Since Hedda Gabler exploded on to European and American stages in the 1890s, the play and its title character have troubled and transfixed audiences, performers and critics the world over. In this Routledge Literary Sourcebook, Christopher Innes balances essential reprinted texts with clear, incisive commentary to:
*set the play within the contexts of Norwegian nationalism, the women's movement and the cultural movement of Naturalism
*examine and emphasize the links between - the performance and criticism of the play, from 1890 to the present
*offer the ideal guide to key passages in the play, showing how a knowledge of the play's contexts, performance history and critical fortunes can give rise to exciting new readings of the text
*prepare readers for further study of the play, with suggestions for reading on specific issues of interest.
No student should be without this guide as they enter the fascinating world of Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen and Naturalist theater.

Since Hedda Gabler exploded on to European and American stages in the 1890s, the play and its title character have troubled and transfixed audiences, performers and critics the world over. In this Routledge Literary Sourcebook, Christopher Innes balances essential reprinted texts with clear, incisive commentary to:
*set the play within the contexts of Norwegian nationalism, the women's movement and the cultural movement of Naturalism
*examine and emphasize the links between - the performance and criticism of the play, from 1890 to the present
*offer the ideal guide to key passages in the play, showing how a knowledge of the play's contexts, performance history and critical fortunes can give rise to exciting new readings of the text
*prepare readers for further study of the play, with suggestions for reading on specific issues of interest.
No student should be without this guide as they enter the fascinating world of Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen and Naturalist theater.

This is our best-selling York Notes Advanced title. This book will be packed with features to help the students improve their grade. Talking extensively to teachers, examiners and students there seems to be a need for more information outside what the students already know. Features like check the book, check the film and check the net will now offer students more opportunity to develop their researching skills and provide that extra information. More importantly there will be features that address the specific needs of students studying for the new AS and A2 exams. There will now be text boxes in the margin labelled 'Context' which will describe the literary, historical, cultural, religious, or philisophical context of specific references in the text (contextualisation is the new buzz word in the exam syllabuses). There will be at least 20 of these boxes in every book. The glossaries are now integrated in the text so that students don't need to turn the page to find out the meaning of a word. There will also be regular exam questions integrated in the text which will help students revise. Summaries will be cut down and bulleted where appropriate to make way for extra features (meaning extent remains the same) so that the books are now not only appropriate for students who buy the book to cram, they are also important for higher-level students who need more information to get themselves the top grade.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

This clearly introduces the many critical issues surrounding this complex and haunting play. Ioppolo examines sources, from Holinshed to Spencer, and in the Interpretations section looks at critical readings and notable performances of the play. These range from early critical responses and performances to recent stage and screen interpretations. Edited key passages connect the play to its contexts and criticism, providing both a guide and a new perspective on King Lear. Careful annotation explains Shakespeare's language. This Routledge Literary Sourcebook is ideal introduction for undergraduates, providing orientation in the play, its reception history and the critical material which surrounds it. It examines King Lear within its literary and cultural contexts, bringing together:
*contemporary documents surrounding King Lear
*performance history
*early critical reception from major critics
*twentieth-century criticism
*key passages.
All documents are discussed and explained. The volume also offers carefully annotated key passages from the play itself and concludes with a list of recommended editions and further reading, allowing readers to pursue their study in the areas that interest them most. Grace Ioppolo's broad-ranging analysis and the wealth of materials she brings together make this the ideal guide for any student of King Lear.

This Reader's Guide provides a critical survey of the responses to this popular play, from the earliest published accounts to the present day. Leading the reader through the material in a chronological fashion, the book draws on a rich range of critical writings, including Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, Bradley, and Leavis. Nicholas Potter carefully relates this material to more general issues regarding Shakespearean criticism and scholarship, and the development of literary history and theory.

