Stephen Sondheim is arguably the most important writer for the American musical stage today, the equivalent in his field of Miller, Albee, O'Neill, and Williams. Yet he has rarely been treated seriously within the academy.Reading Stephen Sondheim: A Collection of Critical Essays is an attempt to remedy that situation. Bringing together scholars and critics from a wide variety of literary and theoretical perspectives, this book undertakes to examine all of Sondheim's major productions and themes.

This text presents the best of John Heilpern's theatre writings. The players are many: Vanessa Redgrave and Ralph Fiennes; Helen Mirren and George C. Wolfe; Fiona Shaw and Savion Glover; Karen Finley and David Mamet; and many others. There is also an important essay on the differences between the British and American theatre scenes, including profiles of such legends as Noel Coward, Alec Guinness, Michael Bennett, Peter Brook and Robert Brustein. It also reviews essays on dozens of great, good and awful plays, as well as contrary opinions on some of the most widely admired playwrights. There are comic turns too: "The Year of the Penis" and "The Art of Falling Asleep at the Theatre."

Bringing together seminal writings on Beckett from the 1950s and 1960s with critical readings from the 1980s and 1990s, this collection is inspired by a wide variety of literary-theoretical approaches and covers the whole range of Beckett's creative work. Following an up-to-date review and analysis of Beckett criticism, fifteen extracts of Beckett criticism are introduced and set in context by editors' headnotes. The book aims to make easily accessible to students and scholars stimulating and innovative writing on the work of Samuel Beckett, representing the wide range of new perspectives opened up by contemporary critical theory: philosophical, political and psychoanalytic criticism, feminist and gender studies, semiotics, and reception theory.

Interest in Ben Jonson is higher today than at any time since his death. This new collection offers detailed readings of all the major plays - Volpone, Epicene, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair - and the poems. It also provides significant insights into the court masques and the later plays which have only recently been rediscovered as genuinely engaging stage pieces.

The most familiar assertion of Shakespeare scholarship is that he is our contemporary. Shakespeare After Theory provocatively argues that he is not, but what value he has for us must at least begin with a recognition of his distance from us. David Scott Kastan compellingly restores Shakespeare's plays to the rich densities of the world in which and to which they were created.

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The most familiar assertion of Shakespeare scholarship is that he is our contemporary. Shakespeare After Theory provocatively argues that he is not, but what value he has for us must at least begin with a recognition of his distance from us. David Scott Kastan compellingly restores Shakespeare's plays to the rich densities of the world in which and to which they were created.

This collection of essays examines the ways in which writing and cinema can be studied in relation to each other. A wide range of material is presented, from essays which look at particular films, including The Piano and The English Patient, to discussions of the latest developments in film studies including psychoanalytic film theory and the cultural study of film audiences. Specific topics that the essays address also include: the kinds of writing produced for the cinema industry, advertising, film adaptations of written texts and theatre plays from nineteenth century 'classic' novels to recent cyberpunk science fiction such as Blade Runner and Starship Troopers. The essays deal with existing areas of debate, like questions of authorship and audience, and also break new ground, for example in proposing approaches to the study of writing on the cinema screen. The book includes a select bibliography, and a documents section gives details of a range of films for further study.

Series Information:
Critical Studies in Black Life and Culture

"Backgrounds" includes essays on Wilde and the 1890s by prominent cultural critics Joseph Donohue, Regenia Gagnier, and Karl Beckson. "Reviews and Reactions" collects contemporary responses to The Importance of Being Earnest, among them George Bernard Shaw s famous dissenting view and the American assessment by H. F. "Essays in Criticism" includes six diverse assessments of Wilde and the play by E. H. Mikhail, Camille Paglia, Christopher Craft, Michael Patrick Gillespie, Peter Raby, and Richard Haslam. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included."

