Clifford Odets, one of the 20th century's leading American playwrights, was a fervent believer in democracy and the human ability to overcome obstacles. Yet his legacy has been overshadowed by persistent attempts to read him as a thoroughly political playwright. This new consideration reads his career--the work itself and the conditions of its invention--as cultural creations in a time of political, social, and economic change. Spanning two World Wars, the Depression, and the Cold War, the works of Clifford Odets illuminate a period of tremendous change in American life and theatre. Herr adroitly examines Odets's plays and screenplays against the backdrop of the artistic and economic pressures placed upon him by the Group Theatre, Broadway, Hollywood, and the 1952 HUAC hearings in which he testified. He avers that Odets's experience as a writer in the film and theatre industries is reflected in expressions of economic struggle in his plays. While a "culture of abundance" in the face of economic catastrophe shaped the structure and content of his early works, political pressures, especially during the Cold War, shaped his later career. This book illustrates the deeply utopian nature of Odets's vision, which existed alongside a continuing ambivalence toward consumer culture as a means of political and social change. Herr's fresh new look at Odets's works and contributions to the American stage invites readers to reconsider accepted notions about the playwright's importance.

William Shakespeare's sonnets are some of his most enduring work and a treasure for all time. Mystery surrounds these magical poems. Who was Shakespeare's Dark Lady and who was the Fair Youth that Shakespeare addressed in so many of the sonnets? These Poems are both witty and poignant. Interestingly, Shakespeare chose to break many of the established rules when writing these. They are simply a joy to read. My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun, Coral is far more red, than her lips red, If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun: If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head: I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks, And in some perfumes is there more delight, Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know, That music hath a far more pleasing sound: I grant I never saw a goddess go, My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. And yet by heaven I think my love as rare, As any she belied with false compare.

Doctor Faustus, is Christopher Marlowe's most popular play andis often seen as one of the overwhelming triumphs of the English Renaissance. It has had a rich and varied critical history often arousing violent critical controversy

'Now I am alone,' says Hamlet before speaking a soliloquy. But what is a Shakespearean soliloquy? How has it been understood in literary and theatrical history? How does it work in screen versions of Shakespeare? What influence has it had? Neil Corcoran offers a thorough exploration and explanation of the origin, nature, development and reception of Shakespeare's soliloquies. Divided into four parts, the book supplies the historical, dramatic and theoretical contexts necessary to understanding, offers extensive and insightful close readings of particular soliloquies and includes interviews with eight renowned Shakespearean actors providing details of the practical performance of the soliloquy. A comprehensive study of a key aspect of Shakespeare's dramatic art, this book is ideal for students and theatre-goers keen to understand the complexities and rewards of Shakespeare's unique use of the soliloquy.

Eupolis (fl. 429-411 BC) was one of the best-attested and most important of Aristophanes' rivals. He wrote the same sort of vigorous, topical, and often indecent comedy that we know from the surviving plays of Aristophanes. No complete play has survived, but more than 120 lines of his best-known comedy, Demoi (The Demes), are extant. This book provides a new translation of all the remaining fragments and an essay on each lost play, as well as discussions of Eupolis' career and the sort of comedy that this prizewinning poet created.

This is the first complete new scholarly edition for almost a century of one of the masterpieces of Athenian Old Comedy. Olson offers an extensive introduction, a text based on a fresh collation of the manuscripts, and a massive literary and historical commentary. All Greek in the introduction and commentary not cited for technical reasons is translated, making much of the edition accessible to non-specialists.

This concise introduction to American drama gives readers an overview of how American drama developed from the end of the Second World War to the turn of the twenty-first century.
Provides a balanced assessment of the major plays and playwrights of the period.
Shows how these dramatists broke new ground in their contribution to political, economic, social and cultural debates, as well as in their dramaturgical strategies.
Organized chronologically, with plays, playwrights and movements clustered around different movements such as realism and experimentalism.
Gives readers a sense of the development of American drama over time.