The appearance in 1609 of Shakespeare's Sonnets is cloaked in mystery and controversy, while the poems themselves are masterpieces of silence and deception. The intervening four centuries have done little to diminish either their mystique or their appeal, and recent years have witnessed an upsurge in interest in these brilliant and contentious lyrics. John Blades' penetrating study of the Sonnets is a highly lucid introduction to Shakespeare's subjects and poetic craft, involving detailed insights on the major themes, together with a comprehensive exploration of the Rival Poet and Dark Mistress sequences. Shakespeare: The Sonnets: - draws on an extensive range of sonnets, offering a line-by-line analysis that engages with the poems as masterworks in their own right, as well as registering their relationship with Shakespeare's dramas - locates the Sonnets in their Elizabethan and humanist framework, with a survey of the history of the sonnet form and rhetorical conventions within the context of the early modern period - concludes with a brief assessment of critical attitudes towards the Sonnets over the four centuries since their publication and an indepth examination of four important critics. Providing students with the critical and analytical skills with which to approach the Sonnets, and featuring a helpful glossary and suggestions for further study, this fascinating book is an indispensable guide.

Designed as a complement to the sections of pre-Shakespearean and Elizabethan comedies already published in The World's Classics as part of a series of anthologies of the English drama.

KING. Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives, Live regist'red upon our brazen tombs, And then grace us in the disgrace of death; When, spite of cormorant devouring Time, Th' endeavour of this present breath may buy That honour which shall bate his scythe's keen edge, And make us heirs of all eternity. Therefore, brave conquerors- for so you are That war against your own affections And the huge army of the world's desires- Our late edict shall strongly stand in force: Navarre shall be the wonder of the world; Our court shall be a little Academe, Still and contemplative in living art. You three, Berowne, Dumain, and Longaville, Have sworn for three years' term to live with me My fellow-scholars, and to keep those statutes That are recorded in this schedule here. Your oaths are pass'd; and now subscribe your names, That his own hand may strike his honour down That violates the smallest branch herein. If you are arm'd to do as sworn to do, Subscribe to your deep oaths, and keep it too.

This innovative collection brings together a group of leading theatre historians to identify and exemplify a variety of productive new approaches to the investigation of plays, players, playwrights, playhouses and other aspects of theatre in the long eighteenth century. Their inquiries are multi-faceted, ranging from stage censorship and anti-theatricalism to the investigation of playhouse finances, from the performance representation of Othello and Oroonoko to the political resonances of adultery comedy, and from Garrick's vocal art to the interpretation of contemporary paintings of actors and actresses.

This book is the first comprehensive critical assessment of the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Augusta Gregory, founder, patron, director, and dramatist of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It elaborates on her distinctive vision of the social role of a National Theatre in Ireland, especially in relation to the various reform movements of her age: the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, the Co-operative Movement, and the Home Industries Movement. It illustrates the impact of John Ruskin on the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Gregory and her circle that included Horace Plunkett, George Russell, John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw. All of these friends visited the celebrated Gregory residence of Coole Park in Country Galway, most famously Yeats. The study thus provides a pioneering evaluation of Ruskin's immense influence on artistic, social, and political discourse in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

People find me. When it's dark. 1863. An asylum. A woman locked in a windowless cell, with no memory as to who she is, or how she arrived there. When spiritualist medium Mrs Lyall requires a new assistant, this nameless woman seems the perfect candidate. But as the woman's past begins to reveal itself, so do new powers neither are prepared for. Alistair McDowall's haunting new play The Glow was the 2018 Pinter Commission, an award given annually by Lady Antonia Fraser to support a new commission at the Royal Court Theatre. This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at London's Royal Court Theatre in January 2022.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book documents how Oscar Wilde was appropriated as a fictional character by no less than thirty-two of his contemporaries. Focusing on Wilde's relationships with many of these writers, Kingston examines and critiques 'Wildean' portraits by such celebrated authors as Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw and Bram Stoker, as well as some lesser-known writers. Many fascinating, little-known biographical and literary connections are revealed. While this work will be of significant interest to scholars of Wilde, it is also written in a clear, accessible style which will appeal to the non-academic reader with a general interest in Wilde or the late Victorian period.

