As You Like It is a light-hearted, gender-bending comedy by William Shakespeare. Rosalind has fallen for Orlando, but wants to test his feelings, so she disguises herself as a boy and befriends him. Will Orlando convince Rosalind he is for real, or will the guy talk turn her off? Shakespeare gleefully throws a number of courting couples into the mix, adds a dose of political scheming, and turns up the fun in what has become one of his most beloved and frequently-performed plays.

Brill's Companion to the Reception of Aeschylus explores the various ways Aeschylus' tragedies have been discussed, parodied, translated, revisioned, adapted, and integrated into other works over the course of the last 2500 years. Immensely popular while alive, Aeschylus' reception begins in his own lifetime. And, while he has not been the most reproduced of the three Attic tragedians on the stage since then, his receptions have transcended genre and crossed to nearly every continent. While still engaging with Aeschylus' theatrical reception, the volume also explores Aeschylus off the stage--in radio, the classroom, television, political theory, philosophy, science fiction and beyond.

Bertolt Brecht has been perceived as an ardent proponent of social change, an avid advocate of a just world that he defined in terms of socialism, and an adamant foe of capitalism for whose demise he hoped. He is justly regarded as one of the great innovators of theater theory and practice in the 20th century, and his influence has extended to Latin America and Asia. This reference book surveys Brecht's enormous contribution to world drama. Chapters by expert contributors assess his dramatic innovations, his poetry and prose, and topics of special interest to Brecht studies. With the centennial of his birth approaching in 1998, Bertolt Brecht's controversial reception in general and in the United States in particular, is coming into clearer focus. One of the great dramatists of the 20th century, Brecht has been viewed as an ardent proponent of social change, an avid advocate of a just world that he defined in terms of socialism, and an adamant foe of capitalism for whose demise he hoped. With the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the political and economic milieu of Europe has changed drastically, and socialist writers are now being studied from a fresh perspective. This volume surveys and assesses Brecht's enormous contribution to the arts. Chapters by expert contributors explore his innovative dramatic theory and theatrical practice. Though best known for his contribution to the stage, Brecht also wrote poetry and prose fiction, and his poems and prose are examined in this work. Brecht's influence is also considered, and chapters examine topics of special interest, such as Brecht and film, the role of music in his works, feminist and Marxist approaches to his writings, the problem of translating Brecht into English, and the reception and appropriation of his plays and dramatic theory in various countries. While the chapters are historical in focus, the contributors also demonstrate the continuing relevance of Brecht in general and the Brechtian theater in particular in the 1990s.

Widely acclaimed as one of America's most distinguished female playwrights, Lillian Hellman made an entrance into a largely male-dominated field in 1934 with" The Children's Hour," a drama that rocked the literary establishment with its frank treatment of lesbianism while calling attention to her writing talents. Written between 1934 and 1963, Hellman's dramatic canon includes eight original plays and four adaptations. Two of these, "Watch on the Rhine" (1941) and "Toys in the Attic" (1960), received Drama Critics' Circle Awards. In addition to her dramatic activities, she wrote three memoirs and a novella, contributed articles to national magazines, edited ChekoV's letters and Dashiell Hammett's mysteries, and penned several screenplays. She is probably best known for "The Little Foxes" (1939), her drama about a family of predatory entrepreneurs who seek to build an industrial fortune on the ruins of the old South.

Both a quick reference guide and an exhaustive resource, this volume provides broad and thorough coverage of Hellman's dramatic career. It begins with a critical overview of her life, along with a chronology of her accomplishments. The bulk of the book, which treats her eight original plays and four adaptations, all written for the Broadway stage, provides detailed plot summaries, stage histories, and critical overviews. The next section offers an annotated bibliography of primary sources. This is followed by an annotated secondary bibliography, which is divided into sections on reviews, books, and articles. Entries in the bibliographies are first arranged chronologically and then alphabetically, so that the reader can gain a fuller sense of the development of Hellman's career and the response to her works over time. Detailed indexes conclude the volume and offer full alphabetical access to its contents.