A poetic 'voice' scans the rhythm of academic research, telling of the encounter with "odun"; then the voice falls silent. What is then raised is the dust of a forgotten academic debate on the nature of theatre and drama, and the following divergent standpoints of critical discourses bent on empowering their own vision, and defining themselves, rather, as counterdiscourses. This, the first part of the book: a metacritical discourse, on the geopolitics (the inherent power imbalances) of academic writing and its effects on "odun," the performances dedicated to the gods, ancestors, and heroes of Yoruba history. But "odun": where is it? and what is it? And the 'voice'? The many critical discourses have not really answered these questions. In effect, "odun" is many things. To enable the reader to see these, the study proceeds with an 'intermezzo': a frame of reference that sets "odun," the festival, in its own historico-cultural ecoenvironment, identifying the strategies that inform the performance and constitute its aesthetic. It is a 'classical' yet, for "odun," an innovative procedure. This interdisciplinary background equips the reader with the knowledge necessary to watch the performance, to witness its beauty, and to understand the 'half words' "odun" utters. And now the performance can begin. The 'voice' emerges one last time, to introduce the second section, which presents two case studies. The reader is led, day by day, through the celebrations -"odun edi," Moremi's story, and its realization in performance; then confrontation by the masks of the ancestors duing "odun egungun" (particularly as held in Ibadan). The meaning of "odun" becomes clearer and clearer. "Odun" is poetry, dances, masks, food, prayer. It is play ("ere") and belief ("igbagbo"). It is interaction between the players (both performers and spectators). It is also politics and power. It contains secrets and sacrifices. It is a reality with its own dimension and, above all, as the quintessential site of knowledge, it possesses the power to transform. In short, it is a challenge - a challenge that the present book and its voices take up.

This book opens up "Twelfth Night" as a play to see and hear, provides useful contextual and source material, and considers the critical and theatrical reception over four centuries. A detailed performance commentary brings to life the many moods of Shakespeare's subtle but robust humor. Students are encouraged to imagine the theatrical challenges of Shakespeare's Illyria afresh for themselves, as well as the thought, creative responses and wonder it has provoked.

"Often set in domestic environments and built around protagonists of more modest status than traditional tragic subjects, domestic tragedy was a genre that flourished on the Renaissance stage from 1580-1620. Shakespeare, Othello, and Domestic Tragedy is the first book to examine Shakespeares relationship to the genre by way of the King's and Chamberlain's Mens ownership and production of many of the domestic tragedies, and of the genres extensive influence on Shakespeare's own tragedy, Othello. Drawing in part upon recent scholarship that identifies Shakespeare as a co-author of Arden of Faversham, Sean Benson demonstrates the extensive even uncanny ties between Othello and the domestic tragedies. Benson argues that just as Hamlet employs and adapts the conventions of revenge tragedy, so Othello can only be fully understood in terms of its exploitation of the tropes and conventions of domestic tragedy. This book explores not only the contexts and workings of this popular sub-genre of Renaissance drama but also Othellos secure place within it as the quintessential example of the form."

Shakespeare is the national poet of many nations besides his own, though a peculiarly subversive one in both east and west. This volume contains a score of essays by scholars from Britain, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Poland, Romania, Spain, Ukraine and the USA, written to show how the momentous changes of 1989 were mirrored in the way Shakespeare has been interpreted and produced. The collection offers a valuable record of what Shakespeare has meant in the modern world and some pointers to what he may mean in the future.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDES TO EXAM SUCCESS from York Notes - the UK's favourite English Literature Study Guides. York Notes for AS & A2 have been specifically designed to help AS and A2 studnets to get the very best grade you can. They are comprehensive, easy to use, packed with valuable features and written by experienced examiners and teachers to give you an expert understanding of the text, critical approaches and the all-important exam. This edition covers Macbeth and includes: An enhanced exam skills section which includes essay plans, expert guidance on understanding questions and sample answers. You'll know exactly what you need to do and say to get the best grades. A wealth of useful content like key quotations, revision tasks and vital study tips that'll help you revise, remember and recall all the most important information. The widest coverage and the best, most in-depth analysis of characters, themes, language, form, context and style to help you demonstrate an exhaustive understanding of all aspects of the text. York Notes for AS & A2 are also available for these popular titles: The Bloody Chamber(9781447913153) Doctor Faustus(9781447913177) Frankenstein (9781447913214) The Great Gatsby(9781447913207) The Kite Runner(9781447913160) Othello(9781447913191) WutheringHeights(9781447913184)

