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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Plays & playwrights
First published in English 1961, this reissue relates the problems of form and style to the development of dramatic speech in pre-Shakespearean tragedy. The work offers positive standards by which to assess the development of pre-Shakespearean drama and, by tracing certain characteristics in Elizabethan tragedy which were to have a bearing on Shakespeare's dramatic technique, helps to illuminate the foundations on which Shakespeare built his dramatic oeuvre.
First published in 1939, The Irish Dramatic Movement is a critical study of the dramatic work of W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, their contemporaries and some of their successors. Professor Ellis-Fermor relates each to the movement as a whole, discussing the nature of poetic drama in the hands of Yeats and Synge, while attempting to describe the remarkable contribution made by Irish drama to the literature of the early twentieth century. In her appendices, the author includes a chronological table of the main events in the first years of the movement, a list of plays produced in London in the last decade of the nineteenth century and a subject index to some of the main critical opinions of W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory.
First published in 1930, in Tamburlaine the Great - in Two Parts, Professor Ellis-Fermor discusses early editions of the work and considers how far the spelling and punctuation of the 1590 octavo should be retained in modern editions. The author discusses the date that the play was written and its authorship and sources. She then goes on to look at the stage history of Tamburlaine before presenting the play itself in two parts. Professor Ellis-Fermor retains the spelling of the majority of proper names. She also keeps the old stage directions where they occur, as these are, she says, picturesque and succinct, and there appears no reason to discard them in favour of the more modern forms used by subsequent editors. In her appendices, she includes extracts from other accounts of Tamburlaine and looks at later editions of the work.
Arguably the first play in a Shakespearean tetralogy, Richard II is a unique and compelling political drama whose themes still resonate today. It is one of the few Shakespeare plays written entirely in verse and its format presents unique theatrical challenges. Politically engaged and controversial, it raises crucial debates about the relationship between early modern art, audience response and state power. This collection provides a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the critical and theatrical history of the play. The substantial introduction surveys the history of critical interpretations of Richard II since the eighteenth century. The eleven newly written critical essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field then adopt an eclectic range of critical approaches that encourage scholars and students to pursue new and imaginative directions with the text.
First published in 1927, this book aims to trace the development of Christopher Marlowe's mind and art as these are revealed in the surviving parts of his work, while portraying the personality thus perceived. Professor Ellis-Fermor begins by looking at Marlowe's life and early works, before making a more detailed study of Tamburlaine, Faustus, The Plays of Policy, and finaly Hero and Leander. She then goes on, in the appendix of this work, to consider contention and true tragedy before concluding with a study of Marlowe in the eyes of his contemporaries. The author has followed the text of the Oxford Edition of Marlowe's works (1910), except in a few quotations, where she has preferred the reading of another early edition.
This book offers a new, accurate and actable translation of one of Euripides' most popular plays, together with a commentary which provides insight into the challenges it sets for production and suggestions for how to solve them. The introduction discusses the social and cultural context of the play and its likely impact on the original audience, the way in which it was originally performed, the challenges which the lead roles present today and Medea's implications for the modern audience. The text of the translation is followed by the 'Theatrical Commentary' section on the issues involved in staging each scene and chorus today, embodying insights gained from a professional production. Notes on the translation, a glossary of names, suggestions for further reading and a chronology of Euripides' life and times round out the volume. The book is intended for use by theatre practitioners who wish to stage or workshop Medea and by students both of drama, theatre and performance and of classical studies.
Now in its third edition Shakespeare: The Basics is an insightful and informative introduction to the work of William Shakespeare. Exploring all aspects of Shakespeare s plays including the language, cultural contexts, and modern interpretations, this text looks at how a range of plays from across the genres have been understood. Updates in this edition include:
With fully updated further reading throughout and a wide range of case studies and examples, this text is essential reading for all those studying Shakespeare s work.
