First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Kanadehon Chushingura has been one of the most popular bunraku and kabuki plays. This fascinating study explores the full spectrum of ukiyo-e (floating world) representations of the Chushingura story. Essential reading for all students of Japanese theatre, the history of Japanese art and the social history of Japan.

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.

Hannah Cowley (1743-1809) was a very successful dramatist, and something of an eighteenth-century celebrity. New critical interest in the drama of this period has meant a resurgence of interest in Cowley's writing and in the performance of her plays. This is the first substantial monograph study to examine Cowley's life and work.

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.

From the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright of "Fences" and "The Piano Lesson"
"The glow accompanying August Wilson's place in contemporary American theater is fixed." - Toni Morrison
When Harold Loomis arrives at a black Pittsburgh boardinghouse after seven years' impressed labor on Joe Turner's chain gang, he is a free man--in body. But the scars of his enslavement and a sense of inescapable alienation oppress his spirit still, and the seemingly hospitable rooming house seethes with tension and distrust in the presence of this tormented stranger. Loomis is looking for the wife he left behind, believing that she can help him reclaim his old identity. But through his encounters with the other residents he begins to realize that what he really seeks is his rightful place in a new world--and it will take more than the skill of the local "People Finder" to discover it.
This jazz-influenced drama is a moving narrative of African-American experience in the 20th century.

This study of Egyptian theatre and its narrative construction explores the ways representations of Egypt are created of and within theatrical means, from the 19th century to the present day. Essays address the narratives that structure theatrical, textual, and performative representations and the ways the rewriting process has varied in different contexts and at different times. Drawing on concepts from Theatre and Performance Studies, Translation Studies, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Diaspora Studies, scholars and practitioners from Egypt and the West enter into dialogue with one another, expanding understanding of the different fields. The articles focus on the ways theatre texts and performances change (are rewritten) when crossing borders between different worlds. The concept of rewriting is seen to include translation, transformation, and reconstruction, and the different borders may be cultural and national, between languages and dramaturgies, or borders that are present in people's everyday lives. Essays consider how rewritings and performances cross borders from one culture, nation, country, and language to another. They also study the process of rewriting, the resulting representations of foreign plays on stage, and representations of the Egyptian revolution on stage and in Tahrir Square. This assessment of the relationship between theatre practices, exchanges, and rewritings in Egyptian theatre brings vital coverage to an undervisited area and will be of interest to developments in theatre translation and beyond.

The commedia dell'arte, the improvised Italian theatre that dominated the European stage from 1550 to 1750, is arguably the most famous theatre tradition to emerge from Europe in the early modern period. Its celebrated masks have come to symbolize theatre itself and have become part of the European cultural imagination. Over the past twenty years a revolution in commedia dell'arte scholarship has taken place, generated mainly by a number of distinguished Italian scholars. Their work, in which they have radically separated out the myth from the history of the phenomenon remains, however, largely untranslated into English (or any other language). The present volume gathers together these Italian and English-speaking scholars to synthesize for the first time this research for both specialist and non-specialist readers. The book is structured around key topics that span both the early modern period and the twentieth-century reinvention of the commedia dell'arte.

A decade after the Restoration of Charles II, a disturbing group of tragedies, dubbed by modern critics the horror or the blood-and-torture villain tragedies, burst onto the London stage. Ten years later they were gone - absorbed into the partisan frenzy which enveloped the theatre at the height of the Exclusion Crisis. Despite burgeoning interest, until now there has been no full investigation into why these deeply unsettling plays were written when they were and why they so fascinated audiences for the period that they held the stage. The author's contention is that the genre of horror gains its popularity at times of social dislocation. It reflects deep schisms in society, and English society was profoundly unsettled and in a (delayed) state of shock from years of social upheaval and civil conflict. Through recurrent images of monstrosity, madness, venereal disease, incest and atheism, Hermanson argues that the horror dramatists trope deep-seated and unresolved anxieties - engaging profoundly with contemporary discourse by abreacting the conspiratorial climate of suspicion and fear. Some go as far as to question unequivocally the moral and political value of monarchy, vilifying the office of kingship and pushing ideas of atheism further than in any drama produced since Seneca. This study marks the first comprehensive investigation of these macabre tragedies in which playwrights such as Nathaniel Lee, Thomas Shadwell, Elkanah Settle, Thomas Otway and the Earl of Rochester take their audience on an exploration of human iniquity, thrusting them into an examination of man's relationship to God, power, justice and evil.