A comprehensive reassessment of Middleton's cultural importance, this wide-ranging study examines the writer's dramatic and non-dramatic texts to show how he laid bare the complicit interests at work behind assumptions about sex, morality, society, and politics in late feudal culture. Middleton's importance has long been acknowledged in the modern theatre, but academic criticism still seems distracted by questions regarding his morals and 'Puritanism'. Swapan Chakravorty argues against the reductivism of such enquiries, and demonstrates the complexity behind the texts' disengagement from received ideological premisses and generic formulae. Combining close reading with lively historical analysis, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton reveals Middleton to have been a pioneer of politically self-conscious theatre. Full of insight, this study brings alive the plays' meanings by engaging with the social, political, and cultural concerns of Middleton's day.

This the first sustained study of the interest of John Ruskin in the theatre of his time. It examines Ruskin's active engagement with and influence on the Victorian popular theatre. Ruskin was an enthusiastic and catholic theatre-goer, enjoying pantomime as much as Shakespeare. Through the lens of Ruskin's discussions of pantomime, melodrama, Shakespearean tragedy, and painting and the stage, Newey and Richards offer a new view of the late Victorian stage focusing on London's West End in its heyday.

Ibsen and the Irish Revival examines Henrik Ibsen's influence on the Irish Revival and the reception of his plays in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Dublin. It highlights the international dimension of the Irish Literary Revival and offers new perspectives on W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Lennox Robinson, James Joyce, George Moore and Sean O'Casey.

Staging the Impossible explores the most recent critical thinking on the relationship between the literary mode of the fantastic and the literary genre of drama with respect to modern theatre. While a few monographs treat a particular dimension of the fantastic in drama, the Gothic or the fairy tale for instance, no other volume provides a critically sophisticated introduction to the diversity of fantastic drama written and performed in this century. The essays here lay to rest the illusion that realism is the only genuine form of theatrical expression and the notion that cinema special effects have rendered science fiction and the stage incompatible. Competing with the realism of the first half of the twentieth century and the "new realism" of the second half have been a range of successful theatrical repertoire, including the absurd, the horrific, the supernatural, the mythic, the dream-vision quest, the postmodern, the hyper-realistic, and the science fictional. Wide ranging in time and space, this volume comprises fourteen essays on the fantastic on the modern stage, assessing dramatic works from the United States, Ireland, England, Western Europe, and the Caribbean. Canonical figures, such as Strindberg, Yeats, Beckett, Ionesco, Cocteau, and Stoppard are studied, along with neglected figures, such as Wassily Kandinsky, better known as an expressionist painter, and Halper Leivick, author of the Yiddish play The Golem, and innovative new performance troupes and individual artists, such as Squat Theatre and Spalding Gray. Concluding essays are devoted to contemporary experimental theatre and postmodern drama. A study of science fiction on stage includes an annotated listing of fortyEnglish-language plays. Concerned with the interstice of theatre and the fantastic, this work will be valuable to students and scholars of both, of genre studies, and of contemporary literature in general.

Reflections on the late Arthur Miller from over seventy writers, actors, directors and friends, with 'Arthur Miller Remembers' an interview with the writer from 1995. Following his death in February 2005, newspapers were filled with tributes to the man regarded by many as the greatest playwright of the twentieth century. Published as a celebration and commemoration of his life, Part I of Remembering Arthur Miller is a collection of over seventy specially commissioned pieces from writers, actors, directors and friends, providing personal, critical and professional commentary on the man who gave the theatre such timeless classics as All my Sons, A View from the Bridge, The Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible. Contributors read like a Who's Who of theatre, film and literature: Edward Albee, Alan Ayckbourn, Brian Cox, Richard Eyre, Joseph Fiennes, Nadine Gordimer, Dustin Hoffman, Warren Mitchell, Harold Pinter, Vanessa Redgrave and Tom Stoppard, to name but a few. Part II, 'Arthur Miller Remembers', is an in-depth and wide-ranging interview conducted with Miller in 1995. commentary and analysis both of Miller's life and the life of twentieth century America, including Miller's upbringing in Harlem, the Depression, marriage to Marilyn Monroe, post-war America, being sentenced to prison by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956, and his presidency of the writer's organisation, PEN International, as well as commentary and analysis of his many plays and his reflections on the theatre in America. October 2005 sees the 90th anniversary of Miller's birth. The much acclaimed new Broadway production of Death of a Salesman opened to rave reviews at the Lyric Theatre, London, in May 2005, starring Brian Dennehy. Miller is a perennial of the theatre. His plays are constantly revived all over the world; and studied on school and university courses. Arthur Miller was born in New York in 1915. After graduating from the University of Michigan, he started a career as a playwright, which resulted in more than 25 important plays. He has also written fiction, screenplays, and non-fiction. He died on February 10 2005.

