In this first introduction to Plautus' Trinummus, students and non-specialists alike are guided through the themes, context, and enduring humor of this Roman comedy. The play portrays the story of an elaborate game of keep-away involving a hidden treasure, a hot-blooded spendthrift youth, his pious sister, her would-be fiancee, a con-artist, and the most unlikely of comic schemers-a group of overly pious old men. The conflict of the plot focuses on whether a pair of old men can help their absent friend Charmides by getting a dowry to his daughter without Charmides' wastrel son Lesbonicus first spending the money on the usual comic debauchery. The money is taken from a treasure hidden by Charmides when he left and a sycophant is hired to pretend to bring letters from Charmides along with the cash for the dowry. Comic confusion ensues when Charmides returns from abroad just in time to intercept the con-artist and overturn the scheming of his friends. Long neglected, Trinummus is one of many Plautine plays that is experiencing a resurgence. This volume elucidates the humor of the play, which is largely based on parody and clever inversions of typical characters and situations from Roman comedy. This discussion is accompanied by an examination of the religious, social, and historical context of the play, as well as its modern reception. The genuine humor of Trinummus has something to say to modern readers, as it showcases how parody can skewer those engaged in pompous moral posturing and presents readers with a playwright who astutely views issues of imperialism and moral justification through a comic lens.

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.

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.

BEDFORD. Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night! Comets, importing change of times and states, Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky And with them scourge the bad revolting stars That have consented unto Henry's death! King Henry the Fifth, too famous to live long! England ne'er lost a king of so much worth. GLOUCESTER. England ne'er had a king until his time. Virtue he had, deserving to command; His brandish'd sword did blind men with his beams; His arms spread wider than a dragon's wings; His sparkling eyes, replete with wrathful fire, More dazzled and drove back his enemies Than mid-day sun fierce bent against their faces. What should I say? His deeds exceed all speech: He ne'er lift up his hand but conquered.

Chosen as one of the ten canonical plays by Euripides during the Hellenistic period in Greece, Hecuba was popular throughout Antiquity. The play also became part of the so-called 'Byzantine triad' of three plays of Euripides (along with Phoenician Women and Orestes) selected for study in school curricula, above all for the brilliance of its rhetorical speeches and quotable traditional wisdom. Translations into Latin and vernacular languages, as well as stage performances emerged early in the sixteenth century. The Renaissance admired the play for its representation of the extraordinary suffering and misfortunes of its newly-enslaved heroine, the former queen of Troy Hecuba, for the courageous sacrificial death of her daughter Polyxena, and for the beleaguered queen's surprisingly successful revenge against the unscrupulous killer of her son Polydorus. Later periods, however, developed reservations about the play's revenge plot and its unity. Recent scholarship has favorably reassessed the play in its original cultural and political context and the past thirty years have produced a number of exciting staged productions. Hecuba has emerged as a profound exploration of the difficulties of establishing justice and a stable morality in post-war situations. This book investigates the play's changing critical and theatrical reception from Antiquity to the present, its mythical and political background, its dramatic and thematic unity, and the role of its choruses.

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.

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.

In this selection of research articles Butterworth focuses on investigation of the practical and technical means by which early English theatre, from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century, was performed. Matters of staging for both 'pageant vehicle' and 'theatre-in-the-round' are described and analysed to consider their impact on playing by players, expositors, narrators and prompters. All these operators also functioned to promote the closely aligned disciplines of pyrotechnics and magic (legerdemain or sleight of hand) which also influence the nature of the presented theatre. The sixteen chapters form four clearly identified parts-staging, playing, pyrotechnics and magic-and drawing on a wealth of primary source material, Butterworth encourages the reader to rediscover and reappreciate the actors, magicians, wainwrights and wheelwrights, pyrotechnists, and (in modern terms) the special effects people and event managers who brought these early texts to theatrical life on busy city streets and across open arenas. The chapters variously explore and analyse the important backwaters of material culture that enabled, facilitated and shaped performance yet have received scant scholarly attention. It is here, among the itemised payments to carpenters and chemists, the noted requirements of mechanics and wheelwrights, or tucked away among the marginalia of suppliers of staging and ingenious devices that Butterworth has made his stamping ground. This is a fascinating introduction to the very 'nuts and bolts' of early theatre. Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre is a closely argued celebration of stagecraft that will appeal to academics and students of performance, theatre history and medieval studies as well as history and literature more broadly. It constitutes the eighth volume in the Routledge series Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies and continues the valuable work of that series (of which Butterworth is a general editor) in bringing significant and expert research articles to a wider audience.