An original and provocative study of the evolution of Shakespeare's image, building on the success of Duncan-Jones' acclaimed biography, "Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life." Taking a broadly chronological approach, she investigates Shakespeare's changing reputation, as a man, an actor and a poet, both from his own viewpoint and from that of his contemporaries. Many different categories of material are explored, including printed books, manuscripts, literary and non-literary sources. Rather than a biography, the book is an exploration with biographical elements. The change in public opinion in Shakespeare's time is quite startling: Henry Chettle attacked him as an 'upstart Crow' in 1592, an attack from which Shakespeare sought to defend himself; and yet by the time of the First Folio in 1623 he had become the 'Sweet Swan of Avon ' and was fast becoming the literary treasure he remains today.

This engaging and fascinating study brings the politics and fashions of Shakespeare's literary and theatrical world vividly to life.

Drawing on the later writings of Martin Heidegger, the book traces the correspondence between the philosopher's concept of technology and Shakespeare's poetics of human and natural productivity in the Sonnets.

The Romantics invented Shakespeare studies, and in losing contact with our origins, we have not been able to develop an adequate alternative foundation on which to build our work. This book asserts that among Shakespeareans at present, the level of conviction required to sustain a healthy critical practice is problematically if not dangerously low, and the qualities which the Romantics valued in an engagement with Shakespeare are either ignored these days or fundamentally misunderstood.

"The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity "offers the first sustained examination of fatness in the early modern period. As Levy-Navarro notes, bodily perceptions have evolved that value the thin body as they mark and stigmatize the fat one. Using readings of such major figures as Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Skelton, this book considers alternative ways that fat was constructed before the introduction of the modern pathologized category of "obesity." Levy-Navarro argues that Shakespeare, Jonson, and Skelton understood that a thin aesthetic consolidates the power of the elite and chose to align themselves with their fat, lowly, and revolting characters--an alliance that offers a model of defiance with continued relevance.""

Contents:
General Editor's Preface. Acknowledgements. 1. Preliminaries: Semiotics and Poetics: The Semiotics Enterprise; How Many Semiotics?; The material. 2. Foundations: Signs in the Theatre: Prague structuralism and the theatrical sign; Typologies of the sign. 3. Theatrical Communication: Codes, Systems and the Performance Text: Elements of theatrical communication; Theatrical Systems and Codes; Theatrical competence: frame, convention and the role of the audience. 4. Dramatic Logic: The construction of the dramatic world; Dramatic action and time; Actant, dramatis persona and the dramatic model. 5. Dramatic Discourse: Dramatic Communication; Context and deixis; Universe of discourse and co-text; Speech acts; The said and the unsaid: implicatures and figures; Textuality; Towards a dramatological analysis. 6. Concluding Comments: Theatre, Drama, Semiotics: Dramatic Text/performance text; A united enterprise? Suggestions for further reading. Bibliography. Index.

Contents:
General Editor's Preface. List of Illustrations. Contributors. Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction: John Drakakis 2. Swisser-Swatter: making a man of English letters: Terence Hawkes 3. Post-structuralist Shakespeare: text and ideology: Christopher Norris 4. Deconstructing Shakespeare's comedies: Malcolm Evans 5. Sexulaity in the reading of Shakespeare: Hamlet and Measure for Measure: Jacqueline Rose 6. Reading the signs: towards a semiotics of Shakespearean drama: Alessandro Serpieri, translated by Keir Elam 7. Shakespeare in ideology: James H. Kavanagh 8. Disrupting sexual difference: meaning and gender in the comedies: Catherine Belsey 9. Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish: the discursive con-texts of The Tempest: Francis Barker and Peter Hulme 10. History and ideology: the instance of Henry V: Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield 11. Afterword: Robert Weimann.

