survey of her plays and the world's reception to them, the book provides a thorough treatment of Luce's published and unpublished work. For each play, the volume includes a plot summary, critical commentary, and production information. The book also includes an exhaustive and generously-annotated bibliography of both popular reviews and scholarly criticism.

Eugene O'Neill has long been celebrated as America's greatest playwright. This year, in the centennial of his birth, Yale University Press takes pride in bringing out an edition of O'Neill's little-known works of the imagination and his principal critical statements, most of which have not hitherto been published. Edited and introduced by eminent O'Neill scholar Travis Bogard, the pieces-mostly early works-shed valuable light on O'Neill's artistic development. Contained here are a four-act tragedy, "The Personal Equation"; the original version of Marco Millions; a dramatic adaptation of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"; a scenario "The Reckoning," and Bolton O'Neill; the fourth act of "The Ole Davil," which became, with some alteration of tone, "Anna Christie"; and two short stories, "Tomorrow" and "S.O.S." Also included are an unpublished love poem and several critical and occasional pieces, composition of Mourning Becomes Electra and "The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O'Neill," written on behalf of his Dalmatian, Blemie. "There is here no undiscovered masterwork," says Bogard in his foreword, "but much here foreshadows what was to come as 'Tomorrow,' written in 1917, explores the ground on which The Iceman Cometh was to be created. In some of the writing, O'Neill is struggling to learn his craft: the scenario of 'The Reckoning,' for example, shows him in the process of forming a lifelong habit of detailing a play in a long narrative account. In the poem to Jane Caldwell and the memorial for Blemie, glimpses of a gentle, private man can be caught. In the critical pieces, O'Neill attempts an uncharacteristic but interesting articulation of his theatrical principles. In all the fugitive works gathered here, the O'Neill voice sounds clear.... It remains worth hearing." "An important work about an unknown O'Neill that will reveal this fascinating personality to the general public." -Paul Shyre Travis Bogard, emeritus professor of dramatic art at the University of California, Berkeley, has edited many works and papers of O'Neill, including, with Jackson R. Bryer, "The Theatre We Worked For": The Letters of Eugene O'Neill to Kenneth Macgowan.

Brecht was never inclined to see any of his plays as completely finished, and this volume collects some of the most important theatrical projects and fragments that were always to remain 'works in progress'. Offering an invaluable insight into the writer's working methods and practices, the collection features the famous Fatzer as well as The Bread Store and Judith of Shimoda, along with other texts that have never before been available in English. Alongside the familiar, 'completed' plays, Brecht worked on many ideas and plans which he never managed to work up even once for print or stage. In pieces like Fleischhacker, Garbe/Busching and Jacob Trotalong we see how such projects were abandoned or interrupted or became proving grounds for ideas and techniques. The works collated here span over thirty years and allow the reader to follow Brecht's creative process as he constantly revised his work to engage with new contexts. This treasure-trove of new discoveries is also annotated with dramaturgical notes to present readable and useable texts for the theatre. The volume is edited by Tom Kuhn and Charlotte Ryland, with the translation and dramaturgical edition of each play provided by a team of experienced writers, scholars and translators.

A study of the 30-year collaboration between playwright Samuel Beckett and director Alan Schneider, Bianchini reconstructs their shared American productions between 1956 and 1984. By examining how Beckett was introduced to American audiences, this book leads into a wider historical discussion of American theatre in the mid-to-late 20th century.

This checklist is witness to the vast and varied production of 20th-century French women playwrights. Like Beach's preceding volume, "French Women Playwrights Before the Twentieth Century: A Checklist" (Greenwood, 1994), this reference book presents an extensive list of dramatic works. Beach provides biographical information about the authors when known, as well as name variations (pseudonyms, maiden name, other marriages, etc.)

The plays are listed chronologically under each author's name, followed by a variety of information about each work: genre, the place and date of publication and performances, and the location of over 2000 texts in published or manuscript form in French holding libraries. The checklist also includes a title index and a bibliography. This book provides a useful research tool not only for scholars interested in drama and/or women's literature, but also for theatre professionals.

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

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.