The authors of this book ask how digital research tools are changing the ways in which practicing editors historicize Shakespeare's language. Scholars now encounter, interpret, and disseminate Shakespeare's language through an increasing variety of digital resources, including online editions such as the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE), searchable lexical corpora such as the Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) or the Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) collections, high-quality digital facsimiles such as the Folger Shakespeare Library's Digital Image Collection, text visualization tools such as Voyant, apps for reading and editing on mobile devices, and more. What new insights do these tools offer about the ways Shakespeare's words made meaning in their own time? What kinds of historical or historicizing arguments can digital editions make about Shakespeare's language? A growing body of work in the digital humanities allows textual critics to explore new approaches to editing in digital environments, and enables language historians to ask and answer new questions about Shakespeare's words. The authors in this unique book explicitly bring together the two fields of textual criticism and language history in an exploration of the ways in which new tools are expanding our understanding of Early Modern English.

No Fear Shakespeare gives you the complete text of The Tempest on the left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand translation on the right. Each No Fear Shakespeare contains

• The complete text of the original play
• A line-by-line translation that puts Shakespeare into everyday language
• A complete list of characters with descriptions
• Plenty of helpful commentary

Value Engineering: Scenes from the Grenfell Inquiry is a verbatim reconstruction of the Grenfell Tower Public Inquiry. Using only the words spoken at the Inquiry, the play deals predominantly with Part 2 which ran between January 2020 - July 2021 in which evidence was heard from those responsible for the disastrous refurbishment of Grenfell Tower before the tragic fire. Edited by Richard Norton-Taylor and directed by Nicholas Kent, the team behind previous testimonial plays The Colour of Justice: The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and Bloody Sunday: Scenes from the Saville Inquiry, this edited verbatim account of the Grenfell Inquiry is aimed at giving the public an overview and access to some of the most important evidence. The play shows how companies involved in the refurbishment of the Tower conspired to cover up what they knew about the dangerous and life-threatening materials used to refurbish the Tower. It also reveals the incompetence and neglect of local authorities. Staged in Notting Hill Tabernacle in October 2021, this features the full text of the play alongside additional information on the context of Grenfell and the ongoing inquiry.

Series Information:
The New Classical Canon

Christopher Marlowe has provoked some of the most radical criticism of recent years. There is an elective affinity, it seems, between this pre-modern dramatist and the post-modern critics whose best work has been inspired by his plays. The reason suggested by this collection of essays is that Marlowe shares the post-modern preoccupation with the language of power - and the power of language itself. As Richard Wilson shows in his introduction, it is no accident that the founding essays of New Historicism were on Marlowe; nor that current Queer Theorists focus so much on his images of gender and homosexuality. Marlowe staged both the birth of the modern author and the origin of modern sexual desire, and it is this unique conjunction that makes his drama a key to contemporary debates about the state and the self: from pornography to gays in the military. Gay Studies, Cultural Materialism, New Historicism and Reader Response Criticism are all represented in this selection, which the introduction places in the light not only of theorists like Althusser, Bataille and Bakhtin, but also of artists and writers such as Jean Genet and Robert Mapplethorpe. Many of the essays take off from Marlowe's extreme dramatisations of arson, cruelty and aggression, suggesting why it is that the thinker who has been most convincingly applied to his theatre is the philosopher of punishment and pain, Michel Foucault. Others explore the exclusiveness of this all-male universe, and reveal why it remains so offensive and impenetrable to feminism. For what they all make disturbingly clear is Marlowe's violent, untamed difference from the cliches and correctness of normative society.

English Drama before Shakespeare surveys the range of dramatic activity in English up to 1590. The book challenges the traditional divisions between Medieval and Renaissance literature by showing that there was much continuity throughout this period, in spite of many innovations. The range of dramatic activity includes well-known features such as mystery cycles and the interludes, as well as comedy and tragedy. Para-dramatic activity such as the liturgical drama, royal entries and localised or parish drama is also covered. Many of the plays considered are anonymous, but a coherent, biographical view can be taken of the work of known dramatists such as John Heywood, John Bale, and Christopher Marlowe. Peter Happe's study is based upon close reading of selected plays, especially from the mystery cycles and such Elizabethan works as Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. It takes account of contemporary research into dramatic form, performance (including some important recent revivals), dramatic sites and early theatre buildings, and the nature of early dramatic texts. Recent changes in outlook generated by the publication of the written records of early drama form part of the book's focus. There is an extensive bibliography covering social and political background, the lives and works of individual authors, and the development of theatrical ideas through the period. The book is aimed at undergraduates, as well as offering an overview for more advanced students and researchers in drama and in related fields of literature and cultural studies.

