More Bassey than Bhangra... Sonia's life has always been a bit of a double act, brought up as one half of a Shirley Bassey tribute act. Alongside her overbearing mother Gloria, she left a trail of sequins across the working men's clubs of East Anglia. Now she's divorced, battling through the middle-age jungle, wrangling unimpressed teenagers and navigating rocky friendships. But the arrival of her half-brother Naim brings a refreshed sense of belonging and cultural identity, and she begins to piece together the mosaic of her life. Can Sonia shake off the past, even with her ever-present mother keeping 'the show' on the road from beyond the grave? Glitterball is a play with live music, wry humour and a whole lotta sparkle. This edition was published to coincide with the first run produced by Rifco Theatre and Watford Palace Theatre at Watford Palace Theatre, in September 2022.

What skills did Shakespeare's actors bring to their craft? How do these skills differ from those of contemporary actors? Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare's Theatre: Thinking with the Body examines the 'toolkit' of the early modern player and suggests new readings of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of their many skills. Theatre is an ephemeral medium. Little remains to us of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries: some printed texts, scattered documents and records, and a few scraps of description, praise, and detraction. Because most of what survives are printed playbooks, students of English theatre find it easy to forget that much of what happened on the early modern stage took place within the gaps of written language: the implicit or explicit calls for fights, dances, military formations, feats of physical skill, song, and clowning. Theatre historians and textual editors have often ignored or denigrated such moments, seeing them merely as extraneous amusements or signs that the text has been 'corrupted' by actors. This book argues that recapturing a positive account of the skills and expertise of the early modern players will result in a more capacious understanding of the nature of theatricality in the period.

This volume proposes new insights into the uses of classical mythology by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, focusing on interweaving processes in early modern appropriations of myth. Its 11 essays show how early modern writing intertwines diverse myths and plays with variant versions of individual myths that derive from multiple classical sources, as well as medieval, Tudor and early modern retellings and translations. Works discussed include poems and plays by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and others. Essays concentrate on specific plays including The Merchant of Venice and Dido Queen of Carthage, tracing interactions between myths, chronicles, the Bible and contemporary genres. Mythological figures are considered to demonstrate how the weaving together of sources deconstructs gendered representations. New meanings emerge from these readings, which open up methodological perspectives on multi-textuality, artistic appropriation and cultural hybridity. -- .

While The Tempest has always been one of Shakespeare's most entertaining and enchanting plays, it continues to stir up passionate debate throughout the world because of its ideas and attitudes toward race, class, political power, and colonialism. This casebook systematically examines these issues, as well as several others, from dramatic and historical perspectives and through parallel contemporary applications. Readers are first introduced to the play with a dramatic analysis that situates the work within Shakespeare's canon and within the romantic tradition. This fresh interpretation also casts much light on the use of imagery and language in setting, character, and thematic development. This casebook draws on the themes and issues introduced, and examines each one in turn with insightful original essays and primary documents. The shipwreck that sets the play in motion is examined in terms of the discovery of the new world, and the prevailing attitudes toward colonialism. A brief chronology of "New World" events helps situate the historical excerpts. Another intriguing topic explored in the casebook is the diverging Elizabethan views on science and religion, with a particular focus on the role of magic. Primary documents that help readers appreciate the significance of matters of sorcery and the supernatural include excerpts from Reginald Scott's 1584 The Discovery of Witchcraft, James I's Demonology (1597) as well as Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Other topic chapters examine political power and treachery, as well as society in terms of marriage and the court. A full chapter is also devoted to performance and interpretation of the play. The final "Contemporary Applications" sectioninvestigates current global concerns that parallel those in the play, and help readers appreciate Shakespeare's play in relation to the world around us. Readers are shown dramatically contrasting perspectives on colonialism in Zimbawe. The casebook concludes with a fascinating discussion of the parallel elements of fantasy in The Tempest and in literary works by popular contemporary writers J.R.R. Tolkien and J. K. Rowling. Understanding The Tempest follows the successful casebook format developed specifically for the Literature in Context series. Following a dramatic analysis, each topic chapter presents an important historical issue in the play, with insightful narrative essays supported by primary documents. In several chapters, brief chronologies of significant related events help readers understand the historical context of the play and its thematic concerns. As a tool for student research and classroom work, educators will appreciate the numerous topics for written and oral discussion suggested at the conclusion of each unit. Suggested readings further complement the content and research applications of the casebook.

