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 Handbook provides an introductory guide to "The Winter's Tale" offering a scene-by-scene theatrically aware commentary, contextual documents, a brief history of the text and first performances, case studies of key performances and productions, a survey of film and TV adaptation, a wide sampling of critical opinion and further reading.

The Reception of Aeschylus' Plays through Shifting Models and Frontiers addresses the need for an integrated approach to the study and staging of Aeschylus' plays. It offers an invigorating discussion about the transmission and reception of his plays and explores the interrelated tasks of editing, translating, adapting and remaking them for the page and the stage. The volume seeks to reshape current debates about the place of his tragedies in the curriculum and the repertory in a scholarly manner that is accessible and innovative. Each chapter makes a significant and original contribution to its selected topic, but the collective strength of the volume rests on its simultaneous appeal to readers in theatre studies, classical studies, performance studies, comparative studies, translation studies, adaptation studies, and, naturally, reception studies.

Eighteenth-century drama is often dismissed as homogenous, aesthetically uninteresting, or politically complacent. This book reveals the incredibly intriguing and intricate nature of the periods history plays and their often messy dramatisaton of the complexities of patriotic rhetoric and national identification.

This book is an account of the history and continuation of plague as a potent metaphor since the disease ceased to be an epidemic threat in Western Europe, engaging with twentieth-century critiques of fascism, anti-Semitic rhetoric, the Oedipal legacy of psychoanalysis and its reception, and film spectatorship and the zombie genre.

This collection brings together a group of distinguished and original theater historians engaged in rethinking the nature of early modern theater history as a discipline. Whether focusing on the relation between scripts and performance practice, the structure of theatrical companies, the social dimensions of drama, or the archaeology of the stage, all are concerned with basic questions of evidence and interpretation, and offer significant, and often startling, revisions of our view of the early modern theater.

This collection of 15 essays surveys the work of some of the most major British and Irish dramatists since 1960. Included are four dramatists - Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Peter Shaffer and Peter Nichols - who began writing plays before 1960, and whose work has since continued to develop. Most of the dramatists considered, however, are those who have begun writing more recently, and who illustrate some of the distinctive characteristics of British and Irish drama of the present.;James Acheson is co-editor of "Beckett's Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company" and editor of "The British and Irish Novel since 1960".

Complementing other volumes in the Shakespeare Criticism Series, this collection of twenty original essays will expand the critical contexts in which Antony and Cleopatra can be enjoyed as both literature and theater. The essays will cover a wide spectrum of topics and utilize a diversity of scholarly methodologies, including textual and performance-oriented approaches, intertextual studies, as well as feminist, psychoanalytical, Marxist, and postcolonial inquiries. The volume will also feature an extensive introduction by the editor surveying the under-examined performance history and critical trends/legacy of this complex play. Contributors include prominent Shakespeare scholars David Bevington, Dympna Callaghan, Leeds Barroll, David Fuller, Dorothea Kehler, and Linda Woodbridge.

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.

LEONATO. I learn in this letter that Don Pedro of Arragon comes this night to Messina. MESSENGER. He is very near by this. He was not three leagues off when I left him. LEONATO. How many gentlemen have you lost in this action? MESSENGER. But few of any sort, and none of name. LEONATO. A victory is twice itself when the achiever brings home full numbers. I find here that Don Pedro hath bestowed much honour on a young Florentine called Claudio.

First published in 1970, this book includes all of the annual editions and also a final pamphlet of Samhain: October 1901 - November 1908, a literary magazine edited by W. B. Yeats. Samhain was one of the several magazines that the Irish Literary Theatre (later to become The Abbey Theatre) produced and it was born when the original magazine, Beltaine, came to an end in 1900. Yeats's editorial role was essential to the publication which served to publicize the work of the Theatre, promote current works of Irish playwrights and challenging those of their English opponents. The magazine mainly consists of a series of essays on the theatre in Dublin, and supplementing these are explanations and discussions of new plays, excerpts from which are often included. This book will be of interest to those with an interest in Yeats, early nineteenth-century literature, and Irish theatre.