This is the first collection of criticism on Shakespeare's romances to register the impact of modern literary theory on interpretations of these plays. Kiernan Ryan brings together the most important recent essays on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, the greatest of the `last plays', staging a dynamic debate between feminist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and new historicist views of the masterpieces Shakespeare wrote at the close of his career. The book aims not only to anthologise accounts of the last plays by leading Shakespearean critics, including Stephen Greenblatt, Janet Adelman, Leah Marcus, Howard Felperin and Steven Mullaney, but also to dramatise what is at stake in the choice of a particular critical approach. It allows the student to compare the strengths and limitations of a deconstructive and a feminist reading of the same romance, or to test the plausibility of one psychoanalytic angle on the last plays against another. The headnotes that preface the essays highlight their distinctive slants on Shakespearean romance, unpack the theoretical assumptions that steer their interpretations, and throw into relief the key points at which their authors collide or converge. The editor's introduction places the essays in the context of twentieth-century criticism of the last plays and makes a powerful case for a fundamental reappraisal of Shakespearean romance. The comprehensive, fully annotated bibliography provides an unrivalled guide to further reading on all four plays.

This work offers an assessment of appropriations of Shakespeare that respond to the enduring impositions of colonialism. Through a range of readings, Thomas Cartelli illuminates texts and events that position themselves in relation or response to Shakespeare, such as: polemical essays by Walt Whitman; the 19th-century play, "Jack Cade", commissioned and staged by the first major American Shakespeare actor; an essay on labour-management reform by social activist Jane Addams; novels by Aphra Behn, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Michelle Cliff, Tayeb Salih, Nadine Gordimer and Robert Stone; the 1849 Astor Place Riot; and a 1916 Shakespeare tercentenary celebration performance at the City College Campus of New York. Divided into three sections, Part One examines US contentions with Shakespeare and argues that they witness a failure to develop models of subjectivity that break from the heroic, and paternalist bias of Shakespearean drama. Part Two focuses on the role of "The Tempest" in postcolonial formulations of power and identity, and the efforts to write postcolonial subjectivities that extend beyond its orbit. Part Three treats the colonial afterlife and postcolonial career of the so-called "O

Modern biographies of William Shakespeare abound; however, close scrutiny of the surviving records clearly show that there is insufficient material for a cradle to grave account of his life, that most of what is written about him cannot be verified from primary sources, and that Shakespearean biography did not attain scholarly or academic respectability until long after Samuel Schoenbaum published William Shakespeare A Documentary Life in 1975. This study begins with a short survey of the history and practice of biography and then surveys the very limited biographical material for Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare gradually attained the status as a national hero during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were no serious attempts to reconstruct his life. Any attempt at an account of his life or personality amounts, however, merely to "biografiction". Modern biographers differ sharply on Shakespeare's apparent relationships with Southampton and with Jonson, which merely underlines the fact that the documentary record has to be greatly expanded through contextual description and speculation in order to appear like a Life of Shakespeare.

Frank Harris argues that the way women are presented in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets are a reflection of the real-life women in his life, namely his wife, mother, mistress and daughter. Originally published in 1911, The Women of Shakespeare also analyses the traditional criticism of the time and places his own views in this context. This title will be of interest to students of English Literature.

