FOLGER Shakespeare Library: the world's leading center for Shakespeare studies.

Each edition includes:
- Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play
- Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play
- Scene-by-scene plot summaries
- A key to famous lines and phrases
- An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language
- An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play
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Featuring original essays by leading scholars in the field, this bookexplores the immense legacy of women playwrights in Irish theatre since the beginning of the twentieth century. Chapters consider the intersecting contexts of gender, sexuality and the body in order to investigate the broader cultural, political and historical implications of representing 'woman' on the stage.In addition, a number of essays will engage with representations of women by a selection of male playwrights in order to re-evaluate familiar contexts and traditions in Irish drama. It features a foreword by Marina Carr and a useful appendix of Irish women playwrights and their works.

The first three decades of the twentieth century saw the New Woman writing an astonishing array of dramatic presentations. This checklist, gleaned from hundreds of library collections and out-of-print anthologies, reveals over 12,000 plays by perhaps 2,000 American women. Some of these works are well known, most are not; some are of enduring literary quality, probably most are not; but all are of social significance and serve to document women's history of the period. Included in a broad definition of play, are dramas and comedies, musicals, farces, monologues and dialogues, pageants and masques, stunts and exercises, operas and cantatas. In addition to adult drama, there are numerous plays written for children and for holiday celebrations. A vast amount of dramatic material was written for amateur theatre, school and church productions, and community events. The sheer volume of these mostly unrewarded contributions is noteworthy, and this checklist should be consulted by researchers in women's studies as well as drama. Playwrights include such noted writers as Susan Glaspell and Zora Neale Hurston in addition to many unremembered women, some of whom have entries for scores of plays. The playwrights are listed in alphabetical order with their works following. Information is given on life dates as known, and the playwrights are keyed to inclusion in major biographical reference books if relevant. The type of dramatic presentation and number of acts is indicated, as is production and publication information as available; and, in almost all cases, at least one library or anthology source is given, coded to a list in the front of the book. Appendixes record contributions to several anthologies, and a selected bibliography completes the work.

In a context of financial crisis that has often produced a feeling of identity crisis for the individual, the theatre has provided a unifying forum, treating spectators as citizens. This book critically deals with representative plays and playwrights who have stood out in the UK and internationally in the post-recession era, delivering theatre that in the process of being truthful to the contemporary experience has also redefined theatrical form and content. Built around a series of case-studies of seminal contemporary plays exploring issues of social and political crisis, the volume is augmented by interviews with UK and international directors, artistic directors and the playwrights whose work is examined. As well as considering UK stage productions, Angelaki analyses European, North American and Australian productions, of post-2000 plays by writers including: Caryl Churchill, Mike Bartlett, Dennis Kelly, Simon Stephens, Martin Crimp, debbie tucker green, Duncan Macmillan, Nick Payne and Lucy Prebble. At the heart of the analysis and of the plays discussed is an appreciation of what interconnects artists and audiences, enabling the kind of mutual recognition that fosters the feeling of collectivity. As the book argues, this is the state whereby the theatre meets its social imperative by eradicating the distance between stage and spectator and creating a genuinely shared space of ideas and dialogue, taking on topics including the economy, materialism, debt culture, the environment, urban protest, social media and mental health. Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain demonstrates that such contemporary playwriting invests in and engenders moments of performative reciprocity and spirituality so as to present the audience with a cohesive collective experience.

Fifty years after the publication of Martin Esslin's "The Theatre of the Absurd," which suggests that "absurd" plays purport the meaninglessness of life, Michael Y. Bennett's "Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd" is a timely reassessment of one of the most important theatre "movements" of the 20th century. Bennett argues that these "absurd" plays are, instead, ethical texts that suggest how life can be made meaningful. Analyzing the works of five major playwrights/writers of the 1950s (including three winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature), Bennett's work challenges fifty years of scholarship though his upbeat and hopeful readings.

This first book dedicated to US-Cuban playwright/director Maria Irene Fornes is a lucid theoretical, historical, and production-oriented study of Fornes' published works and their critical legacy. Kent argues that most critics, including a range of theatre feminists, have yet to fully explicate the incisive social critique presented in Fornes' work. Examining the complex relationships between Fornes' aesthetic innovations and her unconventional social politics, Kent presents a comprehensive, contextualized study of Fornes work and the critics' response.

