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.

The royal judge was an archetypal character in French tragedy during the 17th century. This figure impersonated the king by asserting his judicial authority and bringing order to an otherwise chaotic world. In Passing Judgment, Helene Bilis examines how an overlooked character-type-the royal judge-remained a constant of the tragic genre throughout the 17th century, although the specifics of his role and position fluctuated as playwrights experimented with changing models of sovereignty onstage. Her readings analyze how this royal decision-maker stood at the intersection of political and theatrical debates, and evolved through a process of trial and error in which certain portrayals of kingship were deemed obsolete and were discarded, while others were promoted as culturally allowable and resonant. In tracing the royal judge's persistent presence and transformation, Bilis argues that we can better grasp the weighty political stakes of theatrical representations under the ancien regime.

No one in the twentieth century used language with the same precision and wit as Noel Coward. In his plays, his verse, his song lyrics, stories and in everyday life, he chose his words to uniquely stylish and truthful effect. This affectionate portrait of Coward's life includes not only his best-loved witticisms and lyrics, but also excerpts from private papers and hidden gems from unpublished material. Barry Day Delves into the whole range of Coward's talents, as well as his thoughts on a wide variety of subjects - including the theatre, England, the Arts, religion, love and death - all the while giving insights into the man himself.

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.

From Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers to Arthur Kopit and Brian Friel, New York-based literary agent Audrey Wood encouraged and guided the unique talents of playwrights in the Broadway theatre of her day. Audrey Wood and the Playwrights illuminates the gifts and strategies of the tenacious woman at the Liebling-Wood Agency who melded playwrights with producers, directors, and leading actors and shaped the American theatre and film industry during the mid-twentieth century. Wood's story is told here through her interactions with her clients, now household names, whose works she steered through periods of triumph and failure. In an era when women, with the exception of actresses, were rare in the theatre business, she was known as the "go-to" agent for success in the commercial theater. Dubbed a "guardian agent," her quiet determination and burning enthusiasm brought America's finest mid-century playwrights to prominence and altered stage history.

Where science has often been used to explore the questions raised by art, this book does the reverse, suggesting that art can address a problem raised by science: the deep challenge to ethics posed by Darwin's discovery that we are intentional beings living in an unintentional world. Using "Hamlet," "Othello," and "Macbeth," among others, Angus Fletcher shows how the physical experience of art can transform Darwin's discouraging theory into a practice-based ethics that establishes pluralism, curiosity, and cooperation as the basis of progressive life.

This book explores the appropriation of Shakespeare by youth culture and the expropriation of youth culture in the manufacture and marketing of 'Shakespeare'. Considering the reduction, translation and referencing of the plays and the man, the volume examines the confluence between Shakepop and rock, rap, graphic novels, teen films and pop psychology.

Was Shakespeare really the original genius he has appeared to be since the eighteenth century, a poet whose words came from nature itself? The contributors to this volume propose that Shakespeare was not the poet of nature, but rather that he is a genius of rewriting and re-creation, someone able to generate a new language and new ways of seeing the world by orchestrating existing social and literary vocabularies. Each chapter in the volume begins with a key word or phrase from Shakespeare and builds toward a broader consideration of the social, poetic, and theatrical dimensions of his language. The chapters capture well the richness of Shakespeare's world of words by including discussions of biblical language, Latinity, philosophy of language and subjectivity, languages of commerce, criminality, history, and education, the gestural vocabulary of performance, as well as accounts of verbal modality and Shakespeare's metrics. An Afterword outlines a number of other important languages in Shakespeare, including those of law, news, and natural philosophy.

This book examines Field Day's cultural intervention into the Northern Irish 'Troubles' through individual readings of the fourteen plays produced by the enterprise. It argues that at the heart of this project were performances, in a variety of different forms and registers, of an ethics of translation that disrupted notions of Irish identity.

