Frances E. Dolan examines the puzzling pronouns and puns, the love poetry, mischief, and disguises of "Twelfth Night," exploring its themes of grief, obsessive love, social climbing and gender identity, and helping you towards your own close-readings.

Brian Friel is Ireland's foremost living playwright, whose work spans fifty years and has won numerous awards, including three Tonys and a Lifetime Achievement Arts Award. Author of twenty-five plays, and whose work is studied at GCSE and A level (UK), and the Leaving Certificate (Ire), besides at undergraduate level, he is regarded as a classic in contemporary drama studies. Christopher Murray's Critical Companion is the definitive guide to Friel's work, offering both a detailed study of individual plays and an exploration of Friel's dual commitment to tradition and modernity across his oeuvre.Beginning with Friel's 1964 work "Philadelphia, Here I Come ," Christopher Murray follows a broadly chronological route through the principal plays, including "Aristocrats," "Faith Healer," "Translations," "Dancing at Lughnasa," "Molly Sweeney" and "The Home Place." Along the way it considers themes of exile, politics, fathers and sons, belief and ritual, history, memory, gender inequality, and loss, all set against the dialectic of tradition and modernity. It is supplemented by essays from Shaun Richards, David Krause and Csilla Bertha providing varying critical perspectives on the playwright's work.

In the early modern period, envy was often represented iconographically in the image of the Medusa, with snaky locks and a poisonous gaze. Ben Jonson and Envy investigates the importance of envy to Jonson's imagination, showing that he perceived spectators and readers as filled with envy, and created strategies to defend his work from their distorting and potentially 'deadly' gaze. Drawing on historical and anthropological studies of evil eye beliefs, this 2009 study focuses on the authorial imperative to charm and baffle ritualistically the eye of the implied spectator or reader, in order to protect his works from defacement. Comparing the exchange between authors and readers to social relations, the book illuminates the way in which the literary may be seen to be informed by popular culture. Ben Jonson and Envy tackles a previously overlooked, but vital, aspect of Jonson's poetics.

This book charts the influence of Seneca--both as specific text and inherited tradition--through Shakespeare's tragedies. Discerning patterns in previously attested borrowings and discovering new indebtedness, it presents an integrated and comprehensive assessment. Familiar methods of source study and a sophisticated understanding of intertextuality are employed to re-evaluate the much maligned Seneca in the light of his Greek antecedents, Renaissance translations and commentaries, and contemporary dramatic adaptations, especially those of Chapman, Jonson, Marston, Garnier, and Giraldi Cinthio. Three broad categories organize the discussion--Senecan revenge, tyranny, and furor--and each is illustrated by an earlier and later Shakespearean tragedy. The author keeps in view Shakespeare's eclecticism, his habit of combining disparate sources and conventions, as well as the rich history of literary criticism and theatrical interpretation. The book concludes by discussing Seneca's presence in Renaissance comedy and, more important, in that new and fascinating hybrid genre, tragicomedy. Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy makes an important contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare and of his foremost antecedents, as well as throwing light on the complex interactions of the Classical and Renaissance theatres.

The Pulitzer Prize Archive presents for the first time an extensive history of this award from its beginnings to the present. In the volumes of parts A to E the awarding of the prize in each category is documented, commented and arranged chronologically. The jury reports are printed completely in the supplements. The volumes of part F cover the history of the prize biographically and bibliographically. The supplement volumes of part G provide the background to the individual decisions.

How can the most silent member of the family carry the message of subversion against venerated institutions of state and society? Why would two playwrights, writing 300 years apart, employ the same dramatic methods for rebelling against the establishment, when these methods are virtually ignored by their contemporaries? This book considers these and similar questions. It examines the historical similarities of the eras in which Shakespeare and Shaw wrote and then explores types of father-daughter interactions, considering each in terms of the existing power structures of society.

