In Acts of Resistance in Late-Modernist Theatre, Richard Murphet presents a close analysis of the theatre practice of two ground-breaking artists - Richard Foreman and Jenny Kemp - active over the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century. In addition, he tracks the development of a form of 'epileptic' writing over the course of his own career as writer/director. Murphet argues that these three auteurs have developed subversive alternatives to the previously dominant forms of dramatic realism in order to re-think the relationship between theatre and reality. They write and direct their own work, and their artistic experimentation is manifest in the tension created between their content and their form. Murphet investigates how the works are made, rather than focusing upon an interpretation of their meaning. Through an examination of these artists, we gain a deeper understanding of a late modernist paradigm shift in theatre practice.

Romeo and Juliet always use 'thou' to each other, but they are the only pair of lovers in Shakespeare to do this. Why? All the women in Richard III address Richard as 'thou', but no man ever does. Why? When characters address the dead, they use 'thou' - except for Hamlet, who addresses Yorick as 'you'. Why? Shakespeare's contemporaries would have known the answers to these questions because they understood what 'thou' signified, but modern actors and audiences are in the dark. Through performance-oriented analysis of extracts from the plays, this book explores the language of 'trulls' and termagants, true loves and unwelcome wooers, male impersonators, smothering mothers, warring spouses and fighting men, as well as investigating lese-majeste, Freudian slips, crisis moments and rhetorical flourishes. Drawing on work with RSC actors, as well as the author's experience of playing a range of Shakespearean roles, the book equips the reader with a new tool for tracking emotions, weighing power relations and appreciating dazzling complexity.

In American Dramatists in the 21st Century: Opening Doors, Christopher Bigsby examines the careers of seven award-winning playwrights: David Adjmi, Julia Cho, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Will Eno, Martyna Majok, Dominique Morisseau and Anna Ziegler. In addition to covering all their plays, including several as yet unpublished, he notes their critical reception while drawing on their own commentary on their approach to writing and the business of developing a career. The writers studied come from a diverse range of racial, religious and immigrant backgrounds. Five of the seven are women. Together, they open doors on a changing theatre and a changing America, as ever concerned with identity, both personal and national. This is the third in a series of books which, together, have explored the work of twenty-four American playwrights who have emerged in the current century.

Much Ado About Nothing presents a world of glittering surfaces and exquisite social performances. The language of the play sparkles with a fireworks of wit and dazzling bouts of repartee, most memorably in the "merry war" of words between the reluctant lovers, Benedick and Beatrice. A closer look at the language of the play, however, reveals it to be laced with violence and charged with the desire to humiliate others. Wit is deployed as a weapon to ridicule one's opponent; much of the humour circulates incessantly around the theme of cuckoldry, a major source of male anxiety in the period. The most drastic use of language is to slander Hero by accusing her of a lack of chastity - an accusation that spelt social death for a woman in the early modern age. The death that Hero feigns mirrors accurately the devastating effects of the assassination of her character by the smart set of young noblemen in the play. This study guide focuses on examining the array of the uses of language that the play displays, and probes into the ideas about language that it explores. The book looks at key film versions of the play by Kenneth Branagh and Joss Whedon which are often used on courses, whilst also offering practical questions and tips to help students develop their own critical writing skills and deepen their understanding of the play.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. This is the first critical study in English to focus exclusively on the work of Marie NDiaye, born in central France in 1967, winner of the Prix Femina (2001), the Prix Goncourt (2009), shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize (2013), and widely considered to be one of the most important French authors of her generation. Andrew Asibong argues that at the heart of NDiaye's world lurks an indefinable 'blankness' which makes it impossible for the reader to decode narrative at the level of psychology or event. NDiaye's texts explore social stigmata and familial disintegration with a violence unmatched by any of her contemporaries, but in doing so they remain as strangely affectless and 'unrecognizable' as their dissociated protagonists. Considering each of NDiaye's works in chronological order (including her novels, theatre, short fiction and writing for children), Asibong assesses the aesthetic, emotional and political stakes of NDiaye's portraits of impenetrable selfhood. His book provides an original and provocative framework within which to read NDiaye as a simultaneously hybrid and hyper-French cultural figure, fascinating and fantastical practitioner of the postmodern - and reluctantly postcolonial - 'blank arts'.

Teenager Alan, fought over by a religious mother and an atheist father, finds release in horses, until he is driven to blind them with a spike. Why? While treating the boy, a psychiatrist discovers his own life is paradoxically in the witness box.

