Shakespeare in the Present is a stunning collection of essays by Terence Hawkes, which engage with, explain, and explore 'presentism'. Presentism is a critical manoeuvre which uses relevant aspects of the contemporary as a crucial trigger for its investigations. It deliberately begins with the material present and lets that set the interrogative agenda. This book suggests ways in which its principles may be applied to aspects of Shakespeare's plays.
Hawkes concentrates on two main areas in which Presentism impacts on the study of Shakespeare. The first is the concept of 'devolution' in British politics. The second is presentism's commitment to a reversal of conceptual hierarchies such as primary/secondary and past/present, and the interaction between performance and reference. The result is to sophisticate and expand our notion of performing and to refocus interest on what the early modern theatre meant by the activity it termed 'playing'.

A study of how the use of Ovid in Middle English texts affected Shakespeare's treatment of the poet. The debt owed by Shakespeare to Ovid is a major and important topic in scholarship. This book offers a fresh approach to the subject, in aiming to account for the Middle English literary lenses through which Shakespeare and his contemporaries often approached Greco-Roman mythology. Drawing its principal examples from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Lucrece, and Twelfth Night, it reinvestigates a selection of moments in Shakespeare's works that have been widely identified in previous criticism as "Ovidian", scrutinising their literary alchemy with an eye to uncovering how ostensibly classical references may be haunted by the under-acknowledged, spectral presences of medieval intertexts and traditions. Its central concern is the mutual hauntings of Ovid, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Gower in the early modern literary imagination; it demonstrates that "Ovidian" allusions to mythological figures such as Ariadne, Philomela, or Narcissus in Shakespeare's dramatic and poetic works were sometimes simultaneously mediated by the hermeneutic and affective legacies of earlier vernacular texts,including The Legend of Good Women, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Confessio Amantis. LINDSAY ANN REID is a Lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

The 'Sound of Shakespeare' reveals the surprising extent to which Shakespeare's art is informed by the various attitudes, beliefs, practices and discourses that pertained to sound and hearing in his culture.
In this engaging study, Wes Folkerth develops listening as a critical practice, attending to the ways in which Shakespeare's plays express their author's awareness of early modern associations between sound and particular forms of ethical and aesthetic experience. Through readings of the acoustic representation of deep subjectivity in Richard III, of the 'public ear' in Antony and Cleopatra, the receptive ear in Coriolanus, the grotesque ear in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the 'greedy ear' in Othello, and the 'willing ear' in Measure for Measure, Folkerth demonstrates that by listening to Shakespeare himself listening, we derive a fuller understanding of why his works continue to resonate so strongly with is today.

The 'Sound of Shakespeare' reveals the surprising extent to which Shakespeare's art is informed by the various attitudes, beliefs, practices and discourses that pertained to sound and hearing in his culture.
In this engaging study, Wes Folkerth develops listening as a critical practice, attending to the ways in which Shakespeare's plays express their author's awareness of early modern associations between sound and particular forms of ethical and aesthetic experience. Through readings of the acoustic representation of deep subjectivity in Richard III, of the 'public ear' in Antony and Cleopatra, the receptive ear in Coriolanus, the grotesque ear in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the 'greedy ear' in Othello, and the 'willing ear' in Measure for Measure, Folkerth demonstrates that by listening to Shakespeare himself listening, we derive a fuller understanding of why his works continue to resonate so strongly with is today.

Beth Henley was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play for her first full-length play, Crimes of the Heart, yet there has been no book-length consideration of her body of work until now. This volume includes original essays that contextualize and analyze her works from a variety of perspectives, focusing on her vexed status as a southern writer, her use of the comic grotesque, and her alleged feminist critiques of modern society. Receiving special attention are lesser-known plays which are crucial to understanding Henley's development as a playwright and postmodern thinker. This new collection marks an important addition to our Casebooks on Modern Dramatists series.

This book explores the inspirations and creative process of America's Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights of the last dozen years. There is a chapter on each playwright: Wasserstein, Wilson, Simon, Schenkkan, Kushner, Albee, Foote, Larson, Vogel, Edson, and Margulies. It also includes interviews in which these artists speak about the state of theatre in America, offering their prescriptions for survival.

