This ground-breaking study analyses Beckett's television plays in relation to the history and theory of television. It argues that they are in dialogue with innovative television traditions connected to Modernism in television, film, radio, theatre, literature and the visual arts. Using original research from BBC archives and manuscript sources, the book provides new perspectives on the relationships between Beckett's television dramas and the wider television culture of Britain and Europe. It also compares and contrasts the plays for television with Beckett's Film and broadcasts of his theatre work including the recent Beckett on Film season. Chapters deal with the production process of the plays, the broadcasting contexts in which they were screened, institutions and authorship, the plays' relationships with comparable programmes and films and reaction to Beckett's screen work by audiences and critics. This book is a major contribution to Beckett scholarship and to studies of television drama. It will be essential reading in literature and drama studies, television historiography and for devotees of Beckett's work. -- .

In this book, Derek Cohen studies the relationship of Shakespearean drama to the Western culture of violence. He argues that violence is an inherent feature and form of patriarchy and that its production and control is one of the dominant motives of the political system. Shakespeare's plays supply examples of the way in which the patriarchy of his plays - and hence, perhaps, of modern Western culture - absorbs, naturalizes, and legitimizes violence in its attempts to maintain political control over its subjects.

This is a comprehensive introduction to "The Duchess of Malfi" that introduces its critical and performance history, the current critical landscape and new directions in research. John Webster's classic revenge tragedy "The Duchess of Malfi" was first performed in 1614 and published in 1623. This guide offers students and scholars an introduction to its critical and performance history, including recent versions on stage and screen. It includes a keynote chapter outlining major areas of current research on the play and four new critical essays presenting new critical positions on the text include gender and political perspectives on the idea of secrecy in the play and debates surrounding Webster's religio-political allegiances. Finally, a guide to critical, web-based and production-related resources and an annotated bibliography provide a basis for further individual research. "Continuum Renaissance Drama" offers practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performative contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Each guide introduces the text's critical and performance history but also provides students with an invaluable insight into the landscape of current scholarly research through a keynote essay on the state of the art and newly commissioned essays of fresh research from different critical perspectives.

A Companion to Sophocles presents the first comprehensive collection of essays in decades to address all aspects of the life, works, and critical reception of Sophocles. * First collection of its kind to provide introductory essays to the fragments of his lost plays and to the remaining fragments of one satyr-play, the Ichneutae, in addition to each of his extant tragedies * Features new essays on Sophoclean drama that go well beyond the current state of scholarship on Sophocles * Presents readings that historicize Sophocles in relation to the social, cultural, and intellectual world of fifth century Athens * Seeks to place later interpretations and adaptations of Sophocles in their historical context * Includes essays dedicated to issues of gender and sexuality; significant moments in the history of interpreting Sophocles; and reception of Sophocles by both ancient and modern playwrights

'Moliere on Stage' takes the reader onstage, backstage and into the audience of Moliere's plays, analyzing the performance of his works in both his own time and in ours. Written by a professional stage director with over fifty years' experience directing and translating Moliere, this text explores how the playwright strove to create a communal experience of shared laughter, and investigates four key topics relating to this achievement: Moliere's early experiences that lead to his later theater experiences; his central great plays of love and lust; his comedic genius and his passion for the stage; and the final words and performances of his life.

The five volumes of "A Shakespeare Music Catalogue" provide documentation of all music, published and unpublished, from Shakespeare's day to the 20th century, relating to Shakespeare's life and work. The music includes operas, ballets, overtures, tone-poems, songs and various types of incidental music for stage, radio, film and television productions. Each composition is cited with information on its vocal and instrumental requirements, its publication history and, when known, its first performance. The first three deal with music and musical stage-directions for the plays and settings of the sonnets and narrative poems. The fourth volume contains indices of Shakespeare's titles and lines, the titles of musical works, composers, arrangers, editors and librettists. The final volume provides an annotated bilbiography of writings, in all language, on the subject of Shakespeare and music.

This four-volume "Companion to Shakespeare's Works," compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism.

