The Victorians, having once been seen as 'them', the age responsible for the mistakes of the past, were transformed by the new theatrical forms of the 1960s into 'us', a metaphor for what the nation thinks (and fears) about itself. And, since the 1980s and the rise of new biographical forms in the theatre, the emphasis has shifted further, from 'we' to 'me': plays about individuals, great and small, and their struggles for personal validation. This study argues powerfully that the stage portrayal of the Victorians in recent times is a key reference point in understanding notions of Britishness, heritage and nostalgia, and the profound politicisation of national identity over the last four decades. Using many examples drawn from theatre archives, and throwing new light on works by canonical playwrights like Bond, Edgar, and Churchill, it charts the decline in class-based narratives of the British people and the move towards plays reflecting a more atomised, individuated society, preoccupied with identity and the past but no longer able to provide a convincing account of itself as a nation.

This book is a systematic attempt to establish Sheridan as a major figure in the history of English comedy. Leading scholars address Sheridan's role not only as an outstanding playwright, but also as the manager of Drury Lane Theatre, and his subsequent career as a Member of Parliament. The essays examine the theatrical world in which Sheridan worked, discuss his major plays, and include a modern director's observations on the production of his work today. This is combined with an important re-evaluation of Sheridan's achievements as a master of rhetoric in the political arena, to provide a much needed contemporary assessment of this multifaceted man and his work.

A comprehensive reassessment of Middleton's cultural importance, this wide-ranging study examines the writer's dramatic and non-dramatic texts to show how he laid bare the complicit interests at work behind assumptions about sex, morality, society, and politics in late feudal culture. Middleton's importance has long been acknowledged in the modern theatre, but academic criticism still seems distracted by questions regarding his morals and 'Puritanism'. Swapan Chakravorty argues against the reductivism of such enquiries, and demonstrates the complexity behind the texts' disengagement from received ideological premisses and generic formulae. Combining close reading with lively historical analysis, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton reveals Middleton to have been a pioneer of politically self-conscious theatre. Full of insight, this study brings alive the plays' meanings by engaging with the social, political, and cultural concerns of Middleton's day.

Staging the Impossible explores the most recent critical thinking on the relationship between the literary mode of the fantastic and the literary genre of drama with respect to modern theatre. While a few monographs treat a particular dimension of the fantastic in drama, the Gothic or the fairy tale for instance, no other volume provides a critically sophisticated introduction to the diversity of fantastic drama written and performed in this century. The essays here lay to rest the illusion that realism is the only genuine form of theatrical expression and the notion that cinema special effects have rendered science fiction and the stage incompatible. Competing with the realism of the first half of the twentieth century and the "new realism" of the second half have been a range of successful theatrical repertoire, including the absurd, the horrific, the supernatural, the mythic, the dream-vision quest, the postmodern, the hyper-realistic, and the science fictional. Wide ranging in time and space, this volume comprises fourteen essays on the fantastic on the modern stage, assessing dramatic works from the United States, Ireland, England, Western Europe, and the Caribbean. Canonical figures, such as Strindberg, Yeats, Beckett, Ionesco, Cocteau, and Stoppard are studied, along with neglected figures, such as Wassily Kandinsky, better known as an expressionist painter, and Halper Leivick, author of the Yiddish play The Golem, and innovative new performance troupes and individual artists, such as Squat Theatre and Spalding Gray. Concluding essays are devoted to contemporary experimental theatre and postmodern drama. A study of science fiction on stage includes an annotated listing of fortyEnglish-language plays. Concerned with the interstice of theatre and the fantastic, this work will be valuable to students and scholars of both, of genre studies, and of contemporary literature in general.

Filling a critical void, this book examines French women dramatists of the nineteenth-century who staged works prior to the lifting of censorship laws in 1864. Though none staged overtly feminist drama, Sophie de Bawr, Sophie Gay, Virginie Ancelot, and Delphine Girardin questioned patriarchal dominance and reconstructed ideals of womanhood.

Discover all the foul facts about the history of the Bard's hometown with history's most horrible headlines: Stratford-upon-Avon edition. The master of making history fun, Terry Deary, turns his attention to the historical town of Shakespeare's birthplace. From why fleabites turned fatal and what bloody battles took place there to why locals lob cheese in the river. It's all in Horrible Histories: Stratford-upon-Avon: fully illustrated throughout and packed with hair-raising stories - with all the horribly hilarious bits included with a fresh take on the classic Horrible Histories style, perfect for fans old and new the perfect series for anyone looking for a fun and informative read Horrible Histories has been entertaining children and families for generations with books, TV, stage show, magazines, games and 2019's brilliantly funny Horrible Histories: the Movie - Rotten Romans. Get your history right here and collect the whole horrible lot. Read all about it!