The Oxford Handbook to Tudor Drama is the authoritative secondary text on Tudor drama. It both integrates recent important research across different disciplines and periods and sets a new agenda for the future study of Tudor drama, questioning a number of the central assumptions of previous studies. Balancing the interests and concerns of scholars in theatre history, drama, and literary studies, its scope reflects the broad reach of Tudor drama as a subject, inviting readers to see the Tudor century as a whole, rather than made up of artificial and misleading divisions between 'medieval' and 'renaissance', religious and secular, pre- and post-Shakespeare. The contributors, both the established leaders in their fields and the brightest young scholars, attend to the contexts, intellectual, theatrical and historical within which drama was written, produced and staged in this period, and ask us to consider afresh this most vital and complex of periods in theatre history. The book is divided into four sections: Religious Drama; Interludes and Comedies, Entertainments, Masques, and Royal Entries; and Histories and political dramas.

The year 1988 was notable for being the centennial of playwright Eugene O'Neill's birth and a time of unprecedented democratization in the People's Republic of China and rapprochement with the West. In this optimal climate, a remarkable festival and conference devoted to O'Neill was held in Nanjing, China, orchestrated mainly by Haiping Liu, who secured the funds and cooperation necessary to lure noted O'Neill scholars and theatre artists from around the world. Liu selected and edited papers for publication after the conference, but he realized that this would be a difficult task conducted from China. At his invitation Lowell Swortzell, a conference participant, became co-editor, and in the dark days following the political upheaval in China in 1989, Swortzell assumed much of the burden of editing, organizing, clearing rights, and generally readying the final volume. The essays included capture the intellectual and artistic stimulation of the conference. Organized in divisions similar to the order in which the papers were delivered, they explore the major areas of O'Neill scholarship by some of the most renowned scholars from the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, Japan, and China. They emphasize O'Neill's international reputation and productions, particularly in Asia. Included is an open forum discussion of the festival productions, as well as photographs. The circumstances of the festival and conference are a story unto themselves, and in their individual introductions, the co-editors relate some of the background and convey some of the flavor of the events--providing insights into the continued appeal of O'Neill in China and the world.

In the wake of the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, the subject of In Memoriam, Alfred Tennyson wrote a range of intricately connected poems, many of which feature pivotal scenes of rapture, or being carried away. This book explores Tennyson's representation of rapture as a radical mechanism of transformation-theological, social, political, or personal-and as a figure for critical processes in his own poetics. The poet's fascination with transformation is figured formally in the genre he is credited with inventing, the dramatic monologue. Tennyson's Rapture investigates the poet's previously unrecognized intimacy with the theological movements in early Victorian Britain that are the acknowledged roots of contemporary Pentacostalism, with its belief in the oncoming Rapture, and its formative relation to his poetic innovation. Tennyson's work recurs persistently as well to classical instances of rapture, of mortals being borne away by immortals. Pearsall develops original readings of Tennyson's major classical poems through concentrated attention to his profound intellectual investments in advances in philological scholarship and archeological exploration, including pressing Victorian debates over whether Homer's raptured Troy was a verifiable site, or the province of the poet's imagination. Tennyson's attraction to processes of personal and social change is bound to his significant but generally overlooked Whig ideological commitments, which are illuminated by Hallam's political and philosophical writings, and a half-century of interaction with William Gladstone. Pearsall shows the comprehensive engagement of seemingly apolitical monologues with the rise of democracy over the course of Tennyson's long career. Offering a new approach to reading all Victorian dramatic monologues, this book argues against a critical tradition that sees speakers as unintentionally self-revealing and ignorant of the implications of their speech. Tennyson's Rapture probes the complex aims of these discursive performances, and shows how the ambitions of speakers for vital transformations in themselves and their circumstances are not only articulated in, but attained through, the medium of their monologues.

Until recently, French women playwrights had received almost no critical attention and their works were for the most part completely unknown, but this volume is evidence of the important contribution they have made to world literature. It presents an extensive list of the dramatic works of more than 400 French women playwrights from the 16th through 19th centuries and includes brief biographical information, as well as publication, performance, and availability information for nearly 3,000 plays.