Complementing David Scott Kastan's "A Companion to Shakespeare "(1999), which focused on Shakespeare as an author in his historical context, these volumes examine each of his plays and major poems using all the resources of contemporary criticism from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analyses.

Scholars from all over the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and United States - have joined in the writing of new essays addressing virtually the whole of Shakespeare's canon from a rich variety of critical perspectives. A mixture of younger and more established scholars, their work reflects some of the most interesting research currently being conducted in Shakespeare studies.

Arguing for the persistence and utility of genre as a rubric for teaching and writing about Shakespeare's works, the editors have organized the four volumes in relation to generic categories: namely, the tragedies, the histories, the comedies, and the poems, problem comedies and late plays. Each volume thus contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre.

This ambitious project offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twentieth-first century.

This companion to Shakespeare's comediescontains original essays on every comedy from "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" to "Twelfth Night." In addition, thevolume features twelve articles on such topics as the humoral body in Shakespearean comedy, Shakespeare's comedies on film, Shakespeare's relation to other comic writers of his time, Shakespeare's cross dressing comedies, and the geographies of Shakespearean comedy.

After Robert Armin joined the Chamberlain's Men, singing in Shakespeare's dramas catapulted from 1.25 songs and 9.95 lines of singing per play to 3.44 songs and 29.75 lines of singing, a virtually unnoticed phenomenon. In addition, many of the songs became seemingly improvisatory-similar to Armin's personal style as an author and solo comedian. In order to study Armin's collaborative impact, this interdisciplinary book investigates the songs that have Renaissance music that could have been heard on Shakespeare's stage. They occur in some of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, and The Tempest. In fact, Shakespeare's plays, as we have them, are not complete. They are missing the music that could have accompanied the plays' songs. Significantly, Renaissance vocal music, far beyond just providing entertainment, was believed to alter the bodies and souls of both performers and auditors to agree with its characteristics, directly inciting passions from love to melancholy. By collaborating with early modern music editor and performing artist Lawrence Lipnik, Catherine Henze is able to provide new performance editions of seventeen songs, including spoken interruptions and cuts and rearrangement of the music to accommodate the dramatist's words. Next, Henze analyzes the complete songs, words and music, according to Renaissance literary and music primary sources, and applies the new information to interpretations of characters and scenes, frequently challenging commonly held literary assessments. The book is organized according to Armin's involvement with the plays, before, during, and after the comic actor joined Shakespeare's company. It offers readers the tools to interpret not only these songs, but also vocal music in dramas by other Renaissance playwrights. Moreover, Robert Armin and Shakespeare's Performed Songs, written with non-specialized terminology, provides a gateway to new areas of research and interpretation in an increasingly significant interdisciplinary field for all interested in Shakespeare and early modern drama.

This volume offers critical and theoretical perspectives on some of the major figures in European drama in the 20th century. There are 13 essays, covering Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Anouilh, Fernando Arrabal, Jean Genet, Peter Weiss, Vaclav Havel, contemporary German theatre, and Dario Fo and Franca Fame. These essays combine contemporary theory with a discussion of the dramatic work and theories of theatre and drama of the playwrights who created modern drama in Europe. Brian Docherty is the co-editor of "Nineteenth-Century Suspense: From Poe to Conan Doyle", and editor of "American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre", "American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King", "Twentieth Century American Drama", "American Modernist Poetry", "Twentieth Century British Poetry 1900-50", Twentieth Century British Poetry 1950-90" and "The Beat Generation".

POET. Good day, sir. PAINTER. I am glad y'are well. POET. I have not seen you long; how goes the world? PAINTER. It wears, sir, as it grows. POET. Ay, that's well known. But what particular rarity? What strange, Which manifold record not matches? See, Magic of bounty, all these spirits thy power Hath conjur'd to attend! I know the merchant. PAINTER. I know them both; th' other's a jeweller.

