This book explores the textured process of rewriting and revising theatrical works in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean as both a material and metaphorical practice. Deftly tracing these themes through community theater groups, ancient Greek theater, religious traditions, and national historical events, Katherine Ford weaves script, performance and final product together with an eye to the social significance of revision. Ultimately, to rewrite and revise is to re-envision and re-imagine stage practices in the twentieth-century Hispanic Caribbean.

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.

Best known for his many theater masterpieces; William Shakespeare was also a prolific poet. It seems likely that an outbreak of the plague in London, which led to a closure of public gathering places like theaters, forced Shakespeare to find another means of earning wages. In the third Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley he found a patron that allowed him to stay in London and write the brief epics Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, which would become his most widely printed works during his lifetime. His collection of 154 Sonnets was published in 1609. Mostly about love, they are an intriguing and fascinating work both individually and as a whole. At the time poetry was more respected than works for the theater and with these poems he did much to build his reputation. Enjoy the richness of language and depth of feeling in this edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets and other Poems.

This book establishes an analytical model for the description of existing translations in their historical context within a framework suggested by systemic concepts of literature. It argues against mainstream 20th-century translation theory and, by proposing a socio-cultural model of translation, takes into account how a translation functions in the receiving culture. The case studies of successive translations of "Hamlet" in France from the eighteenth century neoclassical version of Jean-Francois Ducis to the 20th-century Lacanian, post-structuralist stage production of Daniel Mesguich show the translator at work. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the changing theatrical and literary norms to which translators through the ages have been bound by the expectations both of their audiences and the literary establishment.

This is the first collection from groundbreaking playwright Alistair McDowall, "an exceptionally talented and fast-rising writer. Still only in his twenties, this writer is surely going places. Whatever he dreams up next, his name will almost certainly be in lights at the Royal Court soon, if not at the National Theatre." (The Times) Having won a Judges Award at the Bruntwood Prize in 2011 and been shortlisted for the Writers' Guild Best Play Award in 2013, Alistair McDowall is one of the most exciting playwrights of this generation. The anthology features the play that brought McDowall to people's attention, Brilliant Adventures, up to his latest major play, Pomona, that received ecstatic reviews, transferred to the National Theatre, and hailed him as one of the most important playwrights of this generation. It also includes two previously unpublished plays. Brilliant Adventures (Royal Exchange/Live Theatre, 2013) is a fast paced tale of brotherhood, addiction and breaking the laws of physics. It won McDowall a Bruntwood Prize. Captain Amazing (Live Theatre, 2013) is a funny and poignant one-man show that thrusts us into the life of Britain's only part-time superhero. Talk Show (Royal Court, 2013) is black comedy about talking and transmission. It was premiered as part of the Royal Court's Open Court season and has not previously been published. Pomona (Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama/Orange Tree Theatre, 2014) is a sinister and surreal thriller, which takes as its setting Manchester's Pomona - an abandoned concrete island at the heard of the city; a place where journeys end and nightmares are born. The anthology is introduced by the author and includes a foreword by Olivier-award-winning playwright Simon Stephens.

Since its Golden Age, Spanish drama has evolved in considerably unintended and unexpected ways with the contemporary playwrights of any present time engaging in experimental forms and treating current political issues intended to modernize, reformulate, and re-conceptualize the State and the stage. This reference includes alphabetically arranged entries on 33 Spanish dramatists from the eighteenth century to the present. Some of these figures have been translated, anthologized, and studied for centuries; others remain known chiefly to specialists; still others are active in contemporary theater and draw critical interest for their innovative work.

Each of the entries is written by an expert contributor and provides an overview of the dramatist's life and art. Each includes a brief biography; a discussion of works, themes, and dramaturgy; an overview of the critical and scholarly response to the playwright's productions; and primary and secondary bibliographies. As a whole, the volume highlights trends, movements, and historical contexts related to modern Spanish drama. A lengthy introductory essay overviews the history and development of Spanish drama since the Golden Age, and extensive bibliographies conclude the work.