The use of significant proper names is one of the most entertaining aspects of Aristophanes' art; unsurprisingly, it has received much scholarly attention. But although there are a large number of articles and scattered comments on individual names, the present book offers the first systematic study on the subject. It is, as far as possible, an exhaustive discussion of significant proper names that appear in Aristophanes' eleven extant plays: personal names (which occupy the largest part), theonyms, place-names, ethnics and demotics - all names that seem to be deliberately used for their meanings. Two appendixes discuss slave-names and selected names from Aristophanes' fragmentary plays. Names are carefully analysed in their context, taking into account a range of factors such as language (etymology and word-plays), the content of the plays (the plots, set against their political and social background), and issues of characterisation. This work is thus meant to contribute simultaneously to Aristophanic scholarship, by enabling a deeper appreciation of Aristophanes ' humour, and to the field of Greek literary onomastics.

King Richard III is one of Shakespeare's most popular and frequently performed plays. Janis Lull's introduction to this new edition, based on the First Folio, emphasises the play's tragic themes individual identity, determinism and choice and stresses the importance of women's roles in the play. It also underscores the special relationship between Richard III and Macbeth, demonstrating that the later tragedy re-examines issues raised in the earlier one. A thorough performance history of stage and film versions of Richard III shows how the text has been cut, rewritten and reshaped by directors and actors to enhance the role of Richard at the expense of other parts, especially those of the women. This updated edition contains a new introductory section covering recent criticism and performances including the RSC cycles of the history plays of this perennially popular play. The notes define the play's language in terms easily accessible to contemporary readers."

The third edition of Hamlet offers a completely new introduction to this rich, mysterious play, examining Shakespeare's transformation of an ancient Nordic legend into a drama whose philosophical, psychological, political, and spiritual complexities have captivated audiences world-wide for over 400 years. Focusing on the ways in which Shakespeare re-imagined the revenge plot and its capacity to investigate the human experiences of love, grief, obligation, and memory, Heather Hirschfeld explores the play's cultural and theatrical contexts, its intricate textual issues, its vibrant critical traditions and controversies, and its history of performance and adaptation by celebrated directors, actors, and authors. Supplemented by an updated reading list, extensive illustrations and helpful appendices, this edition also features revised commentary notes explicitly designed for the student reader, offering the very best in contemporary criticism of this great tragedy.

Who is the proper occupant of the nursery? The obvious answer is the child, and not an archive, a seductive troll-princess, or poor fosterlings. Nevertheless, characters in Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, and Little Eyolf intend to host these improper occupants in their children's rooms. Dr. Gunn calls these dramas 'the empty nursery plays' because they all describe rooms intended for offspring, as well as characters' plans for refilling that space. One might expect nurseries to provide an ideal setting for a realist playwright to dramatize contemporary problems. Rather than mattering to Ibsen in terms of naturalist detail or explicit social critique, however, they are reserved for the maintenance of characters' fears and expectations concerning the future. Empty Nurseries, Queer Occupants intervenes in scholarly debates in child studies by arguing that the empty bourgeois nursery is a better symbol for innocence than the child. Here, 'emptiness' refers to the common construction of the child as blank and latent. In Ibsen, the child is also doomed or deceased, and thus essentially absent, but nurseries persist as spaces of memorialization and potential alike. Nurseries also gesture toward the domains of childhood and women's labor, from birth to domestic service. 'Bourgeois nursery' points to the classed construction of innocence and to the more materialist aspects of this book, which inform our understanding of domesticity and family in the West and uncover a set of reproductive connotations broader than 'the innocent child' can convey.

A dynamic new study in literary and dramatic influence, Misreading Shakespeare defines and explores the relation between two modern plays-Edward Bond's Lear and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead-and Shakespeare's King Lear and Hamlet. While some see the modern plays as derivative, others claim that they are as original as the Shakespearean plays. The effort to define and explore this relationship is a challenge for critics and readers alike. Here, Wagdi Zeid, a playwright and professor of Shakespeare and drama, puts forth a theoretical perspective derived from W. Jackson Bate and Harold Bloom's theories of influence.

Zeid's study manages to defi ne and explore not only this intriguing and ambiguous relationship but the concept of originality itself. Furthermore, while theorists like Bate and Bloom are wholly concerned with just general statements and concepts, Misreading Shakespeare goes inside the dramatic texts themselves, and this practical aspect makes a big difference. Also, neither Bate nor Bloom has tried to apply his theory to dramatic texts.

Misreading Shakespeare offers readers both theory and practice. Misreading Shakespeare was written for an eclectic audience, including scholars of drama, theatre, Shakespeare, and literary theory and criticism; playwrights and other writers striving for originality; and theatrical artists and audiences alike.

A pioneering study of the development of one of the key critical discourses in contemporary Irish studies, this book covers all the major figures, publications and debates within Irish postcolonial criticism, delivering a commentary on this diverse body of work as well as positioning Irish postcolonial criticism within the wider postcolonial field.