'It's all real. All of it. Everything bad is real' - Moe Alistair McDowall's Pomona was first staged in 2014 and won properly startling, and startled, acclaim. Its edgeland setting permits a surrealistic disengagement of linear forms of time, which is both dreamlike and wildly funny; nightmarish and ominously enveloping. The play has as its imaginative springboard a landscape which is both real and surreal. It offers an unforgettable journey into radical uncertainty, alongside unpredictable action that presents and questions the forms by which all too much of British life is lived. Rabey offers us a wild plunge into this modern English urban rabbit hole, a haunting and bewildering high-stakes hunt for meaning and value, set in a gothic noir Manchester, possibly dystopian (or possibly not).

The late twentieth century saw an explosion of interest in semiotics, the science of the signs and processes by which we communicate. In this study, the first of its kind in English, Keir Elam shows how this new 'science' can provide a radical shift in our understanding of theatrical performance, one of our richest and most complex forms of communication.
Elam traces the history of semiotic approaches to performance, from 1930s Prague onwards, and presents a model of theatrical communication. In the course of his study, he touches upon the 'logic' of the drama and the analysis of dramatic discourse. This edition also includes a new post-script by the author, looking at the fate of theatre semiotics since the publication of this book, and a fully updated bibliography. Much praised for its accessibility, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama remains a 'must-read' text for all those interested in the analysis of theatrical performance.

When critical theory met literary studies in the 1970s and 80s, some of the most radical and exciting theoretical work centred on quasi-sacred figure of Shakespeare. In Alternative Shakespeares, John Drakakis brought together key essays by founding figures in this movement to remake Shakespeare studies.
A new afterword by Robert Weimann outlines the extraordinary impact of Alternative Shakespeares on academic Shakespeare studies. But as yet, the Shakespeare myth continues to thrive both in Stratford and in our schools. These essays are as relevant and as powerful as they were upon publication and with a contributor list that reads like a 'who's who' of modern Shakespeare studies, Alternative Shakespeares demands to be read.

Molière's plays are the cornerstone of the French Classical dramatic repertoire. Adapted and exploited in his day by dramatists of the English Restoration, they are now again growing in popularity.
In this detailed and fascinating volume, Gerry McCarthy examines the practice and method of possibly the greatest actor-dramatist. From the rough farces of Molière's days on the road to the creation of the diverse and spectacular court entertainments on his return to Paris, McCarthy sheds new light on the dramatic intelligence and theatrical understanding of Molière's writing for the actor.
Drawing on Molière's own brief discussions of performance and the contemporary evidence of his practice, this is a crucial addition to the debate on style and method in classical acting and on the staging of classical plays on the contemporary stage.

This classic work not only records developments in the form and style of Greek drama, it also analyses the reasons for these changes. It provides illuminating answers to questions that have confronted generations of students, such as:
* why did Aeschylus introduce the second actor?
* why did Sophocles develop character drawing?
* why are some of Euripides' plots so bad and others so good?
Greek Tragedy is neither a history nor a handbook, but a penetrating work of criticism which all students of literature will find suggestive and stimulating.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203412605

This book traces the presence of the theatre, both literally and metaphorically, in the plays and poetry of Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens, and examines the parallel depictions of modern 'consciousness' as performance, as 'staging' that are found in both authors' work. Approaching the question of consciousness for these two writers in its specific literary and cultural contexts, the author shows how the concepts of stage and theatre allow both Stein and Stevens to articulate a form of modernist consciousness that is created and self-creating.

In this volume, the author argues that blood was, crucially, a means by which dramatists negotiated shifting contours of domesticity in 16th and 17th century England. Early modern English drama vividly addressed contemporary debates over an expanding idea of "the domestic," which encompassed the domus as well as sex, parenthood, household order, the relationship between home and state, and the connections between family honor and national identity. The author contends that the domestic ideology expressed by theatrical depictions of marriage and household order is one built on the simultaneous familiarity and violence inherent to blood. The theatrical relation between blood and home is far more intricate than the idealized language of the familial bloodline; the home was itself a bloody place, with domestic bloodstains signifying a range of experiences including religious worship, sex, murder, birth, healing, and holy justice. Focusing on four bleeding figures-the Bleeding Bride, Bleeding Husband, Bleeding Child, and Bleeding Patient-the author argues that the household blood of the early modern stage not only expressed the violence and conflict occasioned by domestic ideology, but also established the home as a site that alternately reified and challenged patriarchal authority.