The relation between body and mind is one of the oldest riddles that has puzzled mankind. That material and mental events may interact is accepted even by the law: our mental capacity to concentrate on the task can be seriously reduced by drugs. Physical and chemical processes may act upon the mind; and when we are writing a difficult letter, our mind acts upon our body and, through a chain of physical events, upon the mind of the recipient of the letter. This is what the authors of this book call the 'interaction of mental and physical events'. We know very little about this interaction; and according to recent philosophical fashions this is explained by the alleged fact that we have brains but no thoughts. The authors of this book stress that they cannot solve the body mind problem; but they hope that they have been able to shed new light on it. Eccles especially with his theory that the brain is a detector and amplifier; a theory that has given rise to important new developments, including new and exciting experiments; and Popper with his highly controversial theory of 'World 3'. They show that certain fashionable solutions which have been offered fail to understand the seriousness of the problems of the emergence of life, or consciousness and of the creativity of our minds. In Part I, Popper discusses the philosophical issue between dualist or even pluralist interaction on the one side, and materialism and parallelism on the other. There is also a historical review of these issues. In Part II, Eccles examines the mind from the neurological standpoint: the structure of the brain and its functional performance under normal as well as abnormal circumstances. The result is a radical and intriguing hypothesis on the interaction between mental events and detailed neurological occurrences in the cerebral cortex. Part III, based on twelve recorded conversations, reflects the exciting exchange between the authors as they attempt to come to terms with their opinions.

Comparatively little is known about Shakespeare's first audiences. This study argues that the Elizabethan audience is an essential part of Shakespeare as a site of cultural meaning, and that the way criticism thinks of early modern theatregoers is directly related to the way it thinks of, and uses, the Bard himself.

Jealousy and suspicion shape the tragic opening of The Winter's Tale, one of Shakespeare's final plays, yet in time romance and redemption ultimately lead to a happy ending. Leontes, King of Sicilia, convinced of his wife's infidelity, is consumed by a jealous rage. Sure that she is pregnant with his old friend King Polixenes' child and unmoved by the entreaties of his wife proclaiming her innocence, he tears his family apart. He imprisons his wife and sends the newborn daughter into exile, while Polixenes escapes back to his homeland of Bohemia. The years pass and in a pastoral haven a young girl, Perdita, raised by shepherds falls in love with a prince, Florizel. Thus begins a magical journey of love and redemption that will at last heal the family's wounds.

Examining the ways in which contemporary Western theatre protests against the 'War on Terror', this book analyses six twenty-first century plays that respond to the post-9/11 military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. The plays are written by some of the most significant writers of this century and the last including Elfriede Jelinek, Caryl Churchill, Helene Cixous and Tony Kushner. Anti-war Theatre After Brecht grapples with the problem of how to make theatre that protests the policies of democratically elected Western governments in a post-Marxist era. It shows how the Internet has become a key tool for disseminating anti-war play texts and how online social media forums are changing traditional dramatic aesthetics and broadening opportunities for spectator access, engagement and interaction with a work and the political alternatives it puts forward.

In what is perhaps Shakespeare's earliest play, love goes astray, deception and betrayal cause confusion, and a multilayered plot keeps the pace energetic and joyful. Proteus and Valentine are each sent from Verona to the court of the Duke of Milan. They are the best of friends, until Proteus is enamored by Silvia, though she is the new object of Valentine's affections. Despite having sworn constancy to his own betrothed, Julia, Proteus sets out to betray his unsuspecting friend, only to find that both Silvia and Julia have a thing or two to teach him about loyalty and love. The play reveals how the ideal of male friendship can crumble under the strain of conflicting love interests. A wonderful comedy filled with passionate lovers, women disguised, outlaws, fights, sudden revelations, and a happy denouement, all highlighted by a farcical subplot featuring the character Launce and his dog Crab.

In this work of scholarship and creativity, Meagher argues that Shakespeare has been misunderstood because of a failure to recognize his own directions as a playwright. Through an examination of several of his plays Meagher uncovers Shakespeare as artist, director, and actor.

