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.

This book addresses a deceptively simple question: what accounts for the global success of A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen's most popular play? Using maps, networks, and images to explore the world history of the play's production, this question is considered from two angles: cultural transmission and adaptation. Analysing the play's transmission reveals the social, economic, and political forces that have secured its place in the canon of world drama; a comparative study of the play's 135-year production history across five continents offers new insights into theatrical adaptation. Key areas of research include the global tours of nineteenth-century actress-managers, Norway's soft diplomacy in promoting gender equality, representations of the female performing body, and the sexual vectors of social change in theatre.

This book asserts the extraordinary quality of mid-twentieth century playwright Terence Rattigan's dramatic art and its basis in his use of subtext, implication, and understatement. By discussing every play in chronological order, the book also articulates the trajectory of Rattigan's darkening vision of the human potential for happiness from his earlier comedies through his final plays in which death appears as a longed for peace. New here is the exploration through close analysis of Rattigan's style of writing dialogue and speeches, and how that style expresses Rattigan's sense of life. Likewise, the book newly examines how Rattigan draws on sources in Greek and Roman history, literature, and myth, as well as how he invites comparison with the work of other playwrights, especially Bernard Shaw and Shakespeare. It will appeal broadly to college and university students studying dramatic literature, but also and especially to actors and directors, and the play-going, play-reading public.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a prolific playwright with more than thirty plays to his credit. He is also known for his life-long, passionate engagement with theatre, first at Jorasanko and then at Santiniketan, in multiple roles as actor, director, singer, musician. However, during his own life-time and even after his demise, his experimental plays have proved challenging for directors to stage. Time and again they have been written off as unstageable by prominent theatre makers. Further complications have arisen from the presence of a spectre of authority around Tagore and his plays often promoted by Visva-Bharati, the institution he founded and which held the copyright of his works till 2001. This book travels through time and space intending to untangle the enigma presented by Tagore's plays. The book on one hand immerses itself into the archive of Tagore's plays and his dramaturgy of them in order to problematize the ways in which they have been interpreted. On the other, it also engages with productions of Tagore's plays during and after his life-time to understand the challenges directors have faced while staging them and the strategies they have embraced to circumvent them. While performing a subjective critical reading of the Tagore theatre-archive, an underlying objective of the book remains to understand the very concept of the archive, as it manifests itself in contemporary dramatic theatre.

This volume explores the relationship between the emphasis on performance in Elizabethan humanist education and the flourishing of literary brilliance around the turn of the sixteenth century. This study asks us what lessons we can learn today from Shakespeare's Latin grammar school. What were the cognitive benefits of an education so deeply rooted in what Demosthenes and Quintilian called "actio"-acting? Because of the vast difference between educational practice then and now, we have not often followed one essential thread: the focus on performance. This study examines the connections relevant to the education offered in schools today. This book will be of great interest to teachers, scholars, and administrators in performing arts and education.

Antonio and Mellida was the first play by John Marston performed by the newly revived Paul's Company in 1599. Marston sought to display a variety of talents, comic, tragic, satiric and historical, advertising his own dramatic skills and the prowess of the choristers of Paul's. The play is based on incidents in the reigns of Sforza, Francesco, Galeazzo and Lodovico, who were Dukes of Milan in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Marston displays a detailed knowledge of the dramatic works of Shakespeare, Seneca, Kyd and Nashe as well as the prose of Sidney, Erasmus, Montaigne, Florio and others. This edition relates the play to a wide variety of literary contexts. It also includes a comprehensive introduction, an analysis of staging, and full commentary. The text is based on a collation of all known copies of the 1602 Quarto and is presented in a thoroughly modernised format. -- .

From the controversy in 1995 that heralded "Blasted," to her death in February 1999, Sarah Kane built a reputation as an established playwright of international stature. This is the first volume of collected essays by some of the leading scholars in their field, providing a comprehensive approach to the body of work she produced in this brief period. Essays included cover the political, literary, and theatrical identities that have exerted influence on Kane's work, as well as a discussion and assessment of her innovative theatrical experiments and the performative issues that arise from within the plays. "Sarah Kane in Context" examines one of the most controversial and influential dramatists who emerged during the "In-Yer Face" generation of British dramatists in the 1990s and provides an essential guide to Kane for students and scholars alike.

This New Mermaids anthology brings together the four most popular and widely studied of Christopher Marlowe's plays: Tamburlaine, Parts 1 and 2, The Jew of Malta, Edward II and Dr Faustus. The new introduction by Brian Gibbons explores the plays in the context of early modern theatre, culture and politics, as well as examining their language, characters and themes. On-page commentary notes guide students to a better understanding and combine to make this an indispensable student edition ideal for study and classroom use from A Level upwards.