Patrice Chereau (1944 - 2013) was one of France's leading directors in the theatre and on film and a major influence on Shakespearean performance. He is internationally known for memorable productions of both drama and opera. His life-long companionship with Shakespeare began in 1970 when his innovative Richard II made the young director famous overnight and caused his translator to denounce him publicly as an iconoclast, for a production mixing "music-hall, circus, and pankration". After this break, Chereau read Shakespeare's texts assiduously, "line by line and word by word", with another renowned poet, Yves Bonnefoy. Drawing on new interviews with many of Chereau's collaborators, this study explores a unique theatre maker's interpretations of Shakespeare in relation to the European tradition and to his wider body of work on stage and film, to establish his profound influence on other producers of Shakespeare.

The original Blackfriars closed its doors in the 1640s, ending over half-a-century of performances by men and boys. In 2001, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, it opened once again. The reconstructed Blackfriars, home to the American Shakespeare Center, represents an old playhouse for the new millennium and therefore symbolically registers the permanent revolution in the performance of Shakespeare. Time and again, the industry refreshes its practices by rediscovering its own history. This book assesses how one American company has capitalised on history and in so doing has forged one of its own to become a major influence in contemporary Shakespearean theatre.

Over the past three decades, no critical movement has been more prominent in Shakespeare Studies than new historicism. And yet, it remains notoriously difficult to pin down, define and explain, let alone analyze. Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory provides a comprehensive scholarly analysis of new historicism as a development in Shakespeare studies while asking fundamental questions about its status as literary theory and its continued usefulness as a method of approaching Shakespeare's plays.

Classical Greek Tragedy offers a comprehensive survey of the development of classical Greek tragedy combined with close readings of exemplary texts. Reconstructing how audiences in fifth-century BCE Athens created meaning from the performance of tragedy at the dramatic festivals sponsored by the city-state and its wealthiest citizens, it considers the context of Athenian political and legal structures, gender ideology, religious beliefs, and other social forces that contributed to spectators' reception of the drama. In doing so it focuses on the relationship between performers and watchers, not only Athenian male citizens, but also women and audiences throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. This book traces the historical development of these dynamics through three representative tragedies that span a 50 year period: Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, and Euripides' Helen. Topics include the role of the chorus; the tragic hero; recurring mythical characters and subject matter; Aristotelian assessments of the components of tragedy; developments in the architecture of the theater and their impact on the interactions of characters, and the spaces they occupy. Unifying these discussions is the observation that the genre articulates a reality beyond the visible stage action that intersects with the characters' existence in the present moment and resonates with the audience's religious beliefs and collective psychology. Human voices within the performance space articulate powerful forces from an invisible dimension that are activated by oaths, hymns, curses and prayers, and respond in the form of oracles and prophecies, forms of discourse which were profoundly meaningful to those who watched the original productions of tragedy.

"Twelfth Night "is the most mature and fully developed of Shakespeare's comedies and, as well as being one of his most popular plays, represents a crucial moment in the development of his art. Assembled by leading scholars, this guide provides a comprehensive survey of major issues in the contemporary study of the play.Throughout the book chapters explore such issues as the play's critical reception from John Manningham's account of one of its first performances to major current comentators like Stephen Greenblatt; the performance history of the play, from Shakespeare's day to the present and key themes in current scholarship, from issues of gender and sexuality to the study of comedy and song."Twelfth Night: A Critical Guide" also includes a complete guide to resources available on the play - including critical editions, online resources and an annotated bibliography - and how they might be used to aid both the teaching and study of Shakespeare's enduring comedy.

This new introduction to Euripides' fascinating interpretation of the story of Electra and her brother Orestes emphasizes its theatricality, showing how captivating the play remains to this day. Electra poses many challenges for those drawn to Greek tragedy - students, scholars, actors, directors, stage designers, readers and audiences. Rush Rehm addresses the most important questions about the play: its shift in tone between tragedy and humour; why Euripides arranged the plot as he did; issues of class and gender; the credibility of the gods and heroes, and the power of the myths that keep their stories alive. A series of concise and engaging chapters explore the functions of the characters and chorus, and how their roles change over the course of the play; the language and imagery that affects the audience's response to the events on stage; the themes at work in the tragedy, and how Euripides forges them into a coherent theatrical experience; the later reception of the play, and how an array of writers, directors and filmmakers have interpreted the original. Euripides' Electra has much to say to us in our contemporary world. This thorough, richly informed introduction challenges our understanding of what Greek tragedy was and what it can offer modern theatre, perhaps its most valuable legacy.