This Play Guide is specifically written for A Level students who are studying Antigone as part of the AQA A Level Drama & Theatre specification. It provides structured support for Component 1: Section A - Drama and theatre. / This book is divided into three sections: How to explore a text for A level Drama and Theatre, with vocabulary-building sections on acting, directing and design; An extended exploration of the play to enrich students' understanding and response to the text; Targeted examination preparation to improve writing and test-taking skills. / Fully supports the written examination and helps students develop their key knowledge and understanding of key A Level drama & theatre skills. / Knowledge and understanding of the play are developed with a synopsis, character and scene studies, contextual and practical exploration. / Includes a wide range of practical drama tasks, activities, and research and revision exercises. / Advice on how to interpret and prepare for exam questions with examples of effective responses.
The Routledge Companion to Actors? Shakespeare is a window onto how today's actors contribute to the continuing life and relevance of Shakespeare's plays. The process of acting is notoriously hard to document, but this volume reaches behind famous performances to examine the actors? craft, their development and how they engage with playtexts. Each chapter relies upon privilieged access to its subject to offer an unparalleled insight into contemporary practice. This volume explores the techniques, interpretive approaches and performance styles of the following actors: Simon Russell Beale, Sinead Cusack, Judi Dench, Kate Duchene, Colm Feore, Mariah Gale, John Harrell, Greg Hicks, Rory Kinnear, Kevin Kline, Adrian Lester, Marcelo Magni, Ian McKellen, Patrice Naiambana, Vanessa Redgrave, Piotr Semak, Anthony Sher, Jonathan Slinger, Kate Valk, Harriet Walter This twin volume to The Routledge Companion to Directors? Shakespeare is an essential work for both actors and students of Shakespeare.
Dramatist, theatre practitioner, novelist, and painter, August Strindberg's diverse dramatic output embodied the modernist sensibility. He was above all one of the most radical innovators of Western theatre. This book provides an insightful assessment of Strindberg's vital contribution to the dramatic arts, while placing his creative process and experimental approach within a wider cultural context. Eszter Szalczer explores Strindberg's re-definition of drama as a fluid, constantly evolving form that profoundly influenced playwriting and theatrical production from the German Expressionists to the Theatre of the Absurd. Key productions of Strindberg's plays are analysed, examining his theatre as a living voice that continues to challenge audiences, critics, and even the most innovative directors. August Strindberg provides an essential and accessible guide to the playwright's work and illustrates the influence of his drama on our understanding of contemporary theatre.
First published in English in 1965, this book discusses the roots and development of the dumb show as a device in Elizabethan drama. The work provides not only a useful manual for those who wish to check the occurrence of dumb shows and the uses to which they are put; it also makes a real contribution to a better understanding of the progress of Elizabethan drama, and sheds new light on some of the lesser known plays of the period.
Shakespeare wrote for a theater in which the audience was understood to be, and at times invited to be, active and participatory. How have Shakespeare's audiences, from the sixteenth century to the present, responded to that invitation? In what ways have consumers across different cultural contexts, periods, and platforms engaged with the performance of Shakespeare's plays? What are some of the different approaches taken by scholars today in thinking about the role of Shakespeare's audiences and their relationship to performance? The chapters in this collection use a variety of methods and approaches to explore the global history of audience experience of Shakespearean performance in theater, film, radio, and digital media. The approaches that these contributors take look at Shakespeare's audiences through a variety of lenses, including theater history, dramaturgy, film studies, fan studies, popular culture, and performance. Together, they provide both close studies of particular moments in the history of Shakespeare's audiences and a broader understanding of the various, often complex, connections between and among those audiences across the long history of Shakespearean performance.