You didn't fancy it then? Fancy what? Getting in the taxi. No. Every story starts somewhere. It's the early hours of the morning and Danny's the last straggler at Laura's party. The flat's in a mess. And so are they. One more drink? David Eldridge (Market Boy, The Knot of the Heart, In Basildon) returns to the National Theatre with a sharp and astute two-hander that takes an intimate look at the first fragile moments of risking your heart and taking a chance. This tender and funny play received its world premiere at the National's Dorfman Theatre in October 2017.

More widely studied and more frequently performed than ever before, John Webster's" The Duchesss of Malfi "is here presented in an accessible and thoroughly up-to-date edition. Based on the often reprinted "Revels Plays Edition "of 1964, the notes have been augmented to cast further light on Webster's amazing dialogue and on the stage action which it implies. An entirely new introduction sets the tragedy in the context of pre-Civil War England and gives a revealing view of its themes, action and visual imagery. From its well-documented early performances to the two productions seen in the West End of London in the 1995-96 season, a stage history gives an account of the play in performance. Students, actors, directors and theatre-goers will fiind here a reappraisal of Webster's artistry in the tragedy which stands in the very first rank of plays from perhaps the greatest age of English theatre, and reasons why it has lived on stage with renewed force in the last decades of the twentieth century.

This book showcases the important, but often understudied, work of Nigerian women playwrights. As in many spheres of life in Nigeria, in literature and other creative arts the voices of men dominate, and the work of women has often been sidelined. However, Nigerian women playwrights have made important contributions to the development of drama in Nigeria, not just by presenting female identities and inequalities but by vigorously intervening in wider social and political issues. This book draws on perspectives from culture, language, politics, theory, orality and literature, to shine a light on the engaged creativity of women playwrights. From the trail blazing but more traditional contributions of Zulu Sofola, through to contemporary postcolonial work by Tess Osonye Onwueme, Julie Okoh, and Sefi Atta, to name just a few, the book shows the rich variety of work being produced by female Nigerian dramatists. This, the first major collection devoted to Nigerian women playwrights, will be an important resource for scholars of African theatre and performance, literature and women's studies.

The Self-Centred Art is a study of the plays of Ben Jonson and the actors who first performed in them. Jakub Boguszak shows how the idiosyncrasies of Jonson's comic characters were thrown into relief in actors' part-scripts-scrolls containing a single actor's lines and cues-some five hundred of which are reconstructed here from Jonson's seventeen extant plays. Reading Jonson's spectating parts, humorous parts, apprentice parts, and plotting parts, Boguszak argues that the kind of self-absorption which defines so many of Jonson's famous comic creations would have come easily to actors relying on these documents. Jonson's actors would have moreover worked on their cues, studied their speeches, and thought about the information excluded from their parts differently, depending on the type they had to play. Boguszak thus shows that Jonson brilliantly adapted his comedies to the way the actors worked, making the actors' self-centredness serve his art. This book addresses Jonson's dealings with the actors as well as the printers of his plays and supplements the discussion of different types of parts with a colourful range of case studies. In doing so, it presents a new way of understanding not just Ben Jonson, but early modern theatre at large.

Staging Detection reveals how the new figure of the stage detective emerged in nineteenth-century Britain. The first book to explore the productive intersections between detection and performance across a range of Victorian plays, Staging Detection foregrounds the role of the stage detective in shaping important theatrical modes of the period, from popular melodrama to society comedy. Beginning in 1863 with Tom Taylor's blockbuster play, The Ticket-of-Leave Man, the book criss-crosses London following the earliest performances of stage detectives. Centring the work of playwrights, novelists, critics and actors, from Sarah Lane and Horace Wigan to Wilkie Collins and Oscar Wilde, Staging Detection sheds new light on Victorian acting styles, furthers our understanding of melodrama, and resituates the famous Wildean dandy as a successor to the stage detective. Drawing on histories of masculinity and gender performance as well as developing scientific theory and nineteenth-century visual culture, Staging Detection shows how the earliest stage portrayals of the detective shaped broader Victorian debates concerning fraud, omniscience and earned authority. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre history, Victorian literature and popular culture - as well as anyone with an interest in the figure of the detective.

FIRST GENTLEMAN. You do not meet a man but frowns; our bloods No more obey the heavens than our courtiers Still seem as does the King's. SECOND GENTLEMAN. But what's the matter? FIRST GENTLEMAN. His daughter, and the heir of's kingdom, whom He purpos'd to his wife's sole son- a widow That late he married- hath referr'd herself Unto a poor but worthy gentleman. She's wedded; Her husband banish'd; she imprison'd. All Is outward sorrow, though I think the King Be touch'd at very heart.

