Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was one of the most successful dramatists of the Restoration theatre and a popular poet. This is the fourth volume in a set of seven which comprises a complete edition of all her works.

Zoe Akins was an artist who became successful as a Broadway playwright. For Akins, this was a hard earned title, which she achieved after years of false starts and near misses. She wrote over 40 plays, 18 of which appeared on the Broadway stage between 1919 and 1944. Also in her oeuvre are two novels, numerous short stories and essays, several film and television scripts, and two volumes of poetry. Akins constantly tried to balance her writing style so that it would suit her own moral code and simultaneously appeal to a paying audience. She was a woman in a field dominated by men, but she persevered and accomplished much including winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1935 for "The Old Maid."

This volume follows the progression of Akin's writing career. It primarily focuses on her Broadway plays, but also highlights other plays and writings (such as poems, film scripts, and short stories) which reflect various aspects of Akin's artistry. It will appeal to theatre, history, and women's studies scholars, as well as anyone interested in the literary career of a unique individual.

Introduction - PART 1 - The Ghost - Thyestes and Revenge Structure - The Spanish Tragedy: Dagger and Mirror - Antonio's Revenge: Stoic and Player - The Revenger's Tragedy: Mirror and Dagger - PART 2 HAMLET - Commandment - Performance - Unmasking - I Antithesis - II Deliverance - Appendix - Notes - Index

I come no more to make you laugh; things now That bear a weighty and a serious brow, Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe, Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow, We now present. Those that can pity here May, if they think it well, let fall a tear: The subject will deserve it. Such as give Their money out of hope they may believe May here find truth too. Those that come to see Only a show or two, and so agree The play may pass, if they be still and willing, I'll undertake may see away their shilling Richly in two short hours. Only they That come to hear a merry bawdy play, A noise of targets, or to see a fellow In a long motley coat guarded with yellow, Will be deceiv'd; for, gentle hearers, know,

"Ibadan" is the third volume in Wole Soyinka's series of memoirs, the sequel to "Ake and Isara". In a mixture of fact and fiction - to protect the innocent and nail the guilty and shape an often intolerable reality - it tells of the coming of age of a writer and political activist; and of a nation's betrayal. Linking national and international events with personal experience across 20 years, from confrontations with French immigration officers and the trauma of being black in Britain, to the direct experience of corruption, ballot-rigging, and power-mongering in his native Nigeria - a period otherwise known as the Penkelemes years - "Ibadan" is an exploration into themes of racism, politics and injustice.

When it was first published, "Radical Tragedy" was hailed as a groundbreaking reassessment of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. An engaged reading of the past with compelling contemporary significance, "Radical Tragedy" remains a landmark study of Renaissance drama and a classic of cultural materialist criticism. The corrected and reissued third edition of this critically acclaimed work includes a candid new Preface by the author and features a Foreword by Terry Eagleton.

Contemporary British Theatre: Breaking New Ground brings together a team of internationally prominent academics and delivers cutting-edge discourse on the strongly emerging tradition of experimentation in contemporary British theatre to redefine what the dramatic stands for today. The chapters focus on influential plays, playwrights and theatre practitioners to produce original and rigorous critical perspectives on the key debates informing theatre practice and scholarship today. This book places the spectator at the heart of the enquiry and examines the radical redefinition of form and content in the context of society, politics, authorship and intentionality, the metaphysical turn in drama, social interventions and resonance, expressive unpredictability, race and identity, ethics/responsibility and the boundaries of representation. Featuring contributors such as Dan Rebellato and Chris Megson, the volume discusses contemporary theatre by a range of playwrights including Martin Crimp, Caryl Churchill and Debbie Tucker Green.

Libation Bearers is the 'middle' play in the only extant tragic trilogy to survive from antiquity, Aeschylus' Oresteia, first produced in 458 BCE. This introduction to the play will be useful for anyone reading it in Greek or in translation. Drawing on his wide experience teaching about performance in the ancient world, C. W. Marshall helps readers understand how the play was experienced by its ancient audience. His discussion explores the impact of the chorus, the characters, theology, and the play's apparent affinities with comedy. The architecture of choral songs is described in detail. The book also investigates the role of revenge in Athenian society and the problematic nature of Orestes' matricide. Libation Bearers immediately entered the Athenian visual imagination, influencing artistic depictions on red-figured vases, and inspiring plays by Euripides and Sophocles. This study looks to the later plays to show how 5th-century audiences understood Libation Bearers. Modern reception of the play is integrated into the analysis. The volume includes a full range of ancillary material, providing a list of relevant red-figure vase illustrations, a glossary of technical terms, and a chronology of ancient and modern theatrical versions.

