Contemporary British Theatre: Breaking New Ground brings together a team of internationally prominent academics and delivers cutting-edge discourse on the strongly emerging tradition of experimentation in contemporary British theatre to redefine what the dramatic stands for today. The chapters focus on influential plays, playwrights and theatre practitioners to produce original and rigorous critical perspectives on the key debates informing theatre practice and scholarship today. This book places the spectator at the heart of the enquiry and examines the radical redefinition of form and content in the context of society, politics, authorship and intentionality, the metaphysical turn in drama, social interventions and resonance, expressive unpredictability, race and identity, ethics/responsibility and the boundaries of representation. Featuring contributors such as Dan Rebellato and Chris Megson, the volume discusses contemporary theatre by a range of playwrights including Martin Crimp, Caryl Churchill and Debbie Tucker Green.

Libation Bearers is the 'middle' play in the only extant tragic trilogy to survive from antiquity, Aeschylus' Oresteia, first produced in 458 BCE. This introduction to the play will be useful for anyone reading it in Greek or in translation. Drawing on his wide experience teaching about performance in the ancient world, C. W. Marshall helps readers understand how the play was experienced by its ancient audience. His discussion explores the impact of the chorus, the characters, theology, and the play's apparent affinities with comedy. The architecture of choral songs is described in detail. The book also investigates the role of revenge in Athenian society and the problematic nature of Orestes' matricide. Libation Bearers immediately entered the Athenian visual imagination, influencing artistic depictions on red-figured vases, and inspiring plays by Euripides and Sophocles. This study looks to the later plays to show how 5th-century audiences understood Libation Bearers. Modern reception of the play is integrated into the analysis. The volume includes a full range of ancillary material, providing a list of relevant red-figure vase illustrations, a glossary of technical terms, and a chronology of ancient and modern theatrical versions.

To 'rematerialize' in the sense of Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage is not to recover a lost material infrastructure, as Marx spoke of, nor is it to restore to some material existence its priority over the imaginary. Indeed, this collection of work by some of the most highly-regarded critics in Shakespeare studies does not offer a single theoretical stance on any of the various forms of critical materialism (Marxism, cultural materialism, new historicism, transversal poetics, gender studies, or performance criticism), but rather demonstrates that the materiality of Shakespeare is multidimensional and consists of the imagination, the intended, and the desired. Nothing returns in this rematerialization, unless it is a return in the sense of the repressed, which, when it comes back, comes back as something else. An all-star line-up of contributors includes Kate McLuskie, Terence Hawkes, Catherine Belsey and Doug Bruster.

When it was first published, "Radical Tragedy" was hailed as a groundbreaking reassessment of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. An engaged reading of the past with compelling contemporary significance, "Radical Tragedy" remains a landmark study of Renaissance drama and a classic of cultural materialist criticism. The corrected and reissued third edition of this critically acclaimed work includes a candid new Preface by the author and features a Foreword by Terry Eagleton.

This book is the first to argue that the Rival Poet of Shakespeare's Sonnets is the well-known young Elizabethan writer Richard Barnfield (1574-1620), long suspected to have been one of Shakespeare's "private friends" (as they were termed by Francis Meres in 1598), with whom (as Meres also tells us) Shakespeare shared some of his sonnets. This is also the first book to argue that William Stanley (1561-1642), sixth earl of Derby, is the young man to whom they addressed their respective sonnets and other love poems in the period c. 1592-1595. In making these identifications, this is the first book to examine in detail the dialogue between Shakespeare's Sonnets and three of Barnfield's books of poetry (all published within a little more than one year)--a dialogue only known to be discussed in a conference paper and one other book.William Shakespeare, Richard Barnfield, and the Sixth Earl of Derby will likely appeal to all readers interested in Shakespeare's life and love poetry, both specialist scholars and non-specialist enthusiasts alike.

In this engaging and accessible guidebook, Stephen Guy-Bray uses queer theory to argue that in many of Shakespeare's works representation itself becomes queer. Shakespeare often uses representation, not just as a lens through which to tell a story, but as a textual tool in itself. Shakespeare and Queer Representation includes a thorough introduction that discusses how we can define queer representation, with each chapter developing these theories to examine works that span the entire career of Shakespeare, including his sonnets, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, King John, Macbeth, and Cymbeline. The book highlights the extent to which Shakespeare's works can be seen to anticipate, and even to extend, many of the insights of the latest developments in queer theory. This thought-provoking and evocative book is an essential guide for students studying Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, gender studies, and queer literary theory.