Playing the Martyr is a book about the interplay between theater and religion in early modern France. Challenging the standard narrative of modernity as a process of increased secularization Christopher Semk demonstrates the centrality of religious thought and practices to the development of neoclassical poetics. Engaging with a broad corpus of religious plays, poetic treatises, devotional literature, and contemporary theory, Semk shows that religion was a vital interlocutor in early modern discussions concerning the definition of verisimilitude, the nature and purpose of spectacle, the mechanics of acting, and the position of the spectator. Well researched and persuasively argued, Playing the Martyr makes the case for a more complicated approach to the relationship between religion and literature, namely, one that does not treat religion as a theme deployed within literary works, but as an active player in literary invention. Indeed, it makes the case for a serious reconsideration of the role that religion plays in the development of modern, secular literary forms.

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.

A fully revised, expanded and updated new edition of a successful text which, following Miller's death in 2005, now examines the playwright's career as a whole.It is highly topical and provides much interest in Arthur Miller and his plays following his death in 2005.This study strikes a balance between the possible approaches to Miller's work. Individual works in the theatre and film are discussed in the context in which they first appeared. This fully revised new edition also examines Miller's career as a whole, exploring the ways in which his later work helps us to better understand the plays of his maturity.

Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer students and academics practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Essays from leading international scholars give invaluable insight into the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making the books ideal companions for study and research. Key features include: Essays on the plays' critical and performance history A keynote essay on current research and thinking about the play A selection of new essays by leading scholars A survey of resources to direct students' further reading about the play in print and online The blockbuster Tamburlaine plays (1587) instantly established Marlowe's reputation for experimenting with subversive, outrageous and immoral material. The plays follow the meteoric rise of a Scythian shepherd-turned-warlord, whose conquests of eastern emperors soon sees him established as the most powerful man in the world. The visual tableaux featured in the plays are iconic. He uses his enemy Bajazeth as a footstool, and has other emperors pull his chariot like horses. He burns the Qur'an on stage. The plays were memorable, too, for how they sounded: they showcased the power and variability of iambic pentameter, the meter that Shakespeare would go on to perfect. No history of Shakespeare's theatre is complete without understanding the influence and significance of Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays. Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader offers the definitive introduction to these plays and new perspectives on these seminal works. It provides an overview of their reception on stage and by critics, and offers fresh insights into the teaching of these plays in the classroom.

Theatre, History, Criticism, Soviet Union, Russia, Western countries, Drama, Asian,

This book focuses on the influence of classical authors on Ben Jonson's dramaturgy, with particular emphasis on the Greek and Roman playwrights and satirists. It illuminates the interdependence of the aspects of Jonson's creative personality by considering how classical performance elements, including the Aristophanic 'Great Idea,' chorus, Terentian/Plautine performative strategies, and 'performative' elements from literary satire, manifest themselves in the structuring and staging of his plays. This fascinating exploration contributes to the 'performative turn' in early modern studies by reframing Jonson's classicism as essential to his dramaturgy as well as his erudition. The book is also a case study for how the early modern education system's emphasis on imitative-contaminative practices prepared its students, many of whom became professional playwrights, for writing for a theatre that had a similar emphasis on recycling and recombining performative tropes and structures.

* The only book that provides a thorough introduction to the current state of play in Australian theatre, including coverage of previously marginalized voices; * Platforms previously marginalized voices in Australia, covering the work of writers of colour, queer writers and gender diverse writers; * Includes a series of duologues between major contemporary Australian playwrights which are provided in both written and podcast form.

This book compares the theatrical cultures of early modern England and Spain and explores the causes and consequences not just of the remarkable similarities but also of the visible differences between them. An exercise in multi-focal theatre history research, it deploys a wide range of perspectives and evidence with which to recreate the theatrical landscapes of these two countries and thus better understand how the specific conditions of performance actively contributed to the development of each country's dramatic literature. This monograph develops an innovative comparative framework within which to explore the numerous similarities, as well as the notable differences, between early modern Europe's two most prominent commercial theatre cultures. By highlighting the nuances and intricacies that make each theatrical culture unique while never losing sight of the fact that the two belong to the same broader cultural ecosystem, its dual focus should appeal to scholars and students of English and Spanish literature alike, as well as those interested in the broader history of European theatre. Learning from what one 'playground' - that is, the environment and circumstances out of which a dramatic tradition originates - reveals about the other will help solve not only the questions posed above but also others that still await examination. This investigation will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre history, comparative drama, early modern drama, and performance culture.

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.