Farce is a welcome and uniquely recommended contribution to both Literary Criticism and Culture Studies reference collections and supplementary reading lists." -- Library Bookwatch

Farce has always been relegated to the lowest rung of the ladder of dramatic genres. Distinctions between farce and more literary comic forms remain clouded, even in the light of contemporary efforts to rehabilitate this type of comedy. Is farce really nothing more than slapstick-the "putting out of candles, kicking down of tables, falling over joynt-stools," as Thomas Shadwell characterized it in the seventeenth century? Or was his contemporary, Nahum Tate correct when he declared triumphantly that "there are no rules to be prescribed for that sort of wit, no patterns to copy; and 'tis altogether the creature of imagination"? Davis shows farce to be an essential component in both the comedic and tragic traditions. Farce sets out to explore the territory of what makes farce distinct as a comic genre. Its lowly origins date back to the classic Graeco-Roman theatre; but when formal drama was reborn by the process of elaboration of ritual within the mediaeval Church, the French term "farce" became synonymous with a recognizable style of comic performance. Taking a wide range of farces from the briefest and most basic of fair-ground mountebank performances to fully-fledged five-act structures from the late nineteenth century, the book reveals the patterns of comic plot and counter-plot that are common to all. The result is a novel classification of farce-plots, which serves to clarify the differences between farce and more literary comic forms and to show how quickly farce can shade into other styles of humor. The key is a careful balance between a revolt against order and propriety, and a kind of Realpolitik which ultimately restores the social conventions under attack. A complex array of devices in such things as framing, plot, characterization, timing and acting style maintain the delicate balance. Contemporary examples from the London stage bring the discussion up-to-date and reveal farce as a complex and potent comic form, with its own history, rules and traditions. Farce sheds light on the genre, its history, and usage in terms of dramatic critics. Davis examines the recurring themes in farcical comedies including rebellion, revenge, and coincidence. This classic work, updated with a new introduction and 50% new material, has been a staple of literary and humor studies libraries for years. It is part of the Transaction Series in Humor edited by Arthur Asa Berger. Jessica Milner Davis co-ordinates the Australasian Humour Scholars Network from the University of New South Wales in Sydney as a Visiting Fellow in its Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Since her first book she has published a wide variety of papers on comedy and humor, edited two specialist volumes of The Australian Journal of Comedy (in 1997 and 2001) and serves on the boards of two international humor research journals and book-series.

Othello: Critical Essays includes twenty-one groundbreaking chapters that examine one of Shakespeare's most complex tragedies, exploring issues of friendship and fealty, love and betrayal, race and gender issues, and much more.

The Polish playwright and artist Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, known as Witkacy, is now recognized as Poland's leading theatrical innovator of the interwar years and one of the outstanding creative personalities of the European avant-garde. This volume contains two of Witkacy's "tropical" plays inspired by the playwright's trip to Ceylon and Australia in 1914 with his close friend, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski.
Mr. Price, or Tropical Madness is a drama of heightened passion and greed among British colonists in Rangoon who seem to have stepped out of Joseph Conrad's tales of the South Seas.
Metaphysics of a Two headed Calf, set in New Guinea and Australia, pits savage European imperialists against a native tribal Australia and pits savage European imperialists against a native tribal chieftain whose fetish of a great golden frog offers greater insight into the mystery of existence than the Westerners' shallow rationalism.
Both plays puncture the white rulers' poses of superiority and parody their images of the tropical Other. Also included in the volume are Witkacy's Foreword to Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf in which the playwright defends his concept of theatre as an autonomous art with a scenic language of its own and an appendix containing a documentary itinerary of Witkacy's journey to Ceylon.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203218639

Jacques Lecoq and the British Theatre brings together the first collection of essays in English to focus on Lecoq's school of mime and physical theatre. For four decades, at his school in Paris, Jacques Lecoq trained performers from all over the world and effected a quiet evolution in the theatre.
The work of such highly successful Lecoq graduates as Theatre de Complicite (The Winter's Tale with the Royal Shakespeare Company and The Visit, The Street of Crocodiles and The Causcasian Chalk Circle with the Royal National Theatre) has brought Lecoq's work to the attention of mainstream critics and audiences in Britain. Yet Complicte is just the tip of the Iceberg. The contributors to this volume, most of them engaged in applying Lecoq's work, chart some of the diverse ways in which it has had an impact on our conceptions of mime, physical theatre, actor training, devising street theatre and interculturalism.
This lively - even provocative - collection of essays focuses academic debate and raises awareness of the impact of Lecoq's work in Britain today.
Franc Chamberlain is Senior Lecturer in Performance Studies at University College Northampton. He is performer, director and writer.

