English Stage Comedy 1490-1990 is a unique and beautifully written study of the comedy of the English stage from the Tudor period to the late twentieth century. Alexander Leggatt demonstrates that an examination of comedy as a 'genre' can tell us much about the relationships between literature and society. English Stage Comedy 1490-1990 surveys five centuries of classic comic drama, focusing on major playwrights such as:
* Shakespeare
* Jonson
* Etherege
* Wycherley
* Congreve
* Vanbrugh
* Goldsmith
* Sheridan
* Wilde
* Shaw
* Coward
* Orton
* Ayckbourn

Lyric Incarnate examines the plays of Aleksandr Blok, the pre-eminent poet of Russian Symbolism and one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Blok's plays have received less attention than his poetry in the West, and this book is the first and only English-language monograph devoted to Blok the playwright. In chronological succession, each of Blok's major plays is examined in detail. Special attention is accorded to Blok's relations with the major directors of his time, particularly Meyerhold and Stanislavsky. Blok's role, for instance, in Meyerhold's formulation of the theatre of the grotesque proved to be critical, and his relation to the Moscow Art Theatre just before the October Revolution helped to define the future course of that theatre. Blok's innovative dramatic technique is carefully studied at each stage in his career, from his earliest "lyric dramas," such as A Puppet Show and The Stranger, to his great tragedy The Rose and the Cross.

During the Renaissance, moral philosophy came to permeate the minds of many, including the spectators that poured into Shakespeare's Globe theatre. Examining these strains of thought that formed the basis for humanism, Raspa delves into King Lear, Hamlet, among others to unlock what influence this had on both Shakespeare and his interpreters.

In critical history, Shakespeare's The Tempest has been interpreted as a reticent play, a fascinating and yet mysterious blend of magic and verisimilitude, narrative and drama, spectacle and meditation on death. The Tempest seems to raise fundamental issues without ever exhausting them, it captures and appropriates existing motifs and modes, and allows for later appropriations and re-mediations. Is its signifying potential still alive in the third millennium? Does it still speak to us? Revisiting The Tempest aims to explore that potential and examine the play's more 'intractable material' as a fertile source of significance.The essays that make up this collection range from investigations of the play's position within the European early modern dramatic heritage to its 'domestic' re-writings and/or adaptations in diverse theatrical contexts and media, while also interrogating the play's own resistance to interpretation. Rather than providing new meanings, Revisiting The Tempest explores how this drama makes meaning and reanimates it through time.

Allusions to Shakespeare haunt our contemporary culture in a myriad of ways, whether through brief references or sustained intertextual engagements. Shakespeare's plays and motifs have been appropriated in fragmentary forms onstage and onscreen since motion pictures were invented in 1893. This collection of essays extends beyond a US-UK axis to bring together an international group of scholars to explore Shakespearean appropriations in unexpected contexts in lesser-known films and television shows in India, Brazil, Russia, France, Australia, South Africa, East-Central Europe and Italy, with reference to some filmed stage works.

From his own lifetime thorugh to the present day, the one constant feature of the English theatre has been the work of William Shakespeare. Correspondingly, the influence of his poetry on the critical tradition of successive ages has been central. With the growing influence of neo-classicism after the Restoration, Shakespeare came to be viewed with a mixture of awe and contempt; as a brilliant but flawed artist. He was both subjected to prescriptive literary criticism and frequently "re-invented" according to largely irrelevant criteria, in his intepretation on the stage. However, whether admired or reviled he was never ignored and was consistently a seminal influence in the work of poets, critics and actors. As the Romantic movement emerged, the rift between the worlds of literature and the theatre began slowly to heal and Shakespeare as the absis for serious theatrical art appeared to become a possibility.

The Art of Experience provides an interdisciplinary analysis of selected plays from Ireland's premier female playwright, Marina Carr. Dagmara Gizlo explores the transformative impact of a theatrical experience in which interdisciplinary boundaries must be crossed. This book demonstrates that theatre is therapeutic and therapy is theatrical. The role of emotions, cognitions, and empathy in the theatrical experience is investigated throughout. Dagmara Gizlo utilises the methodological tools stemming from modern empirically grounded psychology (such as cognitive-behavioural therapy or CBT) to the study of theatre's transformative potential. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, performance, and literature, and will be a fascinating read for those at the intersection of cognitive studies and the humanities.

Tracing Lyubimov's work play by play, we discover an indivudual doomed to be at odds with the prevailing political and social climate of his literary contemporaries. From this unique book there emerges a clear picture of Lyubimov's mischievous, provocative, fearless, and tireless imagination.
In this fascinating study of Yury Lyubimov's tempestuous career and his liberating style of theatre, Birgit Beumers thoroughly explores the making of a major figure in twentieth-century theatre. She traces the development of Lyubimov's ideas, from his arrival at the Taganka theatre in 1964, through his expulsion in 1984 and his period of exile in the West, until his return in 1989 to a much-changed Russia.