This book is a study of August Strindberg's famous drama "Miss Julie, "presented in both Swedish and English. Since it was first performed in 1888, "Miss Julie "has became one of the most successful plays written by Strindberg, widely considered one of the pioneers of modern drama. The book provides a penetrating analysis of the author's text, followed by a close investigation of Ingmar Bergman's much lauded 1985 production at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. "Drama as Text and Performance "is intended as a paradigmatic illustration of similarities and differences between the two media--textand performance and their recipients, readers and spectators.

Maria Irene Fornes is the most influential female American dramatist of the 20th century. That is the argument of this important new study, the first to assess Fornes's complete body of work.

Scott T. Cummings considers comic sketches, opera libretti and unpublished pieces, as well as her best-known plays, in order to trace the evolution of her dramaturgy from the whimsical Off-Off Broadway plays of the 1960s to the sober, meditative work of the 1990s. The book also reflects on her practice as an inspirational teacher of playwriting and the primary director of her own plays.

Drawing on the latest scholarship and his own personal research and interviews with Fornes over two decades, Cummings examines Fornes's unique significance and outlines strategies for understanding her fragmentary, enigmatic, highly demanding theater.

What are Shakespeare's uses of the conceptual space of conflict? And what has been the role played by principles, patterns and situations of conflict in the construction of the Shakespeare myth, and in its European and then global spread? This collection looks, from a truly pan-European vantage point, at the variety of conflictive and conflicting dimensions embedded in Shakespeare's texts (Part I); at the way Shakespeare's universe of discourse has been enlisted to address and dramatize conflicts of a socio-political, cultural or aesthetic nature (Part II); and at how Shakespearean meanings have been renegotiated through reception and reproduction in actual historical contexts of strife or outright belligerence (Part III). The fascinatingly complex picture that emerges from the original studies gathered here provides new insight into Shakespeare's unique position in world literature and culture.

Euripides' Electra opened up for its audience an opportunity to become self-aware as to the appeal of tragic Kunstsprache: it both reflected and sustained traditional, aristocratically-inflected assumptions about the continuity of appearance and substance, even in a radical democracy. A complex analogy between social and aesthetic valuation is played out and brought to light. The characterization of Orestes early in the play demonstrates how social appearances made clear the identity of well-born, and how they were still assumed to indicate superior virtue and agency. On the aesthetic side of the analogy, one of the functions of tragic diction, as an essential indication of heroic character and agency, comes into view in a dramatic and thematic sequence that begins with Achilles ode and ends with the planning of the murders. Serious doubts are created as to whether Orestes will realize the assumed potential inherent in his heroic genealogy and, at the same time, as to whether the components of his character as an aesthetic construct are congruent with such qualities and agency. Both sides of this complex analogy are thus problematized, and, at a metapoetic level, its nature and bases are exposed for reflection.

The word "like" occurs some 2,400 times in the writings ascribed to Shakespeare. So many occurrences of the word suggest that Shakespeare's is a theater of likeness, "as you like it." This book demonstrates that part of the enduring value of Shakespeare's art is his poetry of likeness here, in the "land of unlikeness," where human beings invent their likenesses. It shows that Shakespeare's theater is also Shakespeare's theory of the psychology of likeness and unlikeness in the human striving for the most elusive (and allusive) of all attainments, an individual identity. "This is an extraordinary book, an examination like no other of Shakespeare's plays, a brilliant study . . . that will help shape for the next generation the way the world reads Shakespeare. It is long, dense, exciting, and exact. . . . But those to whom this method is congenial will treasure this work and will come to a new understanding of where Shakespeare's great power resides." - Mark Taylor, Professor of English, Manhattan College. "Professor Shoaf has picked up on Shakespeare's use of the word 'like' with its interesting ambiguities. . . . I can imagine this book being cited by Shakespeare critics and scholars in all kinds of contexts for years and years. . . . This book looks like a winner." - Norman N. Holland, Marston-Milbauer Professor of English, University of Florida. "I find this book to be a valuable and useful contribution to the understanding of Shakespeare. It is original and stimulating." - Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities, Yale University.

The most lauded playwright in American history, Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) won four Pulitzer Prizes and a Nobel Prize for a body of work that includes The Iceman Cometh, Mourning Becomes Electra, Desire Under the Elms, and Long Day's Journey into Night. His life, the direct source for so much of his art, was one of personal tumult from the very beginning. The son of a famous actor and a quiet, morphine-addicted mother, O'Neill had experienced alcoholism, a collapse of his health, and bouts of mania while still a young man. Based on years of extensive research and access to previously untapped sources, Sheaffer's authoritative biography examines how the pain of O'Neill's childhood fed his desire to write dramas and affected his artistically successful and emotionally disastrous life.