Euripides' Herakles, which tells the story of the hero's sudden descent into filicidal madness, is one of the least familiar and least performed plays in the Greek tragic canon. Kathleen Riley explores its reception and performance history from the fifth century BC to AD 2006. Her focus is upon changing ideas of Heraklean madness, its causes, its consequences, and its therapy. Writers subsequent to Euripides have tried to 'reason' or make sense of the madness, often in accordance with contemporary thinking on mental illness. She concurrently explores how these attempts have, in the process, necessarily entailed redefining Herakles' heroism.
Riley demonstrates that, in spite of its relatively infrequent staging, the Herakles has always surfaced in historically charged circumstances - Nero's Rome, Shakespeare's England, Freud's Vienna, Cold-War and post-9/11 America - and has had an undeniable impact on the history of ideas. As an analysis of heroism in crisis, a tragedy about the greatest of heroes facing an abyss of despair but ultimately finding redemption through human love and friendship, the play resonates powerfully with individuals and communities at historical and ethical crossroads.

This timely book challenges conventional critical wisdom about the work of Ben Jonson. Looking in particular at his Jacobean and Caroline plays, it explores his engagement with concepts of republicanism. Julie Sanders investigates notions of community in Jonson's stage worlds - his 'theatrical republics' - and reveals a Jonson to contrast with the traditional image of the writer as conservative, absolutist, misogynist, and essentially 'anti-theatrical'. The Jonson presented here is a positive celebrant of the social and political possibilities of theatre.

The only book to treat in detail all the plays of contemporary English playwright David Storey, this study focuses on the major themes found in his work: the worlds of madness, work, and the family. Storey's developing technique as a dramatist is closely examined and attention is given to his experimental concerns. In addition, Liebman identifies relationships between Storey's fiction and his drama, highlighting how similar themes and characters appear in both his novels and his plays. The study also includes discussion of contemporary thinking on Storey by scholars, critics, and theatre professionals.

This book examines the dramatic work of Dickens, Browning, Collins, and Tennyson, their interaction with the theatrical world, and their attempts to develop their reputations as playwrights. These major Victorian writers each authored several professional plays, but why has their achievement been overlooked?

In Dialogue with Godot: Waiting and Other Thoughts, edited by Ranjan Ghosh, PhD, puts together thirteen new essays on Beckett s most popular and widely read play, Waiting for Godot. Chapters are envisaged as dialogues with Godot, keeping in mind the event of waiting and other issues related to this Godot-Waiting phenomenon. The merit of this book lies in exploring this play from thirteen fresh perspectives introducing some important themes that have not been dealt previously. Contributors explore the play in reference to topics as varied as Hindu philosophy, Agamben, Kristeva, Derrida, the absence of women in the play, Aristotleanism in structural reading, and anti-existentialism. Essays ask, can we make claims to read this play outside the absurd tradition ? Is it an anti-existential play? Can Beckett possibly be Indianised ? How can the dialectic between waiting and delay be problematized? If Beckett was up to de-structure conventional modes of drama-writing, what connection could he possibly have with Aristotle and his normative modes? Can the Vladimir-Estragon relationship be critiqued psychoanalytically? Can questions of political commitment be challenged anew, resisting easy propositions to considering it a Resistance play? Can the Godot / Resistance collocation be examined through torture (the series of beatings that structures the play), through relationship (the pseudo-couple), and finally through language (the insistent coupling of violence and meaning)? In Dialogue with Godot offers a refreshingly new and varied approach to Samuel Beckett s most popular play."

