In New Dramaturgies: Strategies and Exercises for 21st Century Playwriting, Mark Bly offers a new playwriting book with nine unique play-generating exercises. These exercises offer dramaturgical strategies and tools for confronting and overcoming obstacles that all playwrights face. Each of the chapters features lively commentary and participation from Bly's former students. They are now acclaimed writers and producers for media such as House of Cards, Weeds, Friday Night Lights, Warrior, and The Affair, and their plays appear onstage in major venues such as the Roundabout Theatre, Yale Rep, and the Royal National Theatre. They share thoughts about their original response to an exercise and why it continues to have a major impact on their writing and mentoring today. Each chapter concludes with their original, inventive, and provocative scene generated in response to Bly's exercise, providing a vivid real-life example of what the exercises can create. Suitable for both students of playwriting and screenwriting, as well as professionals in the field, New Dramaturgies gives readers a rare combination of practical provocation and creative discussion.

Clifford Odets. Arthur Miller. Paddy Chayefsky. Neil Simon. Jules Feiffer. Wendy Wasserstein. Tony Kushner. These leading American playwrights do not just happen to be Jewish: they are "Jewish playwrights." They and other Jewish playwrights have written out of their own experience, for general American audiences, about what it feels like to be twentieth-century American Jews. "Beyond the Golden Door "is the first book devoted to showing how Jewish playwrights have dramatized the great struggle to balance Old World heritage with New World opportunity--a struggle with implications for all American ethnicities.

This is the third and final volume of plays representing the only modern edition of Fielding's dramatic works. Most have not appeared in print for a century, and never previously in fully-edited form. Fielding is best known as a novelist but, like his great model Cervantes, he came to novel-writing from an important first career in professional theatre. He wrote twenty-eight plays, including comedies, satiric extravaganzas, and ballad operas. He was the leading playwright of his generation, an experimentalist and entrepreneur of dramatic form who sometimes also brought contemporary politics and public figures onto his stage with results even more dramatic off stage.
This volume presents nine plays from the final and most controversial years of his theatre career. The first, Don Quixote in England, is a ballad opera homage to Quixotic idealism played out against rustic English opportunism. Two other plays, including the long-running favourite The VirginUnmask'd, were written as star vehicles for Fielding's brilliant colleague Catherine Clive. The Universal Gallant is another of Fielding's ventures in serious social comedy, but the heart of the volume, as of this concluding period of Fielding's dramatic career, is the group of audacious satirical plays he wrote when he was running his own makeshift company at the Little Haymarket Theatre, including Pasquin and The Historical Register. Audiences flocked to these productions to see the cultural and political life of the moment ridiculed in Aristophanic explicitness, notoriously in one case (Eurydice Hiss'd) including a mocking stage caricature of the prime minister himself. That unamused minister, Sir Robert Walpole, shortly after saw through the 1737 Licensing Act which put an end to unsanctioned playhouses and plays, and to Fielding's own career in theatre.
The plays are given in critical unmodernized texts based on careful collation of the original editions, with explanatory notes and commentary on sources, stage history, and critical reception. All music is included, with appendices giving complete accounts of textual variation and bibliographic history for each play.

Good evening, I'm Inspector Carter. Take my case. This must be Charles Haversham! I'm sorry, this must've given you all a damn shock... The original version of the global hit play created by Mischief. After benefiting from a large and sudden inheritance, the inept and accident-prone Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society embark on producing an ambitious 1920s murder mystery. Hilarious disaster ensues and the cast start to crack under the pressure. Can they get the production back on track before the final curtain falls? This one-act version of Mischief's world famous The Play That Goes Wrong originally premiered at the Old Red Lion Theatre in London in 2012. Since then, the expanded two-act version has taken the world by storm and has been performed in over 35 countries across 5 continents, winning multiple awards including the WhatsOnStage and Olivier Award for Best New Comedy plus a Tony and Drama Desk Award for Best Scenic Design of a Play. This edition features the original one-act edition of the play that's perfect to be enjoyed on the page as well as in performance. A true global phenomenon, it is guaranteed to leave you aching with laughter.

A lively collection of essays from scholars from across Europe, North America and Australia. The book ranges from Shakespeare's use of manuals on war written for the sixteenth-century English public by an English mercenary, to reflections on the ways in which Shakespeare has been represented in Nazi Germany, wartime Denmark, or cold war Romania.

