This is a pioneering scholarly collection of essays outlining W.B. Yeats' reception and influence in Europe. The intellectual and cultural impact of British and Irish writers cannot be assessed without reference to their reception in European countries. These essays, prepared by an international team of scholars, critics and translators, record the ways in which W. B. Yeats has been translated, evaluated and emulated in different national and linguistic areas of continental Europe. There is a remarkable split between the often politicized reception in Eastern European countries and Spain on the one hand, and the more sober scholarly response in Western Europe. Yeats's Irishness and the pre-eminence of his lyrical work have posed continuous challenges. Three further essays describe the widely divergent reactions to Yeats in his native Ireland, during his lifetime and up to the most recent years. Our knowledge of British and Irish authors is incomplete and inadequate without an understanding of the perspectives of other nations, traditions and individuals on them. This series profiles literary and political figures as well as philosophers, historians and scientists. Each volume examines how authors have been translated, published, distributed, read, reviewed and discussed in Europe. In doing so it throws light not only on the specific strands of intellectual and cultural history but also on the processes involved in the dissemination of ideas.

This work provides a wealth of information on obscure and overlooked American playwrights as well as some famous ones; it will be a welcome addition for collections specializing in the theater arts. "Reference Books Bulletin"

This directory and index, the first such volume devoted exclusively to contemporary black American dramatists, will have an important place in theatre collections. It captures and preserves an elusive part of artistic endeavor, giving access to literally thousands of dramatic works that would otherwise be lost to scholars and the public. Organized as an encyclopedia, it provides information on more than 600 noteworthy Black American playwrights whose plays have been written, produced, or published between 1950 and the present. The volume begins with an introductory essay surveying the history of contemporary black American drama. Playwrights, screenwriters, radio and television scriptwriters, and musical theatre collaborators are treated in individual entries that comprise the bulk of the book. The volume also supplies a bibliography of anthologies, books, and periodicals cited; mailing addresses for more than 200 of the playwrights; and title and subject indexes.

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.

Franz Xaver Kroetz -- banana-cutter, hospital orderly, fledgling actor and, more significantly, Germany's most popular contemporary dramatist of the seventies and early eighties. This study, which situates Kroetz's aesthetics in a political context, focuses on four plays that mark crisis points in his development of a political aesthetic. The breaks in otherwise very successful aesthetic models occur as Kroetz responds to changing social conditions.All those interested in Kroetz, as well as in broader aesthetic questions, will find that this book makes important breakthroughs.

In this engaging text, Arthur F. Kinney introduces students to Shakespeare's plays in the context of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater. He focuses on the material conditions of playing and of playgoing in order to show how they both inspired and restricted Shakespeare's art. Subjects treated range from the venues where Shakespeare's plays were first performed and the practicalities of the acting profession to the composition of audiences and the cultural and regulatory contexts in which companies of players operated. Each topic is discussed in relation to a diverse selection of Shakespeare's plays as well as contemporary documents, so that the plays and the theatrical world in which they were produced constantly illuminate one another. A core of 22 plays is considered in total.

Shakespeare, Dissent and the Cold War is the first book to read Shakespeare's drama through the lens of Cold War politics. The book uses the Cold War experience of dissenting artists in theatre and film to highlight the coded religio-political subtexts in Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and The Winter's Tale.

Luigi Pirandello is best known in the English-speaking world for his radical challenge to traditional Western theatre with plays such as Six Characters in Search of an Author. But theatre is just one manifestation of his experiments with language which led to a remarkable collection of novels, short stories, and essays as well as his work for a film industry then in its infancy. This study, which is based on the view that Pirandello's writings are most fruitfully discussed in a European context, takes as its starting-point the author's belief in the primacy of the literary character in a creative process which is necessarily conflictual. The book argues that all Pirandello's characters are engaged in a continual performance which transcends the genre distinction between narrative and dramatic forms. In this performance it is the spoken word in which the characters invest most heavily as they struggle to sustain an identity of their own, tell their life-stories, and assert themselves before their most prominent antagonist, the author himself.

Co-founder of the Provincetown Players and one of its leading writers, Susan Glaspell won the Pulitzer Prize for Alison's House (1930) and was also successful as an actress, producer, and novelist. Her plays were compared, often favorably, with O'Neill's. After a period of eclipse, Glaspell's concern with woman's desire for selfhood brought her plays to the attention of feminist scholarship beginning in the 1970s. Mary Papke argues in this work for a reassessment of Glaspell as a major American playwright. This sourcebook begins with a bio-critical survey and includes plot summaries for each staged work, complete with production history and critical reception. An annotated bibliography of primary works includes plays, novels, short fiction, nonfiction, nonprint, and archival sources. The secondary bibliography documents reviews and provides extensive annotations for a broad range of materials. Chronologically organized, it constitutes a detailed examiniation of Glaspell criticism.

