In this book, Jeanette Malkin considers a broad spectrum of postwar plays in which characters are created, coerced, and destroyed by language. The playwrights examined are diverse and include Handke, Pinter, Bond, Albee, Mamet and Shepard, as well as Vaclav Havel and two of his plays: The Garden Party and The Memorandum. These playwrights portray language's manipulation of our political, social, and interpersonal worlds. Writing in a variety of idioms and styles, the playwrights all reveal the link between language and power.

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.

Greg Walker provides a new account of the relationship between politics and drama in the turbulent period from the accession of Henry VIII to the reign of Elizabeth I. Building on ideas first developed in Plays of Persuasion (1991), he focuses on political drama in both England and Scotland, exploring the complex relationships among politics, court culture and dramatic composition, performance and publication. This interdisciplinary analysis will find a market among Tudor historians as well as students of medieval and Renaissance drama.

Representations of the Body in Middle English Biblical Drama combines epistemological enquiry, gender theory and Foucauldian concepts to investigate the body as a useful site for studying power, knowledge and truth. Intertwining the conceptualizations of violence and the performativity of gender identity and roles, Estella Ciobanu argues that studying violence in drama affords insights into the cultural and social aspects of the later Middle Ages. The text investigates these biblical plays through the perspective of the devil and offers a unique lens that exposes medieval disquiets about Christian teachings and the discourse of power. Through detailed primary source analysis and multidisciplinary scholarship, Ciobanu constructs a text that interrogates the significance of performance far beyond the stage.

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.

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.

This book draws on the theatrical thinking of Samuel Beckett and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to propose a method for research undertaken at the borders of performance and philosophy. Exploring how Beckett fabricates encounters with the impossible and the unthinkable in performance, it asks how philosophy can approach what cannot be thought while honouring and preserving its alterity. Employing its method, it creates a series of encounters between aspects of Beckett's theatrical practice and a range of concepts drawn from Deleuze's philosophy. Through the force of these encounters, a new range of concepts is invented. These provide novel ways of thinking affect and the body in performance; the possibility of theatrical automation; and the importance of failure and invention in our attempts to respond to performance encounters. Further, this book includes new approaches to Beckett's later theatrical work and provides an overview of Deleuze's conception of philosophical practice as an ongoing struggle to think with immanence.

Beckett's Intuitive Spectator: Me to Play investigates how audience discomfort, instead of a side effect of a Beckett pedagogy, is a key spectatorial experience which arises from an everyman intuition of loss. With reference to selected works by Henri Bergson, Immanuel Kant and Gilles Deleuze, this book charts the processes of how an audience member's habitual way of understanding could be frustrated by Beckett's film, radio, stage and television plays. Michelle Chiang explores the ways in which Beckett exploited these mediums to reconstitute an audience response derived from intuition.

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.

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.

Euripides' Heracles is an extraordinary play of great complexity, exploring the co-existence of both positive and negative aspects of the eponymous hero. Euripides treats Heracles' ambivalence by showing his uncertain position after the completion of his labours and turns him into a tragic hero by dramatizing his development from the invincible hero of the labours to the courageous bearer of suffering. This book offers a comprehensive reading of Heracles examining it in the contexts of Euripidean dramaturgy, Greek drama and fifth-century Athenian society. It shows that the play, which raises profound questions on divinity and human values, deserves to have a prominent place in every discussion about Euripides and about Greek tragedy. Tracing some of Euripides' most spectacular writing in terms of emotional and intellectual effect, and discussing questions of narrative, rhetoric, stagecraft and audience reception, this work is required reading for all students and scholars of Euripides.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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,

The historical tragedy Octavia focuses on Nero's divorce from the princess Octavia, Claudius' daughter by Valeria Messalina, and on the emperor's subsequent marriage to Poppaea Sabina. This book includes a full-length introduction, a new edition of the text based on a fresh examination of the manuscripts, and a detailed commentary dealing with textual, linguistic, and literary points. Spanning three days in June AD 62, the tragic action of the play ends with Octavia's deportation to the island of Pandateria, where she would be executed shortly afterwards.

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.

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.

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.

First published in 1970, this book includes all of the annual editions and also a final pamphlet of Samhain: October 1901 - November 1908, a literary magazine edited by W. B. Yeats. Samhain was one of the several magazines that the Irish Literary Theatre (later to become The Abbey Theatre) produced and it was born when the original magazine, Beltaine, came to an end in 1900. Yeats's editorial role was essential to the publication which served to publicize the work of the Theatre, promote current works of Irish playwrights and challenging those of their English opponents. The magazine mainly consists of a series of essays on the theatre in Dublin, and supplementing these are explanations and discussions of new plays, excerpts from which are often included. This book will be of interest to those with an interest in Yeats, early nineteenth-century literature, and Irish theatre.

Maria Irene Fornes is the most influential female American dramatist of the 20th century. That is the argument of this important new study, the first to assess Fornes's complete body of work.

Scott T. Cummings considers comic sketches, opera libretti and unpublished pieces, as well as her best-known plays, in order to trace the evolution of her dramaturgy from the whimsical Off-Off Broadway plays of the 1960s to the sober, meditative work of the 1990s. The book also reflects on her practice as an inspirational teacher of playwriting and the primary director of her own plays.

Drawing on the latest scholarship and his own personal research and interviews with Fornes over two decades, Cummings examines Fornes's unique significance and outlines strategies for understanding her fragmentary, enigmatic, highly demanding theater.

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).

First published in 1936, The Jacobean Drama is a brilliant interpretation of the drama written between the last years of Elizabeth I and the first years of Charles I. Professor Una Mary Ellis-Fermor's book traces the evolution of thought and mood from the end of Marlowe's career, through the works of Ben Jonson, Marston, Chapman, Middleton, Tourneur, Webster, Greville, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ford. The author then discusses a culminating phase in the plays of Shakespeare and the modifications of his successors. She finally looks into the Jacobean stage and in her Appendix considers the 'theatre war'.