This collection brings together established scholars and new names in the field of Tudor drama studies. Through a range of traditional and theoretical approaches, the essays address the neglected early and mid-Tudor period before the rise of the 'mature' drama of Marlowe and Shakespeare in the 1590s. New Ideas for research topics and pedagogical methods are discussed in the essays, which each provide original arguments about specific texts and/or performances while also providing an advanced introduction to a concentrated area of Tudor drama studies. While the continuation of mystery play performances and morality plays through the first three-quarters of the sixteenth century have been discussed with some consistency in the academy, other types of drama (e.g. folk or school plays) have received short shrift, and critical theory has been slow in coming to this scholarship. This collection begins to fill in these deficiencies and suggest fruitful directions for a twenty-first century revival in pre-Shakespearean Tudor drama studies.

Despite the popularity of plays about the East, the representation of the East in early modern drama has been either overlooked, marginalized as footnotes or generalized into stereotypes. Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama focuses on the multi-layered, often conflicting and changing perceptions of the East and how dramatic works made use of their respective theatrical space to represent the concept of the East in drama. This volume re-examines the (mis)representation of the East on the early modern English outdoor and indoor stage and broadens our understanding of early modern theatrical productions beyond Shakespeare and the European continent. It traces the origin of conventional depictions of the East to university dramas and explores how they influenced the commercial stage. Chapters uncover how conflicting representations of the East were communicated on stage through the material aspects of stage architecture, costumes and performance effects. The collection emphasizes these material aspects of dramatic performances and showcases neglected plays, including George Salterne's Tomumbeius, Robert Greene's The Historie of Orlando Furioso and Joseph Simons' Leo the Armenian, and puts them in conversation with William Shakespeare's The Tempest and John Fletcher's The Island Princess.

Ideal for student research and class discussion, this interdisciplinary casebook provides a rich variety of primary historical documents and commentary on The Crucible within the context of two relevant historical periods: the Salem witch-trials of 1692 and the "Red Scare" of the 1950s, when the play was written. The play is a testimony to the inherent dangers Miller sees in any community seized by hysteria. The Salem witch-hunts, which Miller uses to illustrate such a community, were echoed more than 250 years later in the hunt for subversives during the "Red Scare" of the 1950s. The authors provide literary and dramatic analysis of the play, comprehensive historical backgrounds, relevant documents of the periods, and questions and projects to help students in their understanding of The Crucible and the issues it raises. In a discussion of Puritan society of the seventeenth century, the authors explore the habits of many of the residents of Massachusetts Bay and specific events which seemed to make the witch-hunts of 1692 inevitable. The text of relevant documents illustrate their beliefs, combined with the disasters that contributed to community hysteria. A chapter on the Salem witch trials includes testimony, letters, and first person accounts by actual people on which Miller based his characters. A chapter on the "Red Scare" of the 1950s features testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, case studies of blacklisted people, and an exclusive interview with a couple who were blacklisted. The authors include a chapter on witch-hunting in the 1990s in the form of testimony from preschoolers which sent child care workers to prison on charges of sexual abuse. Studentswill be able to compare and contrast witch- hunting over 300 years with the materials provided here, many of which are available in no other printed form. Each section of the casebook contains study questions, topics for research papers and class discussion, and lists of further reading for examining the issues raised by the play.

This book throws new light on the issue of the dramatist's religious orientation by dismissing sectarian and one-sided theories, tackling the problem from the angle of the variegated Elizabethan context recently uncovered by modern historians and theatre scholars. It is argued that faith was a quest rather than a quiet certainty for the playwright.

The history of European drama began at the festivals of Dionysus in ancient Athens, where tragedy, satyr-drama and comedy were performed. Understanding this background is vital for students of classical, literary and theatrical subjects, and Alan H. Sommerstein's accessible study is the ideal introduction.
The book begins by looking at the social and theatrical contexts and different characteristics of the three genres of ancient Greek drama. It then examines the five main dramatists whose works survive - Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and Menander - discussing their styles, techniques and ideas, and giving short synopses of all their extant plays.