The only book to treat in detail all the plays of contemporary English playwright David Storey, this study focuses on the major themes found in his work: the worlds of madness, work, and the family. Storey's developing technique as a dramatist is closely examined and attention is given to his experimental concerns. In addition, Liebman identifies relationships between Storey's fiction and his drama, highlighting how similar themes and characters appear in both his novels and his plays. The study also includes discussion of contemporary thinking on Storey by scholars, critics, and theatre professionals.

This timely book challenges conventional critical wisdom about the work of Ben Jonson. Looking in particular at his Jacobean and Caroline plays, it explores his engagement with concepts of republicanism. Julie Sanders investigates notions of community in Jonson's stage worlds - his 'theatrical republics' - and reveals a Jonson to contrast with the traditional image of the writer as conservative, absolutist, misogynist, and essentially 'anti-theatrical'. The Jonson presented here is a positive celebrant of the social and political possibilities of theatre.

The Victorians, having once been seen as 'them', the age responsible for the mistakes of the past, were transformed by the new theatrical forms of the 1960s into 'us', a metaphor for what the nation thinks (and fears) about itself. And, since the 1980s and the rise of new biographical forms in the theatre, the emphasis has shifted further, from 'we' to 'me': plays about individuals, great and small, and their struggles for personal validation. This study argues powerfully that the stage portrayal of the Victorians in recent times is a key reference point in understanding notions of Britishness, heritage and nostalgia, and the profound politicisation of national identity over the last four decades. Using many examples drawn from theatre archives, and throwing new light on works by canonical playwrights like Bond, Edgar, and Churchill, it charts the decline in class-based narratives of the British people and the move towards plays reflecting a more atomised, individuated society, preoccupied with identity and the past but no longer able to provide a convincing account of itself as a nation.

Provides a representative selection of O'Neill's voluminous correspondence written over a fifty-year period to intimate friends and family and to literary and theatrical personalities.

"Antigone" is Sophocles' masterpiece, a seminal influence on a wide range of theatrical, literary, and intellectual traditions all over the world. This volume sets the play in the contexts of its ancient mythical background, its original circumstances of performance, its relation to the culture and thought of contemporary Athens, and the rich and complicated history of its reception. But its main aim is to encourage readers to engage with the text at first hand and to appreciate the inexhaustible richness that makes this play in particular so hard to pin down, so enduringly thought-provoking, and hence so rewarding to study. Though Creon's actions prove disastrous and Antigone's are vindicated, the "Antigone" (it is argued) is no simple study in the excesses of tyranny or the virtues of heroic resistance, but a more complex and nuanced exploration of conflicting views of right and wrong and of the conditions that constrain human beings' efforts to control their own destinies and secure their own happiness.The book's chapters consider the extent of the original audience's acquaintance with earlier versions of the legends of Antigone's family, the structure of the plot as it unfolds in theatrical performance, the presentation of the characters and the motivations that drive them, the major political, social, and ethical themes that the play raises, and the resonance of those themes in the ways that the play has been interpreted, adapted, performed, and appropriated in later periods.

This ambitious work features forty of Etherege's poems and three plays, which are still popular after 300 years. The concordance provides an easy-to-use identification system that helps determine lexical shading, isolate word clusters that suggest patterns of meaning, and examine changes in language over several decades. Speech prefixes in the body of the concordance allow readers to see who is the speaker of a specific line of drama. An appendix of word frequency and cross-references to compound words are also included.

