This book presents an analysis of more than 30 plays written by Irish dramatists and poets that are based on the tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus. These plays proceed from the time of Yeats and Synge through MacNeice and the Longfords on to many of today's leading writers. A special feature of the book is that, in order to cater for these who may know little about Greek tragedy, it begins with a chapter entitled 'A Brief Reading of Greek Tragedy', and then, in regard to each Greek play analysed, it presents a mini-essay on that play, before coming to the Irish version(s) of it. Three features of these Irish appropriations stand out. Firstly, there are three methods of using a Greek tragedy: straight translation, which requires us to interrogate the original play; version, which preserves the invariant core of the original, but which can add or subtract material; loose adaptation, which often moves the action into the modern world. Secondly, there is a considerable stress on Sophocles whose emphasis on the theme of recognition resonates in a postcolonial society that must define itself. Thirdly, there is a considerable stress on the experience of women - such as Antigone and Medea - that can relate to the position of women in Irish society after independence.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre provides the single most comprehensive survey of the field to be found in a single volume. Drawing on more than forty contributors from around the world, the book addresses a full range of topics relating to modern Irish theatre from the late nineteenth-century theatre to the most recent works of postdramatic devised theatre. Ireland has long had an importance in the world of theatre out of all proportion to the size of the country, and has been home to four Nobel Laureates (Yeats, Shaw, and Beckett; Seamus Heaney, while primarily a poet, also wrote for the stage). This collection begins with the influence of melodrama, looks at arguably the first modern Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde, before moving into a series of considerations of the Abbey Theatre, and Irish modernism. Arranged chronologically, it explores areas such as women in theatre, Irish-language theatre, and alternative theatres, before reaching the major writers of more recent Irish theatre, including Brian Friel and Tom Murphy, and their successors. There are also individual chapters focusing on Beckett and Shaw, as well as a series of chapters looking at design, acting and theatre architecture. The book concludes with an extended survey of the critical literature on the field. In each chapter, the author does not simply rehearse accepted wisdom; all of the authors push the boundaries of their respective fields, so that each chapter is a significant contribution to scholarship in its own right.

This new Chronology allows for quick and easy retrieval of all the major dates pertaining to Christopher Marlowe's life and career. It also helpfully gives dates relevant to the real people and historical events dramatized in his plays and to those who acted in, produced them, the dates of publication of the works which he used as sources, the dates of principal revivals of his works, and the dates at which various key facts about his life and works were later rediscovered.

The essays in Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity, written by renowned international scholars, open up the many dimensions and arenas of modernist movement and movements: spatial, geographical and political: affective and physiological; temporal and epochal; technological, locomotive and metropolitan; aesthetic and representational. Individual essays explore modernism's complex geographies, focusing on Anglo-European modernisms while also engaging with the debates engendered by recent models of world literatures and global modernisms. From questions of space and place, the volume moves to a focus on movement and motion, with topics ranging from modernity and bodily energies to issues of scale and quantity. The final chapters in the volume examine modernist film and the moving image, and travel and transport in the modern metropolis. 'Movement is reality itself', the philosopher Henri Bergson wrote: the original and illuminating essays in Moving Modernisms point in new ways to the realities, and the fantasies, of movement in modernist culture.

Written (and occasionally performed) by Rob Drummond in collaboration with director David Overend, these scripts are a record of a long-term artistic partnership. From the award-winning magic of Bullet Catch (the Arches, 2012), to the audience votes of The Majority (National Theatre of Great Britain, 2017), these six plays open up a space for improvisation and participation, and a range of responses and reactions from the audience. The collection includes four previously unpublished scripts along with up-to-date versions of their most successful productions. With introductory essays and in-text commentary by both the writer and director, this is a valuable resource for practitioners, students, and scholars of contemporary British theatre.