Focusing on eighteenth-century cultural productions, Wendy Sutherland examines how representations of race in philosophy, anthropology, aesthetics, drama, and court painting influenced the construction of a white bourgeois German self. Sutherland positions her work within the framework of the transatlantic slave trade, showing that slavery, colonialism, and the triangular trade between Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean function as the global stage on which German bourgeois dramas by Friedrich Wilhelm Ziegler, Ernst Lorenz Rathlef, and Theodor Koerner (and a novella by Heinrich von Kleist on which Koerner's play was based) were performed against a backdrop of philosophical and anthropological influences. Plays had an important role in educating the rising bourgeois class in morality, Sutherland argues, with fathers and daughters offered as exemplary moral figures in contrast to the depraved aristocracy. At the same time, black female protagonists in nontraditional dramas represent the boundaries of physical beauty and marriage eligibility while also complicating ideas of moral beauty embodied in the concept of the beautiful soul. Her book offers convincing evidence that the eighteenth-century German stage grappled with the representation of blackness during the Age of Goethe, even though the German states were neither colonial powers nor direct participants in the slave trade.

Contending that criticism of Marlowe's plays has been limited by humanist conceptions of tragedy, this book engages with trauma theory, especially psychoanalytic trauma theory, to offer a fresh critical perspective within which to make sense of the tension in Marlowe's plays between the tragic and the traumatic. The author argues that tragedies are trauma narratives, narratives of wounding; however, in Marlowe's plays, a traumatic aesthetics disrupts the closure that tragedy seeks to enact. Martin's fresh reading of Massacre at Paris, which is often dismissed by critics as a bad tragedy, presents the play as deliberately breaking the conventions of the tragic genre in order to enact a traumatic aesthetics that pulls its audience into one of the early modern period's most notorious collective traumatic events, the massacre of French Huguenots in Paris in 1572. The chapters on Marlowe's six other plays similarly argue that throughout Marlowe's drama tragedy is held in tension with-and disrupted by-the aesthetics of trauma.

The Self-Centred Art is a study of the plays of Ben Jonson and the actors who first performed in them. Jakub Boguszak shows how the idiosyncrasies of Jonson's comic characters were thrown into relief in actors' part-scripts-scrolls containing a single actor's lines and cues-some five hundred of which are reconstructed here from Jonson's seventeen extant plays. Reading Jonson's spectating parts, humorous parts, apprentice parts, and plotting parts, Boguszak argues that the kind of self-absorption which defines so many of Jonson's famous comic creations would have come easily to actors relying on these documents. Jonson's actors would have moreover worked on their cues, studied their speeches, and thought about the information excluded from their parts differently, depending on the type they had to play. Boguszak thus shows that Jonson brilliantly adapted his comedies to the way the actors worked, making the actors' self-centredness serve his art. This book addresses Jonson's dealings with the actors as well as the printers of his plays and supplements the discussion of different types of parts with a colourful range of case studies. In doing so, it presents a new way of understanding not just Ben Jonson, but early modern theatre at large.

"Matura's play not only offers a potted guide to Trinidadian ethnicity, economics and politics, but also a potent metaphor for the post-colonial process. It is also very funny ... the real power of Matura's play lies in its reminder, under all that surface exuberance, that the movement towards independence carried its own element of fancy-dress masquerade." The Guardian 1950s Port of Spain. Samuel, a young tailor's assistant, dreams of Trinidad's independence. On the eve of carnival everyone fills the streets, dressed up to play mas. This annual celebration turns to tragedy and spurs Samuel on to make a decision that will change the political landscape of the future of this vibrant, volatile island. Play Mas premiered at the Royal Court in 1974, winning the Evening Standard Award for Best Play, and transferred to the West End. Described as a wickedly funny, exuberant and poignant play, it is published in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series for the first time, with a brand new introduction by Paulette Randall.

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.

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 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.