The Humorous Magistrate is a seventeenth-century satiric comedy extant in two highly distinctive manuscripts. This, the earliest and clearly working draft of the play is bound with three other plays (including The Emperor's Favourite, published by the Malone Society in 2010) in a volume in the library of the Newdigate family of Arbury Hall, Nuneaton, Warwickshire. The second version, showing yet another stage of revision not found in the Arbury manuscript and orientated towards performance, was purchased by the University of Calgary from the English antiquarian Edgar Osborne in 1972. The relationship between the manuscripts was discovered in 2005. The anonymous play has been attributed to John Newdigate III (1600-1642). Like The Emperor's Favourite, it takes aim at the court; its particular object of satire is governmental strategies under the Personal Rule of Charles I. The play appears in print for the first time in these separate editions. The volumes are illustrated with several plates, some provided for comparative purposes. -- .

Filling a critical void, this book examines French women dramatists of the nineteenth-century who staged works prior to the lifting of censorship laws in 1864. Though none staged overtly feminist drama, Sophie de Bawr, Sophie Gay, Virginie Ancelot, and Delphine Girardin questioned patriarchal dominance and reconstructed ideals of womanhood.

The highly performative categories of 'Irish culture' and 'Irishness' are in need of critical address, prompted by recent changes in Irish society, the arts industry and modes of critical inquiry. This book broaches this task by considering Irish expressive culture through some of the paradigms and vocabularies offered by performance studies.

This book examines the dramatic work of Dickens, Browning, Collins, and Tennyson, their interaction with the theatrical world, and their attempts to develop their reputations as playwrights. These major Victorian writers each authored several professional plays, but why has their achievement been overlooked?

The Austrian composer Hanns Eisler was Bertolt Brecht's closest friend and most politically committed collaborator. In these conversations with Hans Bunge which took place over a period of four years, from 1958 until his death in 1962, Eisler offers a compelling and absorbing account of his and Brecht's period of exile in Europe and the USA between 1933 and 1947, and of the quality of artistic, social and intellectual life in post-war East Germany. Brecht, Music and Culture includes a discussion of a number of Brecht's principal plays, including Life of Galileo and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, considers the place of music in Brecht's work and discusses the time that Brecht was brought before The House of Un-American Activities Committee. It includes lively accounts of Brecht's meetings with key cultural figures, including Arnold Schoenberg, Charlie Chaplin and Thomas Mann, and offers throughout a sustained response to the question of the purpose of art in a time of political turmoil. Throughout the conversations, Eisler provides illuminating and original insights into Brecht's work and ideas and gives a highly entertaining first-hand account of his friend's personality and attitudes. First published in Germany in 1975, and now published in English for the first time, the conversations provide a fascinating account of the lives and work of two of the twentieth century's greatest artists.

Geo-spatial identity and early Modern European drama come together in this study of how cultural or political attachments are actively mediated through space. Matei-Chesnoiu traces the modulated representations of rivers, seas, mountains, and islands in sixteenth-century plays by Shakespeare, Jasper Fisher, Thomas May, and others.

Euripides' Phoenissae bears one of the richest tragic plots: multiple narrative levels are interwoven by means of various anachronies, focalizers offer different and often challenging points of view, while a complex mythical matrix is deftly employed as the backdrop against which the exploration of the mechanics of tragic narrative takes place. After providing a critical perspective on the ongoing scholarly dialogue regarding narratology and drama, this book uses the former as a working tool for the study and interpretation of the latter. The Phoenissae is approached as a coherent narrative unit and issues like the use of myth, narrators, intertext, time and space are discussed in detail. It is within these contexts that the play is seen as a Theban mythical 'thesaurus' both exploring previous mythical ramifications and making new additions. The result is rewarding: Euripides constructs a handbook of the Theban saga that was informative for those mythically untrained, fascinating for those theatrically demanding, but also dexterously open upon each one's reception.

Japan on the Jesuit Stage offers a comprehensive overview of the representations of Japan in early modern European Neo-Latin school theater. The chapters in the volume catalog and analyze representative plays which were produced in the hundreds all over Europe, from the Iberian Peninsula to present-day Croatia and Poland. Taking full account of existing scholarship, but also introducing a large amount of previously unknown primary material, the contributions by European and Japanese researchers significantly expand the horizon of investigation on early modern European theatrical reception of East Asian elements and will be of particular interest to students of global history, Neo-Latin, and theater studies.