This anthology is the sister volume to The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama. It contains sixteen of the most important, innovative, and dramatically exciting plays from the long Tudor century (1485-1603) newly edited in accessible modern spelling from original manuscripts or printed texts. Unlike previous anthologies, which have tended to divide the period by selecting examples of only 'medieval' or 'Renaissance' drama, and so eliding the continuities between the two, this volume gives readers an overview of the whole period. For in reality 'medieval' plays such as the magnificent York mystery cycle and the interludes of John Heywood were being performed through much of the sixteenth century, alongside 'Renaissance' works such as the comedy Gammer Gurton's Needle and Jasper Heywood's English re-imagining of Seneca's tragedy of blood, Thyestes. Tudor audiences clearly did not share the assumptions of modern editors, who have seen the plays produced before the 1590s as 'primitive', didactic stuff, soon swept away by the genius of Marlowe and Shakespeare. They enjoyed all of the works printed here, some anthologised in a readily available collection for the first time, seeing in each of them elements of dramatic action, character, and emotional engagement that moved and entertained them. This anthology will allow modern readers to see why, offering a chronological arrangement of the best Tudor plays that allows them to see for themselves the ways in which the traditions and tropes that would characterise the Shakespearean stage were tried and tested through a century of innovation and experiment. With the riches of a century of Tudor drama before them in a single volume, readers and performers will be able to judge both what was gained in the long century from the 1480s to the 1600s and also what was lost as drama moved from the streets and halls of the early Tudor period to the professional playhouses of the Elizabethan age.

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.

In this book, each chapter explores significant Irish texts in their literary, cultural, and historical contexts. With an introduction that establishes the multiple critical contexts for Irish cinema, literature, and their adaptive textual worlds, the volume addresses some of the most popular and important late 20th-Century and 21st Century works that have had an impact on the Irish and global cinema and literary landscape. A remarkable series of acclaimed and profitable domestic productions during the past three decades has accompanied, while chronicling, Ireland's struggle with self-identity, national consciousness, and cultural expression, such that the story of contemporary Irish cinema is in many ways the story of the young nation's growth pains and travails. Whereas Irish literature had long stood as the nation's foremost artistic achievement, it is not too much to say that film now rivals literature as Ireland's key form of cultural expression. The proliferation of successful screen versionings of Irish fiction and drama shows how intimately the contemporary Irish cinema is tied to the project of both understanding and complicating (even denying) a national identity that has undergone radical change during the past three decades. This present volume is the first to present a collective accounting of that productive synergy, which has seen so much of contemporary Irish literature transferred to the screen.

This book explores the role of alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Hermetic philosophy in one of Shakespeare's last plays, The Winter's Tale. A perusal of the vast literary and iconographic repertory of Renaissance alchemy reveals that this late play is imbued with several topoi, myths, and emblematic symbols coming from coeval alchemical, Paracelsian, and Hermetic sources. It also discusses the alchemical significance of water and time in the play's circular and regenerative pattern and the healing role of women. All the major symbols of alchemy are present in Shakespeare's play: the intertwined serpents of the caduceus, the chemical wedding, the filius philosophorum, and the so-called rex chymicus. This book also provides an in-depth survey of late Renaissance alchemy, Paracelsian medicine, and Hermetic culture in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. Importantly, it contends that The Winter's Tale, in symbolically retracing the healing pattern of the rota alchemica and in emphasising the Hermetic principles of unity and concord, glorifies King James's conciliatory attitude.

A discussion of the text or interpretation of passages from six plays by Euripides edited by the author for Oxford Classical Texts: Supplices, Electra, Heracles, Troades, Iphigenia in Tauris, Ion. In addition, if James Diggle has already discussed a passage from these plays in a published article, he has incorporated a reference to that discussion at the appropriate place, often adding new material. But the book is designed not only as a contribution to the amendment and interpretation of particular passages in these plays. Many of the notes are used as a basis for pursuing topics (whether linguistic or metrical) which are of general interest, and as a result the book will be of value to all future commentators on Greek tragedy.

