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.

In Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity Weller argues through an analysis of the interrelated topics of translation, comedy, and gender that to read Beckett in this way is to miss the strangely 'anethical' nature of his work, as opposed to the notion that the literary event constitutes the affirmation of an alterity.

'Julius Caesar is, simply, Shakespeare's African play' John Kani In 2012, actor Paterson Joseph played the role of Brutus in the Royal Shakespeare Company's acclaimed production of Julius Caesar - Gregory Doran's last play before becoming Artistic Director for the RSC. It is a play, Joseph is quick to acknowledge, that is widely misunderstood - even dreaded - when it comes to study and performance. Alongside offering fascinating insights into Julius Caesar and Shakespeare's writing, Joseph serves up details of the rehearsal process; his key collaborations during an eclectic career; as well as his experience of working with a majority black cast. He considers the positioning of ethnic minority actors in Shakespeare productions in general, and female actors tackling so seemingly masculine a play in particular. Audience reactions are also investigated by Joseph, citing numerous conversations he has had with psychologists, counsellors and neurologists on the subject of what happens between performer and spectator. For Paterson Joseph, his experience of playing Brutus in Julius Caesar with the RSC was a defining point in his career, and a transformative experience. For any actor or practitioner working on Shakespeare - or for any reader interested in his plays - this is a fascinating and informative read, which unlocks so much about making and understanding theatre from the inside.

Shakespeare was a master of language, his sayings have become part of everyday speech, and his plays endure, in part, because of the beauty of his verse. Shakespeare's language, however, poses special difficulties for modern actors because many of his words seem unusual or difficult to pronounce, he employs rhetorical devices throughout his works, and he carefully uses rhythm to convey sense.

The relation of the modern actor to the Shakespearean text, the importance of understanding the nuances of his language, and the fundamentals of grammar are all thoroughly examined in this volume. Its heart is a detailed consideration of the iambic code, the metrical system that Shakespeare used to give so much power to his verse. O'Dell also examines the importance of formal rhetoric in Elizabethan England and Shakespeare's artful use of rhetorical devices in his plays. As a practical reference guide, this volume keeps in mind the particular needs of theater professionals.

This book examines the socio-political and theatrical conditions that heralded the shift from the margins to the mainstream for black British Writers, through analysis of the social issues portrayed in plays by Kwame Kwei-Armah, debbie tucker green, Roy Williams, and Bola Agbaje.

This book provides a needed new interpretation of the complex cultural meanings of the late medieval, guild-produced, biblical plays of York and Chester, England, commonly known as mystery plays. It argues that the plays are themselves a "drama of masculinity," that is, dramatic activity specifically and self-consciously concerned with the fantasies and anxieties of being male in the urban, mercantile worlds of their performance. It further contends that the plays in their historical performance contexts produced and reinforced masculine communities defined by occupation, thus visibly naturalizing the world of work as masculine. The book offers welcome insight into a significant, canonical genre of dramatic literature that has been studied previously in devotional and civic contexts, but not yet in its role in the cultural history of masculinity.

A major study of the work of one of Britain's best-known dramatists Peter Barnes was one of the UK's most significant, prolific and enduring playwrights. This book offers a major critical appraisal of the canon of Barnes' work, including a detailed study of his best-known plays, The Ruling Class, Bewitched, Laughter!, Red Noses, and Dreaming, as well as a selection of his television and radio plays which illuminate his thematic concerns, and offer key insights into his dramatic methods. Through this examination, Brian Woolland shows that many of Barnes' plays have remarkable contemporary relevance, and are formally far more innovative than has hitherto been recognised. Woolland analyses the ways in which Barnes uses and subverts theatrical traditions, and relates his work to relevant critical contexts: theatrical, critical and socio-political. Deservedly, Barnes' use of comedy is given special attention. It is a sad truth that Barnes' great talents have not always been acknowledged by the theatrical establishment. In this exciting study, Barnes finally gets the recognition he deserves, as one of the most original, daring and exuberant dramatists of his generation.

Adorno and Modern Theatre explores the drama of Edward Bond, David Rudkin, Howard Barker and Sarah Kane in the context of the work of leading philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). The book engages with key principles of Adorno's aesthetic theory and cultural critique and examines their influence on a generation of seminal post-war dramatists.

Theatre has always been a site for selling outrage and sensation, a place where public reputations are made and destroyed in spectacular ways. This is the first book to investigate the construction and production of celebrity in the British theatre. These exciting essays explore aspects of fame, notoriety and transgression in a wide range of performers and playwrights including David Garrick, Oscar Wilde, Ellen Terry, Laurence Olivier and Sarah Kane. This pioneering volume examines the ingenious ways in which these stars have negotiated their own fame. The essays also analyze the complex relationships between discourses of celebrity and questions of gender, spectatorship and the operation of cultural markets.

