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.

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.

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.

This study explores the relationship between humans and machines during an age when technology became increasingly domesticated and accepted as an index to the American dream. The marriage between dramatic art and dramatic technology stems from the physical realities of staging and from the intimate connection of technology with human labor inside and outside the household. This book examines how American dramatists of the 1920s drew upon European Expressionism and innovative staging techniques to develop their characters and themes, and how later playwrights, such as Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, established the American dramatic canon when technology had become a conventional and integral component of domestic life.

"Technology in American Drama, 1920-1950," explores the relationship between humans and machines during an age when technology became increasingly domesticated and accepted as an index to the American dream. The marriage between dramatic art and dramatic technology stems from both the physical realities of staging and the intimate connection of technology with human labor inside and outside the household. Technology shapes and defines the values of the soul, individually and collectively, in addition to producing the external environment in which people live. This book studies how playwrights of the era reflected the changing role of technology in American society.

Drawing on the experiments of European Expressionism, American dramatists of the 1920s found new techniques for developing character and theme, along with innovative staging devices, such as the threatening machines in Elmer Rice's "The Adding Machine," Sophie Treadwell's "Machinal," and Eugene O'Neill's "Dynamo." By the time Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller established the canon of American drama, technology was no longer an impersonal force to be resisted, but a conventional and integral component of domestic life. In examining these dramatists and their works, this book provides an insightful analysis of a largely neglected topic.

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.

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.

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.

At the start of the seventeenth century a distinction emerged between 'public', outdoor, amphitheatre playhouses and 'private', indoor, hall venues. This book is the first sustained attempt to ask: why? Theatre historians have long acknowledged these terms, but have failed to attest to their variety and complexity. Assessing a range of evidence, from the start of the Elizabethan period to the beginning of the Restoration, the book overturns received scholarly wisdom to reach new insights into the politics of theatre culture and playbook publication. Standard accounts of the 'public' and 'private' theatres have either ignored the terms, or offered insubstantial explanations for their use. This book opens up the rich range of meanings made available by these vitally important terms and offers a fresh perspective on the way dramatists, theatre owners, booksellers, and legislators, conceived the playhouses of Renaissance London.

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.

Published with the Shakespeare Association of America, Shakespeare in Our Time offers lead essays by the distinguished scholars who have served as presidents of the Association over the past two decades. They introduce a range of topics: text, performance, gender, sexuality, the body, history, religion, biography, and global and digital Shakespeare. Each of their essays is counterpointed and complemented by a satellite of shorter contributions by other scholars, new and established. Shakespeare in Our Time represents the shared commitment of its authors and of the Shakespeare Association of America to advancing our understanding of Shakespeare's works, his times, and his afterlife in literary, theatrical, and public culture. This intellectually vibrant and diverse book reflects current debates in the field of Shakespeare studies and points to its possible futures.

The year is 1616. William Shakespeare has just died and the world of the London theatres is mourning his loss. 1616 also saw the death of the famous Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu. Four hundred years on and Shakespeare is now an important meeting place for Anglo-Chinese cultural dialogue in the field of drama studies. In June 2014 (the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth), SOAS, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the National Chung Cheng University of Taiwan gathered 20 scholars together to reflect on the theatrical practice of four hundred years ago and to ask: what does such an exploration mean culturally for us today? This ground-breaking study offers fresh insights into the respective theatrical worlds of Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu and asks how the brave new theatres of 1616 may have a vital role to play in the intercultural dialogue of our own time.

When identical twins wash upon the shore of Ilyria confusion, mistaken identities and misplaced infatuations are sure to follow in this delightful comedy. The shipwrecked twins Viola and Sebastian, each believing the other dead, make their separate ways to the court of Duke Orsinio. Viola protects herself by disguising herself as a boy, Cesario, and enters the Duke's services. He pines for Lady Olivia, but she becomes smitten with the messenger, the disguised Viola, who has herself developed stirrings for the Duke. Add in another suitor, a scheming uncle and the arrival of Sebastian and the hilarious confusion reaches its climax. A wonderful play that is one of Shakespeare's most popular and performed comedies.

As the first collection of essays about Oscar Wilde's comedies, the contributors re-evaluate Oscar Wilde's society plays as 'comedies of manners" to see whether this is actually an apt way to read Wilde's most emblematic plays. Focusing on both the context and the texts, the collection locates Wilde both in his social and literary contexts.

Theatre of the Borderlands: Conflict, Violence, and Healing is an enlightening and encompassing study that focuses on how dramatists from the Northern Mexico border territories write about theater. The plays analyzed in this study are representative of the most important Northern Border playwrights whose plays' themes present the US-Mexico Borderlands in a socio-historical and political context. The most important themes observed include topics that engage in discussions of: the indigenous, Border crossings, heroes and folk saints, the city of Tijuana, and violence in the Borderlands, to name a few. These themes have led to the birth of the Teatro del Norte movement, a group of determined playwrights insistent on presenting dramaturgical themes that show the bond between their particular geographies, histories, socio-political and economic situations, thereby giving birth to an original voice and new aesthetic of representation. Dealing with the topics already mentioned, and pairing them with more timely ones like immigration reform, namely, this study can serve as an invaluable resource to many interdisciplinary academic settings, and can grant an eye-opening insight to Border relations through several critical readings.