This volume argues against Gerard Genette's theory that there is an "insurmountable opposition" between drama and narrative and shows that the two forms of storytelling have been productively intertwined throughout literary history. Building on the idea that plays often incorporate elements from other genres, especially narrative ones, the present study theorises drama as a fundamentally narrative genre. Guided by the question of how drama tells stories, the first part of the study delineates the general characteristics of dramatic narration and zooms in on the use of narrative forms in drama. The second part proposes a history of dramatic storytelling from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century that transcends conventional genre boundaries. Close readings of exemplary British plays provide an overview of the dominant narrative modes in each period and point to their impact in the broader cultural and historical context of the plays. Finally, the volume argues that throughout history, highly narrative plays have had a performative power that reached well beyond the stage: dramatic storytelling not only reflects socio-political realities, but also largely shapes them.

Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy is a volume of essays investigating European tragedy in the seventeenth century, comparing Shakespeare, Vondel, Gryphius, Racine and several other vernacular tragedians, together with consideration of neo-Latin dramas by Jesuits and other playwrights. To what extent were similar themes, plots, structures and styles elaborated? How is difference as well as similarity to be accounted for? European drama is beginning to be considered outside of the singular vernacular frameworks in which it has been largely confined (as instanced in the conferences and volumes of essays held in the Universities of Munich and Berlin 2010-12), but up-to-date secondary material is sparse and difficult to obtain. This volume intends to help remedy that deficit by addressing the drama in a full political, religious, legal and social context, and by considering the plays as interventions in those contexts. Contributors are: Christian Biet, Jan Bloemendal, Helmer J. Helmers, Blair Hoxby, Sarah M. Knight, Tatiana Korneeva, Frans-Willem Korsten, Joel B. Lande, Russell J. Leo, Howard B. Norland, Kirill Ospovat, James A. Parente, Jr., Freya Sierhuis, Nienke Tjoelker and Emily Vasiliauskas.

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.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Willis Richardson (1889-1977) was highly respected as a leading African-American playwright and drama anthologist. His plays were performed by numerous black high school, college, and university drama groups and by theater companies in Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., Cleveland, Baltimore, and Atlanta. With the opening of "The Chip Woman's Fortune" (1923), he became the first African American to have a play produced on Broadway. Several of his 46 plays were published in assorted magazines, and in his essays, he urged black Americans to seek their dramatic material in their own lives and circumstances. In addition, he edited three anthologies of plays by African-Americans. But between 1940 and his death in 1977, Richardson came to realize that his plays were period pieces and that they no longer reflected the problems and situations of African-Americans. In the years before his death, he attempted vigorously yet unsuccessfully to preserve several of his plays through publication, if not production. But the man who has been called the father of African-American drama and who was considered the hope and promise of African-American drama died in obscurity.

Richardson has even been neglected by the scholarly community. This critical biography, the first extensive consideration of his life and work, firmly reestablishes his pioneering role in American theater. The book begins with a detailed chronology, followed by a thoughtful biographical essay. The volume then examines the nature of African-American drama in the 1920s, the period during which Richardson was most productive, and it analyzes his approach to drama as a means of educating African-American audiences. It then explores the African-American community as the central theme in Richardson's plays, for Richardson typically looks at the consequences of refusals by blacks to help one another. The work additionally considers Richardson's history plays, his anthologies, his dramas intended for black children, and his essays. A concluding chapter summarizes his lasting influence; the book closes with a listing of his plays and an extensive bibliography.

York Notes Advanced have been written by acknowledged literature experts for the specific needs of advanced level and undergraduate students. They offer a fresh and accessible approach to the study of English literature. Building on the successful formula of York Notes, this Advanced serles introduces students to more sophisticated analysis and wider critical perspectives. This enables students to appreciate contrasting interpretations of the text and to develop their own critical thinking. York Notes Advanced help to make the study of literature more fulfilling and lead to exam success. They will also be of interest to the general reader as they cover the widest range of popular literature titles.

Current norms of literary criticism tend to ignore ways in which literary experiences relate to life experience, and some ways in which literary experiences can be intensified and deepened. In this vibrant and controversial book, David Fuller seeks to recover the life in Shakespeare's sonnets, arguing that feeling and emotion, often ignored in criticism, should be central. He offers two ways of attempting this - first engaging with the poems through kinds of feeling fundamental to the young man sequence as presented in other kinds of writing and art - philosophy (Plato), poetry and visual art (Michelangelo), fiction (Mann), music (Britten), and film (Jarman). He then discusses reading the poems aloud, showing that dwelling in the words without translating them into other terms brings out their beauty and expressivity, and leads to fuller understanding of their form, structure, and meaning.

