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.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre is the story of one man's exploits on the high seas and the family he wishes to reunite against the odds. The title character loves a challenge, taking on contests of strength and wit as well as heroic acts of charity. His biggest challenge would seem to be coping with the loss of his wife at sea, but fate has another set-back in store for Pericles. Will he also have to face the death of his beloved daughter? Shakespeare offers up a satisfying adventure story which affirms both the vagaries of destiny and the redeeming power of love.

What was it like to be in the audience of the Globe Theater in 1606? By demonstrating fundamental connections between audience reaction then and the use of computers today, Renaissance scholar Arthur Kinney explores the cultural moment of one of Shakespeare's most popular tragedies.

Examining the cultural practices and beliefs that influenced Shakespeare's writing of Macbeth, Kinney reconstructs how playgoers in 1606 understood that drama when it was first presented and shows how many congruent and often conflicting perspectives played on their minds. Calling on hundreds of documents with which Shakespeare might have been familiar -- books and pamphlets circulating in England from 1600 to 1606 as well as manuscripts and statutes -- he records a wide range of cultural practices related to nearly every aspect of society in that day: politics, religion, economics, medicine, family life, witchcraft, and more.

Kinney proposes a new way of reading this period's texts, drawing us closer to the way dramatic plays such as Macbeth were understood from early modern times to beyond today's technological revolution. In the course of this inquiry, he seeks to determine whether the 1623 text of Macbeth that we now have is anything like the original 1606 performance.

Lies Like Truth shows that the computer revolution of our time can help us revisit Shakespeare's works in their own time and thereby enhance our understanding of them. This provocative work unlocks a cultural moment frozen in time and broadens our appreciation of Shakespeare.

The year 1988 was notable for being the centennial of playwright Eugene O'Neill's birth and a time of unprecedented democratization in the People's Republic of China and rapprochement with the West. In this optimal climate, a remarkable festival and conference devoted to O'Neill was held in Nanjing, China, orchestrated mainly by Haiping Liu, who secured the funds and cooperation necessary to lure noted O'Neill scholars and theatre artists from around the world. Liu selected and edited papers for publication after the conference, but he realized that this would be a difficult task conducted from China. At his invitation Lowell Swortzell, a conference participant, became co-editor, and in the dark days following the political upheaval in China in 1989, Swortzell assumed much of the burden of editing, organizing, clearing rights, and generally readying the final volume. The essays included capture the intellectual and artistic stimulation of the conference. Organized in divisions similar to the order in which the papers were delivered, they explore the major areas of O'Neill scholarship by some of the most renowned scholars from the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, Japan, and China. They emphasize O'Neill's international reputation and productions, particularly in Asia. Included is an open forum discussion of the festival productions, as well as photographs. The circumstances of the festival and conference are a story unto themselves, and in their individual introductions, the co-editors relate some of the background and convey some of the flavor of the events--providing insights into the continued appeal of O'Neill in China and the world.

Theatres world-wide embrace Chekhov's handful of plays with a fervour second only to Shakespeare's. Whatever their native language or culture, audiences often see themselves in his Russian characters, making Chekhov seem an author who easily transcends his own culture and time. Nonetheless, students, actors, and audiences alike are often initially puzzled by Chekhov's dramatic texts. Are they comic or tragic, ironic or sincere, starkly familiar or willfully elusive? How can his often seemingly irrelevant dialogue create dynamic performances? In his stories and plays alike, Chekhov challenges his readers to diagnose his characters' desires, opinions, heartaches and joys in the same way that doctors diagnose illness by attending closely to apparently trivial details. In the plays where narrative voice is absent and characters speak for themselves reading under a microscope becomes all the more necessary. The expert attention that Carnicke pays to the performative dimensions of Chekhov's plays makes her book unique among the published guides to Chekhov's works.

Ben Jonson's Volpone is the most widely taught and commonly performed English Renaissance play outside of Shakespeare. However, the dramatic circumstances of its writing are little known. Jonson wrote the play very shortly after the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, an event in which he was personally involved. This book argues that the play alludes to the plot as openly as censorship will allow, using the traditional form of the beast fable. As a Roman Catholic himself, Jonson shared in the repression suffered by his co-religionists in the wake of the Plot, and the play fiercely satirizes the man they chiefly blamed for this, Robert Cecil. The elaborate format which Jonson devised for the 1607 edition of Volpone, with a dedication, Epistle and numerous commendatory poems, is reproduced here photographically, allowing the reader to appreciate Jonson's covert meanings and to approach the text as those in 1607 might have done.

This book considers the cultural residue from pre-Christian Ireland in Synge's plays and performances. By dramatising a residual culture in front of a predominantly modern and political Irish Catholic middle class audience, the book argues that Synge attempted to offer an alternative understanding of what it meant to be "modern" at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book draws extensively on Synge's archive to demonstrate how pre-Christian residual culture informed not just how he wrote and staged pre-Christian beliefs, but also how he thought about an older, almost forgotten culture that Catholic Ireland desperately wanted to forget. Each of Synge's plays is considered in an individual chapter, and they identify how Synge's dramaturgy was informed by pre-Christian beliefs of animism, pantheism, folklore, superstition and magical ritual.