This book focuses on two important topics in Shaw's Major Barbara and Pygmalion that have received little attention from critics: language and metadrama. If we look beyond the social, political, and economic issues that Shaw explored in these two plays, we discover that the stories of the two "Shavian sisters"- Barbara Undershaft and Eliza Doolittle-are deeply concerned with performance and what Jacques Derrida calls "the problem of language." Nearly every character in Major Barbara produces, directs, or acts in at least one miniature play. In Pygmalion, Henry Higgins is Eliza's acting coach and phonetics teacher, as well as the star of an impromptu, open-air phonetics show. The language content in these two plays is just as intriguing. Did Eliza Doolittle have to learn Standard English to become a complete human being? Should we worry about the bad grammar we hear at Barbara Undershaft's Salvation Army shelter? Is English losing its precision and purity? Meanwhile, in the background, Shaw keeps reminding us that language and theatre are always present in our everyday lives-sometimes serving as stabilizing forces, and sometimes working to undo them.

This volume offers a critique of cultural and intellectual life in Greece during the dictatorship of 1967-1974, discussing how Greek playwrights, directors, and actors reconceived the role of culture in a state of crisis and engaged with questions of theater's relationship to politics and community. In the early 1970s, several bold new plays appeared, resonating with the concerns of Greek public and private life. The reinvigorated Greek stage displayed an extraordinary degree of historical consciousness and embraced revisionist cultural critique as well, leading to a drastic re-shaping of the Greek theatrical landscape. Stage of Emergency is the first study to focus on these particular theatrical developments of the so-called junta era, shedding light not only on the messages and impact of the plays themselves, but also on the politics of culture and censorship affecting the Greek public during this period.

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.

This book outlines the evolution of our political nature over two million years and explores many of the rituals, plays, films, and other performances that gave voice and legitimacy to various political regimes in our species' history. Our genetic and cultural evolution during the Pleistocene Epoch bestowed a wide range of predispositions on our species that continue to shape the politics we support and the performances we enjoy. The book's case studies range from an initiation ritual in the Mbendjela tribe in the Congo to a 1947 drama by Bertolt Brecht and include a popular puppet play in Tokugawa Japan. A final section examines the gradual disintegration of social cohesion underlying the rise of polarized politics in the USA after 1965, as such films as The Godfather, Independence Day, The Dark Knight Rises, and Joker accelerated the nation's slide toward authoritarian Trumpism.

Essays on a wide range of topics including the role of early modern chess in upholding Aristotelian virtue; readings of Sidney, Wroth, Spenser, and Shakespeare; and several topics involving the New World. Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The present volume opens with an essay on early modern chess, arguing that it covertly upheld an Aristotelian concept of virtue against the destabilizing ethical views of writers such as Machiavelli. This provocative opening is followed by iconoclastic discussions of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Wroth's Urania, and Spenser's Fairie Queen. The next essay investigates the mystery surrounding editorship of the 1571 printing of The Mirror for Magistrates. The essays then pivot into the exotic world of Hermetic "statue magic" in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale and the even more exotic worlds of alchemy, Aztec war gods, and conversion in sixteenth-century Mexico. Two further essays remain in the New World, the first examining the representational connections between the twelve Caesars and the twelve Inca kings, the second taking stock of Thomas Harriot's contribution to the understanding of Amerindian languages. The penultimate essay looks at Holbein's depiction of Henry VIII's ailing body, and the volume concludes with a complex analysis of guilt and shame in Moliere's L'Ecole des Femmes. Contributors: Jean Marie Christensen, William Coulter, Christopher Crosbie, Shepherd Aaron Ellis, Scott Lucas, Fernando Martinez-Periset, Timothy Pyles, Rachel Roberts, Jesse Russell, Janet Stephens, Weiao Xing. The journal is edited by Jim Pearce of North Carolina Central University and Ward Risvold of Georgia College and State University.

Unrivalled in its coverage of recent work and writers, The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary American Playwrights surveys and analyses the breadth, vitality and development of theatrical work to emerge from America over the last fifty years. This authoritative guide leads you through the work of 25 major contemporary American playwrights, discussing more than 140 plays in detail. Written by a team of 25 eminent international scholars, each chapter provides: * a biographical introduction to the playwright's work; * a survey and concise analysis of the writer's most important plays; * a discussion of their style, dramaturgical concerns and critical reception; * a bibliography of published plays and a select list of critical works. Among the many Tony, Obie and Pulitzer prize-winning playwrights included are Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, August Wilson, Paula Vogel and Neil LaBute. The abundance of work analysed enables fresh, illuminating conclusions to be drawn about the development of contemporary American playwriting.