"Shakespeare Now!" is a series of short books of truly vital literary scholarship, each with its own distinctive form. "Shakespeare Now!" recaptures the excitement of Shakespeare; it doesn't assume we know him already, or that we know the best methods for approaching his plays. "Shakespeare Now!" is a new generation of critics, unafraid of risk, on a series of intellectual adventures. Above all - it is a new Shakespeare, freshly present in each volume. In "Godless Shakespeare", Mallin argues that there is a profound absence of, or hostility to, God in Shakespeare's plays. It is clear that Shakespeare engaged with and deployed much of his culture's broadly religious interests: his language is shot through with biblical quotations, priestly sermonizing, Christian imagery and miracle-play style allegory. However, he claims that a counter-discourse also emerges in the works, arguing against God, or the idea of God. This is a polemical account of the absence of God and of belief in the plays, and of how this absence functions in theatrical moments of crux and crisis. Following Dante's three part structure for the "Divine Comedy" - the first part (Inferno) represents expressions of religious faith in Shakespeare's plays, the second (Purgatorio) sets out more sceptical positions, and the last (Paradiso) articulations of godlessness. The discussion focuses on the moral and spiritual dilemmas of major characters, developing the often subtle transitions between belief, scepticism and atheism and suggesting that there is a liberating potential in unbelief.

Originally published in 1891 when Wilde was at the height of his form, these brilliant essays on art, literature, criticism, and society display the flamboyant poseur's famous wit and wide learning. A leading spokesman for the English Aesthetic movement, Wilde promoted "art for art's sake" against critics who argued that art must serve a moral purpose. On every page of this collection the gifted literary stylist admirably demonstrates not only that the characteristics of art are "distinction, charm, beauty, and imaginative power," but also that criticism itself can be raised to an art form possessing these very qualities.
In the opening essay, Wilde laments the "decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure." He takes to task modern literary realists like Henry James and Emile Zola for their "monstrous worship of facts" and stifling of the imagination. What makes art wonderful, he says, is that it is "absolutely indifferent to fact, art] invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment."
The next essay, "Pen, Pencil, and Poison," is a fascinating literary appreciation of the life of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, a talented painter, art critic, antiquarian, friend of Charles Lamb, and -- murderer.
The heart of the collection is the long two-part essay titled "The Critic as Artist." In one memorable passage after another, Wilde goes to great lengths to show that the critic is every bit as much an artist as the artist himself, in some cases more so. A good critic is like a virtuoso interpreter: "When Rubinstein plays ... he gives us not merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethoven absolutely...made vivid and wonderful to us by a new and intense personality. When a great actor plays Shakespeare we have the same experience."
Finally, in "The Truth of Masks," Wilde returns to the theme of art as artifice and creative deception. This essay focuses on the use of masks, disguises, and costume in Shakespeare.
For newcomers to Wilde and those who already know his famous plays and fiction, this superb collection of his criticism offers many delights.

From the star-crossed romance of Romeo and Juliet to Othello's misguided murder of Desdemona to the betrayal of King Lear by his daughters, family life is central to Shakespeare's dramas. This book helps students learn about family life in Shakespeare's England and in his plays. The book begins with an overview of the roots of Renaissance family life in the classical era and Middle Ages. This is followed by an extended consideration of family life in Elizabethan England. The book then explores how Shakespeare treats family life in his plays. Later chapters then examine how productions of his plays have treated scenes related to family life, and how scholars and critics have responded to family life in his works. The volume closes with a bibliography of print and electronic resources.

The volume begins with a look at the classical and medieval background of family life in the Early Modern era. This is followed by a sustained discussion of family life in Shakespeare's world. The book then examines issues related to family life across a broad range of Shakespeare's works. Later chapters then examine how productions of the plays have treated scenes concerning family life, and how scholars and critics have commented on family life in Shakespeare's writings. The volume closes with a bibliography of print and electronic resources for student research. Students of literature will value this book for its illumination of critical scenes in Shakespeare's works, while students in social studies and history courses will appreciate its use of Shakespeare to explore daily life in the Elizabethan age.

"Alice Birch's new play is scored like a piece of music ... It is an extraordinary echoing text, full of pain and strange beauty. The three stories play out simultaneously on stage, the dialogue from one scene overlapping with the other two in a manner that borders on the choral ... Birch has provided a text that explores these ideas in a formally invigorating way." The Stage Three generations of women. For each, the chaos of what has come before brings with it a painful legacy. A powerful, unflinching look at a family afflicted with severe depression and mental illness. Presented as a triptych of plays performed side by side, this groundbreaking play reverberates with audiences and readers. Published for the first time in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series, this edition features a brand new introduction by Ava Davies.