This is the first major book-length study for four decades to examine the plays written by D. H. Lawrence, and the first ever book to give an in-depth analysis of Lawrence's interaction with the theatre industry during the early twentieth century. It connects and examines his performance texts, and explores his reaction to a wide-range of theatre (from the sensation dramas of working-class Eastwood to the ritual performances of the Pueblo people) in order to explain Lawrence's contribution to modern drama. F. R. Leavis influentially labelled the writer 'D. H. Lawrence: Novelist'. But this book foregrounds Lawrence's career as a playwright, exploring unfamiliar contexts and manuscripts, and drawing particular attention to his three most successful works: The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, The Daughter-in-Law, and A Collier's Friday Night. It examines how Lawrence's novels are suffused with theatrical thinking, revealing how Lawrence's fictions - from his first published work to the last story that he wrote before his death - continually take inspiration from the playhouse. The book also argues that, although Lawrence has sometimes been dismissed as a restrictively naturalistic stage writer, his overall oeuvre shows a consistent concern with theatrical experiment, and manifests affinities with the dramatic thinking of modernist figures including Brecht, Artaud, and Joyce. In a final section, the book includes contributions from influential theatre-makers who have taken their own cue from Lawrence's work, and who have created original work that consciously follows Lawrence in making working-class life central to the public forum of the theatre stage.

Moving effortlessly from Greek to Shakespearean tragedies, to nineteenth and twentieth-century British, American and Russian drama, and fiction and contemporary television, this study sheds new light on the art of comedy.

Exploring the interactions between Shakespeare and popular music, this book links these seeming polar opposites, showing how musicians have woven the Bard into their sounds. How have Shakespearean characters, words, texts and iconography been represented and reworked through popular music? Do all types of popular music represent Shakespeare in the same ways? And how do the links between Shakespeare and popular music challenge what we think we know about both Shakespeare and popular music? One of the enduring myths about how Shakespeare and popular music relate is that they don't - after all the antagonism between high culture and pop music could be considered mutual. In the first book of its kind, Adam Hansen shows what happens to Shakespeare when he exists in and becomes popular music, in all its diverse and glorious forms. Exploring these interactions reveals as much about the functions of the diverse genres of popular music as it does about Shakespeare as a global cultural form. Discussing a wide range of examples in a critically-informed but lively and accessible style, this book brings something new to Shakespeare and popular music, capturing the excitement and energy of both for its readers.

Until recently, French women playwrights had received almost no critical attention and their works were for the most part completely unknown, but this volume is evidence of the important contribution they have made to world literature. It presents an extensive list of the dramatic works of more than 400 French women playwrights from the 16th through 19th centuries and includes brief biographical information, as well as publication, performance, and availability information for nearly 3,000 plays.

The volume includes authors who are relatively unknown, as well as more canonical names such as Marguerite de Navarre and George Sand. The book is divided into four chapters, each devoted to a particular century with authors listed alphabetically. Each entry includes basic biographical information about the author, such as pseudonyms, place and date of birth and death, professions or activities for which the author is known, and other genres in which the author wrote. Plays are listed chronologically under the author's name.

Many people today first encounter staged Shakespeare in an open-air setting. In Australia, picnic Shakespeares seem particularly suited to the predilections of contemporary audiences and the plays have been performed in a remarkably varied range of sites. Shakespeare has been transported to gardens, parks, caves, mountains and beaches all over the country, in a place that for Shakespeare and his contemporaries was completely unknown. Why does the anomaly of performing Shakespeare in Australian space exert such a strong appeal? This book traces the history of open-air Shakespeare production in Australia from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day and suggests that the industry reflects important changes in the ways contemporary Australians relate to both their environment and to Shakespeare. It provides striking evidence of the diversity of localised responses to Shakespeare that exist outside Britain, and contributes to our understanding of Shakespeare's changing global impact.

No one does romantic comedy like William Shakespeare, and Much Ado About Nothing is the Bard at the top of his game. The Italian countryside is the perfect setting for love, which soon appears in abundance. We have Hero and Claudio, star-struck sweethearts who are kept apart by wicked machinations. Beatrice and Benedick are the original couple who can't stand each other yet are made for each other. Add to that a bevy of villains, fools, and assorted family members, and you have a recipe for fun of the highest order.

The majority of Shakespeare's plays have at least one clown figure making an appearance. These characters range from rogues who say only a line or two, to important figures like Touchstone and Falstaff. Videbaek examines even the smallest clown roles, showing how the clown's freedom of speech allows him to become a mediator between the audience and the action of the play, helping audience interpretation. This illuminating celebration of the stage clown's contribution to the understanding and enjoyment of Shakespeare's plays will be a valuable resource for both students and scholars alike.