These two dramatists draw on themes of incest, daughter sacrifice, role playing, education, and androgyny to create both active and passive daughters. The daughters literally represent a challenge to the patriarchy and metaphorically extend that challenge to such institutions as church and state. The volume argues that the father-daughter relationship was the ideal dramatic vehicle for Shakespeare and Shaw to advance their social and political agendas. By exploring larger issues through the father-daughter relationship, both playwrights were able to avoid the watchful eyes of censors and comment on such topics as the divine right of kings, filial bonds of obedience, and even regicide.

Best known for his plays "Six Degrees of Separation" and "The House of Blue Leaves, " John Guare is a major figure in the contemporary American theater. Other notable works by Guare include "Bosoms and Neglect, " "Landscape of the Body, " and the "Lydie Breeze" series. His career began with off-off-Broadway experimentation in the sixties and continues through the present. In that time Guare has created many imaginative, eccentric plays that reflect the chaos, violence, and loneliness of life in our time. He frequently combines outrageous farce with painfully serious subject matter.

This sourcebook is both a convenient reference and a resource for further investigation of Guare's works. The volume chronicles his achievements with a chronology and biographical essay. It also includes summaries of his published and unpublished plays, overviews of the critical reception of each work, production credits, a primary bibliography of dramatic and nondramatic writings, and extensive annotated bibliographies of reviews and other secondary material.

This book analyzes the interaction of crimes, punishments, and Bernard Shaw in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It explores crimes committed by professional criminals, nonprofessional criminals, businessmen, believers in a cause, the police, the Government, and prison officials. It examines punishments decreed by judges, juries, colonial governors, commissars, and administered by the police, prison warders, and prison doctors. It charts Shaw's view of crimes and punishments in dramatic writings, non-dramatic writings, and his actions in real life. This book presents him in the context of his contemporaries and his world, inviting readers to view crimes and punishments in their context, history, and relevance to his ideas in and outside his plays, plus the relevance of his ideas to crimes and punishments in life.

This collection of essays challenges preconceptions about Marlowe by tackling major aspects of his dramaturgy, his use of magic, the homoeroticism of the plays, his female characters, twentieth-century performances of his plays, and the radical nature of his narrative poem Hero and Leander. Taking nothing on trust, the authors review what is known about Marlowe's life and plays, conditions in Elizabethan theater, and his reputation among his contemporaries and among late-twentieth-century critics. Together they contribute to the critical effort to construct a fuller understanding of the poet and playwright.

This book rigorously examines the work of leading contemporary playwright Martin Crimp. It examines his plays, adaptations, translations and versions, treats them as texts and performance events and argues that their challenge to audiences derives from their 'making strange': producing theatrical innovation, thus rendering the familiar unfamiliar.

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.

From 1880 to 1956, when John Osborne transformed the British theater world with Look Back in Anger, British playwrights made numerous lasting contributions and provided a foundation for the innovations of dramatists during the latter half of the 20th century. This reference profiles the life and work of some 40 British playwrights active during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many of whom are also known for their work as novelists and poets. Included are figures such as W. H. Auden, Max Beerbohm, Noel Coward, T. S. Eliot, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, D. H. Lawrence, W. Somerset Maugham, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde. Each entry provides a biographical overview; a list of major plays and summaries of their critical reception; a list of minor plays, adaptations, and productions; an assessment of the playwright's career; and archival and bibliographical information. Included in this reference book are alphabetically arranged entries for some 40 British playwrights active from 1880 through 1956. Entries are written by expert contributors, with each entry providing a biographical overview; a list of major plays, premieres, and significant revivals, along with a summary of the critical reception of these works; a listing of additional plays, adaptations, and productions; an assessment of the playwright's career and contributions, with reference to published evaluations in magazines, journals, dissertations, and books; a listing of locations housing unpublished archival material, if available; a selected bibliography of the dramatist's published plays and of essays and articles by the playwright on aspects of the theater; a selected bibliography of secondary sources; and, when available, a listing of previously published bibliographies on the playwright.