Unsettled Toleration: Religious Difference on the Shakespearean Stage historicizes and scrutinizes the unstable concept of toleration as it emerges in drama performed on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages. Brian Walsh examines plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries that represent intra-Christian conflict between mainstream believers and various minorities, analyzing the sometimes explicit, sometimes indirect, occasionally smooth, but more often halting and equivocal forms of dealing with difference that these plays imagine can result from such exchanges. Through innovative and in some cases unprecedented readings of a diverse collection of plays, from Chapman's An Humorous Day's Mirth, Middleton's The Puritan Widow, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and Pericles, and Rowley's When You See Me You Know Me, Walsh shows how the English stage in the first decade of the seventeenth century, as a social barometer, registered the basic condition of religious "unsettlement " of the post-Reformation era; and concurrently that the stage, as a social incubator, brooded over imagined scenarios of confessional conflict that could end variously in irresolution, accommodation, or even religious syncretism. It thus helped to create, sustain and enlarge an open-ended public conversation on the vicissitudes of getting along in a sectarian world. Attending to this conversation is vital to our present understanding of the state of religious toleration the early modern period, for it gives a fuller picture of the ways religious difference was experienced than the limited and inert pronouncements on the topic that officials of the church and state offered.

Rachel Crothers had a fascinating and influential career as a woman playwright and director. She was a major part of Broadway history during the first half of the 20th century, when she wrote for leading actresses such as Tallulah Bankhead, Katharine Cornell, and Gertrude Lawrence. While she is primarily known for her plays, she also worked for a time in Hollywood, and many of her plays were filmed--some more than once. This volume presents a biographical and critical overview of Crothers's life and career, along with synopses of her plays, descriptions of the critics' responses to each play, and substantial primary and secondary bibliographies. This book makes suggestions about the criticism that Crothers's work has elicited in the past, as well as about the directions that criticism might and should take in the future. Because of Crothers's work on Broadway, the book is a valuable guide to theater history throughout the 1900s, particularly because of the detailed cast and production information provided in the entries.

Many modern readers believe that, in his dramas, Euripides was questioning the nature and sometimes even the existence of the gods. In Euripides and the Gods, eminent classicist Mary K. Lefkowitz shows that the tragedian is not undermining ancient religion, but rather describing with a brutal realism what the gods are like, reminding his mortal audience of the limitations of human understanding. Although some scholars have begun to express similar views about the theology of individual plays, no one so far has written an extended treatment of these issues for a general audience who do not necessarily know ancient Greek. Lefkowitz will provide a book that will deal with all of his dramas, accessible to non-specialist readers, containing a more tolerant and nuanced understanding of ancient Greek religion: Euripides, like Homer, is making "a statement about the nature of the world and human life, terrible and dispassionate." That view of divinity was well known and understood in Euripides' own time. In spite of what has seemed to later critics his brutally realistic characterization of the gods, he was selected in virtually every year of his adult life to be one of the three poets allowed to put on a set of plays at the festival of Dionysus, and even after his death he remained the most popular and influential of the great playwrights in the Greek-speaking world. This would hardly have been the case if his portrayal of the gods appeared impious to the majority of his audiences. Like most of the author's distinguished publications in this field, the book will discuss a number of important related topics, including religion, philosophy, the surviving works of Euripides' contemporaries, and the theater and its significance to Greek society. The result will be a compelling invitation to return to the dramatic masterpieces of Euripides with fresh eyes.

SUFFOLK. As by your high imperial Majesty I had in charge at my depart for France, As procurator to your Excellence, To marry Princess Margaret for your Grace; So, in the famous ancient city Tours, In presence of the Kings of France and Sicil, The Dukes of Orleans, Calaber, Bretagne, and Alencon, Seven earls, twelve barons, and twenty reverend bishops, I have perform'd my task, and was espous'd; And humbly now upon my bended knee, In sight of England and her lordly peers, Deliver up my title in the Queen To your most gracious hands, that are the substance Of that great shadow I did represent: The happiest gift that ever marquis gave, The fairest queen that ever king receiv'd.

