These issues consist of the edited Proceedings of the Shepard conference, organized by the Belgian-Luxembourg American Studies Association and the Free University of Brussels (VUB), which took place in Brussels, 28-30 May 1993. It will be of interest to undergraduates and postgraduates, professors, critics, theater practitioners, writers and those with a keen interest in the fields of literature, theater studies and cultural studies.

Readings in Renaissance Women's Drama is the most complete sourcebook for the study of this growing area of inquiry. It brings together, for the first time, a collection of the key critical commentaries and historical essays - both classic and contemporary - on Renaissance women's drama. Specifically designed to provide a comprehensive overview for students, teachers and scholars, this collection combines:
* this century's key critical essays on drama by early modern women by early critics such as Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot
* specially-commissioned new essays by some of today's important feminist critics
* a preface and introduction explaining this selection and contexts of the materials
* a bibliography of secondary sources
Playwrights covered include Joanna Lumley, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth and the Cavendish sisters.

Shakespeare's Suicides: Dead Bodies That Matter is the first study in Shakespeare criticism to examine the entirety of Shakespeare's dramatic suicides. It addresses all plays featuring suicides and near-suicides in chronological order from Titus Andronicus to Antony and Cleopatra, thus establishing that suicide becomes increasingly pronounced as a vital means of dramatic characterisation. In particular, the book approaches suicide as a gendered phenomenon. By taking into account parameters such as onstage versus offstage deaths, suicide speeches or the explicit denial of final words, as well as settings and weapons, the study scrutinises the ways in which Shakespeare appropriates the convention of suicide and subverts traditional notions of masculine versus feminine deaths. It shows to what extent a gendered approach towards suicide opens up a more nuanced understanding of the correlation between gender and Shakespeare's genres and how, eventually, through their dramatisation of suicide the tragedies query normative gender discourse.

Collected Studies CS1069 The essays selected for this volume reflect Peter Meredith's major contribution to the revival and revision of academic and public interest in medieval English drama and theatre. A number of coinciding factors in the last quarter of the twentieth century brought together a group of scholars, represented here in the Shifting Paradigms series, determined to place the study of medieval drama in a broader context than that of solely reading texts. The publication of Records of Early English Drama, the University of Leeds facsimiles of medieval drama manuscripts, the establishment of the journal and annual meetings of Medieval English Theatre, brought a wider perspective to the discipline. And, by no means least, the bringing to bear of all these ground-breaking developments to the mammoth tasks of recreating in the public domain the original-staging of medieval plays. Peter Meredith had a hand in the formation and lasting influence of all these crucial innovations. The variety and depth of his comprehensive approach to the study of medieval drama and theatre is clearly evinced in each of the essays chosen for this volume.

New Theatre in Italy 1963-2013 makes the case for the centrality of late-millennium Italian avant-garde theatre in the development of the new forms of performance that have emerged in the 21st Century. Starting in the Sixties, young artists and militants in Italy reacted to the violence in their streets and ruptures in the family unit that are now recognized as having been harbingers of the end of the global post-war system. As traditional rituals of State and Church faltered, a new generation of cultural operators, largely untrained and driven away from political activism, formed collectives to explore new ways of speaking theatrically, new ways to create and experience performance, and new relationships between performer and spectator. Although the vast majority of the works created were transient, like all performance, their aesthetic and social effects continue to surface today across media on a global scale, affecting visual art, cinema, television and the behavioural aesthetics of social networks.

Postcolonial Shakespeares is an exciting step forward in the dialogue between postcolonial studies and Shakespearean criticism. This unique volume features original work by some of the leading critics within the growing field of Shakespeare studies and is the most authoritative collection on this topic to date.
This study explores:
* the colonial and racial discourses emerging in early modern Britain
* how the Shakespearean text later became a colonial battlefield
* how Shakespeare circulates in our post- and neo-colonial world today
This collection of new essays traces the connections between early modern and contemporary vocabularies of colonization, 'race' and nationhood.

Edward Bond Letters, Volume IV, focuses on four significant areas of Edward Bond's work: education, imagination and the child; theatre-in-education; At the Inland Sea; language and imagery. The letters represent a coruscating attack on our present society, as well as offering insights into how the situation might be improved.
Bond's letters attack modern education, arguing that "children are being educated to sell themselves" and suggesting that social problems are caused by an oppression of the imagination.
Many letters refer directly to a play - for instance Tuesday, which presents an assessment of the many difficulties faced by contemporary society. The language and imagery of one of Bond's most recent plays, In the Company of Men, is animatedly discussed, and Bond reminds us in a final description that "the good image is always absent, because it is present in the mind.