RUMOUR. Open your ears; for which of you will stop The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks? I, from the orient to the drooping west, Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold The acts commenced on this ball of earth. Upon my tongues continual slanders ride, The which in every language I pronounce, Stuffing the ears of men with false reports. I speak of peace while covert emnity, Under the smile of safety, wounds the world; And who but Rumour, who but only I, Make fearful musters and prepar'd defence, Whiles the big year, swoln with some other grief, Is thought with child by the stern tyrant war, And no such matter? Rumour is a pipe Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures, And of so easy and so plain a stop

The late D. F. McKenzie worked on this comprehensive edition of the works of the playwright, poet, librettist, and novelist William Congreve for more than twenty years, until his sudden death in 1999. This was a task he had taken over from Herbert Davis, to whom this edition is dedicated. During that time McKenzie uncovered new verse and letters, collated Congreve's texts, recorded their complicated textual history, constructed appendices that shed light on the dramatic context in which Congreve worked, and examined how his contemporaries received Congreve's work. More importantly, McKenzie has convincingly re-evaluated Congreve's works and life to transform our image of the man and his reputation.
McKenzie here follows the editorial practice suggested in two early editions of the Works published by Congreve's friend, the bookseller Jacob Tonson, in 1710 and 1719. These three volumes follow a plan similar to that in the Tonson edition, with The Old Batchelor, The Double-Dealer, and Love for Love collected in the first, a central volume with The Way of the World, and a final volume with Congreve's novel Incognita, some of his prose works, letters, and later verse. In each case, Congreve's work is left to speak for itself, unencumbered by intrusive notes, textual apparatus, or collations, which are gathered instead near the end of each volume.
This edition will be an invaluable resource for scholars for many years to come. It is a monument to McKenzie's own scholarship as well as to the integrity of William Congreve.

Faust stories are found across the ages and the arts. From its earliest to most recent expressions, the Faust figure continues to capture our imagination, dealing with problems and themes that are still relevant for a twenty-first century audience. Of the many variations on the Faust-myth, Goethe's remains especially provocative and laden with meaning and is the work most responsible for determining the subsequent character of the Faust archetype. His Faust reflects an individual who asserts, yet wrestles unrelentingly with the futility of faith, the bankruptcy of knowledge, and the loss of meaning. One of the greatest texts of both German and world literature, "Faust, Parts I and II", confronts us with pressing questions about rebellion and suffering, faith and its loss, reality and simulation, order and chaos, weakness and power, technology and human improvement. This monograph offers a new interpretation of Goethe's famous play, emphasising its continuing significance today.

Magicians, necromancers and astrologers are assiduous characters in the European golden age theatre. This book deals with dramatic characters who act as physiognomists or palm readers in the fictional world and analyses the fictionalisation of physiognomic lore as a practice of divination in early modern Romance theatre from Pietro Aretino and Giordano Bruno to Lope de Vega, Calderon de la Barca and Thomas Corneille.

While the infamous Theatre du Grand-Guignol in Paris closed its doors in 1962, the particular form of horror theatre it spawned lives on and has, moreover, witnessed something of a resurgence over the past twenty years. During its heyday it inspired many imitators, though none quite as successful as the Montmartre-based original. In more recent times, new Grand-Guignol companies the world over have emerged to reimagine the form for a new generation of audiences. This book, the fourth volume in University of Exeter Press's series on the Grand-Guignol by Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson, examines the ongoing influence and legacy of the Theatre du Grand-Guignol through an appraisal of its contemporary imitators and modern reincarnations. As with the previous volumes, Grand-Guignolesque consists of a lengthy critical introduction followed by a series of previously unpublished scripts, each with its own contextualizing preface. The effect thereof is to map the evolution of horror theatre over the past 120 years, asking where the influence of the Grand-Guignol is most visible today, and what might account for its recent resurgence. This book will be of interest not only to the drama student, theatre historian and scholar of popular theatre, but also to the theatre practitioner, theatregoer and horror fan.

Designed to meet the requirements for students at GCSE and A level, this accessible educational edition offers the complete text of The History Boys with a comprehensive study guide. Highlights of Andrew Bruff's guide include: - detailed analyses of character, theme and structure; - a clear introduction to the context of the play and its author; - key quotations and activities both for the student working alone and in the classroom. An unruly bunch of bright, funny sixth-form boys in pursuit of sex, sport and a place at university. A maverick English teacher at odds with the young and shrewd supply teacher. A headmaster obsessed with results; a history teacher who thinks he's a fool. In Alan Bennett's award-winning and hugely popular play, staffroom rivalry and the anarchy of adolescence provoke insistent questions about history and how you teach it, about education and its purpose.