This is the first comprehensive study of Nobel Laureate Samuel Beckett's innovative work for the screen. "Samuel Beckett's Plays on Film and Television "provides meticulous analysis of every play Beckett wrote, directed, or adapted for the screen. Herren studies Beckett's use of "memory machines"--technological media for channeling personal, cultural, philosophical, and artistic ghosts from the past. Having conjured these ghosts, Beckett "decomposes" them in order to recompose them for distinctly innovative use. Herren traces this countraditional approach to tradition as Beckett's signature style for film and television. The book concludes with a consideration of the "Beckett on Film" project, where Herren defends the vital need for creative freedom in future productions of Beckett's plays. With this publication, the film and television plays can now assume their rightful place alongside Beckett's remarkable fiction and stage plays, collectively constituting one of the most innovative artistic achievements of the twentieth century.

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 title offers a fresh approach to the plays that suggests they can be seen as metaphysical 'experiments' conducted in the medium of drama.Metaphysics is usually associated with that part of the philosophical tradition which asks about 'last things', questions such as: How many substances are there in the world? Which is more fundamental, quantity or quality? Are events prior to things, or do they happen to those things? While he wasn't a philosopher, Shakespeare was obviously interested in 'ultimates' of this sort. Instead of probing these issues with argument, however, he did so with plays. "Shakespearean Metaphysics" argues for Shakespeare's inclusion within a metaphysical tradition that opposes empiricism and Cartesian dualism.Through close readings of three major plays - "The Tempest", "King Lear" and "Twelfth Night" - Witmore proposes that Shakespeare's manner of depicting life on stage itself constitutes an 'answer' to metaphysical questions raised by later thinkers such as Spinoza, Bergson, and Whitehead. Each of these readings shifts the interpretative frame around the plays in radical ways; taken together they show the limits of our understanding of theatrical play as an 'illusion' generated by the physical circumstances of production."Shakespeare Now!" is a series of short books that engage imaginatively and often provocatively with the possibilities of Shakespeare's plays. It goes back to the source - the most living language imaginable - and recaptures the excitement, audacity and surprise of Shakespeare. It will return you to the plays with opened eyes.

Using close readings of Shaw's plays and letters, as well as archival research, David Clare illustrates that Shaw regularly placed Irish, Irish Diasporic, and surrogate Irish characters into his plays in order to comment on Anglo-Irish relations and to explore the nature of Irishness.

By concentrating on Sam Shepard's visual aesthetics, Emma Creedon argues that a consideration of Shepard's plays in the context of visual and theoretical Surrealism illuminates our understanding of his experimental approach to drama.

This work is the first major commentary on Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris to appear in English in more than 65 years. It offers detailed analysis of a fascinating play that scholars so far had considered mainly as a source of information about Athenian cult and viewed as a romantic adventure story with happy end. Apart from including sober assessments of textual, linguistic and metrical problems, the commentary sheds new light on the play's treatment of myth, its intricate structure, presentation of character, and place in Euripides' work. In particular it offers fresh insights into the play's relationship to the literary tradition, especially its treatment of the crimes of the Pelopids, and its presentation of the complex, ambiguous relationship of humans and gods as well as that of Greeks and barbarians. Unlike most other tragedies, Iphigenia in Tauris does not feature any villain and avoids concentrating on past crimes and their corrosive influence on the characters' present. The Taurians are not portrayed simply as savage and slow barbarians and Iphigenia, the most intelligent character, fails to transcend her limitations. Religion and cult in both myth and contemporary Athens are a mixture of traditional and invented elements and the play as a whole turns out to be an intriguing and unique experiment in Euripides' career.

Contemporary performance is a particularly stimulating area for the study of how Shakespeare is produced and received in different cultural contexts. Francesca Clare Rayner's original and thought-provoking book highlights the diversity and experimentalism of contemporary performance practices through a focus on unexplored performances in Portugal. This book references key debates within contemporary performance studies on intermediality, globalization and political participation and analyses their particular configurations within the Portuguese context. These case studies represent clear alternatives to the market-driven view of the contemporary as the continual reproduction of the new and the topical for global consumers. Instead, they recast the contemporary as a site of disempowerment, crisis and erasure in a Europe fragmented by economic austerity, political divisions around Brexit, ecological vacillation and an anxious refashioning of global relations between North and South.

