This volume offers critical and theoretical perspectives on some of the major figures in European drama in the 20th century. There are 13 essays, covering Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Anouilh, Fernando Arrabal, Jean Genet, Peter Weiss, Vaclav Havel, contemporary German theatre, and Dario Fo and Franca Fame. These essays combine contemporary theory with a discussion of the dramatic work and theories of theatre and drama of the playwrights who created modern drama in Europe. Brian Docherty is the co-editor of "Nineteenth-Century Suspense: From Poe to Conan Doyle", and editor of "American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre", "American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King", "Twentieth Century American Drama", "American Modernist Poetry", "Twentieth Century British Poetry 1900-50", Twentieth Century British Poetry 1950-90" and "The Beat Generation".

"The Gothic and the Rule of Law" is the first full-length theoretical and historical study of the relation between early Gothic fiction and an emerging modern rule of law. The work identifies not only a political and cultural, but also an ontological relation between what critics have conceptualized as 'Gothic' and the nature and function of modern juridical power. It represents a highly significant contribution to Gothic criticism and to law and literature scholarship.

POET. Good day, sir. PAINTER. I am glad y'are well. POET. I have not seen you long; how goes the world? PAINTER. It wears, sir, as it grows. POET. Ay, that's well known. But what particular rarity? What strange, Which manifold record not matches? See, Magic of bounty, all these spirits thy power Hath conjur'd to attend! I know the merchant. PAINTER. I know them both; th' other's a jeweller.

First published in 1990. The book surveys of the development of German theatre from a market sideshow into an important element of cultural life and political expression. It examines Schiller as 'theatre poet' at Mannheim, Goethe's work as director of the court theatre at Weimar, and then traces the rapid commercial decline that made it difficult for Kleist and impossible for Buchner to see their plays staged in their own lifetime. Four representative texts are analysed: Schiller's The Robbers, Goethe's Iphigenia on Tauris, Kleist's The Prince of Homburg, and Buchner's Woyzeck. This title will be of interest to students of theatre and German literature.

This volume offers a current reading of the Italian writer, Pirandello. The author examines the representation of gender relations in Pirandello's writing in the light of recent developments in textual analysis. She reassesses Pirandello's status as an innovative, avant-garde writer, arguing that whilst on the level of dramatic form he is certainly avant-garde, he is not so on the more covert level of gender relations. The author uses contemporary feminist theory to show how textual analysis can expose the covert reinforcement of patriarchal values. The study provides an illustration of a variety of methods which could be applied to texts other than those of Pirandello's.

This collection of multi-authored essays not only refashions and revises critical understandings of the early modern dramatist Ben Jonson and his canon of work, but is also self-reflexive about the process. It includes original essays by both established and emergent Jonson scholars, and employs materialist, feminist and queer theory in the production of its readings of Jonsonian playtexts and masques, familiar and otherwise. It is intended to encourage new approaches by students to this central figure from the Renaissance.

Writing Catholic Women examines the interplay of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality through the lens of Catholicism in a wide range of works by women writers, forging interdisciplinary connections among women's studies, religion, and late twentieth-century literature. Discussing a diverse group of authors, Jeana DelRosso posits that the girlhood narratives of such writers constitute highly charged sites of their differing gestures toward Catholicism and argues that an understanding of the ways in which women write about religion from different cultural and racial contexts offers a crucial contribution to current discussions in gender, ethnic, and cultural studies.

This book offers a new, accurate and actable translation of one of Euripides' most popular plays, together with a commentary which provides insight into the challenges it sets for production and suggestions for how to solve them. The introduction discusses the social and cultural context of the play and its likely impact on the original audience, the way in which it was originally performed, the challenges which the lead roles present today and Medea's implications for the modern audience. The text of the translation is followed by the 'Theatrical Commentary' section on the issues involved in staging each scene and chorus today, embodying insights gained from a professional production. Notes on the translation, a glossary of names, suggestions for further reading and a chronology of Euripides' life and times round out the volume. The book is intended for use by theatre practitioners who wish to stage or workshop Medea and by students both of drama, theatre and performance and of classical studies.

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.

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

MASTER. Boatswain! BOATSWAIN. Here, master; what cheer? MASTER. Good! Speak to th' mariners; fall to't yarely, or we run ourselves aground; bestir, bestir. BOATSWAIN. Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! yare, yare! Take in the topsail. Tend to th' master's whistle. Blow till thou burst thy wind, if room enough.

During the years 1880 to 1945, American theatre grew up, moving from entertainment-driven motives and melodramatic formulas to serious confrontations with issues of its time and to an experimentation with forms that would allow those confrontations to be frank and earnest. Many of the playwrights of this time wrote works of lasting significance, while others have impacted the work of contemporary dramatists. This reference is a guide to American theatre during this formative period.

The volume includes alphabetically arranged entries for 40 American playwrights active between 1880 and 1945. Included are the most frequently canonized figures, as well as previously neglected women and minority playwrights whose work is a vital part of American theatre history. Each entry includes a biographical overview, a summary of the critical reception of major productions and significant revivals, a critical assessment of the playwright's career, and a listing of archival, primary, and secondary bibliographic material.

This is a critical study of Friel's entire oeuvre, relating his work to the problems of subjectivity, representation, history and the body, with a view to offering some placement of Friel in relation to both postmodernism and traditional humanism. Central to the study is Friel's concept of "translation", whereby he offers us the tension of shaping the new through a "translation" or reformulation of the old. The book includes discussion of Friel's play "Wonderful Tennessee".