"Performing Libertinism in Charles II's Court: Politics, Drama, Sexuality" examines the performative nature of Restoration libertinism by reading reports of libertine activities and texts of libertine plays within the context of the fraternization between George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Sir Charles Sedley, Sir George Etherege, and William Wycherley. Webster argues that libertines, both real and imagined, performed traditionally secretive acts, including excessive drinking, sex, sedition, and sacrilege, in the public sphere. This eruption of the private into the public challenged a Stuart ideology that distinguished between the nation's public life and the king's and his subjects' private consciences. Although this eruption was contained by the early 1680s, the libertine performances this book analyzes nevertheless played an important part in the history of English radicalism.

Demastes, in his interesting study of the work of David Rabe, David Mamet, Sam Shepard, Charles Fuller, Beth Henley, and Marsha Norman, examines how these playwrights utilize the realist format to redirect perception of human life, how they cope with the consciously taken 'task of challenging old systems of thought from a base of new perspective.' The analyses of individual plays are preceded by a brief review of some earlier dramatic theories of realism revealing the roots and antecedents of the new forms. . . . Beyond Naturalism is a very useful and valuable contribution to drama and theatre studies. American Literature Demastes explores the work of a group of playwrights who have moved beyond the often-maligned naturalist approach to create what he terms the new realism in American theatre. Demastes argues that this new realism is separate and distinct from the narrow focus of naturalism and is the result of tapping into a growing tradition inherited from the experimental work of prior decades such as absurdist theatre and experimentation of the 1960s. The playwrights who most exemplify the new realism--David Rabe, David Mamet, Sam Shepard, Charles Fuller, Beth Henley, and Marsha Norman--are examined in depth. Each has separately taken on the challenge to modify the forms of traditional realism to fit more modern visions of existence. In the process, they have broken from naturalism, infusing realism with fresh and contemporary perspectives of the world around them. Demastes shows that even though these playwrights' return to realism has won them larger audiences and greater accessibility, the break from naturalist logic has sometimes confused American critics and audiences--leading them to conclude such works to be bad drama. To uncover the various points of confusion, Demastes not only analyzes the playwrights' contributions but also examines the critical impressions of their productions to assess the reactions of a theatre-going public raised on naturalist assumptions and now asked to adapt to the new alterations confronting them. This two-pronged approach enables the reader to both explore the evolution of new realism and assess the degree to which it can legitimately be considered a new form of American theatre.

Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life situates the individual works of Marlowe within the context of his overall literary career. Areas covered include: Marlowe's preference for foreign settings and his unusually accurate depictions of them; the importance of his scholarly background; his consistent portrayal of family groups as fissured and troubled; the challenge that his works posed to contemporary orthodoxies about religion, sexuality, and government; and the long and sometimes spectacular afterlife of his works and of his literary reputation as a whole.

Honestly the best science I've ever done and - frankly the best science in the history of humankind - has started with the same thought experiment: find the ways in which humanity thinks it is special... and assume that we're not. How do you plan for a catastrophe? Virologist Nathan Wolfe, named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in the World for his work tracking viral pandemic outbreaks, proposed pandemic insurance years before the novel coronavirus outbreak. No one bought it. Now, in a post-COVID world, we hear his story. A time-jumping tale based on the life and work of Nathan Wolfe (who also happens to be the playwright's husband). Though not a play about COVID19, it is a true story of a pandemic expert. A deep dive into the profundities of scientific exploration and modern Judaism, the lengths one goes for love and family, the bracing truths of fatherhood and discovery, and the harrowing realities of facing your own mortality, The Catastrophist is also a story of a main character battling the story he's in... and who is writing it.

"It's moral vision, as well as the Miller voice, which remains as strong and unrelenting as a prophet's, that distinguish Broken Glass." - The New York Times When Sylvia Gellburg, a young Jewish woman living in Brooklyn, becomes partially paralyzed from the waist down, her husband Phillip is shocked: what could've caused this sudden condition? The answer is Kristallnacht, the horrific, anti-Semitic event occurring halfway around the world. As the Gellburgs reckon with this pogrom and with the breakdown of their own marriage, a terrifying thought emerges: will the Jewish people ever be able to avoid persecution? Broken Glass is one of Miller's most moving and personal works, touching on themes of Jewish identity and anti-Semitism, winning him the Olivier Award for Best New Play in 1994. This Methuen Drama Student Edition is edited by Ambika Singh, and Nupur Tandon, with commentary and notes that explore the play's production history (including excerpts from an interview with director David Thacker,) as well as the dramatic, thematic and academic debates that surround it.