Collected Studies CS 1068 The essays selected for this volume are chosen to reflect the important and intersecting ways in which over the last forty years Meg Twycross has shifted paradigms for people reading early English religious drama. The focus of Meg Twycross's research has been on performance in its many aspects, and this volume chooses four of the most important strands of her work - the York plays; new ways of understanding acting and performance in late medieval theatre, particularly in Britain and across Europe; why scenes are staged in the ways they are, verbally and by extrapolation visually, by close reading of texts against the background of medieval theology; and the attention paid to wider contexts of medieval theatre - concentrating especially on essays that are not easily available today. These thematic strands are reflective of Meg Twycross's major contribution to the field. They also represent those areas from her wider work which will have most utility and value for those, whether students or senior specialists in areas beyond early drama, who are looking for ways into understanding English medieval plays. The crucial work that has been done here has opened new perspectives on late medieval theatre, and will allow new generations to begin their study and research from further along the road.

What was German Naturalism? What were its achievements? How does it compare with its counterparts in other European countries?
These are some of the difficult questions addressed by John Osborne in Gerhart Hauptmann and the Naturalist Drama, a revised and updated version of his The Naturalist Drama in Germany, now widely acknowledged as the standard introduction to the subject. The debates to which he contributed, and in some cases initiated, on Naturalism in the German theatre, Naturalist theory in Germany, and the development of the Naturalist movement to the contemporary Social Democrat movement, have remained central issues. This revised edition preserves the structure and approach of the original, including its emphasis on the early dramas of Hauptmann, while taking full account of subsequent scholarship which provides the context in which this Naturalist playwright's work can be placed.

A sensible and straightforward guide for students, teachers, and actors of Shakespeare. Based on the results of an extensive survey of 100 Shakespearean scholars and dramatists from the US, Canada, and the UK. Their recommendations on the pronunciation of over 300 controversial words, together with a variety of linguistic studies, are the authorities for the pronunciations given here. Pronunciation variants are listed for the UK, Canada, and the US.

The only collection of essays on one of Britain's Angry Young Men, this book contains discussions of most of Wesker's published plays with an emphasis on the more recent works. Essays reevaluate the plays that made Wesker a household name in Britain (the "Trilogy," "The Kitchen, and Chips with Everything)." Clive Barker, co-director of "Centre 42," gives a fresh account of that movement, and playwright Paul Levitt provides a previously unrecorded history of "Caritas, Blood Libel, and Shylock." A personal profile of Wesker by novelist Margaret Drabble is reprinted from an earlier article. Original essays cover the theory and practice of theatre-Wesker's in-text stage directions, British television's adaptation of his plays, and an actor's and a director's perspectives on working with the playwright.
Major international Weskerian critics are assembled here: Klaus Peter Mÿ ller and Heiner Zimmermann from Germany; Rossana Bonadei, Angela Locatelli, and Alessandra Marzola from Italy; Keith Gore, Glenda Leeming, Martin Priestman, Jeremy Ridgman, Margaret Rose, and Robert Wilcher from Great Britain; Menakshi Ponnuswami from India; Robert Gross, Kimball King, and Robert Skloot from the United States. These essays take a wide range of critical approaches from an exploration of gender, to semiotics, biography, and the New Historicism. This is the most comprehensive collection of criticism on Arnold Wesker to date. Every major Weskerian scholar writing in English has contributed a piece to this casebook. Originating in Germany, Italy, Great Britain, India, and the United States, their essays create an international cultural context for Wesker's plays.
They also position his workamong his contemporaries, in his historical era, and in the political and theatrical environment that defines his world. Furthermore, they form a biographical profile of Wesker, often giving us firsthand accounts of turning points in his career. Finally, some essays evaluate and interpret the major plays, dissecting and scrutinizing the formal elements that make them distinct. Their critical approaches are varied in that they make liberal use of semiotics, Bakhtinian and communication theory, cultural studies, and traditional readings. Their contributions compose a multi-faceted view of Wesker's life and work setting out fresh arguments for all his plays.