The volume includes authors who are relatively unknown, as well as more canonical names such as Marguerite de Navarre and George Sand. The book is divided into four chapters, each devoted to a particular century with authors listed alphabetically. Each entry includes basic biographical information about the author, such as pseudonyms, place and date of birth and death, professions or activities for which the author is known, and other genres in which the author wrote. Plays are listed chronologically under the author's name.

I'm really looking forward to robbing this bank! Mischief's smash-and-grab hit The Comedy About A Bank Robbery is a fast, fabulous comedy caper and the funniest show in the West End! Summer 1958. Minneapolis City Bank has been entrusted with a priceless diamond. An escaped convict is dead set on pocketing the gem with the help of his screwball sidekick, trickster girlfriend... and the maintenance man. With mistaken identities, love triangles and hidden agendas, even the most reputable can't be trusted. In a town where everyone's a crook, who will end up bagging the jewel? Written by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, the creators of the Olivier Award-winning Best New Comedy The Play That Goes Wrong and Peter Pan Goes Wrong, The Comedy About A Bank Robbery opened at the Criterion Theatre in London's West End in April 2016. 'The best new comedy to open straight into the West End in decades' Time Out 'Thrilling and daringly inventive' The Guardian

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.

No one does romantic comedy like William Shakespeare, and Much Ado About Nothing is the Bard at the top of his game. The Italian countryside is the perfect setting for love, which soon appears in abundance. We have Hero and Claudio, star-struck sweethearts who are kept apart by wicked machinations. Beatrice and Benedick are the original couple who can't stand each other yet are made for each other. Add to that a bevy of villains, fools, and assorted family members, and you have a recipe for fun of the highest order.

Drawing on a range of works from the English Renaissance, Death and Drama in Renaissance England offers a novel way to understand, in their original contexts, key aspects of Renaissance mental life and letters. Focusing on the classical Memory Arts, William Engel explores issues of death and decline in exemplary dramas, dictionaries, and histories of the period, and demonstrates the ways in which emblems and memory images were used to communicate special meanings.

Honorable Mention from the 2022 International Latino Book Awards for Best Nonfiction - Multi-Author A curated collection of new Latinx and Latin American plays, monologues, interviews, and critical essays that asks the question: what is the common ground between Latinx and Latin American artists? Featuring a mix of plays and scholarly essays, this work originally emerged from the Latino Theater Company's Encuentro de las Americas festival, produced in partnership with the Latinx Theatre Commons (LTC) at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 2017. The collection chronicles not only the theatrical productions of the festival, but also features a transnational exploration of U.S. Latinx and Latin American theatre-making. Alongside plays by Evelina Fernandez, Alex Alpharaoh, J.Ed Araiza and Carlos Celdran this anthology also includes a mix of monologues, snapshots, profiles and interviews that together provide a dynamic account of these intersections within U.S. Latinx and Latin American Theater. A unique collection it serves not only as a testament to the diversity of Latinx artists, but also to the strength of the Latinx Theater movement and its ever-growing networks across the Hemispheric Americas. Full playtexts include: Dementia by Evelina Fernandez WET: A DACAmented Journey by Alex Alpharoah Miss Julia adapted by J.Ed Araiza 10 Million by Carlos Celdran

One of the most important American playwrights of the 20th century, Maxwell Anderson won a Pulitzer Prize for "Both Your Houses" (1933), and New York Drama Critics Circle awards for "Winterset" (1935) and "High Tor" (1936). Though he believed that poetry was the glory of drama, he also devoted himself to realism. His crowning achievement was "Winterset," in which he popularized the use of blank verse in contemporary drama. During a career that spanned more than a quarter century, he wrote 33 plays, many of which were produced in European capitals and were translated into more than a dozen languages.

As a comprehensive guide to Anderson's career, this reference book is an indispensable volume for anyone interested in American drama. An introductory essay discusses Anderson's life and work. The bulk of the text provides synopses and critical overviews of his plays, a feature useful to readers unacquainted with his works. Also included is cast information for major productions. Annotated bibliographies cover primary sources, as well as books, chapters, and articles about Anderson. A separate bibliography cites and annotates reviews of performances.