The essays in this volume challenge current 'givens' in medieval and early modern research around periodization and editorial practice. They showcase cutting-edge research practices and approaches in textual editing, and in manuscript and performance studies to produce new ways of reading and working for students and scholars.

Over the past two decades, theatre practitioners across the West have turned to documentary modes of performance-making to confront new socio-political realities. The essays in this book place this work in context, exploring historical and contemporary examples of documentary and 'verbatim' theatre, and applying a range of critical perspectives.

The Art of Experience provides an interdisciplinary analysis of selected plays from Ireland's premier female playwright, Marina Carr. Dagmara Gizlo explores the transformative impact of a theatrical experience in which interdisciplinary boundaries must be crossed. This book demonstrates that theatre is therapeutic and therapy is theatrical. The role of emotions, cognitions, and empathy in the theatrical experience is investigated throughout. Dagmara Gizlo utilises the methodological tools stemming from modern empirically grounded psychology (such as cognitive-behavioural therapy or CBT) to the study of theatre's transformative potential. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, performance, and literature, and will be a fascinating read for those at the intersection of cognitive studies and the humanities.

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 (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.

How should we read a text that does not exist, or present a play the manuscript of which is lost and the identity of whose author cannot be established for certain?

Such is the enigma posed by "Cardenio" - a play performed in England for the first time in 1612 or 1613 and attributed forty years later to Shakespeare (and Fletcher). Its plot is that of a 'novella' inserted into Don Quixote, a work that circulated throughout the major countries of Europe, where it was translated and adapted for the theatre. In England, Cervantes' novel was known and cited even before it was translated in 1612 and had inspired "Cardenio."

But there is more at stake in this enigma. This was a time when, thanks mainly to the invention of the printing press, there was a proliferation of discourses. There was often a reaction when it was feared that this proliferation would become excessive, and many writings were weeded out. Not all were destined to survive, in particular plays for the theatre, which, in many cases, were never published. This genre, situated at the bottom of the literary hierarchy, was well suited to the existence of ephemeral works. However, if an author became famous, the desire for an archive of his works prompted the invention of textual relics, the restoration of remainders ruined by the passing of time or, in order to fill in the gaps, in some cases, even the fabrication of forgeries. Such was the fate of "Cardenio" in the eighteenth century.

Retracing the history of this play therefore leads one to wonder about the status, in the past, of works today judged to be canonical. In this book the reader will rediscover the malleability of texts, transformed as they were by translations and adaptations, their migrations from one genre to another, and their changing meanings constructed by their various publics. Thanks to Roger Chartier's forensic skills, fresh light is cast upon the mystery of a play lacking a text but not an author.

For literary scholars, plays are texts; for scenographers, plays are performances. Yet clearly a drama is both text and performance. Dramatic Spaces examines period-specific stage spaces in order to assess how design shaped the thematic and experiential dimensions of plays. This book highlights the stakes of the debate about spatiality and the role of the spectator in the auditorium - if audience members are co-creators of the drama, how do they contribute? The book investigates: Roman comedy and Shakespearean dramas in which the stage-space itself constituted the primary scenographic element and actors' bodies shaped the playing space more than did sets or props the use of paid applauders in nineteenth-century Parisian theaters and how this practice reconfigured theatrical space transactions between stage designers and spectators, including work by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, William Ritman, and Eiko Ishioka Dramatic Spaces aims to do for stage design what reader-response criticism has done for the literary text, with specific case studies on Coriolanus, The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, Tales of Hoffman, M. Butterfly and Tiny Alice exploring the audience's contribution to the construction of meaning.

"This book examines how violence was used as a spectacle in Cuban and Argentine theater in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a reflection of and a dialogue with the violence occurring in the public arena. Using the international affair of the Caso Padilla as a way to appreciate how the notion of revolutionary spectacle pertains to culture, Ford deftly examines the use of violence in four plays from Cuba and Argentina to understand how simulated violence was used as a tool to address the very real violence that was taking place offstage."--BOOK JACKET.

The author considers the Elizabethan playwright Ben Jonson a realist and an acute observer of the transformation from feudalism to capitalism. Many of the forms and purposes of Jonson's realism resulted from the social dynamics of the London theater audience. In this book, Haynes presents a detailed literary historical argument about the sources and consequences of Jonson's realism. He examines the entanglements of life and art in Jonson's time both through a look at the life of that period and through insightful readings of Jonson's plays. The book polemicizes against the moral and formal pre-occupations of the last two generations of Jonson criticism proceeding it; it is instead informed by the social history and by the sociology of Pierre Bordieu and Norbert Elias.