Shakespeare and Moral Agency presents a collection of new essays by literary scholars and philosophers considering character and action in Shakespeare's plays as heuristic models for the exploration of some salient problems in the field of moral inquiry. Together they offer a unified presentation of an emerging orientation in Shakespeare studies, drawing on recent work in ethics, philosophy of mind, and analytic aesthetics to construct a powerful framework for the critical analysis of Shakespeare's works.
Contributors suggest new possibilities for the interpretation of Shakespearean drama by engaging with the rich body of contemporary work in the field of moral philosophy, offering significant insights for literary criticism, for pedagogy, and also for theatrical performance.

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.

"Character Studies" aims to promote sophisticated literary analysis through the concept of character. It demonstrates the necessity of linking character analysis to texts, themes, issues and ideas, and encourages students to embrace the complexity of literary characters and the texts in which they appear. The series thus fosters close critical reading and evidence-based discussion, as well as an engagement with historical context, and with literary criticism and theory.This book provides an introductory study of Beckett's most famous play, dealing not just with the four main characters but with the pairings that they form, and the implications of these pairings for the very idea of character in the play. After locating Godot within the context of Beckett's work, Lawley discusses some of the play's puzzles and difficulties - including the absent 'fifth character', Godot himself - he examines character-in-action in particular episodes and passages, drawing frequently on Beckett's revised text and paying consistent attention to the problems and possibilities of the text in performance."Character Studies" aims to promote sophisticated literary analysis through the concept of character. It demonstrates the necessity of linking character analysis to texts' themes, issues and ideas, and encourages students to embrace the complexity of literary characters and the texts in which they appear. The series thus fosters close critical reading and evidence-based discussion, as well as an engagement with historical context, and with literary criticism and theory.

This is a revised version of the book which was privately published by the author in 1982. At the time, the book was widely welcomed by Shakespearean scholars as a trenchant, scholarly and highly original contribution to the field of Shakespearean studies. The book's argument is that a full response to Shakespearean tragedy has to take account of the fate of the victims as well as of the tragic heroes; and this thesis is illustrated and developed by a consideration of Lavinia, Lucrece and the children in Richard III, Macbeth and King John; and to the three principal Shakespearean tragic victims, Ophelia, Desdemona and Cordelia. The author is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. his other works include 'Let Wonder Seem Familiar: Endings in Shakespeare's Romance Vision' and 'Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare'(forthcoming).

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, France became famous - notorious even - across Europe for its ambitious attempts to codify and theorise a system of universally valid dramatic 'rules'. So fundamental and formative was this 'classical' conception of drama that it still underpins our modern conception of theatre today. Yet rather than rehearsing familiar arguments about plays, Inventing the Spectator reads early modern France's dramatic theory against the grain, tracing instead the profile and characteristics of the spectator that these arguments imply: the living, breathing individual in whose mind, senses, and experience the theatre comes to life. In so doing, Joseph Harris raises numerous questions - of imagination and illusion, reason and emotion, vision and aurality, to name but a few - that strike at the very heart of human psychology, cognition, and experience. Bridging the gap between literary and theatre studies, history of psychology, and intellectual history, Inventing the Spectator thus reconstructs the theatre spectator's experience as it was understood and theorised within French dramatic theory between the Renaissance and the Revolution. It explores early modern spectatorship through three main themes (illusion and the senses; pleasure and narrative; interest and identification) and five key dramatic theoreticians (d'Aubignac, Corneille, Dubos, Rousseau, and Diderot). As it demonstrates, the period's dramatic rules are at heart rules of psychology, cognition, and affect that emerged out of a complex dialogue with human subjectivity in all its richness.