When Hamlet says he 'wears' Horatio in his 'heart of hearts', he is claiming that the strongest bonds between people are forged, stored, and understood in the heart. The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare sets out to trace the sources and subsequent impact of Hamlet's conviction. The book presents the case that by studying the interlocking anatomical, religious, and literary discourses of the heart between 1550 and 1650 we can open a new window on the culture that produced such works as The Faerie Queene, Catholic and Protestant emblem books, George Herbert's lyrics, and William Harvey's treatise on the circulation of the blood. By crossing several disciplinary boundaries and combining the material with the metaphorical, the book identifies a complex set of cardiological concerns in the dramatic works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

This book is the first in-depth cultural history of cinema's polyvalent and often contradictory appropriations of Shakespearean drama and performance traditions. The author argues that these adapatations have helped shape multiple aspects of film, from cinematic style to genre and narrative construction.

This Critical Companion to the work of one of Ireland's most famous and controversial playwrights, Sean O'Casey, is the first major study of the playwright's work to consider his oeuvre and the archival material that has appeared during the last decade. Published ahead of the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland with which O'Casey's most famous plays are associated, it provides a clear and detailed study of the work in context and performance. James Moran shows that O'Casey not only remains the most performed playwright at Ireland's national theatre, but that the playwright was also one of the most controversial and divisive literary figures, whose work caused riots and who alienated many of his supporters. Since the start of the 'Troubles' in the North of Ireland, his work has been associated with Irish historical revisionism, and has become the subject of debate about Irish nationalism and revolutionary history. Moran's admirably clear study considers the writer's plays, autobiographical writings and essays, paying special attention to the Dublin trilogy, The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, and The Plough and the Stars. It considers the work produced in exile, during the war and the late plays. The Companion also features a number of interviews and essays by other leading scholars and practitioners, including Garry Hynes, Victor Merriman and Paul Murphy, which provide further critical perspectives on the work.

Butler Plays: Two brings together a selection of Leo Butler's work, currently both published and previously unpublished, covering the years 2007 to 2013. It showcases his incredible variety in style and tone, and brings together some of his best-loved works alongside some of his lesser known pieces. Airbag (Royal Court, Rough Cuts, 2007) an old woman is lying on her death bed, imagining that she is being terrorised by gorillas. Butler's play is an exploration of death and the dying. I'll Be The Devil (RSC/Tricycle Theatre, 2008): With a poetic fearlessness, Leo Butler looks at what happens when a brutal foreign power is in intimate and callous contact with the primitive heart of an ancient society. Faces in the Crowd (Royal Court Theatre, 2008): Faces in the Crowd is a darkly comic play that offers a unique insight into twenty-first century London and the debts we accrue in the wake of seeking out our ambitions. Juicy Fruits (Paines Plough and Oran Mor, 2011): a one-act comedy set in a coffee shop in which two old friends from university meet again after many years. 69 (Natural Shocks Theatre Company; Pleasance, 2012): a series of 69 short vignettes, all on the subject of sex, offering a glimpse on a whole range of issues surrounding sexuality. Do It! (Royal Court, Open Court Season, 2013) is an unsettling journey through the secrets and innermost thoughts of a group of pedestrians, unwittingly watched over by a violent force. The volume includes an introduction by the playwright.

"A forgotten yet award-winning playwright, Cal Yeomans was one of the founders of gay theatre whose work was fueled by gay liberation and extinguished by the AIDS epidemic. Exploring both sex and sexuality so candidly, he burst the boundaries of what was considered acceptable. His writings were not only manifestations of the sexual liberation of the times, but were also attempts to overcome what he had been raised to despise. Schanke's examination of Yeomans' life and legacy allows a rare exploration into the pivotal moment of gay American history between the Stonewall riots and the AIDS epidemic"--