This title was first published in 2000. This book offers a wide-ranging account of tragic drama from the Greeks to Arthur Miller. It puts forward a bold and vigorously developed argument about the recurrent concerns of tragedy, and proposes to uncover the archetypal tragic plot that emerges at key points of historical transition. It traces this plot through fascinatingly diverse formations on Athens, Renaissance England and the modern world, and offers detailed analysis of over twenty plays. The needs of the first-time reader are not forgotten, while challenging new light is thrown on each period. There is substantial discussion of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Lorca and Miller, along with briefer consideration of the Senecan tradition, Yeats, Synge, O'Neill and T.S. Eliot. Felicity Rosslyn asks why tragic plays get written when they do, and why they so often dramatise the struggle to break the ties of blood for the bonds of law.

"Post-Hamlet: Shakespeare in an Era of Textual Exhaustion" examines how postmodern audiences continue to reengage with Hamlet in spite of our culture's oversaturation with this most canonical of texts. Combining adaptation theory and performance theory with examinations of avant-garde performances and other unconventional appropriations of Shakespeare's play, Post-Hamlet examines Shakespeare's Hamlet as a central symbol of our era's "textual exhaustion," an era in which the reader/viewer is bombarded by text-printed, digital, and otherwise. The essays in this edited collection, divided into four sections, focus on the radical employment of Hamlet as a cultural artifact that adaptors and readers use to depart from textual "authority" in, for instance, radical English-language performance, international film and stage performance, pop-culture and multi-media appropriation, and pedagogy.

This title was first published in 2000: Insults, abuse, oaths, scatological and bawdy language - these form the subject of Lynn Forest-Hill's study on "bad" language in the late Middle Ages. She demonstrates how, in mediaeval mystery plays and morality plays, dramatists used outrageous language with great sophistication and subtlety to create characterizations and define characters' moral status, to reflect on social conditions, to condemn social evils, and to comment upon sensitive cultural, political and religious topics of the 16th century. The author begins by defining what constitutes sinful or transgressive language in the later mediaeval period, and establishes its moral significance. She then illustrates how the moral significance of language is used in drama to define the spiritual and social status of characters, and introduces the concept of sinful language as a sign of spiritual change. In later chapters the book explores the use of "bad" language in mystery and morality plays, focusing specifically on Skelton's "Magnyfycence", Heywood's "The Play of the Weather", and Bale's "King Johan". The study shows the extent to which the moral significance of language in drama shifted during the 16th century under pressure from cultural and political change, paving the way for less morally rigorous and more socially sensitive definitions of "bad" language.

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Branding Oscar Wilde traces the development and perception of Wilde's public persona and examines the impact of interpretations of his writing. Through calculated behavior, provocative language, and arresting dress, Wilde self-consciously created a brand initially recognized by family and friends, then by the British public, and ultimately by large audiences over the world. That brand changed over the course of his public career-both in the way Wilde projected it and in the way it was perceived. Comprehending the fundamental elements of the Wilde brand and following its evolution are integral to a full understanding of his art. The study focuses on how branding established important assumptions about Wilde and his work in his own mind and in those of his readers, and it examines how each stage of brand development affected the immediate responses to Wilde's writings and, as it continued to evolve, progressively shaped our understanding of the Wilde canon.

This title was first published in 2002: In the topsy-turvy 1580s and 1590s, as the episodic Anglo-Spanish war became the greatest threat to "English" security since circa 1066, Marlowe rose up in the London theatres like some Phaeton of the entertainment industry, taking war itself as a central subject of his art. This book reads his plays - especially "Tamburlaine", "Edward II", "The Massacre at Paris", and "Doctor Faustus" - as part of a bright new conversation then taking place in London about the nature of state security and martial law, the decorum of playing "the soldier" on stage, the rhetoric of warfever, and the necessity for draconian prescriptions about English manhood. Those public conversations, spilling out of Whitehall, the church pulpits, and the pubs, took center stage during the few years the playwright worked in London. Shepard argues that the Marlowe plays wrestle with the philosophical assumptions about the nature of war and the role and status of soldiers in English culture that were being embedded in those years in contemporary military handbooks penned by veterans of war, in homilies, royal proclamations, poems, pamphlets, and other plays, Shakespeare's included. Drawing on early modern theories and uses of classical rhetoric, stage history, queer theory, historicist strategies and even magical realism, "Marlowe's Soldiers" investigates how and why Marlowe's plays make entertainment of a wealth of historically and geopolitically divergent fantasies about martial law and its discontents.

This collection focuses on Moliere's theatre as works to be performed as well as read. The essays deal in their various ways with limits which are imposed and respected or violated and broken. The question of transgression both as a subject within Moliere's plays and as a dilemma confronting Moliere's critics and interpreters is addressed. The book aims to enlarge the scope of academic scholarship and include the thinking and insights of actors.