"Performing Libertinism in Charles II's Court: Politics, Drama, Sexuality" examines the performative nature of Restoration libertinism by reading reports of libertine activities and texts of libertine plays within the context of the fraternization between George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Sir Charles Sedley, Sir George Etherege, and William Wycherley. Webster argues that libertines, both real and imagined, performed traditionally secretive acts, including excessive drinking, sex, sedition, and sacrilege, in the public sphere. This eruption of the private into the public challenged a Stuart ideology that distinguished between the nation's public life and the king's and his subjects' private consciences. Although this eruption was contained by the early 1680s, the libertine performances this book analyzes nevertheless played an important part in the history of English radicalism.

Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice explores the impact of digital technologies on the theatrical performance of Shakespeare in the twenty-first century, both in terms of widening cultural access and developing new forms of artistry. Through close analysis of dozens of productions, both high-profile and lesser known, it examines the rise of live broadcasting and recording in the theatre, the growing use of live video feeds and dynamic projections on the mainstream stage, and experiments in born-digital theatre-making, including social media, virtual reality, and video-conferencing adaptations. In doing so, it argues that technologically adventurous performances of Shakespeare allow performers and audiences to test what they believe theatre to be, as well as to reflect on what it means to be present-with a work of art, with others, with oneself-in an increasingly online world.

In The Quality of Mercy, one of the world's most revered theatre directors reflects on a fascinating variety of Shakespearean topics. In this sequence of essays, Peter Brook debates such questions as who was the man who wrote Shakespeare's plays, why Shakespeare is never out of date, and how actors should approach Shakespeare's verse. He also revisits some of the plays which he has directed with notable brilliance, such as King Lear, Titus Andronicus and, of course, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Taken as a whole, this short but immensely wise book offers an illuminating and provocative insight into a great director's relationship with our greatest playwright. 'An invaluable gift from the greatest Shakespeare director of our time... Brook's genius, modesty, and brilliance shine through on every page' James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

Employing psychoanalysis, trauma theory, and materialist perspectives, this book examines Shakespeare's appropriations of Ovid's poetry in his Roman poems and plays. It argues that Shakespeare uses Ovid to explore violence, trauma, and virtus - the traumatic effects of aggression, sadomasochism, and the shifting notions of selfhood and masculinity.

Demastes, in his interesting study of the work of David Rabe, David Mamet, Sam Shepard, Charles Fuller, Beth Henley, and Marsha Norman, examines how these playwrights utilize the realist format to redirect perception of human life, how they cope with the consciously taken 'task of challenging old systems of thought from a base of new perspective.' The analyses of individual plays are preceded by a brief review of some earlier dramatic theories of realism revealing the roots and antecedents of the new forms. . . . Beyond Naturalism is a very useful and valuable contribution to drama and theatre studies. American Literature Demastes explores the work of a group of playwrights who have moved beyond the often-maligned naturalist approach to create what he terms the new realism in American theatre. Demastes argues that this new realism is separate and distinct from the narrow focus of naturalism and is the result of tapping into a growing tradition inherited from the experimental work of prior decades such as absurdist theatre and experimentation of the 1960s. The playwrights who most exemplify the new realism--David Rabe, David Mamet, Sam Shepard, Charles Fuller, Beth Henley, and Marsha Norman--are examined in depth. Each has separately taken on the challenge to modify the forms of traditional realism to fit more modern visions of existence. In the process, they have broken from naturalism, infusing realism with fresh and contemporary perspectives of the world around them. Demastes shows that even though these playwrights' return to realism has won them larger audiences and greater accessibility, the break from naturalist logic has sometimes confused American critics and audiences--leading them to conclude such works to be bad drama. To uncover the various points of confusion, Demastes not only analyzes the playwrights' contributions but also examines the critical impressions of their productions to assess the reactions of a theatre-going public raised on naturalist assumptions and now asked to adapt to the new alterations confronting them. This two-pronged approach enables the reader to both explore the evolution of new realism and assess the degree to which it can legitimately be considered a new form of American theatre.

In this book, David Mann examines the influence of the Elizabethan cross-dressed tradition on the performance and conception of Shakespeare's female roles through an analysis of all 205 extant plays written for the adult theatre. The study provides both an historical context, showing how performance practice developed in the era before Shakespeare, and a comparative one, in revealing how dramatists in general treated their female characters and the influence their characterisation had upon Shakespeare's writing. The book challenges many views of the sexual ethos of Elizabethan theatre, offering instead a picture of Shakespeare which pays less attention to his supposed gender politics and more to his ability to exploit the cross-dressed convention as a dramatic medium. By challenging the gay and polemical feminist accounts that currently dominate the treatment of Elizabethan cross-dressing, the book restores its importance as a mainstream performance topic for academics and students.

Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life situates the individual works of Marlowe within the context of his overall literary career. Areas covered include: Marlowe's preference for foreign settings and his unusually accurate depictions of them; the importance of his scholarly background; his consistent portrayal of family groups as fissured and troubled; the challenge that his works posed to contemporary orthodoxies about religion, sexuality, and government; and the long and sometimes spectacular afterlife of his works and of his literary reputation as a whole.

In this first introduction to Plautus' Trinummus, students and non-specialists alike are guided through the themes, context, and enduring humor of this Roman comedy. The play portrays the story of an elaborate game of keep-away involving a hidden treasure, a hot-blooded spendthrift youth, his pious sister, her would-be fiancee, a con-artist, and the most unlikely of comic schemers-a group of overly pious old men. The conflict of the plot focuses on whether a pair of old men can help their absent friend Charmides by getting a dowry to his daughter without Charmides' wastrel son Lesbonicus first spending the money on the usual comic debauchery. The money is taken from a treasure hidden by Charmides when he left and a sycophant is hired to pretend to bring letters from Charmides along with the cash for the dowry. Comic confusion ensues when Charmides returns from abroad just in time to intercept the con-artist and overturn the scheming of his friends. Long neglected, Trinummus is one of many Plautine plays that is experiencing a resurgence. This volume elucidates the humor of the play, which is largely based on parody and clever inversions of typical characters and situations from Roman comedy. This discussion is accompanied by an examination of the religious, social, and historical context of the play, as well as its modern reception. The genuine humor of Trinummus has something to say to modern readers, as it showcases how parody can skewer those engaged in pompous moral posturing and presents readers with a playwright who astutely views issues of imperialism and moral justification through a comic lens.

Traditionally literary modernism has been seen as a movement marked by transcendent epiphanies, episodes of estrangement, and a privileging of the extraordinary. Yet modernist writings often take great pains to describe the material, seemingly insignificant details of daily life. Modernismand the Ordinary upends our perceived notions of the period's literature as it recognizes just how pivotal commonplace activities are to modernist aesthetics.
Through pointed readings of prose and poetry from both the U. S. and abroad, Liesl Olson highlights the variety of ways modernist writers represented the quotidian details of modern life, even during times of political crisis and war. Run of the mill experiences like walking to work, eating a sandwich, or mending a dress were often resistant to shock, and these daily actions presented a counter-force to the aesthetic of heightened affect with which modernism is often associated. In a series of persuasively argued chapters, we see how the ordinary operates in its many modernist manifestations: the minutiae of list-making and the decidedly unheroic qualities of Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses; Virginia Woolf's rendering of the ordinary as an affective experience in Mrs. Dalloway; the retreat into daily routine as a refuge from the tumult of World War II in Gertrude Stein's Mrs.Reynolds; Wallace Steven's conception of the commonplace as rooted in pragmatist philosophy; and how Beckett and Proust are simultaneously compelled and repelled by the banalities of modern life. These works are read alongside the ideas of philosophers such as William James, Henri Bergson, and Henri Lefebvre to illustrate how these artists responded to the difficulty of representing the mundane without making it transcendent.
A trenchant, richly textured monograph, Modernism and the Ordinary reveals how the non-transformative power of everyday experiences-what Virginia Woolf called the "cotton wool of daily life"-exerts a profound influence on the epoch-defining art of some of the twentieth century's most celebrated writers.

Written (and occasionally performed) by Rob Drummond in collaboration with director David Overend, these scripts are a record of a long-term artistic partnership. From the award-winning magic of Bullet Catch (the Arches, 2012), to the audience votes of The Majority (National Theatre of Great Britain, 2017), these six plays open up a space for improvisation and participation, and a range of responses and reactions from the audience. The collection includes four previously unpublished scripts along with up-to-date versions of their most successful productions. With introductory essays and in-text commentary by both the writer and director, this is a valuable resource for practitioners, students, and scholars of contemporary British theatre.

The essays in this volume challenge current 'givens' in medieval and early modern research around periodization and editorial practice. They showcase cutting-edge research practices and approaches in textual editing, and in manuscript and performance studies to produce new ways of reading and working for students and scholars.

