This book is an analysis of the sonnet in the English Renaissance. It especially traces the relations between Shakespeare's sonnets and the ways in which other writers use the form. It looks at how the poetry fits into the historical situation at the time, with regard to images of the family and of women. Its explorationi of these issues is informed by much recent work in critical theory, which it tries to make as accessible as possible.

This is a critical study of Friel's entire oeuvre, relating his work to the problems of subjectivity, representation, history and the body, with a view to offering some placement of Friel in relation to both postmodernism and traditional humanism. Central to the study is Friel's concept of "translation", whereby he offers us the tension of shaping the new through a "translation" or reformulation of the old. The book includes discussion of Friel's play "Wonderful Tennessee".

This Play Guide is specifically written for A Level students who are studying Antigone as part of the AQA A Level Drama & Theatre specification. It provides structured support for Component 1: Section A - Drama and theatre. / This book is divided into three sections: How to explore a text for A level Drama and Theatre, with vocabulary-building sections on acting, directing and design; An extended exploration of the play to enrich students' understanding and response to the text; Targeted examination preparation to improve writing and test-taking skills. / Fully supports the written examination and helps students develop their key knowledge and understanding of key A Level drama & theatre skills. / Knowledge and understanding of the play are developed with a synopsis, character and scene studies, contextual and practical exploration. / Includes a wide range of practical drama tasks, activities, and research and revision exercises. / Advice on how to interpret and prepare for exam questions with examples of effective responses.

MASTER. Boatswain! BOATSWAIN. Here, master; what cheer? MASTER. Good! Speak to th' mariners; fall to't yarely, or we run ourselves aground; bestir, bestir. BOATSWAIN. Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! yare, yare! Take in the topsail. Tend to th' master's whistle. Blow till thou burst thy wind, if room enough.

In 1963 Martin Seymour-Smith produced his comprehensive edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Here, it is revised and corrected. It includes an introduction and a critical commentary on each sonnet.

In his plays, Shakespeare produced a new and unprecedented way of thinking about life, death, power, and their affects. "Philosophical Readings of Shakespeare" offers close readings of "King Lear," "Hamlet," "Macbeth," and "Timon of Athens" to provide insight into the ontological discourse of poverty and money. Following Marxian thought, Margherita Pascucci shows how Shakespeare was the first to depict money as a conceptual persona. Ultimately, the book's analysis of the themes of creation, subjectivity, and value opens new reflections on central questions of our time.

With the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan opened its doors to the West and underwent remarkable changes as it sought to become a modern nation. Accompanying the political changes that Western trade ushered in were widespread social and cultural changes. Newspapers, novels, poems, and plays from the Western world were soon adapted and translated into Japanese. The combination of the rich storytelling tradition of Japan with the realism and modernism of the West produced some of the greatest literature of the modern age. Historical Dictionary of Modern Japanese Literature and Theater presents a broad perspective on the development and history of literature narrative, poetry, and drama in modern Japan. This book offers a chronology, introduction, bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors, literary and historical developments, trends, genres, and concepts that played a central role in the evolution of modern Japanese literature."

Arden Student Skills: Language and Writing volumes offer a new type of study aid that combines lively critical insight with practical guidance on the writing skills you need to develop in order to engage fully with Shakespeare's texts. The books' core focus is on language: both understanding and enjoying Shakespeare's complex dramatic language and expanding your own critical vocabulary as you respond to his plays. Each guide in the series will empower you to read and write about Shakespeare with increased confidence and enthusiasm. This lively and informative guide to Shakespeare's popular comedy equips you with the critical skills to analyse its language, structure and themes and to expand and enrich your own response to the play. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a perfect play for exploring Shakespeare's diverse uses of language to reveal character and themes, from formal iambics and rhyming couplets of courtiers and lovers, and 'warbling' notes' and nursery rhythms of fairies, to stocky prose by the artisan players including Bottom's comic malapropisms. An introduction considers when and how the play was written, and addresses the language with which Shakespeare created A Midsummer Night's Dream, as well as the generic, literary and theatrical conventions at his disposal. It then moves to a detailed examination and analysis of the play, focusing on its literary, technical and historical intricacies, and its critical reception; an account of the play's movie adaptations completes the volume. Each chapter offers a 'writing matters' section, clearly linking the analysis of Shakespeare's language to your own writing strategies in coursework and examinations.

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, first published in 1960, is intended primarily to increase the understanding of drama among those who do not have easy access to the live theatre and who, therefore, study plays mainly in print. The author's emphasis is on Shakespeare, but most forms of drama receive some attention. A lucid and lively study of the techniques of plot, dialogue and characterization will help the reader to a deeper appreciated of the problems and successes of the dramatist.