Aristophanes' Wasps was produced in Athens in 422 BCE. Like other Aristophanic comedies, it is a satire on Athenian society and democratic institutions, in this case focusing on the legal system and its supposed manipulation for personal ends by corrupt democratic leaders. This critical edition of the play includes the full Greek text, detailed commentary notes, and an extensive introduction. It represents a thorough re-evaluation of the play, providing a wealth of insights and advances in our understanding of the work and related topics since the last full scholarly commentary by Douglas M. MacDowell in 1971. The text depends on a complete, independent collation of the manuscripts and contains numerous new choices of readings and emendations. The introduction guides readers around fundamental information; not just on Aristophanes' life, but on poetic and political interpretations of the play, matters of staging, and the manuscript tradition. The extensive commentary aims to equip readers of all levels with the information they will need to appreciate the play in its original performance context, and to evaluate it as both an historical document and an artistic creation. This new critical edition will be a starting point for all further research on Wasps, and will serve readers and scholars for decades to come.

This is the sixth volume of a detailed play-by-play catalogue of drama written by English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish authors during the 110 years between the English Reformation to the English Revolution, covering every known play, extant and lost, including some which have never before been identified. It is based on a complete, systematic survey of the whole of this body of work, presented in chronological order. Each entry contains comprehensive information about a single play: its various titles, authorship, and date; a summary of its plot, list of its roles, and details of the human and geographical world in which the fictional action takes place; a list of its sources, narrative and verbal, and a summary of its formal characteristics; details of its staging requirements; and an account of its early stage and textual history.

Theatre and Event: Staging the European Century, examines how, in these first decades of the twenty-first century, contemporary European theatre-makers have sought to consider the disastrous events of the twentieth century as the 'unfinished business' of the contemporary. Kear argues that by thinking through the logic of the event, and the theatre event especially, contemporary performance practice enables an affective interrogation of 'the event' of the European century.Examining the work of leading theatre companies, Theatre and Event: Staging the European Century offers detailed expositions and engaged analyses of key works by Needcompany (Belgium), Jaunais Rigas Teatris (Latvia), Societas Raffaello Sanzio (Italy), National Theatre Wales (UK), and Studios Kabako (France/Democratic Republic of the Congo). This book offers an original conception of the theatre event as an event which exists in relation to, and performatively historicises, other 'events', requiring a critical and creative practice of spectatorship to animate its political affects.

"Digital Practices" offers a description of a range of art and performance practices that have emerged within the context of a broad-based technological infiltration of all areas of human experience. They are integral to alternative and also to mainstream performance and culture, and demand perceptive strategies that can address the interface between the physical and the virtual. In this pioneering study, Susan Broadhurst explores the aesthetic theorisation of these practices and extends her analysis to include other approaches, including those offered by recent research into neuroesthetics.

Henrik Ibsen's plays have long beguiled philosophically-oriented readers. From Nietzsche to Adorno to Cavell, philosophers have drawn inspiration from Ibsen. But what of Ibsen's own philosophical orientation? As part of larger European movements to reinvent drama, Ibsen and fellow playwrights grappled with contemporary philosophy. Philosophy of drama found a central place with figures such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Gottfried Herder, but reached its mature form, in Ibsen's time, in the works of G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche. Kristin Gjesdal reveals the centrality of philosophy of theater in nineteenth-century philosophy and shows how drama, as an art form, offers insight into human historicity and the conditions of modern life. The Drama of History deepens and actualizes the relationship between philosophy and drama-not by suggesting that either philosophy or drama should have the upper hand, but rather by indicating how a sustained dialogue between them brings out the meaning and intellectual power of each. Her study reveals underappreciated aspects of Hegel's and Nietzsche's works through their reception in European art and investigates the philosophical dimensions of Ibsen's drama. At the heart of this interrelation between philosophy and drama is a shared interest in exploring the existential condition of human life as lived and experienced in history.