Using a variety of approaches, from postcolonialism and New Historicism to psychoanalysis and gender studies, the international contributors to Hamlet: New Critical Essays contribute major new interpretations on the conception and writing, editing, and cultural productions of Hamlet. This book is the most up-to-date and comprehensive critical analysis available of one of Shakespeare's best-known and most engaging plays.

Arthur F. Kinney and his international team of ten Shakespearean scholars shine new light on the world's most famous tragedy. With essays covering a wide range of topics, from editorial and production issues to postmodern studies of race and gender dynamics, this volume offers cutting-edge analyses of the play. The refreshing insight and originality of the selections will surprise students new to Shakespeare as well as experts in the field. For anyone interested in what is arguably the most complex tale ever told, Kinney and his contributors have enlivened a fascinating, age-old debate.

THE WORLD'S GREATEST SWORDSMEN...* A major new family comedy set in the world of the Three Musketeers... sort of. When the famous Musketeers are lost in a shipwreck on a routine mission across the channel, their hapless servants are left with no masters and an important mission to complete. Will they fool the king? Will they save the day? Will they even work out which end of the sword to use?! The New Musketeers features brilliant music, terrible sword fighting and a hilarious cast of characters. This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at Trinity Theatre, Tunbridge Wells, in December 2022. *Are not in this play

Next to Shakespeare, Ben Jonson is perhaps the most widely studied Renaissance dramatist. Very few students of literature or drama would not encounter Volpone or Bartholomew Fair in the course of their studies, and there has been a recent resurgence of interest in Epicoene, or the Silent Women amongst gender theorists. As part of The Complete Critical Guide series, this volume offers the broadest range of information on Jonson and his works, from background on contexts to details of recent interpretations of his plays. A must for students of the Renaissance.

Related link: http://www.literature.routledge.com/criti calguides/

Styled as a complete update to Miller & Winston's 1991 book, Administration and Leadership in Student Affairs, this book addresses issues of critical importance to today's student affairs professional. Grounded in human development, learning, leadership, group dynamics, management theories, and current social science research and evaluation methods, this book articulates the means for college student affairs administrators to function in the forefront of student learning and personal development initiatives.
The book focuses on the three essential roles played by student affairs administrators: as educators who play a significant role in addressing the academic goals of their institutions, as leaders who help to shape the vision of their institution's student affairs practice and education mission, and as managers who are responsible for coordinating programs and services, supervising staff, and overseeing university facilities and budgets. In their treatment of the diverse roles student affairs professionals must play in the current academic environment, the editors give voice to their view that they have an educational mission that is best accomplished through a partnership between student affairs and academic affairs which focuses on the individual student. The book is organised into five parts, each focusing on both the management of college environments and the administrative processes which effect student learning. In addition, it addresses such cutting-edge concerns as:
* student affairs in a multicultural world
* advancing technology and student affairs practice
* legal and ethical issues in student affairs.
The Professional Student Affairs Administrator is a comprehensive textbook for Masters and doctoral level students in college student affairs administration preparation courses, as well as a valuable reference guide for both beginning and seasoned professionals alike.

A comprehensive collection of critical essays on The Taming of the Shrew, including studies of the play's print, theatre, and performance history. The essay deals primarily with issues of gender, authority, domination, metatheatricality, and privacy. The volume includes a bibliographic introduction, which provides an historical overview of the play's place in Shakespeare's canon and contextualizes the issues historically.

Tennessee Williams' plays are performed around the world. His famous portrayals of women engage feminist critics, and as America's leading gay playwright from the repressive postwar period, through Stonewall, to the growth of gay liberation, he represents an important and controversial figure for queer theorists. Gross and his contributors have included all of his plays, a chronology, introduction and bibliography.

New Playwriting Strategies offers a fresh and dynamic approach to playwriting that will be welcomed by teachers and aspiring playwrights alike.