"Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama" uniquely brings together memory theory, medieval and contemporary images, cognition, and the English Corpus Christi drama. Lerud argues that the role of frames or backgrounds is integral to the image and has been underestimated or misunderstood in the study of the drama. Lerud examines the use of doorways, arches, gates, and other significant town spaces in framing or setting off particular pageant images, to achieve a fuller understanding of the longevity of a drama often viewed as "Catholic" that nonetheless survived the dissolution of the monasteries and the turmoil of the early Reformation.

This book explores ways in which Shakespeare's writing strategies shape our embodied perception of objects - both real and imaginary - in four of his plays. Taking the reader on a series of perceptual journeys, it engages in an exciting dialogue between the disciplines of phenomenology, cognitive studies, historicist research and modern acting techniques, in order to probe our sentient and intuitive responses to Shakespeare's language. What happens when we encounter objects on page and stage; and how we can imagine that impact in performance? What influences might have shaped the language that created them; and what do they reveal about our response to what we see and hear? By placing objects under the phenomenological lens, and scrutinising them as vital conduits between lived experience and language, this book illuminates Shakespeare's writing as a rich source for investigation into the way we think, feel and communicate as embodied beings.

One of the earliest domestic tragedies, Arden of Faversham is a powerful Elizabethan drama based on the real-life murder of Thomas Arden. This Critical Reader presents the first collection of essays specifically focused upon Arden of Faversham. It highlights the way in which this important play from the early 1590s stands at several different critical intersections. Focused research chapters propose new directions for exploring the play in the light of ecocriticism, genre studies, critical race studies and narratives of dispossession. It also looks forward to Arden of Faversham's role and status in a less author-centred critical climate. Chapters explore how this anonymous and canonically marginal play has been approached in the past by scholars and theatre-makers and the frameworks that have offered productive insight into its unique features. The volume includes chapters covering a wide range of critical discourses and resources available for its study, as well as offering practical approaches to the play in the classroom.

An enhanced exam section: expert guidance on approaching exam questions, writing high-quality responses and using critical interpretations, plus practice tasks and annotated sample answer extracts. Key skills covered: focused tasks to develop analysis and understanding, plus regular study tips, revision questions and progress checks to help students track their learning. The most in-depth analysis: detailed text summaries and extract analysis to in-depth discussion of characters, themes, language, contexts and criticism, all helping students to reach their potential.

This book has been specially written for the needs of A-level and undergraduate students. This book enables students to appreciate contrasting interpretations of the text and develop their own critical thinking.Key Features: *Study methods *Introduction to the text *Summaries with critical notes *Themes and techniques *Textual analysis of key passages *Author biography *Historical and literary background *Modern and historical critical approaches *Chronology *Glossary of literary term

This anthology consists of ten plays from countries involved in World War I, including plays from Germany and France never before available in translation. The playwrights reconstruct imagined communities, challenge concepts of national identity, and rewrite history. Representing a range of dramatic forms, from radio play to street-epic, from comic sketch to musical, this anthology includes plays from: Muriel Box; Marion Wentworth Craig; Dorothy Hewitt; Berta Lask; Marie Leneru; Wendy Lill; Alice Dunbar Nelson; Christina Reid; and Gertrude Stein. Highly successful in their day, these plays demonstrate how women have attempted to use theatre to achieve social change. The collection explores the historical development of theatrical conventions and genres and the historical context of social and gender issues.

In this text, the author Philippa Berry rewrites critical perceptions of death in Shakespeare's tragedies from a feminist perspective. Drawing on feminist theory, postmodern thought and queer theory, Berry challenges existing critical notions of what is "fundamental" to Shakespearean tragedy. She argues that there is a figurative rejection of death as terminus, which owes more to pagan thought than Christian. Through a close reading of the main tragedies, Berry discovers a sensuous and meditative Shakespearean discourse of materialism. Her theoretical and textual insights into the properties of matter, time, the soul, and the body now have relevance to contemporary debates about time and matter in science and philosophy.

"Sharp and funny. Gunderson taps into a buoyant spirit ... the touching 'barbaric yawp' (Whitman's phrase) of these two deeply engaging kids." The Washington Post Housebound by illness, Caroline hasn't been to school in months. Confined to her room, she has only social media for company. That is until classmate Anthony bursts in - uninvited and armed with waffle fries, a scruffy copy of Walt Whitman's poetry and a school project due the next day... Caroline is unimpressed, but an unlikely friendship develops and a seemingly mundane piece of homework starts to reveal the pair's hopes and dreams - as well as a deep and mysterious bond that connects them even further. Finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 2014. This new Modern Classics edition features an introduction by Julie Felise Dubiner.

Shakespeare and the Young Writer presents fascinating and impressive accounts of primary school children encountering Shakespeare's work for the first time.
Fred Sedgwick shows how careful selection of scenes, lines and images from the plays and sonnets - in their original language - can be used to great effect as the starting point for children's writing. Examples of children's work show just how powerful the stimulus can be. The book will be of great value to all teachers looking for new ideas to improve their practice in teaching literacy.

This collection of essays investigates the way Africa has been portrayed on the London stage from the 1950s to the present. It focuses on whether - and, if so, to what extent - the Africa that emerges from the London scene is subject to stereotype, and/or in which ways the reception of audiences and critics have contributed to an understanding of the continent and its arts. The collection, divided into two parts, brings together well-established academics and emerging scholars, as well as playwrights, directors and performers currently active in London. With a focus on Wole Soyinka, Athol Fugard, Bola Agbaje, Biyi Bandele, and Dipo Agboluaje, amongst others, the volume examines the work of key companies such as Tiata Fahodzi and Talawa, as well as newer companies Two Gents, Iroko Theatre and Spora Stories. Interviews with Rotimi Babatunde, Ade Solanke and Dipo Agboluaje on the contemporary London scene are also included.

Revels stuff. . . .|This Edition of George Chapman's tragedy differs from all other modern editions in being primarily based on the Quarto of 1607 in preference to the much revised Quarto of 1641. N. S. Brooke believes that the earlier text gives a more certain indication of Chapman's intentions and he has supported this view in an introduction and by a bibliographical and critical study of the play. The divergence between the texts of 1607 and 1641 are set out clearly in this volume, which includes the usual textual and critical apparatus found in the Revels series. -- .

FLAVIUS. Hence, home, you idle creatures, get you home. Is this a holiday? What, know you not, Being mechanical, you ought not walk Upon a laboring day without the sign Of your profession? Speak, what trade art thou? FIRST COMMONER. Why, sir, a carpenter. MARULLUS. Where is thy leather apron and thy rule? What dost thou with thy best apparel on? You, sir, what trade are you?

The volume explores Elizabeth I's impact on English and European culture during her life and after her death, through her own writing as well as through contemporary and later writers. The contributors are codicologists, historians and literary critics, offering a varied reading of the Queen and of her cultural inheritance.

"Wendy Wasserstein: A Casebook "contains in-depth discussions of the playwright's major works, including her recent play 1 "An American Daughter." Wasserstein's plays and essays are explored within diverse traditions, including Jewish storytelling, women's writing, and classical comedy. Critical perspectives include feminist, Bakhtinian, and actor/director. Comparisons with other playwrights, such as Rachel Crothers, Caryl Churchill, and Anton Chekhov, provide context and understanding. An interview with the playwright and an annotated bibliography are included.

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.

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.