Taking as its starting-point the 'death of tragedy' debate, and focusing on the supposed disappearance from the stage of the individual tragic hero, the book views selected plays and writings on the theatre by Miller, Williams, Maxwell Anderson and O'Neill as exemplifying four versions of heroism: idealism, martyrdom, self-reflection and survival. Julie Adam shows that these diverse playwrights share a desire to redefine tragic heroism in individualistic liberal terms.

An investigation into the connections between the York Plays, religious observance, and the role played by the city itself. WINNER of the 2007 David Bevington Prize The York Play is the earliest near-complete English civic mystery cycle. It evolved constantly throughout its long performance history, but the text that was recorded in the YorkRegister shows that it was already a mature and elaborate civic festival by the time it was written down. This study uncovers the Cycle's connection with worship in York, in the sense both of devotional practice and of civichonour, informing a particular period in the cultural history of the city. The pageants in the Register show in their different ways how the community which devised and performed the Cycle regarded the celebration of the great summer feast of Corpus Christi. Moreover the principles of selection that give the Cycle its structure reflect the broader pattern of the liturgical calendar, with its other feasts and fasts. The Cycle bears witness not only to thepractices of religious observance in York, but also to the ecclesiastical politics in which the city was caught up from the very beginning of the fifteenth century. PAMELA KING is Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Bristol.

As Henry's throne is threatened by rebel forces, England is divided. The characters reflect these oppositions, with Hal and Hotspur vying for position, and Falstaff leading Hal away from his father and towards excess. During Shakespeare's lifetime Henry IV, Part I was his most reprinted play, and it remains enormously popular with theatregoers and readers. Falstaff still towers among Shakespeare's comic inventions as he did in the late 1590s. David Bevington's introduction discusses the play in both performance and criticism from Shakespeare's time to our own, illustrating the variety of interpretations of which the text is capable. He analyses the play's richly textured language in a detailed commentary on individual words and phrases and clearly explains its historical background.

Paracomedy: Appropriations of Comedy in Greek Drama is the first book that examines how ancient Greek tragedy engages with the genre of comedy. While scholars frequently study paratragedy (how Greek comedians satirize tragedy), this book investigates the previously overlooked practice of paracomedy: how Greek tragedians regularly appropriate elements from comedy such as costumes, scenes, language, characters, or plots. Drawing upon a wide variety of complete and fragmentary tragedies and comedies (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Rhinthon), this monograph demonstrates that paracomedy was a prominent feature of Greek tragedy. Blending a variety of interdisciplinary approaches including traditional philology, literary criticism, genre theory, and performance studies, this book offers innovative close readings and incisive interpretations of individual plays. Jendza presents paracomedy as a multivalent authorial strategy: some instances impart a sense of ugliness or discomfort; others provide a sense of light-heartedness or humor. While this work traces the development of paracomedy over several hundred years, it focuses on a handful of Euripidean tragedies at the end of the fifth century BCE. Jendza argues that Euripides was participating in a rivalry with the comedian Aristophanes and often used paracomedy to demonstrate the poetic supremacy of tragedy; indeed, some of Euripides' most complex uses of paracomedy attempt to re-appropriate Aristophanes' mockery of his theatrical techniques. Paracomedy: Appropriations of Comedy in Greek Tragedy theorizes a new, ground-breaking relationship between Greek tragedy and comedy that not only redefines our understanding of the genre of tragedy, but also reveals a dynamic theatrical world filled with mutual cross-generic influence.

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 indispensable overview of modern black British drama spans seven decades of distinctive playwriting from the 1950s to the present. Interweaving social and cultural context with close critical analysis of key dramatists' plays, leading scholars explore how these dramatists have created an enduring, transformative and diverse cultural presence.

This book analyzes the relation between the flow time and poetic speech in drama and rhetoric. It begins with the classical understanding of time as flux, and its problems and paradoxes entailing from Aristotle, Augustine, Kant and Husserl. The reader will see how these problems unfold and find resolutions through dramatic speech and rhetoric which has an essential relation to the flow of time. It covers elements in poetic speech such as affect, rhythm, metaphor, and syntax. It uses examples from classical rhetorical theories by Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, dramatic speeches from Shakespeare, as well as other modern dramatic texts by Chekhov, Beckett, Jelinek and Sarah Kane. This book appeals to students and academic researchers working in the philosophical fields of aesthetics and phenomenology as well those working in theater and the performing arts.