What is home? The answer seems obvious. But Telling Our Stories of Home, an international collection of 11 plays by and about women from Lebanon, Haiti, Venezuela, Uganda, Palestine, Brazil, India, UK, and the US, complicates the answer. The "answer" includes stories as far-ranging as: enslaved women trying to create a home, one by any means necessary, and one in the ocean; siblings wrestling with their differing devotion to home after their mother's death; a family wrestling with the government's refusal to allow the burial of their soldier-son in their hometown; a young scholar attempting to feel at home after studying abroad; a young man fleeing home due to feel safety in his sexual orientation only to discover the difficulty of creating home elsewhere, and Siddis (Indians of African descent) continuing to struggle for acceptance despite having lived in India for over 600 years. These are voices seldom represented to a larger audience. The plays and performance pieces range from 20 to 90 minute pieces and include a mix of monologue, duologue and ensemble plays. Short yet powerful, they allow fantastic performance opportunities particularly in an age of social-distancing with flexible casts that together invite the theme of home to be performed and studied on the page. The plays include: The House by Arze Khodr (Lebanon), Happy by Kia Corthron (US), The Blue of the Island by Evelyne Trouillot (Haiti), Nine Lives by Zodwa Nyoni (UK), Leaving, but Can't Let Go by Lupe Gehrenbeck (Venezuela), Questions of Home by Doreen Baingana (Uganda), On the Last Day of Spring by Fidaa Zidan (Palestine) Letting Go and Moving On by Louella Dizon San Juan (US), Antimemories of an Interrupted Trip by Aldri Anunciacao (Brazil), So Goes We by Jacqueline E. Lawton (US), and Those Who Live Here, Those Who Live There by Geeta P. Siddi and Girija P. Siddi (India)

Adapting Western Classics for the Chinese Stage presents a comprehensive study of transnational, transcultural, and translingual adaptations of Western classics from the turn of the twentieth century to present-day China in the age of globalization. Supported by a wide range of in-depth research, this book Examines the complex dynamics between texts, both dramatic and socio-historical; contexts, both domestic and international; and intertexts, Western classics and their Chinese reinterpretations in huaju and/or traditional Chinese xiqu; Contemplates Chinese adaptations of a range of Western dramatic works, including Greek, English, Russian, and French; Presents case studies of key Chinese adaptation endeavors, including the 1907 adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin by the Spring Willow Society and the 1990 adaptation of Hamlet by Lin Zhaohua; Lays out a history of uneasy convergence of East and West, complicated by tensions between divergent sociopolitical forces and cultural proclivities. Drawing on disciplines and critical perspectives, including theatre and adaptation studies, comparative literature, translation studies, reception theory, post-colonialism, and intertextuality, this book is key reading for students and researchers in any of these fields.

New Theatre in Italy 1963-2013 makes the case for the centrality of late-millennium Italian avant-garde theatre in the development of the new forms of performance that have emerged in the 21st Century. Starting in the Sixties, young artists and militants in Italy reacted to the violence in their streets and ruptures in the family unit that are now recognized as having been harbingers of the end of the global post-war system. As traditional rituals of State and Church faltered, a new generation of cultural operators, largely untrained and driven away from political activism, formed collectives to explore new ways of speaking theatrically, new ways to create and experience performance, and new relationships between performer and spectator. Although the vast majority of the works created were transient, like all performance, their aesthetic and social effects continue to surface today across media on a global scale, affecting visual art, cinema, television and the behavioural aesthetics of social networks.

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.

25 February 1964: 22-year-old Cassius Clay, soon to be Muhammad Ali, has just won the world heavyweight boxing title. Instead of hitting the town, he chooses to celebrate in a Miami hotel room with three close friends - activist Malcolm X, singer Sam Cooke and American football star Jim Brown. This fictional account of a real night imagines what might have happened in that tiny hotel room. As the Civil Rights movement stirs outside, and the melody of 'A Change is Gonna Come' hangs in the air, four men will emerge from that one night ready to define a new world. Kemp Powers' award-winning debut play One Night in Miami... deftly combines the personal and the political at a pivotal moment in history; it received the Ted Schmitt Award 2013 for its world premiere, and went on to be adapted into a critically acclaimed film directed by Regina King in 2020. It is published here in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series with a brand new introduction by Matthew Xia.

Originally published in 1900, this book was the first investigation of the devil and the Vice as dramatic figures, and a study of these figures led to a new view of the subject: it is, in brief, that the appearance of the devil in the non-dramatic as well as in the dramatic literature is limited to a definite range. As a dramatic figure the devil falls more and more into the background and the Vice is distinct in origin and function from the devil.

Originally published in 1982, this book contains the Thomas Middleton and Williiam Rowley's full play, The Old Law, alongisde textual and critical notes.

Published in 1987: This thesis presents an edition of the author's play, Monsieur Thomas, with a substantial introduction in several sections and a sizeable apparatus.