Shakespeare had extraordinary intelligence, unheard-of powers of observation and interpretation, a soaring imagination, a way with words that defies description, and a defining interest in the theater. He brought kings, queens, heroes, and peasantry to the stage so they could be seen in a more realistic fashion. Even so, in modern times, assistance is often needed to interpret Shakespeare's work.

In "A Leg Up on the Canon," author Jim McGahern provides an extensive biography of Shakespeare and offers an introductory guide to his histories, comedies, tragedies, romances, and poems. McGahern presents summaries of the texts, explanations of difficult passages, extensive historical context, and glossaries of terms no longer in use. In each volume, he outlines the plot of plays in that category and then delivers a one-act play with inclusive commentary. McGahern includes pertinent remarks and important speeches and soliloquies interlaced with brief explanations and descriptions of the actions on stage as well as plot developments.

"A Leg Up on the Canon," a four-volume series, provides insights into the word music of the talented man from Stratford.

First published in English 1961, this reissue relates the problems of form and style to the development of dramatic speech in pre-Shakespearean tragedy. The work offers positive standards by which to assess the development of pre-Shakespearean drama and, by tracing certain characteristics in Elizabethan tragedy which were to have a bearing on Shakespeare's dramatic technique, helps to illuminate the foundations on which Shakespeare built his dramatic oeuvre.

Arguably the first play in a Shakespearean tetralogy, Richard II is a unique and compelling political drama whose themes still resonate today. It is one of the few Shakespeare plays written entirely in verse and its format presents unique theatrical challenges. Politically engaged and controversial, it raises crucial debates about the relationship between early modern art, audience response and state power. This collection provides a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the critical and theatrical history of the play. The substantial introduction surveys the history of critical interpretations of Richard II since the eighteenth century. The eleven newly written critical essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field then adopt an eclectic range of critical approaches that encourage scholars and students to pursue new and imaginative directions with the text.

Weyward Macbeth, a volume of entirely new essays, provides innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to the various ways Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' has been adapted and appropriated within the context of American racial constructions. Comprehensive in its scope, this collection addresses the enduringly fraught history of 'Macbeth' in the United States, from its appearance as the first Shakespearean play documented in the American colonies to a proposed Hollywood film version with a black diasporic cast. Over two dozen contributions explore 'Macbeth's' haunting presence in American drama, poetry, film, music, history, politics, acting, and directing - all through the intersections of race and performance.

Joyce Rogers sheds new light upon Shakespeare's last public words through her study of medieval and Renaissance ecclesiastical and testamentary laws and custom. Professor Rogers provides extensive background material on English legal history and shows that the legal documents of the time do give legal answer to the doubts and speculations that have grown up around Shakespeare's will. She shows how the will is replete with elements of civil and common as well as ecclesiastical law and custom, making more understandable the disputed points of Shakespeare's will, and establishing that the will was as correct, incontestable, and conventional as possible.

The main thrust of the book, however, is not on the law as such. It is on how the law was used by Shakespeare to serve the best interests and needs of the women and children in his family as well as the friends named therein. As such, the book will be invaluable to students and scholars of Elizabethan society and to all Shakespearean scholars.

A.M. Gibbs provides an authoritative and comprehensive account of the life, career and associations of George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), one of the most eminent and influential literary figures of the modern age. Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished material, this work illuminates the complex fabric of Shaw's extraordinary career as playwright, novelist, critic, orator, political activist, social commentator, avant-garde thinker and controversialist. Images of Shaw's daily private life, and of his tangled love affairs, flirtations and friendships, are intertwined with the records of his prodigiously productive career as public figure and creative writer, in a fully documented study which is both a scholarly resource and a lively biographical portrait. An introductory chapter explores theoretical issues in biography raised by the chronology form; and a chapter on Shaw's ancestry and family supplies new evidence about his Irish background. A Who's Who section contains thumbnail sketches of over two hundred contemporaries of Shaw who had significant associations with him.