John Derricke's Image of Irelande, with a Discoverie of Woodkarne is a key work of English print-making, Irish and English history and cultural misunderstanding. The work attests to the complexity of English and Irish relations, colonisation, military history, imperial propaganda, poetry, art, printing and the forging of identity in the early modern British Isles. The original work comprises of a lengthy poetic narrative and twelve famous woodcuts of the highest quality produced in sixteenth-century England. They also represent some of the only contemporary views of early modern Ireland on record. The sixteen interdisciplinary essays in this collection focus on the text's political and historical meaning, print history, iconographic elements, paratexts, literary and artistic influences, and cultural archaeology. The collection will appeal to scholars of many disciplines. -- .

Reading and Writing a Screenplay takes you on a journey through the many possible ways of writing, reading and imagining fiction and documentary projects for cinema, television and new media. It explores the critical role of a script as a document to be written and read with both future readers and the future film it will be giving life to in mind. The book explores the screenplay and the screenwriting process by approaching the film script in three different ways: how it is written, how it is read and how it can be rewritten. Combining contemporary screenwriting practices with historical and academic context, Isabelle Raynauld provides key analytical tools and reading strategies for conceptualizing and scripting projects based on the impact different writing styles can have on readers, with various examples ranging from early cinema to new media and new platforms throughout. This title offers an alternative, thought-provoking and inspiring approach to reading and writing a screenplay that is ideal for directors, producers, actors, students, aspiring screenwriters and readers interested in understanding how an effective screenplay is created.

Shakespeare's Law is a critical overview of law and legal issues within the life, career, and works of William Shakespeare as well as those that arise from the endless array of activities that happen today in the name of Shakespeare. Mark Fortier argues that Shakespeare's attitudes to law are complex and not always sanguine, that there exists a deep and perhaps ultimate move beyond law very different from what a lawyer or legal scholar might recognize. Fortier looks in detail at the legal issues most prominent across Shakespeare's work: status, inheritance, fraud, property, contract, tort (especially slander), evidence, crime, political authority, trials, and the relative value of law and justice. He also includes two detailed case studies, of The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, as well as a chapter looking at law in works by Shakespeare's contemporaries. The book concludes with a chapter on the law as it relates to Shakespeare today. The book shows that the legal issues in Shakespeare are often relevant to issues we face now, and the exploration of law in Shakespeare is as germane today, though in sometimes new ways, as in the past.

This book focuses on the role that the Oxford classical curriculum has had in shaping Oscar Wilde's aestheticism. It positions Wilde as a classically trained intellectual and outlines the path he took to gain recognition as a writer and promoter of the aesthetic movement. This narrative is conveyed through a broad range of literary sources, including Wilde's travel poetry, American lectures, and canonical works like 'The Critic as Artist', The Soul of Man, The Picture of Dorian Gray and De Profundis. This study proposes that Wilde approached aestheticism as a personalised, self-directed learning experience - a mode of self-culture - which could be used to maintain an intellectual life outside of the university. It also explores Wilde's thoughts on education and considers the significance of male friendship at Oxford, and in Wilde's life and literature.

"Yet the dark places are the centre" claims George Steiner in "The Bluebird's Castle". Any attempt to analyze rationally the predominating barbaric phenomenon of the 20th century, namely the Holocaust and its Fascist background, challenges the limits of human understanding. The phenomenon of the Holocaust is a consequence of these "dark places" where again in Steiner's words "we have passed out of the major order and symmetries of Western civilization". A final understanding of the theme is beyond the limits of rationality and may also be viewed in the light of Adorno's "no poetry after Auschwitz". Nevertheless, the need to attempt reflective and creative 'work' on this topic continues. The aim of the book is to study the relationship between ideology and myth as they function diversely in Fascist and Antifascist drama. All the plays discussed are constructed as a paradigmatic constellation between myth and ideology, coordinated by a central and homogeneous political intent. The difference between them lies in their Fascist or Antifascist attitude. The plays analyzed were chosen for the treatment of a common thematic Ur-myth: the post-figuration of the return of the prodigal son and the story of the crucifixion from the New Testament. The 'prodigal cluster' includes plays by Franz Theodor Csokor, Ernst Wiechert and Max Frisch, the 'sacrificial cluster' plays by Otto Erler, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and George Tabori. As an introductory analysis, the theme of the artist and his mission is treated in two plays written in the pre-Nationalsocialist period: "Der Einsame. Ein Menschenuntergang" by Hanns Johst and Bertold Brecht's reaction to this play in "Baal". A final analysis deals with the fusion of mythologems and ideologems as demonstrated in two plays dealing with the New Myth of Germania by Richard Eutinger and Heiner Muller.