How did Shakespeare sound to the audiences of his day? For the first time this disc offers listeners the chance to hear England's greatest playwright performed by a company of actors using the pronunciation of his time. Under the guidance of Ben Crystal, actor, author of Shakespeare on Toast and an expert in original Shakespearian pronunciation, the company performs some of Shakespeare's best-known poems, solo speeches and scenes from the plays. Hear new meanings uncovered, new jokes revealed, poetic effects enhanced. The CD is accompanied by an introductory essay by Professor David Crystal. An essential purchase for every student and lover of Shakespeare.

Featuring contributions by established and upcoming scholars, Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity in Early Modern England explores the ways in which Shakespearean texts engage in the social and cultural politics of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century translation practices. Framed by the editor's introduction and an Afterword by Ton Hoenselaars, the authors in this collection offer new perspectives on translation and the fashioning of religious, national and gendered identities in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and The Tempest.

The Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker offers the first comprehensive overview of Wertenbaker's playwriting career which spans more than thirty years of stage plays. It considers the contexts of their initial productions by a range of companies and institutions, including the Royal Court, the Arcola and the Women's Theatre Group. While examining all of Wertenbaker's original stage works, Sophie Bush's companion focuses most extensively on the frequently studied plays Our Country's Good and The Love of the Nightingale, but also draws attention to early unpublished works and more recent, critically neglected pieces, and the counterpoints these provide. The Companion will prove invaluable to students and scholars, combining as it does close textual analysis with detailed historical and contextual study of the processes of production and reception. The author makes comprehensive use of previously undiscussed materials from the Wertenbaker Archive, including draft texts, correspondence and theatrical ephemera, as well as original interviews with the playwright. A section of Performance and Critical Perspectives from other scholars and practitioners offer a range of alternative approaches to Wertenbaker's most frequently studied play, Our Country's Good. While providing a detailed analysis of individual plays, and their themes, theatricalities and socio-historical contexts, The Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker also examines the processes and shape of Wertenbaker's career as a whole, and considers what the struggles and triumphs that have accompanied her work reveal about the challenges of theatrical collaboration. In its scope and reference Sophie Bush's study extends to encompass a wealth of additional information about other individuals and institutions and succeeds in placing her work within a broad range of concerns and resonances.

Essays on a wide range of topics including the role of early modern chess in upholding Aristotelian virtue; readings of Sidney, Wroth, Spenser, and Shakespeare; and several topics involving the New World. Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The present volume opens with an essay on early modern chess, arguing that it covertly upheld an Aristotelian concept of virtue against the destabilizing ethical views of writers such as Machiavelli. This provocative opening is followed by iconoclastic discussions of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Wroth's Urania, and Spenser's Fairie Queen. The next essay investigates the mystery surrounding editorship of the 1571 printing of The Mirror for Magistrates. The essays then pivot into the exotic world of Hermetic "statue magic" in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale and the even more exotic worlds of alchemy, Aztec war gods, and conversion in sixteenth-century Mexico. Two further essays remain in the New World, the first examining the representational connections between the twelve Caesars and the twelve Inca kings, the second taking stock of Thomas Harriot's contribution to the understanding of Amerindian languages. The penultimate essay looks at Holbein's depiction of Henry VIII's ailing body, and the volume concludes with a complex analysis of guilt and shame in Moliere's L'Ecole des Femmes. Contributors: Jean Marie Christensen, William Coulter, Christopher Crosbie, Shepherd Aaron Ellis, Scott Lucas, Fernando Martinez-Periset, Timothy Pyles, Rachel Roberts, Jesse Russell, Janet Stephens, Weiao Xing. The journal is edited by Jim Pearce of North Carolina Central University and Ward Risvold of Georgia College and State University.

<I>An Introduction to Shakespeare's Poems</I> provides a lively and informed examination of Shakespeare's non-dramatic poetry: the narrative poems<I> Venus and Adonis</I> and <I>The Rape of Lucrece</I>; the <I>Sonnets</I>; and various minor poems, including some only recently attributed to Shakespeare. Peter Hyland locates Shakespeare as a skeptical voice within the turbulent social context in which Elizabethan professional poets had to work, and relates his poems to the tastes, values, and political pressures of his time. Hyland also explores how Shakespeare's poetry can be of interest to 21st century readers.