This study focuses on the ways in which Harold Pinter conceives of and dramatizes time according to the medium in which he is working. It goes beyond Pinter's fascination with false and true memory to trace the various textual and non-textual strategies he employs to distort sequence and duration in his plays. This book shows how Pinter undermines the temporal assumptions of naturalism and realism to form a relativistic world in which time is a central feature.

This unique volume contains studies not only of Corneille's and Racine's tragedies but also of the best work of the lesser French-classical tragic dramatists, too generally neglected, to whom more than half of the book is devoted. Its author brings to his tasks of presentation, criticism, and appraisal a wider acquaintance, perhaps, with the drama of many lands and times than anyone who has previously written at any considerable length on the subject of French-classical tragedy. To the desirable perspective thus obtained, he joins an appreciation of good plays of every type, without prejudice either for or against any type of drama. Numerous, often lengthy, quoted passages (with an English verse translation accompanying the French in every case) exemplify the achievement and exhibit the qualities of the dramas and dramatists discussed. That portion of the author's critical work in this field which has already appeared, as introductions in his volumes of translated plays, has been much appreciated, as witness the following brief excerpts from reviews of those books: "The plays...are discussed with insight and enthusiasm."--(London) Notes and Queries. "Refreshingly original and yet free from specious pleading or naive enthusiasm."--Chattanooga Times. "Thoughtful, discerning appraisals."--Seventeenth Century News. "An excellent critical introduction."--The Library Journal. "A judicious introduction."--Arthur Knodel in The Personalist. "The very best interpretative treatment of Corneille that has appeared."--C. Maxwell Lancaster.

Die potlooddief en die engel is 'n hedendaagse blyspel wat losweg gebaseer is op die Middeleeuse mirakel- en moraliteitspele. Alles is moontlik, met die gevolg dat hierdie heerlike en hoogs opvoerbare komedie, wat met groot sukses voorgeskryf is, net sulke prettige leesstof is.

What role did the performance of poetry, music, song, and dance play in the political life of the ancient city? How has philosophy positioned itself and articulated its own ambitions in relation to the poet tradition? The Polis and the Stage poses such questions through a reading of Plato last, longest, and unfinished work, the Laws. Plato's engagement with the Greek poetic tradition has long been recognized as foundational in the history of literary criticism, but the broader critical and philosophical significance of the Laws has been largely ignored. Although Plato is often thought hostile to mimetic art, famously banishing poets from the ideal city of the Republic, this book shows that in his final dialogue Plato made a striking about-face, proposing to rehabilitate Athenian performance culture and envisioning a city, in which poetry, music, song, and dance are instrumental in the cultivation of philosophical virtues. The psychological underpinnings of aesthetic experience and the power of mimetic art to predispose a society to specific kinds of constitutions are central themes throughout this study. Plato's views of the performative properties of language and genre receives systematic treatment in this study for the first time. Performance as a mechanism of sexual construction-a network of social practices uniquely suited to communicate and enforce normative conceptions of gender and erotic pleasure-is another focus, with special attention given to positions occupied by women in the culture envisaged in the Laws. As a whole, Marcus Folch's book provides an integrated interpretation of Plato's final dialogue with the Greek poetic tradition, an exploration of the dialectic between philosophy and mimetic art, which will be of interest to anyone concerned with understanding ancient Greek performance and the emergence of philosophical discourse in fourth-century Athens.

In Stagecraft in Euripides, first published in 1985, Professor Michael Halleran examines certain aspects of the dramaturgy of the most extensively preserved Attic tragedian. Although the ancient dramatic texts do not contain performance directions, they do imply stage actions. This work explores the ways Euripides utilises the latter to make a point: to underline some issue, to suggest a contrast, or to shift the focus of the drama. Specifically, Halleran investigates the rearrangement of characters on stage at the major structural junctures of the play: entrances and their announcements; preparation for and surprise in entrances; and dramatic connections between exits and entrances. Three plays from the same era - Herakles, Trojan Women and Ion - are discussed in greater detail to reveal the potential of this approach for illuminating Euripides' 'grammar of dramatic technique'. Stagecraft in Euripides will thus appeal to students of theatre and drama as well as classicists.