Though a staple in high school English classes, Julius Caesar is not a simple play. Seemingly irreconcilable forces are at work: fate and free will, the changeableness and stubbornness of ambitious men, the demands of public service and the desire for private gain. Drawn from history as recorded by Plutarch, the major characters-Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Antony-are complex, as are the twists and turns of their fortunes. What kind of man rises to power? What price does he pay when he becomes a politician? These questions raised by Shakespeare are relevant in every age, whether ancient Rome, Elizabethan England, or even in our own day.

Few playwrights write as much of their lives into every work as did Tennessee Williams, and few had lives that were so obviously theatrical. Growing up amid abusive alcoholism, genteel posturing, and the incipient madness of his beloved sister, Rose, Williams produced plays in which violence exploded into rape, castration, and even cannibalism, projecting dramatic personal traumas. In this frank, compelling study, the distinguished biographer and critic Ronald Hayman explores the intersection of biography and art in one of the most exuberantly autobiographical dramatists of the American theater. By the time he died, in 1983, Williams's reputation had seriously declined. More than twenty years of drug and alcohol addiction, coupled with devastating openness about his promiscuous homosexuality, had all but destroyed one of America's greatest playwrights, while Williams's new works were increasingly unsuccessful. In recent years, however, Broadway revivals and amateur productions have testified to his enduring greatness as one of the shapers of the American theater. The major plays, such as The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire, never disappeared from American theatrical consciousness. Their heroes - Tom Wingfield, Brick Pollitt, even Blanche Du Bois - are portraits of the artist as a very troubled man. Hayman explores the life and writings of Tennessee Williams and shows how they were linked. More than any previous biographer, he unmasks the compulsive, driven man behind the characters and lays bare the pain that engendered Williams's violent apocalypses. Tennessee Williams will change the way lovers of drama experience and understand some of its finestachievements.

Early modern drama is steeped in biblical language, imagery and stories. This collection examines the pervasive presence of scripture on the early modern stage. Exploring plays by writers such as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Middleton, and Webster, the contributors show how theatre offers a site of public and communal engagement with the Bible.

Hysteria, trauma and melancholia are not only powerful tropes in contemporary culture, they are also prominent in the theatre. As the first study in its field, "Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia" explores the characteristics and concerns of the Drama of Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia through in-depth readings of representative plays.

Though J. M. Synge is considered a major figure of Irish drama and an important canonical playwright, he is the subject of fewer and fewer books and conference sessions. In this volume, chapters by expert contributors confront the possibility that Synge's reputation may not be standing the test of time. The chapters reaffirm the relevance of Synge's plays to contemporary audiences and readers and invite a reassessment of his apparently declining popularity. Comparisions of Synge's work to that of other authors reinforce the argument in favor of his continuing relevance.

J. M. Synge is generally considered one of the most important Irish dramatists, and his standing within the larger canon of world literature usually goes unchallenged. But his reputation may not be standing the test of time. A relative dearth of presentations on Synge's work at major national and international conferences and even at regional Irish studies conferences suggests that he is not studied as much as he once was, especially relative to other Irish authors such as Joyce, Yeats, O'Casey, and even Paul Muldoon and Eavan Boland. Tolerance for some of Synge's once-hailed extragavance is also lessening among students of his drama.

The expert contributors of this book demonstrate that Synge's work is of continuing relevance to contemporary audiences and readers. Each of its essays illuminates the worth of Synge's dramatic canon either by some form of reassessment of individual plays or by comparison of Synge's work to that of authors whose reputation is still indisputably well established, such as Yeats, or to that of contemporary authors whose work is much in the public eye, such as Salman Rushdie. New approaches, including a feminist study of the language of Synge's heroines, also help establish the continued relevance of his drama to contemporary readers.