Shakespeare has been misread for centuries as having modern ideas about sex and gender. This book shows how in the Restoration and Eighteenth century, Shakespeare's plays and other Renaissance texts were adapted to make them conform to these modern ideas. Through readings of Shakespearean texts, including "King Lear," "Antony and Cleopatra," and "Othello," and other Renaissance drama, the book reveals a sexual world before heterosexuality. "Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature Before Heterosexuality" shows how revisions and criticism of Renaissance drama contributed to the emergence of heterosexuality. It also shows how changing ideas about status, adultery, friendship, and race were factors in that emergence.

"The Gothic and the Rule of Law" is the first full-length theoretical and historical study of the relation between early Gothic fiction and an emerging modern rule of law. The work identifies not only a political and cultural, but also an ontological relation between what critics have conceptualized as 'Gothic' and the nature and function of modern juridical power. It represents a highly significant contribution to Gothic criticism and to law and literature scholarship.

A thorough and scholarly study of Spenser and Shakespeare and their contrary artistry, covering themes of theology, psychology, the depictions of passion and intellect, moral counsel, family hierarchy, self-love, temptation, folly, allegory, female heroism, the supernatural and much more. Renaissance psychologies examines the distinct and polarised emphasis of these two towering intellects and writers of the early modern period. It demonstrates how pervasive was the influence of Spenser on Shakespeare, as in the "playful metamorphosis of Gloriana into Titania" in A Midsummer Night's Dream and its return from Spenser's moralizing allegory to the Ovidian spirit of Shakespeare's comedy. It will appeal to students and lecturers in Spenser studies, Renaissance poetry and the wider fields of British literature, social and cultural history, ethics and theology. -- .

This book shows that William Shakespeare was a more personal writer than any of his innumerable commentators have realised. It asserts that numerous characters and events were drawn from the author's life, and puts faces to the names of Jaques, Touchstone, Feste, Jessica, the 'Dark Lady' and others. Steven Sohmer explores aspects of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets that have been hitherto overlooked or misinterpreted in an effort to better understand the man and his work. If you've ever wondered who Pigrogromitus was, or why Jaques spies on Touchstone and Audrey - or what the famous riddle M.O.A.I. stands for - this is the book for you. -- .

'One drink. And if you never want to see me again you never have to see me again.' A quantum physicist and a beekeeper meet. They hit it off, or perhaps they don't. They might go home together, they might not. Constellations explores love, free will, and friendship through quantum multiverse theory and honey. Constellations premiered at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London, in 2012, and transferred to the Duke of York's. It opened on Broadway in 2015; and at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, in 2021. 'Nick Payne's gorgeous two-character drama, may be the most sophisticated date play Broadway has seen.' New York Times

The book presents a systematic method of interpreting Shakespeare film adaptations based on their cinematic genres. Its approach is both scholarly and reader-friendly, and its subject is fundamentally interdisciplinary, combining the findings of Shakespeare scholarship with film and media studies, particularly genre theory. The book is organised into six large chapters, discussing films that form broad generic groups. Part I looks at three genres from the classical Hollywood era (western, melodrama and gangster-noir), while Part II deals with three contemporary blockbuster genres (teen film, undead horror and biopic). Beside a few better-known examples of mainstream cinema, the volume also highlights the Shakespearean elements in several nearly forgotten films, bringing them back to critical attention. -- .

Paradigms Found is an indispensable book for students and teachers of Shakespeare, and for anyone interested in the diverse ways in which his plays are read and taught at the start of the twenty-first century. It traces the paradigm shift in Shakespeare studies which, beginning in the 1970s, has foregrounded the playwright's embeddedness in the material practices and ideological constructs of his time, and focussed on the conflicts, gaps and faultlines in early modern society. The book concentrates on feminism and new historicism as the two critical schools that have brought about significant changes in Shakespeare studies, and devotes a chapter to issues in early modern culture and drama highlighted by gay scholars. Topics covered include: contrasting views on the position of Renaissance women, material feminist criticism, Renaissance attacks and defences of women, the maternal body, boy actors, myths of homosexual desire, theatrical transvestism, the role of anecdotes in new historicist practice, self-fashioning, subversion, anxiety and wonder. In tracking the shifting interests of feminist, gay and new historicist critics, Paradigms Found demonstrates the explanatory power of the new approaches, discusses their limitations and places them in the context of developments in society and the academy.