Edwardian Shaw covers Shaw's campaigns and crusades in the crucial first ten years of the century, when his career hung in the balance. By going to contemporary documents and highlighting aspects of Shaw's career at this time, particularly his emergence as a moral revolutionary and playwright of original and disquieting power, Leon Hugo depicts a man who confronted a highly conservative world and managed by the force of his genius to stamp his personality on the age.

This is an invaluable introduction to ancient Greek tragedy which discusses every surviving play in detail and provides all the background information necessary for understanding the context and content of the plays. Edith Hall argues that the essential feature of the genre is that it always depicts terrible human suffering and death, but in a way that invites philosophical enquiry into their causes and effects, This enquiry was played out in the bright sunlight of open-air theatre, which became a key marker of the boundary between living and dead. The first half of the book is divided into four chapters which address the social and physical contexts in which the plays were performed, the contribution of the poets, actors, funders, and audiences, the poetic composition of the texts, their performance conventions, main themes, and focus on religion, politics, and the family. The second half consists of individual essays on each of the surviving thirty-three plays by the Greek tragedians, and an account of the recent performance of Greek tragic theatre and tragic fragments. An up-to-date 'Suggestions for further reading' is included.

Drawing upon archival material as well as the drama, popular verse and pamphlets, this book reads representations of masters and servants in relation to key Renaissance preoccupations. Apprentices, journeymen, male domestic servants, maidservants and stewards, Burnett argues, were deployed in literary texts to address questions about the exercise of power, social change and the threat of economic upheaval. In this way, writers were instrumental in creating servant 'cultures', and spaces within which forms of political resistance could be realized.

This collection of essays on diverse works of English Renaissance literature is the result of more than 30 years of critical analysis of texts, careful attention to staged and filmed plays, and insightful teaching.

Staging Black Feminisms explores the development and principles of black British women's plays and performance since the late Twentieth century. Using contemporary performance theory to explore key themes (such as migration, motherhood, sexuality, and mixed race identity), it offers close textual readings and production analysis of a range of plays, performance poetry and live art works by practitioners, including Patience Agbabi, Jackie Kay, Valerie Mason John, Winsome Pinnock, Jacqueline Rudet, Debbie Tucker Green, Dorothea Smartt, Su Andi, and Susan Lewis.

This book is a major new critical study of the greatest comic writer of ancient Greece. It relates Aristophanes' work to modern literature and modern theory. It offers a new theory of comedy. It will be essential reading for students and specialists of ancient Greek drama and poetry, and also many students and specialists of modern literature.

Eighteenth-century drama is often dismissed as homogenous, aesthetically uninteresting, or politically complacent. This book reveals the incredibly intriguing and intricate nature of the periods history plays and their often messy dramatisaton of the complexities of patriotic rhetoric and national identification.

A materialist account of Wilde's writing career, based on publishing contracts and other documentation as well as detailed evidence of how he composed, this book argues that Wilde was not driven by an oppositional politics, nor was he an aesthetic 'purist'. Rather, he was thoroughly immersed in the contemporary 'commodification of culture' in which books became product. His writing practices, including his 'plagiarism', reflected the pragmatism of a professional.

This is a selectively comprehensive bibliography of the vast literature about Samuel Beckett's dramatic works, arranged for the efficient and convenient use of scholars on all levels. The scholarship devoted to the dramatic writings of Samuel Beckett is so vast that there is a real need for a full and easy-to-use secondary bibliography enabling students and scholars at all levels to locate and select what they need. This requires comprehensive coverage of those publications which can be deemed both substantial and accessible treatments of topics relevant to his career as a dramatist. In Beckett's case, full coverage extends from the influences and origins of his great variety of plays to their presentations on stage, television, film, and radio, in many countries and venues. This essential bibliography offers comprehensive coverage of the thousands of substantial studies in all Roman-alphabet languages, a clear and helpful arrangement by topics and individual plays, and a lucid, uncluttered bibliographical format to make it as user-friendly as possible.

The first study of the depictions of the Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian stage, this book analyzes plays set in and dramatising the histories of Greece, Rome, Egypt, Babylon and the Holy Land. In doing so, it seeks to locate theatre within the wider culture, tracing its links and interaction with other cultural forms.