Anton Chekhov offers a critical introduction to the plays and productions of this canonical playwright, examining the genius of Chekhov's writing, theatrical representation and dramatic philosophy. Emphasising Chekhov's continued relevance and his mastery of the tragicomic, Rose Whyman provides an insightful assessment of his life and work. All of Chekhov's major dramas are analysed, in addition to his vaudevilles, one-act plays and stories. The works are studied in relation to traditional criticism and more recent theoretical and cultural standpoints, including cultural materialism, philosophy and gender studies. Analysis of key historical and recent productions, display the development of the drama, as well as the playwright's continued appeal. Anton Chekhov provides readers with an accessible comparative study of the relationship between Chekhov's life, work and ideological thought.
Demystifying and contextualising Shakespeare for the twenty-first century, this book offers both an introduction to the subject for beginners as well as an invaluable resource for more experienced Shakespeareans. In this friendly, structured guide, Robert Shaughnessy:
The companion website at www.routledge.com/textbooks/shaughnessy contains student-focused materials and resources, including an interactive timeline and annotated weblinks.
The enduring appeal of Shakespeare's works derives largely from the fact that they contain brilliantly drawn characters. Interpretations of these characters are products of changing modes of thought, and thus past explanations of their behavior, including Shakespeare's, no longer satisfy us. In this work, Bernard J. Paris, an eminent Shakespearean scholar, shows how Shakespeare endowed his tragic heroes with enduring human qualities that have made them relevant to people of later eras. "Bargains with Fate" employs a psychoanalytic approach inspired by the theories of Karen Horney to analyze Shakespeare's four major tragedies and the personality that can be inferred from all of his works. This compelling study first examines the tragedies as dramas about individuals with conflicts like our own who are in a state of crisis due to the breakdown of their bargains with fate, a belief that they can magically control their destinies by living up to the dictates of their defensive strategies. Filled with bold hypotheses supported by carefully detailed accounts, this innovative study is a resource for students and scholars of Shakespeare, and for those interested in literature as a source of psychological insight. The author's combination of literary and psychoanalytic perspectives guides us to a humane understanding of Shakespeare and his protagonists, and, in turn, to a more profound knowledge of ourselves and human behavior.
It's harder to kill people when there's a peace process on. Ulster Loyalist Alan Black is kept awake every night by his neighbour McCorrick's dog barking. To add to his difficulties, McCorrick refuses to acknowledge that he even owns a dog, let alone one that is creating a disturbance. In a Northern Ireland he barely recognises, where politics has proved just to be the continuation of war by other means, a disconsolate Alan sets out to rid himself of the incessant noise. As he seeks help from authority figures, he finally - as a very last resort - turns to the only voice he can really trust, Eamonn Holmes... Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the partition of Ireland and the foundation of Northern Ireland, Yes So I Said Yes is a blackly comic, ferocious, dystopian satire about what it's like to feel alone in a place where everyone else is conspiring to erase you and your history. This edition was published to coincide with the production at London's Finborough Theatre in November 2021.
First published in 1971.
Is King Lear an autonomous text, or a rewrite of the earlier and anonymous play King Leir? Should we refer to Shakespeare's original quarto when discussing the play, the revised folio text, or the popular composite version, stitched together by Alexander Pope in 1725? What of its stage variations? When turning from page to stage, the critical view on King Lear is skewed by the fact that for almost half of the four hundred years the play has been performed, audiences preferred Naham Tate's optimistic adaptation, in which Lear and Cordelia live happily ever after. When discussing King Lear, the question of what comprises 'the play' is both complex and fragmentary. These issues of identity and authenticity across time and across mediums are outlined, debated, and considered critically by the contributors to this volume. Using a variety of approaches, from postcolonialism and New Historicism to psychoanalysis and gender studies, the leading international contributors to King Lear: New Critical Essays offer major new interpretations on the conception and writing, editing, and cultural productions of King Lear. This book is an up-to-date and comprehensive anthology of textual scholarship, performance research, and critical writing on one of Shakespeare's most important and perplexing tragedies. Contributors Include: R.A. Foakes, Richard Knowles, Tom Clayton, Cynthia Clegg, Edward L. Rocklin, Christy Desmet, Paul Cantor, Robert V. Young, Stanley Stewart and Jean R. Brink
Completed only two months before the author's execution in Granada at the age of thirty-eight, La casa de Bernarda Alba marks the completion of Lorca's 'trilogia de la tierra espanola' and is commonly held to be his greatest play. The theme of vitality and repression that runs as a leitmotif through his writings takes on a clearer social dimension in the 'drama de mujeres en los pueblos de Espana', with the presentation of a household of five unmarried daughters tyrannised by their mother's excessive concern with social class and obscurantist village morality. -- .