Are you a theatre-maker looking for devising tools? A writer wanting to improve your dialogue? A director trying to create a story through improvisation? Three Plays by Squint & How They Were Made brings three of the company's plays together with the methods used to create them, in a practical, user-friendly toolkit. Three of Squint's plays - created by Lee Anderson, Adam Foster and Andrew Whyment - are published here for the first time. At the heart of each, a character is struggling to process their personal trauma under the intense glare of the public eye. Long Story Short (2014) dissects journalism in the digital age, Molly (2015) takes a reality television-style journey into the mind of a sociopath, and The Incredible True Story of the Johnstown Flood (2021) embarks on a transatlantic exploration of class, exploitation and appropriation. Developed over ten years through Squint's education programme, the exercises in this book distil the company's collaborative practice into over 25 tools for writing and devising. The Squint Toolkit covers the entire theatre-making process, from carrying out research and improvising story to writing subtext, devising from music and making cuts.

In New Labour's empathetic regime, how did diverse voices scrutinize its etiquettes of articulation and audibility? Using the voice as cultural evidence, Voice and New Writing explores what it means to 'have' a voice in mainstream theatre and for newly included voices to negotiate with the institutions that 'find' and 'represent' their identities.

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.

Many readers today associate the early modern history play with Shakespeare. While not wishing to ignore the influence of Shakespeare, this collection of essays explores other historical drama between 1500 and 1660, covering a wide range of different formats outside the canon of 1590s history cycles. An introduction provides a survey of current criticism, including both early modern and contemporary definitions of the 'history play'. Individual essays in chronological order explore genres that perform 'history' in different ways, such as shows, moralities or closet drama. In this way this collection establishes alternative paradigms of early modern historical drama.

This book constitutes a new direction for feminist studies in English Renaissance drama. While feminist scholars have long celebrated heroic females in comedies, many have overlooked female tragic heroism, reading it instead as evidence of pervasive misogyny on the part of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Displacing prevailing arguments of "victim feminism," the contributors to this volume engage a wide range of feminist theories, and argue that female protagonists in tragedies--Jocasta, Juliet, Cleopatra, Mariam, Webster’s Duchess and White Devil, among others--are heroic in precisely the same ways as their more notorious masculine counterparts.

In studying performances of marriage in modern and contemporary British and American drama, Clum highlights the fact that - paradoxically - at a time when theatre was both popular entertainment and high culture, many of the most commercially and artistically successful plays about marriage were written by homosexual men. Beginning with Oscar Wilde and focusing on some of the most successful British and American playwrights of the past century, including Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan, and Emlyn Williams in England and Clyde Fitch, George Kelly, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Edward Albee in the US, The Drama of Marriagelooks at how the plays they wrote about heterosexual marriage continue to impact contemporary gay playwrights and the depiction of marriage today.

Eugene O'Neill, one of America's most gifted and prolific playwrights, wrote more than 60 plays between 1914 and 1941, a level of creativity paralleled in modern times only by Bernard Shaw. The progress of his art from crude, one-act plays to the monumental tragedies of his later years is a story as dramatic and compelling as that of his tortured personal history. Combining the two, Professor Bogard traces the contours of O'Neill's life in his art. By discussing, in their approximate order of composition, the published and unpublished works, Bogard illuminates not only the plays, but also the literary, aesthetic, and historical influences on the playwright's development. For the revised edition of this insightful, meticulously written work, the author has added new and unpublished material on A Tale of Possessors, Self-dispossessed, a cycle of nine plays written by O'Neill during the 1930s and '40s, only one of which he readied for the stage. Among the plays in this cycle that have been posthumously produced are More Stately Mansions (New York, 1967) and A Touch of the Poet (New York, 1958).

This study examines the historical relationship between tragicomedy in the modernist theatre and the performative culture of Western consumer societies. While discussing a wide range of playwrights, it focusses specifically on the work of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Sam Shepard. Their plays, it is argued, illuminate the forms of pleasure, fear, performance and corruption which dominate our daily lives. Tragicomedy is seen as unique because of the existential playfulness and confusion of its protagonists, and because of its muted vision of apocalypse in the nuclear age.

This volume comprises ten essays challenging the dominant account of Samuel Beckett's engagement with history. As the first full-length volume to address the historical debate in Beckett studies, "Samuel Beckett: " "History, Memory, Archive" provides both ground-breaking analysis of the major works as well as a sustained interrogation of the critical assumptions that underpin Beckett studies more generally. Drawing on a range of archival materials, and situating Beckett in historical context, these essays pose a strong challenge to the prevailing critical consensus that he was a deracinated modernist who cannot be read historically.

Peter Shaffer: Theatre and Drama is an accessible, informed survey of Peter Shaffer's work to date. Covering much ground, the book brings a fresh and original approach to this playwright's drama, incorporating discussion of every play in his canon. Suitable for readers ranging from 'A' level to undergraduate and postgraduate levels, this book introduces a variety of debates and interpretations to students, incorporating material that has not been published before. An engaging and authoritative contribution to the field.

The decade since Beckett's death has seen new interests in the erotic sweeping through our culture, acting in uneasy counterpoint to its established humanistic infrastructure and opening new questions about the significance of sexuality. Surprisingly or not, Beckett has startling further light to throw on the erotic phenomenon variously but insistently recognised in our time. This book is the first to propose a 'mythopoetics of sex' with which to explore Beckett's work as a whole.

SLY. I'll pheeze you, in faith. HOSTESS. A pair of stocks, you rogue SLY. Y'are a baggage; the Slys are no rogues. Look in the chronicles: we came in with Richard Conqueror. Therefore, paucas pallabris; let the world slide. Sessa HOSTESS. You will not pay for the glasses you have burst? SLY. No, not a denier. Go by, Saint Jeronimy, go to thy cold bed and warm thee.