This original and provocative reinterpretation of Hamlet presents the play as the original audiences would have viewed it--a much bleaker, stronger, and more deeply religious play than it has usually been assumed to be. Arthur McGee draws a picture of a Devil-controlled Hamlet in the damnable Catholic court of Elsinore, and he shows that the evil natures of the Ghost and of Hamlet himself were understood and accepted by the Protestant audiences of the day. Using material gleaned from an investigation of play-censorship, McGee offers a comprehensive discussion of the Ghost as Demon. He then moves to Hamlet, presenting him as satanic, damned as revenger in the tradition of the Jacobean revenge drama. There are, he shows, no good ghosts, and Purgatory, whence the Ghost came, was reviled in Protestant England. The Ghost's manipulation extends to Hamlet's fool/madman role, and Hamlet's soliloquy reveals the ambition, conscience, and suicidal despair that damn him. With this viewpoint, McGee is able to shed convincing new light on various aspects of the play. He effectively strips Ophelia and Laertes of their sentimentalized charm, making them instead chillingly convincing, and he works through the last act to show damnation everywhere. In an epilogue, he sums up the history of criticism of Hamlet, demonstrating the process by which the play gradually lost its Elizabethan bite. Appendixes develop aspects of Ophelia.

This is the story of 'the greatest book' written in the English language. The First Folio (1623) was the first collection of Shakespare's drama, and the only source for half the plays. The present volume traces the Folio's sales and prices from one pound in the seventeenth century to over half a million pounds today. Counting the extant copies and showing their worldwide distribution, it also indicates their history of ownership - ranging from country parson to President of Standard Oil.

Among extant Greek comedies, the Frogs is unique for the light it throws on classical Greek attitudes to tragedy and to literature in general. Sir Kenneth Dover's edition, with a full introduction and extensive commentary, has been the most comprehensive edition available, drawing together the relevant scholarship that has accumulated on the subject. The general purpose and character of the abridged version remains the same: to provide a helpful guide on a difficult author for students who wish to translate the play, or need to interpret it for performance. In this edition, nothing relevant to the performance of the play on stage has been sacrificed although information on manuscripts and discussion of the history of the text have been pared to the minimum, and arguments on controversial points have been abbreviated. Where relevant, conclucions reached in the original edition have been changed in the light of work done by others since 1993. The inclusion of a vocabulary should reduce the need for students to have a recourse to a lexicon.

The different versions of Hamlet constitute one of the most vexing puzzles in Shakespeare studies. In this groundbreaking work, Shakespeare scholar Terri Bourus argues that this puzzle can only be solved by drawing on multiple kinds of evidence and analysis, including book and theatre history, biography, performance studies, and close readings.

'York Notes Advanced' offer an accessible approach to English Literature. This series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, 'York Notes Advanced' introduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

Aeschylus' Oresteia is a tragedy of inescapable killing within one family, such that each generation must avenge it in kind. This new and close translation tries to preserve its theatrical and poetic qualities: introductory and explanatory matter emphasizes the interconnection of scenes, ideas, and language which distinguishes this unique work, the only trilogy to survive from Greek tragedy.

Giving equal space to the sanctity of script and the artistic freedom of directors, this book addresses the difficulties encountered by playwrights and directors as they bring a script to the stage. Inspired directors can help a writer of genius turn his play into exciting theatre, but playwrights find that giving directors leeway to interpret and modify text can result in directors' overriding authorial intentions. This book presents the best that has been written by literary theorists on the current definitions of text and attempts to depart from quick rule-of-thumb assessments of the problem.

Drawing from definitive articles in literary and theatre journals, part one gives the reader basic concepts and terminology. Interviews with playwrights and directors, showing the complexity of the issue, appear in part two, and part three includes case studies of playwrights and directors who faced production crises. Legal aspects of collaboration are considered in part four. The book concludes with a positive approach and possible solution to the problem.

What have we learned from the first experiments performed at the reconstructed Globe on Bankside? What light have recent productions shed on the way Shakespeare intended his plays to be seen? Written by the Leverhulme Fellow appointed to study and record actor use of this new-old playhouse, here is the first analytical account of the discoveries that have been made in its important first years, in workshops, rehearsals and performances. It shows how actors, directors and playgoers have responded to the demands of 'historical' constraints (and unexpected freedoms) to provide valuable new insights into the dynamics of Elizabethan theatre.

Fifteen distinguished scholars contribute original essays that analyze A Streetcar Named Desire, one of the most significant plays in modern theatre, from various critical or cultural stances, methods, or modalities. Represented as individual points of view or touched upon in the analysis are the theories of Lacan and Foucault and the tenets of Marxism; the approaches of Feminism, Reader Response Criticism, Deconstructionism, Chaos and Anti-Chaos Theory, Translation Theory, Formalism, Mythology, Perception Theory, and Gender Theory; and the perceptions of Popular Culture, Film History and Theory, Southern Letters, and assorted cultural and regional studies. The volume introduction charts the course of Streetcar criticism from its inception to the present. Each essay begins by articulating the theoretical principles and methods behind the critical approach pursued, then applies these to readings from Streetcar, utilizing and documenting relevant major research. Insightful and challenging, the readings, individually and collectively, advance the study of the play and Tennessee Williams's canon and reputation generally. Each essay offers a fresh, provocative view of a play that has long been discussed in simplistic and dichotomized terms: Blanche as victim/Stanley as predator; Streetcar as a play about a failed southern belle meeting a brutish Pole; or Streetcar as a work of Southern literature. Viewing the play through the lenses of cultural and critical pluralism, the contributors open up the script and expand our awareness of the problems and possibilities offered by this great modern classic.