This volume responds to a renewed focus on tragedy in theatre and literary studies to explore conceptions of tragedy in the dramatic work of seventeen canonical American playwrights. For students of American literature and theatre studies, the assembled essays offer a clear framework for exploring the work of many of the most studied and performed playwrights of the modern era. Following a contextual introduction that offers a survey of conceptions of tragedy, scholars examine the dramatic work of major playwrights in chronological succession, beginning with Eugene O'Neill and ending with Suzan-Lori Parks. A final chapter provides a study of American drama since 1990 and its ongoing engagement with concepts of tragedy. The chapters explore whether there is a distinctively American vision of tragedy developed in the major works of canonical American dramatists and how this may be seen to evolve over the course of the twentieth century through to the present day. Among the playwrights whose work is examined are: Susan Glaspell, Langston Hughes, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, August Wilson, Marsha Norman and Tony Kushner. With each chapter being short enough to be assigned for weekly classes in survey courses, the volume will help to facilitate critical engagement with the dramatic work and offer readers the tools to further their independent study of this enduring theme of dramatic literature.

A Schools Edition of Men Should Weep by Scottish playwright Ena Lamont Stewart, a popular set text for SQA Higher English. Set in the 1930s, Men Should Weep centres on the challenges faced by the Morrison family. This riveting portrayal of life in Glasgow's slums explores themes such as poverty, love and the role of women. This edition includes: - An educational introduction with an overview of the play and playwright - The full playscript - Notes on the text, key quotations and questions to improve students' understanding of the play - Tasks and activities designed to support study/revision and build the skills of analysis and evaluation - Assessment advice for the Critical Reading question paper

The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies is a wide-ranging, authoritative guide to research on Shakespeare and textual studies by an international team of leading scholars. It contains chapters on all the major areas of current research, notably the Shakespeare manuscripts; the printed text and paratext in Shakespeare's early playbooks and poetry books; Shakespeare's place in the early modern book trade; Shakespeare's early readers, users, and collectors; the constitution and evolution of the Shakespeare canon from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century; Shakespeare's editors from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century; and the modern editorial reproduction of Shakespeare. The Handbook also devotes separate chapters to new directions and developments in research in the field, specifically in the areas of digital editing and of authorship attribution methodologies. In addition, the Companion contains various sections that provide non-specialists with practical help: an A-Z of key terms and concepts, a guide to research methods and problems, a chronology of major publications and events, an introduction to resources for study of the field, and a substantial annotated bibliography. The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies is a reference work aimed at advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars and libraries, a guide to beginning or developing research in the field, an essential companion for all those interested in Shakespeare and textual studies.

Eubanks Winkler and Schoch reveal how - and why - the first generation to stage Shakespeare after Shakespeare's lifetime changed absolutely everything. Founder of the Duke's Company, Sir William Davenant influenced how Shakespeare was performed in a profound and lasting way. This open access book provides the first performance-based account of Restoration Shakespeare, exploring the precursors to Davenant's approach to Restoration Shakespeare, the cultural context of Restoration theatre, the theatre spaces in which the Duke's Company performed, Davenant's adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, acting styles, and the lasting legacy of Davenant's approach to staging Shakespeare. The eBook editions of this work are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Queens University Belfast.

The mid-eighteenth century witnessed a particularly intense conflict between the Enlightenment philosophes and their enemies, when intellectual and political confrontation became inseparable from a battle for public opinion. Logan J. Connors underscores the essential role that theatre played in these disputes. This is a fascinating and detailed study of the dramatic arm of France's war of ideas in which the author examines how playwrights sought to win public support by controlling every aspect of theatrical production - from advertisements, to performances, to criticism. An expanding theatre-going public was recognised as both a force of influence and a force worth influencing. By analysing the most indicative examples of France's polemical theatre of the period, Les Philosophes by Charles Palissot (1760) and Voltaire's Le Cafe ou L'Ecossaise (1760), Connors explores the emergence of spectators as active agents in French society, and shows how theatre achieved an unrivalled status as a cultural weapon on the eve of the French Revolution. Adopting a holistic approach, Connors provides an original view of how theatre productions 'worked' under the ancien regime, and discusses how a specific polemical atmosphere in the eighteenth century gave rise to modern notions of reception and spectatorship.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.