Shakespeare's Surrogates contends that the adaptation of Renaissance drama played a key role in the development of modern drama's major aesthetic movements. This book reveals the way that modern drama built itself in response to its Elizabethan past, ransacking the literary work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries for 'new' innovations in dramatic technique and content. Indeed, playwrights central to the evolution of modern and postmodern drama often returned at key moments in their writing careers to the remains of the Renaissance. Sonya Freeman Loftis argues that for playwrights such as Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, and Heiner Muller, Shakespearean appropriation was central both to the creation of their public personas and to the development of their own dramatic canons.

In this volume on "Othello," Laurie Maguire examines the use and misuse of language, the play's textual and performance histories and how critics and directors have responded to the language of sexual jealousy.

A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) are major plays by Tennessee Williams, one of America's most significant dramatists. They both received landmark productions and are widely-studied and performed around the world. The plays have also inspired popular screen adaptations and have generated a body of important and lasting scholarship.
In this indispensable Reader's Guide, Thomas P. Adler:
- charts the development of the criticism surrounding both works, from the mid-twentieth century through to the present day
- provides a readable assessment of the key debates and issues
- examines a range of theoretical approaches from biographical and New Criticism to feminist and queer theory.
In so doing, Adler helps us to appreciate why these plays continue to fascinate readers, theatregoers and directors alike.

The Theatre of Nation is a study of the development of the theatre movement and its relationship to political change in Ireland during the pre-revolutionary period. Ben Levitas traces the connections between Irish drama and Irish politics, and concludes that Ireland's theatre had a pivotal role to play in the controversies of its time and in the coming revolution.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's most widely studied comedies. This guide offers students an introduction to its critical and performance history, including notable stage productions, TV, and film versions as well as opera and ballet. 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 individual research.

Paying full attention to the whole range of Shakespearean drama but also looking closely at his two most significant predecessors, his closest rival, his only known collaborator, and other writers who influenced and carried forward the genres in which he worked, this volume shows both the ways in which Shakespearean drama is typical of its period and of the ways in which it is distinctive. This collection offers practical suggestions for the integration of non-Shakespearean drama into the teaching of Shakespeare.

Essential for students of Theatre Studies, this series of six decadal volumes provides a critical survey and reassessment of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1950s to the present. Each volume equips readers with an understanding of the context from which work emerged, a detailed overview of the range of theatrical activity and a close study of the work of four of the major playwrights by a team of leading scholars. Chris Megson's comprehensive survey of the theatre of the 1970s examines the work of four playwrights who came to promience in the decade and whose work remains undiminished today: Caryl Churchill (by Paola Botham), David Hare (Chris Megson), Howard Brenton (Richard Boon) and David Edgar (Janelle Reinelt). It analyses their work then, its legacy today and provides a fresh assessment of their contribution to British theatre. Interviews with the playwrights, with directors and with actors provides an invaluable collection of documents offering new perspectives on the work. Revisiting the decade from the perspective of the twenty-first century, Chris Megson provides an authoritative and stimulating reassessment of British playwriting in the 1970s.

In Tragedy and Irish Writing McDonald considers the culture of suffering, loss, and guilt in the work of Synge, O'Casey, and Beckett. He applies external ideas of tragedy to the three dramatists and also discerns particular sorts of tragedy within their own work. While alert to the real differences among the three, the book also traces common themes and preoccupations. It identifies a conflict between form and content, between heightened language and debased reality, as the hallmark of Irish tragedy.

This innovative edition of Richard III emphasizes the play as a theatre work, and this understanding informs every aspect of the editing. The choice of the 1597 quarto text brings us close to the play as it would have been performed in Shakespeare's theatre. The play's long performance history is described and illustrated in an introduction that is also responsive to recent historicist and gender-based critical approaches. The commentary gives full and balanced treatment to matters of language, performance, text, and historical and cultural contexts.

'His mind and hand went together' said Hemings and Condell of the speed of Shakespeare. But the conceptual language of literary criticism, be it moralistic or political, has long been too slow to the properly responsive to Shakespeare's meaning. With the help of both Renaissance philosophers and present-day actors, Sudden Shakepeare seeks to locate the underlying secrets of Shakespeare's dynamic power. It offers a technical language wihch, close to Shakespeare's own, is capable of responding suddenly to the speed, transforming shape, and power of Shakespeare's way of thinking as it comes into meaning.