A prolific playwright, Sam Shepard (1943-2017) wrote fifty-six produced plays, for which he won many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. He was also a compelling, Oscar-nominated film actor, appearing in scores of films. Shepard also published eight books of prose and poetry and was a director (directing the premiere productions of ten of his plays as well as two films); a musician (a drummer in three rock bands); a horseman; and a plain-spoken intellectual. The famously private Shepard gave a significant number of interviews over the course of his public life, and the interviewers who respected his boundaries found him to be generous with his time and forthcoming on a wide range of topics. The selected interviews in Conversations with Sam Shepard begin in 1969 when Shepard, already a multiple Obie winner, was twenty-six and end in 2016, eighteen months before his death from complications of ALS at age seventy-three. In the interim, the voice, the writer, and the man evolved, but there are themes that echo throughout these conversations: the indelibility of family; his respect for stage acting versus what he saw as far easier film acting; and the importance of music to his work. He also speaks candidly of his youth in California, his early days as a playwright in New York City, his professionally formative time in London, his interests and influences, the mythology of the American Dream, his own plays, and more. In Conversations with Sam Shepard, the playwright reveals himself in his own words.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

Intermedial Shakespeares argues that intermediality has refashioned performances of Shakespeare's plays over the last two decades in Europe. It describes ways in which text and author, time and space, actor and audience have been redefined in Shakespearean productions that incorporate digital media, and it traces transformations in practice.

This book explores the cultural bridges connecting George Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries, such as Charles Dickens and Arthur Miller, to China. Analyzing readings, adaptations, and connections of Shaw in China through the lens of Chinese culture, Li details the negotiations between the focused and culturally specific standpoints of eastern and western culture while also investigating the simultaneously diffused, multi-focal, and comprehensive perspectives that create strategic moments that favor cross-cultural readings. With sources ranging from Shaw's connections with his contemporaries in China to contemporary Chinese films and interpretations of Shaw in the digital space, Li relates the global impact of not only what Chinese lenses can reveal about Shaw's world, but how intercultural and interdisciplinary readings can shed new light on familiar and obscure works alike.

Eubanks Winkler and Schoch reveal how - and why - the first generation to stage Shakespeare after Shakespeare's lifetime changed absolutely everything. Founder of the Duke's Company, Sir William Davenant influenced how Shakespeare was performed in a profound and lasting way. This open access book provides the first performance-based account of Restoration Shakespeare, exploring the precursors to Davenant's approach to Restoration Shakespeare, the cultural context of Restoration theatre, the theatre spaces in which the Duke's Company performed, Davenant's adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, acting styles, and the lasting legacy of Davenant's approach to staging Shakespeare. The eBook editions of this work are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Queens University Belfast.

Reformations of the Body establishes new ties between theology and theatricality in the time of Shakespeare, juxtaposing original readings of religious thinkers such as John Calvin with case studies of influential tragedies such as Doctor Faustus and Othello. While current accounts of the Reformation often assume that Protestant iconoclasts devalued sensory experience and bodily praxis, Jennifer Waldron shows how and why the human body and the bodily senses retained sacred value after the Reformation. In readings of scenes of providential revival, bloody pacts with the devil, and sacrificial rites of revenge, she shows how theological problems became tightly bound to the living medium of theater itself.

For more than four centuries, cultural preferences, literary values, critical contexts, and personal tastes have governed readers' responses to Shakespeare's sonnets. Early private readers often considered these poems in light of the religious, political, and humanist values by which they lived. Other seventeenth- and eighteenth- century readers, such as stationers and editors, balanced their personal literary preferences against the imagined or actual interests of the literate public to whom they marketed carefully curated editions of the sonnets, often successfully. Whether public or private, however, many disparate sonnet interpretations from the sonnets' first two centuries in print have been overlooked by modern sonnet scholarship, with its emphasis on narrative and amorous readings of the 1609 sequence. First Readers of Shakespeare's Sonnets reintroduces many early readings of Shakespeare's sonnets, arguing that studying the priorities and interpretations of these previous readers expands the modern critical applications of these poems, thereby affording them numerous future applications. This volume draws upon book history, manuscript studies, and editorial theory to recover four lost critical approaches to the sonnets, highlighting early readers' interests in Shakespeare's classical adaptations, political applicability, religious themes, and rhetorical skill during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Monograph on Martin Crimp, one of Europe's most celebrated playwrights Covers Crimp's most recent work Takes an internationalist approach Is the first book to address Crimp's work of the past decade

A guide to the contemporary London stage as well as an argument about its future, the book walks readers through the city's performance spaces following the Brexit vote. Austerity-era London theatre is suffused with the belief that private ownership defines full citizenship, its perspective narrowing to what an affluent audience might find relatable. From pub theatres to the National, Michael Meeuwis reveals how what gets put on in London interacts with the daily life of the neighbourhoods in which they are set. This study addresses global theatregoers, as well as students and scholars across theatre and performance studies-particularly those interested in UK culture after Brexit, urban geography, class, and theatrical economics.