Four Caribbean Women Playwrights aims to expand Caribbean and postcolonial studies beyond fiction and poetry by bringing to the fore innovative women playwrights from the French Caribbean: Ina Cesaire, Maryse Conde, Gerty Dambury, Suzanne Dracius. Focussing on the significance of these women writers to the French and French Caribbean cultural scenes, the author illustrates how their work participates in global trends within postcolonial theatre. The playwrights discussed here all address socio-political issues, gender stereotypes, and the traumatic slave and colonial pasts of the Caribbean people. Investigating a range of plays from the 1980s to the early 2010s, including some works that have not yet featured in academic studies of Caribbean theatre, and applying theories of postcolonial theatre and local Caribbean theatre criticism, Four Caribbean Women Playwrights should appeal to scholars and students in the Humanities, and to all those interested in the postcolonial, the Caribbean, and contemporary theatre.

This book subjects the most accomplished and important of Seneca's tragedies Thyestes to the kind of critical analysis now available for authors such as Virgil, Ovid and Lucan. Drawing many insights from psychoanalytic theory, and recent advances in post-Virgilian literary criticism, it also discusses several other plays of Seneca. The volume presents, therefore, a detailed and comprehensive analysis of all the main themes and stylistic features of Seneca's tragedies. While stressing the importance of Thyestes in post-Classical aesthetics, the study offers important insights into authors such as Ovid and Lucan as well.

The history play is an extremely popular genre among English playwrights of this century, yet very little research has been done in the field. In particular, the sheer size and complexity of the subject appears to have prevented critics from attempting to arrive at a clear definition of the genre. This book examines the term 'history play' afresh, seeking to define more precisely the scope and the limits of the genre in relation to twentieth-century ideas of and attitudes to history.

This book examines the figure of Joan of Arc as depicted in stage works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially those based on or related to Schiller's 1801 romantic tragedy, Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans). The author elucidates Schiller's appropriation of themes from Euripides's Iphigenia plays, chiefly the quality of "sublime sanctity," which transforms Joan's image from a victim of fate to a warrior-prophet who changes history through sheer force of will. Finding the best-known works of his time about her - Voltaire's La pucelle d'Orleans and Shakespeare's Henry VI, part I - utterly dissatisfying, Schiller set out to replace them. Die Jungfrau von Orleans was a smashing success and inspired various subsequent treatments, including Verdi's opera Giovanna d'Arco and a translation by the father of Russian Romanticism, Vasily Zhukovsky, on which Tchaikovsky based his opera Orleanskaya deva (The Maid of Orleans). In turn, the book's final chapter examines Shaw's Saint Joan and finds that the Irish playwright's vociferous complaints about Schiller's "romantic flapdoodle" belie a surprising affinity for Schiller's approach.

The Pronomos Vase is the single most important piece of pictorial evidence for ancient theatre to have survived from ancient Greece. It depicts an entire theatrical chorus and cast along with the celebrated musician Pronomos, in the presence of their patron god, Dionysos. In this collection of essays, illustrated with nearly 60 drawings and photographs, leading specialists from a variety of disciplines tackle the critical questions posed by this complex hub of evidence. The discussion covers a wide range of perspectives and issues, including the artist's oeuvre; the pottery market; the relation of this piece to other artistic, and especially celebratory, artefacts; the political and cultural contexts of the world that it was produced in; the identification of figures portrayed on it: and the significance of the Pronomos Vase as theatrical evidence. The volume offers not only the most recent scholarship on the vase but also some ground-breaking interpretations of it.

Heracles was Greece's most important hero. He was also a strong candidate for representing fifth century Athens who needed a hero of Hellenic stature to be associated with their new empire. However, he is also a deeply problematic figure: a violent hero of ancient epic, with an aristocratic nature and a murderous temper, who does not naturally fit into the new ideals of democratic society at Athens. Heracles and Athenian Propaganda examines how the hero was appropriated and portrayed by Athens in religion, politics, architecture and literature, with a detailed study of Euripides' Heracles in relation to this interplay between the hero and the city's ideology.Examining how this particular play fits within the space of the polis and its political ideology, the title asks specific questions of tragedy and politics: how does Euripides' tragic drama of grief, insanity and murder reconciles this hero to a palatable, patriotic ideal? How does the tragic hero relates to his own representations and his cult within the polis? In a city so marked by iconographic propaganda, how did the imagery influence the audience?By looking at the play's larger contexts of literary, civic, political, religious and ideological, new readings are offered to the most problematic elements of the play, including the question of its unity, the nature of the hero's madness and the role of the gods.