This book examines how early modern and recently emerging theories of consciousness and cognitive science help us to re-imagine our engagements with Shakespeare in text and performance. Papers investigate the connections between states of mind, emotion, and sensation that constitute consciousness and the conditions of reception in our past and present encounters with Shakespeare's works. Acknowledging previous work on inwardness, self, self-consciousness, embodied self, emotions, character, and the mind-body problem, contributors consider consciousness from multiple new perspectives-as a phenomenological process, a materially determined product, a neurologically mediated reaction, or an internally synthesized identity-approaching Shakespeare's plays and associated cultural practices in surprising and innovative ways.

The Parable of the Prodigal Son is one of the best-known stories in the Bible. It has captured the imagination of commentators, preachers and writers. Alison M. Jack explores the reconfiguring of the character of the Prodigal Son and his family in literature in English. She considers diverse literary periods and genres in which the paradigm is particularly prevalent, such as Elizabethan literature, the work of Shakespeare, the novels of female Victorian writers, the American short story tradition, novels focused on the lives of ordained ministers, and the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Iain Crichton Smith. Drawing on scholarship from biblical and literary studies, this study demonstrates the remarkable potency of the parable in generating new, and at times contradictory, meanings in different contexts. Historical and literary criticism are brought into dialogue to explore this remarkably resilient and nimble character as he dances through drama, novels and poetry across the centuries.

This book challenges traditional Shakespeare studies through a study of its textual imperatives in the late eighteenth century. Only with Malone's 1790 edition did concepts now basic to literary studies become dominant.

Raphael Lyne addresses a crucial Shakespearean question: why do characters in the grip of emotional crises deliver such extraordinarily beautiful and ambitious speeches? How do they manage to be so inventive when they are perplexed? Their dense, complex, articulate speeches at intensely dramatic moments are often seen as psychological - they uncover and investigate inwardness, character and motivation - and as rhetorical - they involve heightened language, deploying recognisable techniques. Focusing on A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, Cymbeline and the Sonnets, Lyne explores both the psychological and rhetorical elements of Shakespeare's language. In the light of cognitive linguistics and cognitive literary theory he shows how Renaissance rhetoric could be considered a kind of cognitive science, an attempt to map out the patterns of thinking. His study reveals how Shakespeare's metaphors and similes work to think, interpret and resolve, and how their struggle to do so results in extraordinary poetry.

Every day, in some part of the world, an Arthur Miller play is performed. In the nearly 60 years since its first production, Pulitzer Prize-winning "Death of a Salesman" has become a classic, a staple of school anthologies of American literature and of acting companies' repertoires. It has received worldwide productions, whether as a study of parent-child relationships, as in its landmark 1976 production directed by Miller in Beijing, or as a critique of Western capitalism and has been filmed once for television and twice for movies. This guide provides a comprehensive critical introduction to the play, giving students an overview of the background and context; detailed analysis of the play's structure, style, characters etc; analysis of key production issues and choices; overview of the performance history from the first performances in 1949 to recent productions and film adaptations; and an annotated guide to further reading highlighting key critical approaches.It offers accessible, informative critical introductions to modern plays for students in both Theatre/Performance Studies and English. Offering up-to-date coverage of a broad range of key plays throughout modern drama, the guides include accounts of performance history, production analysis, screen adaptations and summaries of important critical approaches and debates.

One of the most important American playwrights of the 20th century, Maxwell Anderson won a Pulitzer Prize for "Both Your Houses" (1933), and New York Drama Critics Circle awards for "Winterset" (1935) and "High Tor" (1936). Though he believed that poetry was the glory of drama, he also devoted himself to realism. His crowning achievement was "Winterset," in which he popularized the use of blank verse in contemporary drama. During a career that spanned more than a quarter century, he wrote 33 plays, many of which were produced in European capitals and were translated into more than a dozen languages.

As a comprehensive guide to Anderson's career, this reference book is an indispensable volume for anyone interested in American drama. An introductory essay discusses Anderson's life and work. The bulk of the text provides synopses and critical overviews of his plays, a feature useful to readers unacquainted with his works. Also included is cast information for major productions. Annotated bibliographies cover primary sources, as well as books, chapters, and articles about Anderson. A separate bibliography cites and annotates reviews of performances.

"Othello "has long been, and remains, one of Shakespeare's most popular works. It is a favourite work of scholars, students, and general readers alike. Perhaps more than any other of Shakespeare's tragedies, this one seems to speak most clearly to contemporary readers and audiences, partly because it deals with such pressing modern issues as race, gender, multiculturalism, and the ways love, jealousy, and misunderstanding can affect relations between romantic partners. The play also features Iago, one of Shakespeare's most mesmerizing and puzzling villains. This guide offers students and scholars an introduction to the play's critical and performance history, including notable stage productions and film versions. It includes a keynote chapter outlining major areas of current research on the play and four new critical essays. Finally, a guide to critical, web-based and production-related resources and an annotated bibliography provide a basis for further research.

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.