"Tanika Gupta's epic drama pushes the boundaries of verbatim theatre, telling an important story in a fresh and authentic way never seen on stage before. A rousing piece of work." - Greg Walker, University of Edinburgh, UK Based on the true story of Tanika Gupta's great uncle, Lions and Tigers follows 19-year-old Dinesh Gupta's emotional and political awakening as a freedom fighter pitting himself against the British Raj. Drawn from family stories that the playwright herself heard from early childhood, the play teems with details drawn from her grandfather's 500-page handwritten journal about his younger brother, and from the 92 letters written by her great uncle from his prison cell. Set against the backdrop of negotiations between the leaders of the Indian National Congress and culminating in actions that shook the very foundations of the British Empire, Lions and Tigers challenges our assumptions about Indian independence and offers powerful new insights into the battles between the British lions and the Bengal tigers. The play was first performed at Shakespeare's Globe from the 23rd August to 16th September 2017, and was awarded the James Tait Black Prize for Drama in 2018. It is published here in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series for the first time, with a brand new introduction by Durba Ghosh.

Repositioning Shakespeare offers an original assessment of a broad range of texts and cultural events that appropriate Shakespeare. Examining these materials within the context of 'the nation' in a postcolonial era, Thomas Cartelli considers:
* essays by Walt Whitman
* the nineteenth-century play, 'Jack Cade'
* novels by Aphra Behn, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Michelle Cliff, Tayeb Salih, Nadine Gordimer and Robert Stone
* the 1849 Astor Place Riot
Cartelli places particular emphasis on redefining the 'postcolonial' in order to find a place for America. In doing so, Repositioning Shakespeare makes a considerable contribution to the continuing debate about the uses we make of Shakespeare.

Noting that the variation between the playwrights can be as great as between men and women, and acknowledging that her subjects are limited to a narrow class and race population, Detsi-Diamanti the cultural and historical specificity of women playwrights of the period and the interrelationship between their dramatic efforts and the formation of an American national and literary identity. Her major themes are metaphors of freedom, industrial capitalism, and gender perspective and ideology.

The period between 1585 (when Elizabeth formally committed her military support to the Dutch wars against Spain) and 1604 (when James at last brought it to an end) was one in which English life was preoccupied by the menace and actuality of war. The same period spans English drama's coming of age, from Tamburlaine to Hamlet. In this thought-provoking book, Nick de Somogyi draws on a wide range of contemporary military literature (news-letters and war-treatises, maps and manuals), to demonstrate how deeply wartime experience influenced the production and reception of Elizabethan theatre. In a series of vivid parallels, the roles of soldier and actor, the setting of battlefield and stage, and the context of playhouse and muster are shown to have been rooted in the common experience of war. The local armoury served as a props department; the stage as a military lecture-hall. News from the front line has always been shrouded in the fog of war. Shakespeare's Rumour is here seen as kindred to such equally dubious messengers as his Armado, Falstaff or Pistol; soldiers have always told tall tales, military ghost-stories that are here shown to have seeped into such narratives as The Spanish Tragedy and Henry V. This book concludes with a sustained account of Hamlet, a play which both dramatises the Elizabethan context of war-fever, and embodies in its three variant texts the war and peace that shaped its production. By affording scrutiny to each of its title's components, Shakespeare's Theatre of War provides a compelling argument for reassessing the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries within the enduring context of the military culture and wartime experience of his age.

This volume is a comprehensive overview of scholarship on this play. It includes chapters on criticism, sources and background, textual studies, bibliographies, editions, and translations. Also covered are the stage history and major productions of the play, and films, music, television, and adaptations and synopses.

Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays is the essential Sonnets anthology for our time. This important collection focuses exclusively on contemporary criticism of the Sonnets, reprinting three highly influential essays from the past decade and including sixteen original analyses by leading scholars in the field. The contributors' diverse approaches range from the new historicism to the new bibliography, from formalism to feminism, from reception theory to cultural materialism, and from biographical criticism to queer theory. In addition, James Schiffer's introduction offers a comprehensive survey of 400 years of criticism of these fascinating, enigmatic poems.