SLY. I'll pheeze you, in faith. HOSTESS. A pair of stocks, you rogue SLY. Y'are a baggage; the Slys are no rogues. Look in the chronicles: we came in with Richard Conqueror. Therefore, paucas pallabris; let the world slide. Sessa HOSTESS. You will not pay for the glasses you have burst? SLY. No, not a denier. Go by, Saint Jeronimy, go to thy cold bed and warm thee.

Early modern playgoers were avid consumers of voyage drama. When they entered the playhouse they engaged with the players in a collaborative form of 'mind-travelling, ' and the result was an experience of stage-travel that was predicated on pleasure. This book investigates the pleasures of vicarious travel in early modern England, treating playgoing as part of a playing system, wherein imaginative work is distributed across the various participants: playwright, player, the physical environment, technologies of the stage, and emphatically in this study, the playgoer. Drawing on a wide range of drama from across the entire seventeenth century, including works by Marlowe, Heywood, Jonson, Brome, Davenant, Dryden and Behn, it situates voyage drama in its historical and intellectual context between the individual act of reading in early modern England and the communal act of modern sightseeing

This book constitutes a new direction for feminist studies in English Renaissance drama. While feminist scholars have long celebrated heroic females in comedies, many have overlooked female tragic heroism, reading it instead as evidence of pervasive misogyny on the part of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Displacing prevailing arguments of "victim feminism," the contributors to this volume engage a wide range of feminist theories, and argue that female protagonists in tragedies--Jocasta, Juliet, Cleopatra, Mariam, Webster’s Duchess and White Devil, among others--are heroic in precisely the same ways as their more notorious masculine counterparts.

"The silence of Barbara Synge" provides a fascinating companion volume to Bill McCormack's acclaimed "Fool of the Family" (2000), a biography of the playwright J.M. Synge (1871--1909).

Taking the alledged death of Mrs John Hatch (née Synge) in 1767 as a focal point, this book explores the varied strands of the Synge family tree in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland.

Key events in the family's history are carefully documented, including a suicide in 1769 which is echoed in an early Synge play, the effects of the famine which influenced The "Playboy of the Western World" in 1907, and the behavior of Francis Synge at the time of the union.

"The Silence of Barbara Synge" is a unique work of cultural enquiry, combining archival research, literary criticism, and religious and medical history to pull the strands together and relate them to the family's literary descendent J.M. Synge.

Peter Shaffer: Theatre and Drama is an accessible, informed survey of Peter Shaffer's work to date. Covering much ground, the book brings a fresh and original approach to this playwright's drama, incorporating discussion of every play in his canon. Suitable for readers ranging from 'A' level to undergraduate and postgraduate levels, this book introduces a variety of debates and interpretations to students, incorporating material that has not been published before. An engaging and authoritative contribution to the field.

This is the most complete chronological account of Samuel Beckett's life and work, with full details of how, when, and where each work by him came to be written, many details of which have only recently come to light and are often not known to scholars working in the field.

Offering new and theatrically informed readings of plays by a broad range of Renaissance dramatists--including Marlowe, Jonson, Marston, Webster, Middleton and Ford--this new book addresses the question of pleasure: both erotic pleasure as represented on stage and aesthetic pleasure as experienced by readers and spectators. Some of the issues raised (the distribution of pleasure by gender, the notion of consent) intersect with feminist reinterpretations of Renaissance culture.

"Lukas Erne's study of Kyd is remarkable: it engages straightforwardly with this immensely important playwright and presents a great deal that is substantially original and of real significance. Serious students of English Renaissance drama will certainly find this book indispensable, and as an added bonus, it is a pleasure to read. " Professor Brian Gibbons, General Editor of the New Mermaids Kyd is arguably Shakespeare's most important tragic predecessor. Brilliantly fusing the drama of the academic and popular traditions, Thomas Kyd's plays are of central importance for understanding how the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries came about. Called 'an extraordinary dramatic ...genius' by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Kyd invented the revenge tragedy genre that culminated in Shakespeare's Hamlet some twelve years later. In this study, The Spanish Tragedy - the most popular of all plays on the English Renaissance stage - receives the extensive scholarly and critical treatment it deserves, including a full reception and modern stage history. Yet as Erne shows, Thomas Kyd is much more than the author of a single masterpiece. Don Horatio (partly extant in The First Part of Hieronimo), the lost early Hamlet, Soliman and Perseda, and Cornelia all belong to what emerges in this work as a coherent dramatic oeuvre. This groundbreaking study is now in paperback. Contents: Introduction 1. Don Horatio and The First Part of Hieronimo 2. The Spanish Tragedy: an introduction 3. The Spanish Tragedy: origins 4. The Spanish Tragedy: framing revenge 5. The Spanish Tragedy: additions, adaptations, modern stage history 6. Hamlet 7. Soliman and Perseda: an introduction 8. Soliman and Perseda: the play and its making 9. Cornelia 10. Other works and apocrypha Appendix: Kyd's patron Select Bibliography Index Lukas Erne is Professor of English in the Departement d'Anglais, Universite de Geneve.