Reissuing 15 works originally published between 1934 and 1991, this diverse set offers an outstanding collection of scholarship devoted to Renaissance Drama. Routledge Library Editions: Renaissance Drama provides an extensive study of performance history and criticism of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, as well as volumes dedicated to the playwrights Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. These volumes present together a lively picture of the development of British theatre and will be of interest to students of literature, drama and performance.

This study examines the profound changes that twentieth-century performance has wrought on Shakespeare's complex drama of war and politics. What was accepted at the turn of the century as a patriotic celebration of a national hero has emerged in the modern theatre as a dark and troubling analysis of the causes and costs of war. The book details the theatrical innovations and political insights that have turned one of Shakespeare's most traditional-bound plays into one of his most popular and provocative. Henry V gives details analyses of several important modern productions. Beginning with a consideration of the play's political significance in Elizabethan London, the book goes on the reveal its subsequent reinvention, both as patriotic pageant and anti-war manifesto. Individual chapters consider important productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and other British and North American companies, as well as the landmark film versions. A compelling account of the theatrical revolution that has transformed one of Shakespeare's most challenging plays. -- .

This volume offers a current reading of the Italian writer, Pirandello. The author examines the representation of gender relations in Pirandello's writing in the light of recent developments in textual analysis. She reassesses Pirandello's status as an innovative, avant-garde writer, arguing that whilst on the level of dramatic form he is certainly avant-garde, he is not so on the more covert level of gender relations. The author uses contemporary feminist theory to show how textual analysis can expose the covert reinforcement of patriarchal values. The study provides an illustration of a variety of methods which could be applied to texts other than those of Pirandello's.

This lively gathering of materials about Shakespeare's Julius Caesar will enrich students' understanding of the historical context of the play and encourage interpretations of its cultural meaning. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar reflects perennial cultural concerns about order and freedom, particularly as they clash in the figures of Caesar and Brutus. This innovative experiment in Shakespeare literacy features a wide variety of materials--from a modernized text of Plutarch's lives of Caesar and Brutus set on facing pages for easy comparison, to historical and contemporary parodies, to a rap version of the play. Most of the materials presented here are available in no other printed form. Study questions, project ideas, and bibliographies provide additional sources for examining the cultural and historical context of the play. Following a literary interpretation of the play, Derrick presents a wide variety of materials, including: a modernized version of Plutarch's lives of Caesar and Brutus, set side-by-side to aid in the comparison of their characters; dramatic sequels to the play in the Elizabethan theater; a comparison of Julius Caesar to the Lincoln assassination, with reprints of 19th-century newspaper accounts, John Wilkes Booth's obsessions about Brutus, and the desperate notes he left after the assassination; excerpts from popular culture, including a rap version of the play that is perfect for student performances, parodies from Mad Magazine, James Baldwin's little-known appeal to African American consciousness, "Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare," and John Housman's reflections on making the film version that starred Marlon Brando; popular allusions to the play and its verse fromthe 18th century to the present; and a chapter on teaching the play that includes commentary by noted teachers and a parallel layout of a rendering in Basic English alongside Shakespeare's edited play.

This collection of multi-authored essays not only refashions and revises critical understandings of the early modern dramatist Ben Jonson and his canon of work, but is also self-reflexive about the process. It includes original essays by both established and emergent Jonson scholars, and employs materialist, feminist and queer theory in the production of its readings of Jonsonian playtexts and masques, familiar and otherwise. It is intended to encourage new approaches by students to this central figure from the Renaissance.

Writing Catholic Women examines the interplay of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality through the lens of Catholicism in a wide range of works by women writers, forging interdisciplinary connections among women's studies, religion, and late twentieth-century literature. Discussing a diverse group of authors, Jeana DelRosso posits that the girlhood narratives of such writers constitute highly charged sites of their differing gestures toward Catholicism and argues that an understanding of the ways in which women write about religion from different cultural and racial contexts offers a crucial contribution to current discussions in gender, ethnic, and cultural studies.