The refusal on the part of academic critics to recognize the primacy of farce in Moliere's theatre is contradicted by wide spread theatrical pracitce. These essays develop the argument that Moliere needs to be rescued from the pantheon of classical literature and put back on the Pont-Neuf with the strolling players, low-life rogues, cut-purses and clowns with whom he filled his theatre.

Dr. Rabey's profound critical study of David Rudkin's drama constitutes an in-depth evaluation of this unique dramatist, re-assessed in the light of his bi-sexuality and Anglo-Irish origins.
This key study includes insights from noted performers of Rudkin's work, including Ian Hogg, Peter McEnery, Ian McDiarmid, Gerard Murphy, and Charlotte Cornwell. It is a fully authorized study with exclusive reference to archival material which includes some frank and urgent interview contributions from the dramatist himself, who is usually deemed reclusive. It is enhanced by Dr. Rabey's own experience of Wales, Ireland, and the English Black Country for his exposition of Rudkin's mythic sense of Celtic and Mercian history.

Dr. Rabey's profound critical study of David Rudkin's drama constitutes an in-depth evaluation of this unique dramatist, re-assessed in the light of his bi-sexuality and Anglo-Irish origins.
This key study includes insights from noted performers of Rudkin's work, including Ian Hogg, Peter McEnery, Ian McDiarmid, Gerard Murphy, and Charlotte Cornwell. It is a fully authorized study with exclusive reference to archival material which includes some frank and urgent interview contributions from the dramatist himself, who is usually deemed reclusive. It is enhanced by Dr. Rabey's own experience of Wales, Ireland, and the English Black Country for his exposition of Rudkin's mythic sense of Celtic and Mercian history.

Students of international drama are turning more and more to the study of Japanese drama, desirous to know to what extent its development duplicates or differs from the evolution of drama in other countries. Stimulated by the colour, originality, power, and poetry, they are interested to know more. This title, first published in 1928, traces the general development of the drama of the Japanese. This book will be of interest to students of drama, theatre studies and Asian Studies.

This book is a concise single volume guide to studying Shakespeare, covering practical as well as theoretical issues. The text deals with the major topics on a chapter-by-chapter basis, starting with why we study Shakespeare, through Shakespeare and multimedia, to a final chapter on Shakespeare and Theory. Current trends and recent developments in Shakespearean studies are also discussed, with an emphasis on the contextualisation of Shakespeare, historical appropriations of his work and the debate concerning his place in the literary canon. Extensive reference is made to a variety of developing media, e.g. film, audio cassette, video, CD-Rom and global digital networks, bringing the study of Shakespeare into the twentieth century.

The group volume distinguishes itself by its multidisciplinary, comparative approach and by the network of relationships it weaves between the various European languages and cultures. The study takes shape from its different viewpoints and in its diverse contexts, to chart a detailed historical-conceptual map of the basic role theater played in forging the modern European consciousness. The thematic core of ‘theatermania’ lay in the authentic theatrical passion that manifested itself in different ways from one country to another throughout the 18th century. While the aesthetic, social and political value of theater took a variety of forms, its central feature was the privileged place it gave to collective and individual social revolutions, phenomena that could be defined as upheavals of the collective imagination, which found in theater a source of nourishment, mediation or control. The volume offers not just a series of historical-theatrical studies, but a view of history that foregrounds the passions that were regularly sparked by theater. It adds an essential feature to the profile of the century that redefined the role and importance of theater, and that led to its full re-evaluation in the Romantic age.

To this day, Education and Dramatic Art remains the only fully worked critique of drama education in schools. Provocative and iconoclastic, this new edition brings the argument up-to-date and locates the author's proposals for a curriculum based on the making, performing and appraisal of dramas securely in the evolving culture of schools.
The first section of the book traces the origins and fortunes of drama in schools in the context of changing political times and argues that by neglecting the customs and practices of the theatre, drama-in-education has often kept from the students it professes to empower, the very knowledge and understanding necessary for them to take command of their subject.
Part two examines the developmental and pedagogic claims of drama-in-education. Theories of knowledge and meaning and assumptions about schools drama's power to establish a moral and social agenda, are all called to account.
Finally, Education and Dramatic Art proposes a multiculturally-based, theoretical structure for the teaching of drama which pulls the theatre and the classroom together and offers teachers the foundation for a broad and balanced drama curriculum with its own distinctive body of knowledge and skills.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203134354