This volume presents a modernised edition of Christopher Marlowe's critical engagement with one of the bloodiest and traumatic episodes of the French Wars of Religion, the wholesale massacre of French Huguenots in Paris in August, 1572. Sensorily shocking and intellectually gripping, the play's dramatic action spans a tumultuous two decades in French history to unfold for its audience the tragic consequences of religious fanaticism, power politics, and dynastic rivalry. Comprehensively introduced and containing full commentary notes, this edition opens up this frequently neglected but historically significant and dramatically powerful play to student and scholar alike. The introduction examines such topics as the history of the massacre, the play's treatment of its sources, the play's dramatisation of trauma, and the play's exploration of notions of religious toleration. -- .

Argument was the basis of Renaissance education; both rhetoric and dialectic permeated early modern humanist culture, including drama. This study approaches Shakespeare's history plays by analyzing the use of argument in the plays and examining the importance of argument in Renaissance culture. Knowles shows how analysis of arguments of speech and action take us to the core of the plays, in which Shakespeare interrogates the nature of political morality and truth as grounded in the history of what men do and say.

Since the beginning of his artistic career in 1959, Bahram Beyzaie's oeuvre has incorporated various aspects of Iranian, Euro-American, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian performance traditions and cinema. Beyzaie's work reformulates indigenous artistic and ritual forms and cultural narratives in plays and films whose emancipatory aesthetics have influenced several generations of writers, playwrights, and filmmakers. This book examines the origins and development of what the author identifies as Beyzaie's unique sense of creativity, using an interdisciplinary method of semiotic and cultural analysis to identify its manifestations in Beyzaie's films and plays of the 1960 and 1970s. It focusses on Beyzaie's early works, such as Downpour and Uncle Moustache, and how they engage with neglected aspects of Iranian culture to challenge mainstream approaches to writing and directing plays and films. In this way, the author argues, Beyzaie's work questions notions of being and belonging, by subverting exclusionist discourses on art, politics, society, culture, self and other, personal and collective identity, gender relations, intellectuals, heroes and villains, and children.

Over the past two decades, theatre practitioners across the West have turned to documentary modes of performance-making to confront new socio-political realities. The essays in this book place this work in context, exploring historical and contemporary examples of documentary and 'verbatim' theatre, and applying a range of critical perspectives.

The first volume to collect these 3 political plays in one volume. Intro and commentary discusses these texts in the context of Greek history and politics, but also political science and theory as regards more recent eras, including our own, allowing students to relate to the material and work comparitively. The 3 plays selected are the world's first detailed portrayal of demagogy, making them very topical to contemporary readers.

"Love's Labour's Lost" has had a puzzling history. Until the 1950s it was generally considered one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, and it was one of his most vilified until the 20th century. Perhaps more than any other Shakespearean play, it explores the power and limitations of language, and this blatant concern for language led many early critics to believe that it was the work of a playwright just learning his art. Because of its linguistic density, it is one of Shakespeare's most demanding plays, and this difficulty helps account for its initial unpopularity. But modern critics have begun to study the play in earnest and it is now one of Shakespeare's most popular works. This reference is a thorough introduction to the play's origins and legacy.

The volume provides a full overview of all aspects of the play, from its genesis to modern productions, and scholarship. The book begins with a summary of the play's textual history, including the problems of dating it accurately. It then discusses the cultural, social, and ideological contexts that inform the drama and considers some of Shakespeare's plausible sources. The play's dramatic structure, including its language, is examined at length, along with its various themes. The reference then recounts its critical and scholarly reception, and a final chapter surveys the play's performance history. Chapters cite works for further reading, and the volume concludes with a selected bibliography of major studies.

As the first full-length study to analyse utopian plays in Western drama from antiquity to the present, Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre offers an illuminating appraisal of the objectives of utopianism as manifested in drama through the ages, and carefully ascertains the added value that live performance brings to the persuasion of utopian thought. Sian Adiseshiah scrutinises the distinctive intervention of utopian drama through its examination alongside the utopian prose tradition - in this way, the book establishes new ways of approaching utopian aesthetics and new ways of interpreting utopian drama. This book provides fresh understandings of the generic features of utopian plays, identifies the gains of establishing a new genre, and ascertains ways in which this genre functions as political theatre. Referring to over 40 plays, of which 18 are examined in detail, Utopian Drama traces the emergence of the utopian play in the Western tradition from ancient Greek Comedy to experimental contemporary work. Works discussed in detail include plays by Aristophanes, Margaret Cavendish, George Bernard Shaw, Howard Brenton, Claire MacDonald, Cesi Davidson, and Mojisola Adebayo. As well as offering extended attention to the work of these playwrights, the book reflects on the development of utopian drama through history, notes the persistent features, tropes, and conventions of utopian plays, and considers the implications of their registration for both theatre studies and utopian studies.