Best known as a revolutionary playwright of the 1930s, Clifford Odets may have reached his zenith when four of his plays were produced on Broadway in 1935: "Waiting for Lefty," "Till the Day I Die," "Awake and Sing ," and "Paradise Lost." His plays, however, also show a romantic strain and are at least as much inimate and personal as they are political, often reflecting the isolation and loneliness of individuals in family settings. Never achieving the acclaim of Eugene O'Neill, who came before, or Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, who followed, Odets bridged the gap between earlier melodramatic theatre and the mature post-World War II drama on the American stage, creating rich and varied drama well into the 1950s. That his plays continue to be appraised and performed is clearly evident in this detailed and carefully articulated sourcebook.

A near-exhaustive resource for both literary and theatrical research materials on Odets's dramatic career, the volume is organized and indexed for quick reference. Included are a biographical essay; critical overview, production history, and plot summary of each dramatic product; annotated primary and secondary bibliographies and information on archival sources; and production credits. Essential for research libraries and theatre collections, the volume will be useful to theatre scholars and practitioners and to anyone interested in the work of this significant modern American playwright.

Often regarded as Shakespeare's most complex and difficult play Hamlet is also one of his most popular. It has been performed countless times on the stage and has been produced in many film and television versions. Even those who have never read the complete play or seen a performance know a few lines of "To be or not to be" and the image of a young man contemplating the skull of his dead friend Yorick. The play continues to attract the attention of high school students and scholars alike and has generated a tremendous amount of criticism. Because Hamlet exists as text, performance, and cultural icon, only through a study of the play in these three different dimensions can Shakespeare's complex work be appreciated. The purpose of this reference book is to introduce students and others first approaching Hamlet to the traditions of scholarship, criticism, and performance that it has inspired in four centuries. The volume gives close attention to the textual history of the play and to the historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts in which it emerged. Special attention is given to the religious, philosophical, and psychological aspects of the text. The book also treats Shakespeare's language, imagery, themes, and dramatic art, and it offers a summary of the play's critical reception. Throughout an attempt is made to visualize the play in performance, and constant reference is made to the conventions of staging in Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.

Shakespeare's famous play, "Hamlet," has been the subject of more scholarly analysis and criticism than any other work of literature in human history. For all of its generally acknowledged virtues, however, it has also been treated as problematic in a raft of ways. In "Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet," Leon Craig explains that the most oft-cited problems and criticisms are actually solvable puzzles. Through a close reading of the philosophical problems presented in "Hamlet," Craig attempts to provide solutions to these puzzles. The posing of puzzles, some more conspicuous, others less so, is fundamental to Shakespeare's philosophical method and purpose. That is, he has crafted his plays, and "Hamlet "in particular, so as to stimulate philosophical activity in the "judicious" (as distinct from the "unskillful") readers. By virtue of showing what so many critics treat as faults or flaws are actually intended to be interpretive challenges, Craig aims to raise appreciation for the overall coherence of "Hamlet" that there is more logical rigor to its plot and psychological plausibility to its characterizations than is generally granted, even by its professed admirers. "Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet" endeavors to make clear why "Hamlet," as a work of reason, is far better than is generally recognized, and proves its author to be, not simply the premier poet and playwright he is already universally acknowledged to be, but a philosopher in his own right.

This comprehensive, detailed study of Wilder's entire dramatic oeuvre is the only one to place the works in their broad aesthetic and philosophical context and to integrate literary analysis of the plays with interpretation of their theatrical techniques. Its sources include Gilbert Harrison's "authorized" 1983 biography of the dramatist and the published selections from Wilder's journals for the years 1939-1961, as well as unpublished material--letters, diaries, and notes--in the Yale Collection of American Literature Wilder papers. Lifton discusses the symbolist, naturalist, expressionist, Brechtian, futurist, Pirandellian, and existentialist elements in Wilder's plays, as well as parallels between Wilder's theatre and that of such diverse cultures as the classical Greek and Roman, medieval European, Elizabethan, Renaissance Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese.

From Shakespeare's religion to his wife to his competitors in the world of early modern theatre, biographers have approached the question of the Bard's life from numerous angles. Shakespeare & Biography offers a fresh look at the biographical questions connected with the famous playwright's life, through essays and reflections written by prominent international scholars and biographers.