Reflections on the late Arthur Miller from over seventy writers, actors, directors and friends, with 'Arthur Miller Remembers' an interview with the writer from 1995. Following his death in February 2005, newspapers were filled with tributes to the man regarded by many as the greatest playwright of the twentieth century. Published as a celebration and commemoration of his life, Part I of Remembering Arthur Miller is a collection of over seventy specially commissioned pieces from writers, actors, directors and friends, providing personal, critical and professional commentary on the man who gave the theatre such timeless classics as All my Sons, A View from the Bridge, The Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible. Contributors read like a Who's Who of theatre, film and literature: Edward Albee, Alan Ayckbourn, Brian Cox, Richard Eyre, Joseph Fiennes, Nadine Gordimer, Dustin Hoffman, Warren Mitchell, Harold Pinter, Vanessa Redgrave and Tom Stoppard, to name but a few. Part II, 'Arthur Miller Remembers', is an in-depth and wide-ranging interview conducted with Miller in 1995. commentary and analysis both of Miller's life and the life of twentieth century America, including Miller's upbringing in Harlem, the Depression, marriage to Marilyn Monroe, post-war America, being sentenced to prison by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956, and his presidency of the writer's organisation, PEN International, as well as commentary and analysis of his many plays and his reflections on the theatre in America. October 2005 sees the 90th anniversary of Miller's birth. The much acclaimed new Broadway production of Death of a Salesman opened to rave reviews at the Lyric Theatre, London, in May 2005, starring Brian Dennehy. Miller is a perennial of the theatre. His plays are constantly revived all over the world; and studied on school and university courses. Arthur Miller was born in New York in 1915. After graduating from the University of Michigan, he started a career as a playwright, which resulted in more than 25 important plays. He has also written fiction, screenplays, and non-fiction. He died on February 10 2005.

Provides a representative selection of O'Neill's voluminous correspondence written over a fifty-year period to intimate friends and family and to literary and theatrical personalities.

Eugene O'Neill is the only American dramatist ever to have received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He wrote over 50 plays; a number are virtually unknown by the general public; several are considered classics of the American stage; all of them demonstrate, in one way or another, how O'Neill challenged the conventional boundaries of the drama of his time and thereby paved the way for modern American theatre. This volume will provide guides to eight of O'Neill's plays that are most often studied in schools and colleges: The Hairy Ape, Anna Christie, The Emperor Jones, Desire Under the Elms, Ah, Wilderness!, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. More than almost any other author in any fictional genre, O'Neill's works are highly autobiographical. The love/hate relationships he had with the members of his own family resonate throughout his dramatic works. The son of an alcoholic and a morphine addict, he struggled with chemical dependency throughout his life, but determined to be "an artist or nothing," he eventually gave up drinking and fulfilled his artistic ambitions, transforming the traumatic experiences of his life into compelling drama. O'Neill's drama provides insights into the complexities of human behavior and raises questions about the forces, both external and internal, that shape human lives.

This revaluation of Shakespeare's most seductive tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra, allies itself with neither George Bernard Shaw and Philo's Roman judgment of the lovers as "strumpet and fool"-premised on the idle sensuality and feckless self-regard ever evident in the regal pair-nor with the many at the opposite critical pole who have found themselves swept up, to some extent at least, in the "grand illusion" of the lovers themselves as peerless figures transcending the very deaths to which Caesar's heartless predation drives them. Nor does it seek some middle way, settling into a comfortable agnosticism that claims the poet's view of the pair remains too ambiguous to resolve. Instead, by mining a wealth of metaphoric cross-references and ironical, mirroring figurations provided by the tragedy's subsidiary characterizations, this new analysis argues that Shakespeare's assessment of the lovers is in fact unambiguous: Antony and Cleopatra unknowingly settle for functioning merely as two more of the play's eunuchs fanning the flames of their self-destructive passions for one another when they could have realized the new heaven and new earth Antony promised his queen had their "intercourse" with one another been more vigorously complete. Not alone their deaths, but their entire experience is this play is but a search for "easy ways to die" rather than the quest is should have been to live more richly yet and generate new life beyond their respective notorieties as separate individuals to be celebrated.

Euripides' Phoenissae bears one of the richest tragic plots: multiple narrative levels are interwoven by means of various anachronies, focalizers offer different and often challenging points of view, while a complex mythical matrix is deftly employed as the backdrop against which the exploration of the mechanics of tragic narrative takes place. After providing a critical perspective on the ongoing scholarly dialogue regarding narratology and drama, this book uses the former as a working tool for the study and interpretation of the latter. The Phoenissae is approached as a coherent narrative unit and issues like the use of myth, narrators, intertext, time and space are discussed in detail. It is within these contexts that the play is seen as a Theban mythical 'thesaurus' both exploring previous mythical ramifications and making new additions. The result is rewarding: Euripides constructs a handbook of the Theban saga that was informative for those mythically untrained, fascinating for those theatrically demanding, but also dexterously open upon each one's reception.