Focusing on how citizens of early modern England tried to locate themselves and their nation through geography and travel writing, Monica Matei-Chesnoiu explores theatrical representations of Western European space and ethnography. Geographic discourses share many features with drama in that they appeal to the readers' and audience's curiosity and imagination. Playwrights use information derived from geography treatises as vehicles to allegorize contemporary English issues in a dialogical mode. While geography and travel texts provide an objective synthesis in describing Western European nations, dramatic interaction destabilizes any preconceived notions and submits contrastive views on imagined global European communities. This book explores representations of France, Spain, Germany, the Low Countries, and Denmark in a wide range of geography texts and offers fresh readings of Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, Middleton, Dekker, Massinger, Marston, and others.

RODERIGO. Tush, never tell me! I take it much unkindly That thou, Iago, who hast had my purse As if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this. IAGO. 'Sblood, but you will not hear me. If ever I did dream of such a matter, Abhor me. RODERIGO. Thou told'st me thou didst hold him in thy hate. IAGO. Despise me, if I do not. Three great ones of the city, In personal suit to make me his lieutenant, Off-capp'd to him; and, by the faith of man, I know my price, I am worth no worse a place. But he, as loving his own pride and purposes, Evades them, with a bumbast circumstance Horribly stuff'd with epithets of war, And, in conclusion,

How has the media, beginning with the Persian Gulf War, altered political analysis and how has this alteration in turn affected socially-critical art? Jeanne Colleran examines more than forty plays, most of which were written in direct response to the emergent New World Order and the subsequent 1991 war in Iraq as well as to the 9/11 attacks and the retaliatory actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. These works are drawn primarily from the British and American stage - the principal partners in these conflicts. The writers include prominent figures (Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, David Hare, Trevor Griffiths, Naomi Wallace, and Neil LaBute), work by theatre groups and artistic directors (San Francisco Mime Troupe, Nicolas Kent and the Tricycle Theatre, and Alan Buchman and Culture Project), and plays by emerging playwrights and by writers who work primarily as journalists or in other media (Anne Nelson, Lawrence Wright, George Packer, Robin Soans, and others).

The Aesthetic Exception theorises anew the relation between art and politics. It challenges critical trends that discount the role of aesthetic autonomy, to impulsively reassert art as an effective form of social engagement. But it equally challenges those on the flipside of the efficacy debate, who insist that art's politics is limited to a recondite space of 'autonomous resistance'. The book shows how each side of the efficacy debate overlooks art's exceptional status and its social mediations. Mobilising philosophy and cultural theory, and employing examples from visual art, performance, and theatre, it proposes four alternative tests to 'effect' to offer a nuanced account of art's political character. Those tests examine how art relates to politics as a practice that articulates its historical conjuncture, and how it prefigures the 'new' through simulations capable of activating the political life of the spectator. -- .

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 collection of 15 essays surveys the work of some of the most major British and Irish dramatists since 1960. Included are four dramatists - Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Peter Shaffer and Peter Nichols - who began writing plays before 1960, and whose work has since continued to develop. Most of the dramatists considered, however, are those who have begun writing more recently, and who illustrate some of the distinctive characteristics of British and Irish drama of the present.;James Acheson is co-editor of "Beckett's Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company" and editor of "The British and Irish Novel since 1960".

This collection brings together a group of distinguished and original theater historians engaged in rethinking the nature of early modern theater history as a discipline. Whether focusing on the relation between scripts and performance practice, the structure of theatrical companies, the social dimensions of drama, or the archaeology of the stage, all are concerned with basic questions of evidence and interpretation, and offer significant, and often startling, revisions of our view of the early modern theater.

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 is an account of the history and continuation of plague as a potent metaphor since the disease ceased to be an epidemic threat in Western Europe, engaging with twentieth-century critiques of fascism, anti-Semitic rhetoric, the Oedipal legacy of psychoanalysis and its reception, and film spectatorship and the zombie genre.

This book is a study of August Strindberg's famous drama "Miss Julie, "presented in both Swedish and English. Since it was first performed in 1888, "Miss Julie "has became one of the most successful plays written by Strindberg, widely considered one of the pioneers of modern drama. The book provides a penetrating analysis of the author's text, followed by a close investigation of Ingmar Bergman's much lauded 1985 production at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. "Drama as Text and Performance "is intended as a paradigmatic illustration of similarities and differences between the two media--textand performance and their recipients, readers and spectators.