This work undertakes a re-evaluation of Seneca's plays, their relationship to Roman imperial culture and their instrumental role in the evolution of the European theatrical tradition. Following an introduction on the history of the Roman theatre, the book provides dramatic and cultural critique of the whole of Seneca's corpus, analyzing the declamatory form of the plays, their rhetoric, interiority, stagecraft and spectacle, dramatic, ideological and moral structure and their overt theatricality. Each of Seneca's plays is examined in detail, locating the force of Senecan drama not only in the moral complexity of the texts and their representations of power, violence, history, suffering and the self, but the semiotic interplay of text, tradition and culture. The later chapters focus on Seneca's influence on Italian, English and French drama of the Renaissance. A.J. Boyle argues that tragedians such as Cinthio, Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Corneille, and Racine owe a debt to Seneca that goes beyond allusion, dramatic form and the treatment of tyranny and revenge to the development of the tragic sensibility and the metatheatrical mind.

Includes everything students need for their first encounter with Shakespeare - well-chosen scenes from his most famous plays, plus lively accessible activities for discussion, drama, language study and comparison. It's the ideal starting-point for exploring Shakespeare, his theatre and his language. Extracts from: Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice.

This book examines six plays by Shakespeare ("Love's Labour's Lost", "Hamlet", "As You Like It", "Twelfth Night", "The Winter's Tale" and "The Tempest") as dramatizations of the Renaissance Court in its developing history - a history searched by Shakespeare to disclose its most characteristic gains and losses. For these plays do not simply celebrate Tudor and Stuart rule: they scrutinize it too, in the centre of its institutional theatre of power, the Court. This book shows how, if the plays came into Court, the Court also came into the plays, with its most salient features - its competitiveness, its inner tensions and its contradictions, its language, its cultural life and its entertainments - exposed to the scrutiny of an art-form that proved itself to be a new mode of historical understanding.

Key features of this text: How to study the text Author and historical background General and detailed summaries Commentary on themes, structure, characters, language and style Glossaries Test questions and issues to consider Essay writing advice Cultural connections Literary terms Illustrations Colour design

Most philosophy has rejected the theater, denouncing it as a place of illusion or moral decay; the theater in turn has rejected philosophy, insisting that drama deals in actions, not ideas. Challenging both views, The Drama of Ideas shows that theater and philosophy have been crucially intertwined from the start.
Plato is the presiding genius of this alternative history. The Drama of Ideas presents Plato not only as a theorist of drama, but also as a dramatist himself, one who developed a dialogue-based dramaturgy that differs markedly from the standard, Aristotelian view of theater. Puchner discovers scores of dramatic adaptations of Platonic dialogues, the most immediate proof of Plato's hitherto unrecognized influence on theater history. Drawing on these adaptations, Puchner shows that Plato was central to modern drama as well, with figures such as Wilde, Shaw, Pirandello, Brecht, and Stoppard using Plato to create a new drama of ideas. Puchner then considers complementary developments in philosophy, offering a theatrical history of philosophy that includes Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Burke, Sartre, Camus, and Deleuze. These philosophers proceed with constant reference to theater, using theatrical terms, concepts, and even dramatic techniques in their writings.
The Drama of Ideas mobilizes this double history of philosophical theater and theatrical philosophy to subject current habits of thought to critical scrutiny. In dialogue with contemporary thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum, Iris Murdoch, and Alain Badiou, Puchner formulates the contours of a "dramatic Platonism." This new Platonism does not seek to return to an idealist theory of forms, but it does point beyond the reigning philosophies of the body, of materialism and of cultural relativism.

This book explores the role of alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Hermetic philosophy in one of Shakespeare's last plays, The Winter's Tale. A perusal of the vast literary and iconographic repertory of Renaissance alchemy reveals that this late play is imbued with several topoi, myths, and emblematic symbols coming from coeval alchemical, Paracelsian, and Hermetic sources. It also discusses the alchemical significance of water and time in the play's circular and regenerative pattern and the healing role of women. All the major symbols of alchemy are present in Shakespeare's play: the intertwined serpents of the caduceus, the chemical wedding, the filius philosophorum, and the so-called rex chymicus. This book also provides an in-depth survey of late Renaissance alchemy, Paracelsian medicine, and Hermetic culture in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. Importantly, it contends that The Winter's Tale, in symbolically retracing the healing pattern of the rota alchemica and in emphasising the Hermetic principles of unity and concord, glorifies King James's conciliatory attitude.

In this book, each chapter explores significant Irish texts in their literary, cultural, and historical contexts. With an introduction that establishes the multiple critical contexts for Irish cinema, literature, and their adaptive textual worlds, the volume addresses some of the most popular and important late 20th-Century and 21st Century works that have had an impact on the Irish and global cinema and literary landscape. A remarkable series of acclaimed and profitable domestic productions during the past three decades has accompanied, while chronicling, Ireland's struggle with self-identity, national consciousness, and cultural expression, such that the story of contemporary Irish cinema is in many ways the story of the young nation's growth pains and travails. Whereas Irish literature had long stood as the nation's foremost artistic achievement, it is not too much to say that film now rivals literature as Ireland's key form of cultural expression. The proliferation of successful screen versionings of Irish fiction and drama shows how intimately the contemporary Irish cinema is tied to the project of both understanding and complicating (even denying) a national identity that has undergone radical change during the past three decades. This present volume is the first to present a collective accounting of that productive synergy, which has seen so much of contemporary Irish literature transferred to the screen.