The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama historicizes the Tower of London's evolving meanings in English culture alongside its representation in twenty-four English history plays, 1579-c.1634, by Thomas Legge; Robert Greene; William Shakespeare; Shakespeare and John Fletcher; George Peele; Christopher Marlowe; Anthony Munday et. al; Munday, Michael Drayton, Robert Wilson, and Richard Hathway; Thomas Heywood; Thomas Dekker and John Webster; Samuel Rowley; Robert Davenport; John Ford; and unknown authors. While Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I fashioned the Tower as a showplace of royal authority, magnificence, and entertainment, these playwrights revealed the Tower's instability as a royal symbol and represented it, instead, as an emblem of opposition to the crown and as a bodily and spiritual icon of non-royal English identity.
Based on extensive archival research, Shakespeare in the Victorian Periodicals offers an entirely new perspective on popular Shakespeare reception by focusing on articles published in Victorian periodicals. Shakespeare had already reached the apex of British culture in the previous century, becoming the national poet of the middle and upper classes, but during the Victorian era he was embraced by more marginal groups. If Shakespeare was sometimes employed as an instrument of enculturation, imposed on these groups, he was also used by them to resist this cultural hegemony.
"Shakespeare: A Life in Art" brings together in a single volume Fraser's previously published two-volume biography ("Young Shakespeare," 1988, and" Shakespeare: The Later Years," 1992). This volume includes a new introduction, which looks back on the author's lifelong commitment to Shakespeare's work and seeks to find the pattern in his carpet. Fraser's approach places Shakespeare's work first but shows how the life and art interpenetrate, like "the yolk and white of one shell." What Shakespeare was doing in Stratford and London underlies what he was writing, or more exactly, the two flow together. Most of the book is devoted to Shakespeare the man and artist, but it simultaneously throws light on his literary and personal relations with contemporaries such as Jonson, Marlowe, and others known as the University Wits. His experience as an actor and man of theater is absorbingly recounted here, as well as his relations to well-born patrons like the Earl of Southampton and Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon (England's Lord Chamberlain). In 1603 when James I ascended the throne, the Chamberlain's Men became the King's Men, passing under the sovereign's protection. How Shakespeare responded to his ambiguous role--he was both servant to the great and their remorseless critic--is another of Fraser's subjects. In short, Fraser's principal purpose is to advance our understanding of Shakespeare, at the same time throwing light on the work of the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets had the "largest and most comprehensive soul." John Dryden, Shakespeare's first great critic, said that, and Fraser tries to estimate what he meant.
Originally adapted for the stage, Peter Meineck's revised translations achieve a level of fidelity appropriate for classroom use while managing to preserve the wit and energy that led The New Yorker to judge his Clouds The best Greek drama we've ever seen anywhere," and The Times Literary Supplement to describe his Wasps as "Hugely enjoyable and very, very funny. A general Introduction, introductions to the plays, and detailed notes on staging, history, religious practice and myth combine to make this a remarkably useful teaching text.
Motherhood. No one can prepare you for it. No matter how much you tell yourself you can do it - can you? Where's the rush of love? When will sleep again? What if the thing you fear most is also the thing you crave? All you wanted was one night of unbroken sleep, what have you done? Mum is a feverish journey through every parent's worst nightmare. A raw and real exploration of early motherhood from the award-winning writer of Emilia, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm. This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at Theatre Royal, Plymouth and Soho Theatre, London. |
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