Approaching the subject from a dramaturgical point of view, this investigation differs from anything that has been written about the relationship between Thomas More and William Shakespeare. Charles A. Hallett and Elaine S. Hallett define, in specific terms, what Shakespeare learned from his study of More's "History" and how he exploited that knowledge to heighten the drama in his enduring masterpiece "Richard III."

Shakespeare's legal references and allusions constitute a complete catalogue of the substantive, social, institutional, and "professional" concerns of early modern English law. This encyclopaedia-style dictionary explores a wide range of formal, technical, historical, rhetorical and artistic issues, while maintaining regard for the fact that matters of social history cannot be ignored in discussions of either theater or law. New perspectives and questions are revealed concerning Shakespearean drama, early modern social life, legal thought, and their interactions.

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre is recognised worldwide as both a monument to and significant producer of the dramatic art of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. But it has established a reputation too for commissioning innovative and distinctive new plays that respond to the unique characteristics and identity of the theatre. This is the first book to focus on the new drama commissioned and produced at the Globe, to analyse how the specific qualities of the venue have shaped those works and to assess the influences of both past and present in the work staged. The author argues that far from being simply a monument to the past, the reconstructed theatre fosters creativity in the present, creativity that must respond to the theatre's characteristic architecture, the complex set of cultural references it carries and the heterogeneous audience it attracts. Just like the reconstructed 'wooden O', the Globe's new plays highlight the relevance of the past for the present and give the spectators a prominent position. In examining the score of new plays it has produced since 1995 the author considers how they illuminate issues of staging, space, spectators, identity and history - issues that are key to an understanding of much contemporary theatre. Howard Brenton's In Extremis and Anne Boleyn receive detailed consideration, as examples of richly productive connection between the playwright's creativity and the theatre's potential. For readers interested in new writing for the stage and in the work of one of London's totemic theatre spaces, New Playwriting at Shakespeare's Globe offers a fascinating study of the fruitful influences of both past and present in today's theatre.

Through historical and bibliographical research, and through analysis of Shakespeare's work, the author places Shakespeare among the supreme artists of the world. In the first two chapters he examines the facts about Shakespeare's career as a dramatist and summarizes the unfavorable judgments created by his early biographers. In subsequent chapters Professor Alexander establishes an order among the plays that reveals a gradual development of Shakespeare's art.

A.C.Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy, first published in 1904, ranks as one of the greatest works of Shakespearean criticism of all time. In his ten lectures, Bradley has provided a study of the four great tragedies - Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth - which reveals a deep understanding of Shakespearean thought and art This centenary edition features a new Introduction by Robert Shaughnessy which places Bradley's work in the critical, intellectual and cultural context of its time. Shaughnessy summarises the content and argumentative thrust of the book, outlines the critical debates and counter-arguments that have followed in the wake of its publication and, most importantly, prompts readers to engage with Bradley's work itself.

David Greig has been described as 'one of the most interesting and adventurous British dramatists of his generation' ("Daily Telegraph") and 'one of the most intellectually stimulating dramatists around' ("Guardian"). Since he began writing for theatre in the early nineties, his work has been both copious and remarkably varied, defying neat generalisations or attempts to pigeon-hole his work. Besides his original plays, he has adapated classics, is co-founder of the Suspect Culture Theatre Group and is currently Dramaturge for the National Theatre of Scotland. This Critical Companion provides an analytical survey of his work, from his early plays such as "Europe" and "The Architect "through to more recent works "Damascus," "Dunsinane "and "Ramallah"; it also considers the plays produced with Suspect Culture and his work for young audiences. As such it is the first book to provide a critical account of the full variety of his work and will appeal to students and fans of contemporary British theatre.Clare Wallace provides a detailed analysis of a broad selection of plays and their productions, reviews current discourses about his work and offers a framework for enquiry. The Companion features an interview with David Greig and a further three essays by leading academics offering a variety of critical perspectives.