Coriolanus is the last and most intriguing of Shakespeare's Roman tragedies. Critics, directors and actors have long been bewitched by this gripping character study of a warrior that Rome can neither tolerate nor do without. Caius Martius Coriolanus is a terrifying war machine in battle, a devoted son to a wise and ambitious mother at home, and an inflammatory scorner of the rights and rites of the common people. This Critical Reader opens up the extraordinary range of interpretation the play has elicited over the centuries and offers exciting new directions for scholarship. The volume commences with a Timeline of key events relating to Coriolanus in print and performance and an Introduction by the volume editor. Chapters survey the scholarly reaction to the play over four centuries, the history of Coriolanus on stage and the current research and thinking about the play. The second half of the volume comprises four 'New Directions' essays exploring: the rhetoric and performance of the self, the play's relevance to our contemporary world, an Hegelian approach to the tragedy, and the insights of computer-assisted stylometry. A final chapter critically surveys resources for teaching the play.

In "Antony and Cleopatra, " Shakespeare dramatizes the classical love story of the Roman general and the Egyptian queen, their fatal romance, and the power struggle that leads to the triumph of Octavius Caesar. While the play has much to offer, it is also one of Shakespeare's least accessible tragedies. It can baffle readers with its difuseness and multiple perspectives, or intimidate directors eager to do justice to its huge canvass without overwhelming the audience. This reference provides a thorough overview of the play, its background, and its critical and dramatic legacy.

The early chapters examine the original text of "Antony and Cleopatra" and the play's contexts and sources. In particular, the book considers how Shakespeare's dramatic presentation of a powerful female ruler might reflect political attitudes in Renaissance England, and how he drew from North's Plutarch. The volume then analyzes the dramatic structure of the play--its settings, patterns of language, genre, and characters. Later chapters explore the tragedy's major themes and critical reception and discuss its performance history. A bibliographical essay then reviews the most important general works for further reading.

The highly performative categories of 'Irish culture' and 'Irishness' are in need of critical address, prompted by recent changes in Irish society, the arts industry and modes of critical inquiry. This book broaches this task by considering Irish expressive culture through some of the paradigms and vocabularies offered by performance studies.

'This authoritative edition adds a dimension to our understanding of John Millington Synge...annotated in generous detail.' British Book News
'it is good to have all this material brought together, splendidly elucidated by Professor Saddlemyer's notes.' London Review of Books
'a model of editorial scholarship.' Times Higher Education Supplement

In 2006 the Royal Shakespeare Company began its mission to transform the teaching of Shakespeare in schools. This has been a unique initiative from a major cultural organisation for several reasons: - Education has been placed at the heart and not at the periphery of the RSC's vision. Producing versions of Shakespeare's plays for young audiences has, for example, become an annual feature of the Company's programming. - The project's longevity - it has already been in existence for six years and has funding to continue for at least another four years; - The nature of the learning network it has established, involving schools from all over the UK and a partnership in the US; - The partnership with a higher education institution (the University of Warwick) which has steered teachers through their own research projects, resulting in a 90%+ completion rate among the teachers involved; - The amount of independent research that has established the extent and nature of the impact of this work in both quantitative and qualitative terms.The book tells the story of this transformative project - to describe and to theorise the innovative classroom practice that the RSC has pioneered and to explain what the research tells us about the impact this practice has had on children's experience of Shakespeare in both primary and secondary schools. It describes all of this in authoritative but accessible language, and is relevant to anyone with an interest in the teaching of Shakespeare and / or in how a major cultural organisation can use its expertise to impact significantly on the education of young people from a wide range of social backgrounds. As well as drawing upon the research already conducted, the book benefits from the writer's knowledge and expertise of the teaching of drama. It also benefits from interviews from internationally influential figures, notably Michael Boyd and Jonathan Bate.

Geo-spatial identity and early Modern European drama come together in this study of how cultural or political attachments are actively mediated through space. Matei-Chesnoiu traces the modulated representations of rivers, seas, mountains, and islands in sixteenth-century plays by Shakespeare, Jasper Fisher, Thomas May, and others.

This ambitious work features forty of Etherege's poems and three plays, which are still popular after 300 years. The concordance provides an easy-to-use identification system that helps determine lexical shading, isolate word clusters that suggest patterns of meaning, and examine changes in language over several decades. Speech prefixes in the body of the concordance allow readers to see who is the speaker of a specific line of drama. An appendix of word frequency and cross-references to compound words are also included.