Set in Ancient Rome, "Poetaster" offers one of the first and most subtle statements in English of the Augustan cultural ideal. Jonson contrasts Augustus' wise rule with an English polity dominated (like the stage) by malice, intrigue and envy. This text examines these different strands so skilfully interwoven by Jonson, and argues for a reassessment of "Poetaster" as one of the most ideologically interesting of all early modern plays. The accompanying explanatory notes guide the reader through the personal and political illusions which gave the play its immediate satirical impact. -- .

KING JOHN. Now, say, Chatillon, what would France with us? CHATILLON. Thus, after greeting, speaks the King of France In my behaviour to the majesty, The borrowed majesty, of England here. ELINOR. A strange beginning- 'borrowed majesty'! KING JOHN. Silence, good mother; hear the embassy.

Post-Colonial Drama is the first full-length study to address the ways in which performance has been instrumental in resisting the continuing effects of imperialism. It brings to bear the latest theoretical approaches from post-colonial and performance studies to a range of plays from Australia, Africa, Canada, New Zealand, the Caribbean and other former colonial regions. Some of the major topics discussed include:
* the interactions of post-colonial and performance theories
* the post-colonial re-stagings of language and history
* the specific enactments of ritual and carnival
* the theatrical citations of the post-colonial body
Post-Colonial Drama combines a rich intersection of theoretical approaches with close attention to a wide range of performance texts.

eBook available with sample pages: 020342106X

Post-Colonial Drama is the first full-length study to address the ways in which performance has been instrumental in resisting the continuing effects of imperialism. It brings to bear the latest theoretical approaches from post-colonial and performance studies to a range of plays from Australia, Africa, Canada, New Zealand, the Caribbean and other former colonial regions. Some of the major topics discussed in Post-Colonial Drama include:
* the interactions of post-colonial and performance theories
* the post-colonial re-stagings of language and history
* the specific enactments of ritual and carnival
* the theatrical citations of the post-colonial body
Post-Colonial Drama combines a rich intersection of theoretical approaches with close attention to a wide range of performance texts.

"The purpose of these 17 essays . . . is to convey the significance of Chekhov within manageable parameters for readers unable to tackle the considerable body of available Chekhov scholarships." Choice

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was one of the most successful dramatists of the Restoration theatre and a popular poet. This is the fifth volume in a set of seven which comprises a complete edition of all her works.

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was one of the most successful dramatists of the Restoration theatre and a popular poet. This is the sixth volume in a set of seven which comprises a complete edition of all her works.

The political events of "annus mirabilis" 1989 marked a rare turning point in world history, but the significance of the year for German literary history is unique. As the 40-year-old German Democratic Republic ceased to exist, so too did the special circumstances which had fostered a literature separate from and in competition with that of the Federal Republic of Germany. A new period of literary history was delimited almost overnight: Germany Democratic Republic literature now was something to be examined as a whole, cultural movement. At the same time, the literary traditions of the German Democratic Republic have continued to influence the contemporary cultural scene, often in ways that are only gradually becoming clear.
The essays, memoirs, and plays collected in this special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review represent an early attempt to assess and reassess one of the German Democratic Republic's richest cultural domains: its theatre. Contributors include David W. Robinson, C

"Shakespeare, Theory and Performance" is an exciting collection of essays, bringing a full range of contemporary critical perspectives to bear upon the practical questions of performing Shakespeare. During recent years, a new revolution in critical theory has called into question a number of assumptions about the performance of Shakespeare which had long gone unchecked.
In this volume, contributors from theater, literary and Shakespearean studies collaborate to offer a productive rnterplay, employing a variety of discourses--including feminism, post-colonialism, and semiotics--to challenge and interrogate the practice of Shakespearean performance. Issues include implications of gender, race and class for audience response; the impact of technology on the study of performance as text; and the appropriation of Shakespeare by foreign cultures.

Contents:
Martin Brunkhorst, Bergische Universitat (Germany); Anthony B Dawson, University of British Columbia (Canada); Mary Judith Dunbar, University of Santa Clara (USA); Juilet Dusinberre, Girton College, Cambridge; Barbara Hodgdon, Drake University (USA); Dennis Kennedy, University of Pittsburgh (USA); Richard Paul Knowles, University of Guelph (Canada); Douglas Lanier, University of New Hampshire (USA); Philip C McGuire, Michigan State University (USA); Cary Mazer, University of Pennsylvania (USA); Denis Salter, McGill University (Canada); William B Worthen, Northwestern University (USA)