The category of theatrical character has been swiftly dismissed in the academic reception of no-longer-dramatic texts and performances. However, claims on the dissolution of character narrowly demarcate what a subject is and how it may appear. This volume unmoors theatre scholarship from the regulatory ideals of liberal humanism, stretching the notion of character to encompass and illuminate otherwise unaccounted-for subjects, aesthetic strategies and political gestures in recent theatre works. To this aim, contemporary philosophical theories of subjectivation, European theatre studies, and experimental, script-led work produced in Britain since the late 1990s are mobilised as discussants on the question of subjectivity. Four contemporary playtexts and their performances are examined in depth: Sarah Kane's Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, Ed Thomas's Stone City Blue and Tim Crouch's ENGLAND. Through these case studies, Delgado-Garcia demonstrates alternative ways of engaging theoretically with character, and elucidating a range of subjective figures beyond identity and individuality. Alongside these analyses, the book traces a large body of work that has experimented with speech attribution since the early twentieth-century. This is a timely contribution to contemporary theatre scholarship, which demonstrates that character remains a malleable and politically-salient notion in which understandings of subjectivity are still being negotiated.

Shaul Bassi is Associate Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature at Ca'Foscari University of Venice, Italy. His publications include Visions of Venice in Shakespeare, with Laura Tosi, and Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures, with Annalisa Oboe.

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.

The latest book from veteran O'Neillian Edward L. Shaughnessy, Down the Nights and Down the Days: Eugene O'Neill's Catholic Sensibility examines a major aspect of the playwright's vision: the influence of his Catholic heritage upon his moral imagination. Critics, aware of O'Neill's early renunciation of faith at the age of fifteen, have been inclined to overlook this presence in his work.

However, Shaughnessy does uncover evidence that O'Neill retained the impress of his Irish Catholic upbringing and acculturation. Shaughnessy advances this analysis with examples from the O'Neill canon, including several of the key plays (Long Day's Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh, Mourning Becomes Electra), as well as some of the lesser-known works (Welded and Days Without end).

Down the Nights and Down the Days: Eugene O'Neill's Catholic Sensibility offers a fresh and thought-provoking look at the life and work of this nation's most internationally honored playwright.

Shakespeare and the Embodied Heroine is a bold new investigation of Shakespeare's female characters using the late plays and the early adaptations written and staged during the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

Perhaps more than any other single work, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar has popularized the image of Brutus as a ruthless and cowardly traitor, Caesar as a noble ruler and sympathetic victim, and the Ides of March as a time of danger and duplicity. On the surface, the play is comparatively simple and straightforward, and thus it has served to introduce generations of students to Shakespeare's works. But the play is deceptive in its apparent simplicity. While Brutus joins the conspirators in assassinating Caesar, his possibly selfless motives may make him the noblest Roman of them all. And while Caesar emerges as a beneficent leader in Antony's funeral oration, other traditions with which Shakespeare's audience would have been familiar paint him as a tyrannical despot. The play, then, is laden with ambiguity, and it raises more questions about human nature than it answers about Roman history. And while some scholars have criticized the play's language for being relatively unpoetic and inferior to some of Shakespeare's later tragedies, Julius Caesar has given us some of the most memorable passages in English literature. This addition to the "Greenwood Guides to Shakespeare" series offers a comprehensive overview of Julius Caesar and the issues central to an understanding and appreciation of the tragedy. Written at a level accessible to readers of all backgrounds, from secondary school students to scholars, the volume gives full attention to textual, contextual, dramatic, thematic, critical, and performance aspects of the play. The book begins with a look at the history of the text and a consideration of some modern editions. It then examines the historical and cultural contexts ofShakespeare's England and shows how they shaped his work. The book discusses Shakespeare's likely sources and how he adapted them, and it analyzes his dramatic art, including his characterizations, language, and imagery. The guide then turns to the themes treated throughout the play, and it surveys the tragedy's critical reception. Finally, the book charts the drama's lengthy stage history and looks closely at representative productions, including some film versions. An annotated bibliography and comprehensive index conclude the work.

A radical re-examination of Oscar Wilde's plays, Revising Wilde challenges long-established views of the writer as a dilettante and dandy, revealing him as a serious philosopher and social critic who used his plays to subvert traditional values. Sos Eltis examines early drafts of the major plays (Lady Windermere's Fan; A Woman of No Importance; An Ideal Husband; and The Importance of Being Earnest) as well as the little-known Vera; or, The Nihilists, to demonstrate that Wilde was in fact an anarchist, a socialist, and a feminist.

This book, the first to trace revenge tragedy's evolving dialogue with early modern law, draws on changing laws of evidence, food riots, piracy, and debates over royal prerogative. By taking the genre's legal potential seriously, it opens up the radical critique embedded in the revenge tragedies of Kyd, Shakespeare, Marston, Chettle and Middleton.