This text focuses on the plays produced in England in the last two decades - a period that has received relatively little critical attention. The primary aim of the collection is to celebrate the range of British drama since 1970, by examining the work of 14 important and representative playwrights. This emphasis on range applies not only to the dramatists chosen for inclusion, but to the critics as well - specifically to the diversity of critical methodology demonstrated in their essays, thematic study, reader-response theory, semiotics, structuralism and performance theory.

Completed only two months before the author's execution in Granada at the age of thirty-eight, La casa de Bernarda Alba marks the completion of Lorca's 'trilogia de la tierra espanola' and is commonly held to be his greatest play. The theme of vitality and repression that runs as a leitmotif through his writings takes on a clearer social dimension in the 'drama de mujeres en los pueblos de Espana', with the presentation of a household of five unmarried daughters tyrannised by their mother's excessive concern with social class and obscurantist village morality. -- .

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.

Best known as the author of "Waiting for Godot," Samuel Beckett was one of the most distinguished writers of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969, and his works have secured him a lasting place in the literary canon. The critical response to his fiction has been overwhelming. Numerous books and thousands of articles have been published on Beckett, primarily in Europe, the United States, and Canada. Since he wrote most of his works in French, and then translated them himself into English, critics responded to different versions of his works. This reference book documents the critical response to Beckett from his earliest prose and poetry to the public reaction to his death in 1989. Reviews and scholarly articles representing the response to Beckett's creative works are included. Selections are arranged chronologically, so that the reader may trace the reception of Beckett's works over time. An introduction summarizes Beckett's enormous contribution to literature, and a bibliography lists works for further reading.

Winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for literature, Irish-born author Samuel Beckett earned a solid reputation for being one of the most important authors of the 20th century. Best known as the author of "Waiting for Godot," Beckett wrote other dramatic works, such as "Endgame" and "Krapp's Last Tape." He wrote several novels, including "Molloy," "Malone Dies," and "The Unnamable," and a number of poems and short stories. His innovative approach to language, character, plot, and narrative style was appreciated but sometimes criticized, and his nontraditional concepts of time and space taught readers to approach literature in a new way. Though he experimented with literary forms, his works are within the 20th century intellectual tradition of alienation, isolation, and pessimism.

Through essays and reviews, this reference book documents the critical response to Beckett's poetry, fiction, and drama from his earliest works to the public reaction to his death in 1989. Because Beckett often wrote in French and then translated his works into English, scholars responded to several versions of the same work. Because Beckett also had an exceptional knowledge of world literature, philosophy, mathematics, and the sciences, his works are dense with meaning and have invited a broad range of critical approaches. This reference is divided into several sections that roughly correspond with the different genres Beckett utilized. Within each section, reviews and seminal articles are arranged chronologically, so that the reader may trace the response to Beckett over time. An introductory essay discusses the overall response to Beckett, and a bibliography lists works for further reading.

This volume contains nine essays which debate issues arising from contemporary literary theory in relation to drama of the modern period. The authors propose new theoretical approaches to recent drama which derive from post-structuralism, semiotics, feminism, Bakhtinian theory and psychoanalysis. The essays range over much of the "canonical" drama which has been subjected to literary approaches and suggest ways of re-reading well-known texts.;The introduction examines the playwright's authority over textual meaning and surveys existing work which relates theory and drama. The playwrights discussed include Ann Jellicoe, Alan Bleasdale, Jill Hyem and Anne Valery, Shelagh Delaney, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Howard Brenton, Howard Barker, John McGrath, Joe Orton, Caryl Churchill, Trevor Griffiths and David Hare.

"Staging Motherhood" examines the stage representations of motherhood, centring on post-1956 British women playwrights. Asking to what extent transformations in women's lives have impacted on women's theatre, and what strategies have been employed by women in their writing and performing practices, Jozefina Komporaly examines the interactions between the personal, the political and the theatrical. Contributing to a range of discourses, including gender studies, cultural studies and above all theatre and performance studies, this timely volume is crucial to our understanding of women's drama in this period.