Revisionist Shakespeare appropriates revisionist history in order to both criticize traditional transitional interpretations of Shakespearean drama and to offer a new methodology for understanding representations of social conflict in Shakespeare's play and in Early Modern English culture. Rather than argue that Shakespearean drama allegorizes historical transitions and ideological polarization, Revisionist Shakespeare argues that Shakespeare's plays explore the nature of internally contradictory Early Modern institutions and belief-systems that are only indirectly related to competing political and class ideologies. Such institutions and belief-systems include Elizabethan strategies for the management of vagrancy, the nature of Jacobean statecraft, objective and subjective theories of economic value, Protestant ethical theory, and Augustinian notions of sinful habituation. The book looks at five of Shakespeare's plays: The Tempest, Coriolanus, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Hamlet.

Winner of The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2021 Luke Kennard recasts Shakespeare's 154 sonnets as a series of anarchic prose poems set in the same joyless house party. A physicist explains dark matter in the kitchen. A crying man is consoled by a Sigmund Freud action figure. An out-of-hours doctor sells phials of dark red liquid from a briefcase. Someone takes out a guitar. Wry, insolent and self-eviscerating, Notes on the Sonnets riddles the Bard with the anxieties of the modern age, bringing Kennard's affectionate critique to subjects as various as love, marriage, God, metaphysics and a sad horse. 'Luke Kennard has the uncanny genius of being able to stick a knife in your heart with such originality and verve that you start thinking "aren't knives fascinating... and hearts, my god!" whilst everything slowly goes black.' - Caroline Bird A Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Shakespeare's plays were written some four hundred years ago, and while his characters are enduring, they are also alien. In grappling with the text of his plays, the modern actor must bring Shakespeare's Renaissance characters to life for a modern audience. And while it is difficult enough for twentieth-century spectators to make sense of the plays, it is also hard for modern actors to understand the Elizabethan world that created the personalities so vividly sketched in Shakespeare's texts. This reference is a convenient and practical guide for actors faced with the task of playing Shakespeare's characters.

The volume begins with an overview of Elizabethan theatrical conventions, including the training of actors. It then looks at the dramatic tradition of personification, which Shakespeare's world inherited from the medieval stage. Later chapters give special attention to how language reveals character and to the social and cultural contexts of the Renaissance. Throughout, the emphasis is on how to translate Shakespeare's text into action on the stage. While the volume contains much useful information, that information is presented to meet the special needs of theater professionals.

In Shakespeare and the Dawn of Modern Science, renowned astronomy expert Peter Usher expands upon his allegorical interpretation of Hamlet and analyzes four more plays, Love's Labour's Lost, Cymbeline, The Merchant of Venice, and The Winter's Tale. With painstaking thoroughness, he dissects the plays and reveals that, contrary to current belief, Shakespeare was well aware of the scientific revolutions of his time. Moreover, Shakespeare imbeds in the allegorical subtext information on the appearances of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars that he could not have known without telescopic aid, yet these plays appeared coeval with or prior to the commonly accepted date of 1610 for the invention and first use of the astronomical telescope. Dr. Usher argues that an early telescope, the so-called perspective glass, was the likely means for the acquisition of these data. This device was invented by the mathematician Leonard Digges, whose grandson of the same name contributed poems to the First and Second Folio editions of Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare and the Dawn of Modern Science is an important addition to literature, history, and science collections as well as to personal libraries.

This is the first book-length analysis of Shakespeare's depiction of specula (mirrors) to reveal the literal and allegorical functions of mirrors in the playwright's art and thought. Adding a new dimension to the plays" Troilus and Cressida," "Julius Caesar," "Macbeth, ""Hamlet, ""King Henry the Fifth," "Love's Labor's Lost," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and "All's Well That Ends Well, "Maurice A. Hunt also references mirrors in a wide range of external sources, from the Bible to demonic practices." "Looking at the concept of speculation through its multiple meanings--cognitive, philosophical, hypothetical, and provisional--this original reading suggests Shakespeare as a craftsman so prescient and careful in his art that he was able to criticize the queen and a former patron with such impunity that he could still live as a gentleman.

"Unhistorical Shakespeare" argues that the way in which we study history has significant bearing on what desire we study, and how we study it. Menon argues that our embrace of difference as the template for relating past and present produces a hetero temporality in which chronology determines identity. In turn, such an understanding of history fixes sexual identity as the domain of the present and relegates nebulous desire to a thing of the past. In contrast to this temporal-sexual reification, "Unhistorical Shakespeare" outlines the idea of homohistory, which questions the fundamental historicist assumptions of teleology, facticity, citation, origins, and authenticity to lay bare their investments in compulsory hetero temporality.