As literature written in Latin has almost no female authors, we are dependent on male writers for some understanding of the way women would have spoken. Plautus (3rd to 2nd century BCE) and Terence (2nd century BCE) consistently write particular linguistic features into the lines spoken by their female characters: endearments, soft speech, and incoherent focus on numerous small problems. Dorota M. Dutsch describes the construction of this feminine idiom and asks whether it should be considered as evidence of how Roman women actually spoke.

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.

American documentary theatre records the social issues that continue to shape the United States at the close of the twentieth century. This book provides an historical and critical survey of documentary theatre in the United States since John Reed's The Pageant of the Paterson Strike (1913). It defines documentary theatre as a dramatic representation of societal forces using a close reexamination of events, individuals, or situations. While documentary theatre reinvents itself from time to time, this study demonstrates that its constituent parts remain roughly the same. Because documentary theatre is rooted in oral traditions, it offers an alternative to conventional journalistic treatments of social history. Through a close look at the history of documentary theatre, the volume concludes that a new period of expression is presently underway in the United States. Numerous social issues have marked the growth of the United States, and many of these continue to shape contemporary American culture. While many of these issues have been treated in novels, they have also captured the attention of playwrights. Documentary theatre explores the issues and events at the very heart of society. But in spite of its significance, this dramatic form continues to escape, for the most part, the awareness of the theatre community and its public. This book is an historical and critical survey of documentary theatre in the United States since John Reed's The Pageant of the Paterson Strike (1913). It defines documentary theatre as a dramatic representation of societal forces using a close reexamination of events, individuals, or situations. By listing current and more distant examples of American documentary theatre, the book shows that the genre is richly steeped in the oral history tradition. Therefore, American documentary theatre is an alternative to conventional journalism. For the theatre practitioner, the volume provides valuable insight about the process of making a documentary play. For the investigative researcher, the book shows that documentary theatre possesses a non-Aristotelian dramatic structure, in contrast to the strictly narrative form generally found in conventional drama. Through an overview of numerous plays, the book observes that even though documentary theatre reinvents itself from time to time, its constituent parts remain roughly the same. It concludes that a new period of expression is presently underway in the United States, one that affirms that the theatre is a vital part of society and is as important as religion, education, and government.

The plays of the late Nobel laureate Harold Pinter have formed part of the canon of world theatre since the 1960s. Frequently revived on the professional stage, and studied on almost every Theatre Studies course, his importance and influence is hard to overestimate. This Critical Companion offers an assessment of Pinter's entire body of work for the stage, appraising his skill as a dramatist and considering his impact and legacy. Through a clear focus on issues of theatricality and the effect of the plays in performance "The Theatre of Harold Pinter "considers Pinter's chief narrative concerns and offers a unifying theme through which over four decades of work may be understood. Plays are considered in themed chapters that follow the chronological sequence of work, illuminating the development of his aesthetic and concerns. The volume features too a series of essays from other leading scholars presenting different critical perspectives on the work, including Harry Burton on Pinter's early drama; Ann Hall on Revisiting Pinter's Women; Chris Megson on Pinter's Memory Plays of the 1970s, and Basil Chiasson on Neoliberalism and Democracy.

British theatre of the 1990s witnessed an explosion of new talent and presented a new sensibility that sent shockwaves through audiences and critics. What produced this change, the context from which the work emerged, the main playwrights and plays, and the influence they had on later work are freshly evaluated in this important new study in Methuen Drama's Decades of Modern British Playwriting series. The 1990s volume provides a detailed study by four scholars of the work of four of the major playwrights who emerged and had a significant impact on British theatre: Sarah Kane (by Catherine Rees), Anthony Neilson (Patricia Reid), Mark Ravenhill (Graham Saunders) and Philip Ridley (Aleks Sierz). Essential for students of Theatre Studies, the series of six decadal volumes provides a critical survey and study of the theatre produced from the 1950s to 2009. Each volume features a critical analysis of the work of four key playwrights besides other theatre work, together with an extensive commentary on the period. Readers will understand the works in their contexts and be presented with fresh research material and a reassessment from the perspective of the twenty-first century. This is an authoritative and stimulating reassessment of British playwriting in the 1990s.