This volume considers the influential revival of ancient philosophical skepticism in the 16th and early 17th centuries and investigates, from a comparative perspective, its reception in early modern English, Spanish and French drama, dedicating detailed readings to plays by Shakespeare, Calderon, Lope de Vega, Rotrou, Desfontaines, and Cervantes. While all the plays employ similar dramatic devices for "putting skepticism on stage", the study explores how these dramas, however, give different "answers" to the challenges posed by skepticism in relation to their respective historico-cultural and "ideological" contexts.

This volume analyzes early modern cultural representations of children and childhood through the literature and drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Contributors include leading international scholars of the English Renaissance whose essays consider asexuals and sodomites, roaring girls and schoolboys, precocious princes and raucous tomboys, boy actors and female apprentices, while discussing a broad array of topics, from animal studies to performance theory, from queer time to queer fat, from teaching strategies to casting choices, and from metamorphic sex changes to rape and cannibalism. The collection interrogates the cultural and historical contingencies of childhood in an effort to expose, theorize, historicize, and explicate the spectacular queerness of early modern dramatic depictions of children.

Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize How did Shakespeare go from being a talented poet and playwright to become one of the greatest writers who ever lived? In this one exhilarating year we follow what he reads and writes, what he saw and who he worked with as he invests in the new Globe theatre and creates four of his most famous plays - Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet. This book brings the news, intrigue and flavour of the times together with wonderful detail about how Shakespeare worked as an actor, businessman and playwright, to create an exceptionally immediate and gripping account of an inspiring moment in history

An enhanced exam section: expert guidance on approaching exam questions, writing high-quality responses and using critical interpretations, plus practice tasks and annotated sample answer extracts. Key skills covered: focused tasks to develop analysis and understanding, plus regular study tips, revision questions and progress checks to help students track their learning. The most in-depth analysis: detailed text summaries and extract analysis to in-depth discussion of characters, themes, language, contexts and criticism, all helping students to reach their potential.

This book traces the formation and impact of the New Shakspere Society, created in 1873, which dedicated itself to solving the mysteries of Shakespeare's authorship by way of science. This promise, however, was undermined not only by the antics of its director, Frederick J. Furnivall, but also by the inexactitudes of the tests. Jeffrey Kahan puzzles out how a society geared towards science quickly devolved into a series of grudge matches. Nonetheless, the New Shakspere Society set the bibliographical and biographical agenda for the next century-an unusual legacy for an organization that was rife with intrigue, enmity, and incompetence; lives were ruined, lawyers consulted, and scholarship (mostly bad) produced and published.

Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Oedipus plays, Euripides' Medea and Bacchae, and Aristophanes' Birds and Lysistrata are discussed in this lively and scholarly volume. The author's experience teaching these plays to gifted high school students makes this volume particularly useful. The drama festivals, the adaptations of myth, the relevance of Aristotelian criteria, and the political and cultural background of each play are described fully, and the nature of tragedy and comedy, plot construction, stagecraft, theme, character, imagery and individual odes and speeches are analyzed in depth. The 5th century BC witnessed the flourishing of Athenian culture and was one of the most influential periods in history. The achievements of the Greeks at that time forever shaped our political and legal institutions and provided the foundation for Western civilization. At the same time, the world of the Greeks is distant and exotic to contemporary students. The values and beliefs of the Greeks are best represented in the plays that were crafted at that time, and these works continue to be widely read and studied. This book is a valuable introduction to ancient Greek drama. Designed for high school students, undergraduates, and their teachers, this work describes the origins and physical aspects of ancient Greek theatre, discusses Aristotle's Poetics, and analyzes, in ten separate chapters, ten frequently studied Greek plays: Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Antigone, Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus, Euripides' Medea and Bacchae and Aristophanes' Birds and Lysistrata. For each there is cultural, political and mythological background, plot synopsis, and analysis of overall structure and importantscenes, speeches and odes. The Aristophanes chapters explore comic method and all chapters discuss theme and stagecraft in depth.