Beckett's relationship with British theatre is complex and underexplored, yet his impact has been immense. Uniquely placing performance history at the centre of its analysis, this volume examines Samuel Beckett's drama as it has been staged in Great Britain, bringing to light a wide range of untold histories and in turn illuminating six decades of drama in Britain. Ranging from studies of the first English tour of Waiting for Godot in 1955 to Talawa's 2012 all-black co-production of the same play, Staging Samuel Beckett in Great Britain excavates a host of archival resources in order to historicize how Beckett's drama has interacted with specific theatres, directors and theatre cultures in the UK. It traces production histories of plays such as Krapp's Last Tape; presents Beckett's working relationships with the Royal Court, Riverside and West Yorkshire Playhouse, as well as with directors such as Peter Hall; looks at the history of Beckett's drama in Scotland and how the plays have been staged in London's West End. Production analyses are mapped onto political, economic and cultural contexts of Great Britain so that Beckett's drama resonates in new ways, through theatre practice, against the complex contexts of Great Britain's regions. With contributions from experts in the fields of both Beckett studies and UK drama, including S.E. Gontarski, David Pattie, Mark Taylor-Batty and Sos Eltis, the volume offers an exceptional and unique understanding of Beckett's reception on the UK stage and the impact of his drama within UK theatre practices. Together with its sister volume, Staging Samuel Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland it will prove a terrific resource for students, scholars and theatre practitioners.

This study examines the historical relationship between tragicomedy in the modernist theatre and the performative culture of Western consumer societies. While discussing a wide range of playwrights, it focusses specifically on the work of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Sam Shepard. Their plays, it is argued, illuminate the forms of pleasure, fear, performance and corruption which dominate our daily lives. Tragicomedy is seen as unique because of the existential playfulness and confusion of its protagonists, and because of its muted vision of apocalypse in the nuclear age.

The decade since Beckett's death has seen new interests in the erotic sweeping through our culture, acting in uneasy counterpoint to its established humanistic infrastructure and opening new questions about the significance of sexuality. Surprisingly or not, Beckett has startling further light to throw on the erotic phenomenon variously but insistently recognised in our time. This book is the first to propose a 'mythopoetics of sex' with which to explore Beckett's work as a whole.

Of all the poets Francis Meres names in his famous Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598), just two rate a mention as being both 'our best for tragedy' and 'the best poets for comedy': William Shakespeare and George Chapman. All Fools, written in 1599, is the only Elizabethan comedy based directly on the plays of Terence. By taking episodes and characters from two brilliant works, The Self-Tormenter and The Brothers, Chapman creates something that is distinctly Elizabethan while remaining faithful to the spirit of the great Roman master. In this edition, an extensive introduction and commentary show how Chapman combines the literary and theatrical traditions of ancient Rome with everyday life in his own time to fashion a sparkling and innovative comedy that will delight audiences today as much as it did those of 1599. -- .

The essays in this book, first published in 1975, suggest how best to approach Beckett, how to read him, how to get closer to the concrete experience offered by this most concrete of writers. It aims to bring out the full diversity of Beckett's art as dramatist and story-teller. His astonishing flexibility and inventiveness is stressed throughout, either in studies of single novels, or from the whole range of the fiction and stage drama, or from the experiments in other media: the solitary film, the radio plays. Beckett's bilingualism, one of the strangest aspects of his Proteanism, is examined through a comparison of the French and English texts of some of his stage plays. The emphasis of the essays is literary rather than philosophical: they explore narrative and dramatic processes, the strange partial transitions between them, the fine relations of form and feeling which Beckett aims at through whatever medium he is using, and his humaneness, expressed through the many nuances of his humour. The shorter fiction and the later writings also receive close attention.

This book, first published in 1985, assembles essential facts on Samuel Beckett and makes vital but elusive information available. It contains a comprehensive checklist of all the writer's plays, with a detailed performance history, excerpted reviews, and most importantly, a selection of Beckett's own comments on their work drawn from essays, interviews, letters and diaries. Other features include a chronology of life and work, a checklist of non-dramatic writings and an annotated bibliography.