Focusing on All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, Nicholas Marsh uses close analysis of extracts from the plays to build the reader's confidence when approaching Shakespeare's Problem Plays, and exploring the unresolved competing discourses they dramatize. In the first part of the text, chapters on Openings, Young Men, Women, Politics, and Society, Fools and fools, and Drama highlight the multiple interpretations these plays provoke. In the second part, discussion of where the Problem Plays stand in relation to Shakespeare's life and works, a chapter about the historical and cultural context, and a comparison of five critical views, with suggestions for further reading, provide a bridge towards further study.

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.

An expressive dialogue between Deleuze's philosophical writings on cinema and Beckett's innovative film and television work, the book explores the relationship between the birth of the event - itself a simultaneous invention and erasure - and Beckett's attempts to create an incommensurable space within the interstices of language as a (W)hole.

Spanning Stoppard's career from "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" (1967) to "Hapgood" (1988), this study shows his development in the author from moral affirmation to moral application, from the assertion of moral principles to the enactment of moral practice. Using Stoppard's words in a number of interviews as a starting point, the author shows how the major plays bear out Stoppard's contention that he "tries to be consistent about morality". The text is accompanied by a bibliography and discography of Stoppard interviews (over 200 including print and broadcast sources).

"Renaissance Earwitnesses" examines masculinity on the early modern stage through sensory culture. In his reading of plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Cary, and Jonson, Keith M. Botelho argues that earwitnessing, or judicious listening, is a vehicle early modern dramatists used to rethink constructions of male informational authority. Drawing on sound and gender studies and providing close analysis of the circulation of rumor both on and off the stage, Botelho reveals male anxieties to be self-generated, emerging not from female gossip, but from male rumormongering. By rethinking the gendered dimensions to the flow of information, Botelho makes an important contribution to early modern scholarship.

After Dorothy L. Sayers became famous for her fictional sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, she began investigating the mysteries of Anglo-Catholic Christianity, writing plays for both stage and radio. However, because her modernist contemporaries disdained both best-sellers and religious fiction, Sayers has been largely overlooked by the academy. Writing Performances is the first work to position Sayers' diverse writings within the critical climate of high modernism. Employing exuberant illustrations from Sayers' detective fiction to make theoretical issues accessible, the book employs insights from performance theory to argue that Sayers, though a popularizer, presciently anticipated the postmodern ironizing of Enlightenment rationality and scientific objectivity.

This text explores the evolution of critical approaches to Beckett's writing. It should appeal to graduate students (and advance undergraduates) as well as scholars, for it offers both an overview of Beckett studies and investigates early 21st-century debates within the interdisciplinary critical arena. Each of the contributors is a Beckett specialist who has published widely in the field. The volume contains an introduction, twelve essays and a guide for further reading. upper-level students within the state of a field of study.

In the last 30 years, David Hare has written 12 stage plays, seven screenplays and one opera, and has gained international attention as one of Britain's major contemporary playwrights. Hare's prominence springs not only from the sheer volume of his work, but from his long career of chronicling the social and political fragmentation in postwar Britain. This is the first work to demystify the implications of Hare's presentation of the moral and political health of the British nation. Arguing that one needs to have a deeply informed sense of English and British identity and postwar British society in order to understand Hare's work, Donesky thoroughly contextualizes and historicizes Hare's work. This study demonstrates how Hare's seemingly enigmatic moral vision is actually characteristic of the attitudes of Britain's governing classes.

In Sex, Class and the Theatrical Archive: Erotic Economies, Alan Sikes explores the intersection of struggles over sex and class identities in politicized performances during key revolutionary moments in modern European history. The book includes discussions of sodomitical closet dramas from the decades surrounding the English Glorious Revolution of 1688; the performances of 'Tribades and Amazons', public women of the French Revolution; the 'homophilic elitism' in the early plays of Brecht and Hasenclever from the years just before and after the German Revolution that marked the founding of the short-lived Weimar Republic; and the utopian conception of a Soviet 'New Woman' set to take the stage after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Throughout, Sikes invokes the differences between past and present politicized performances in order to cast our own political imaginings into sharper and more critical relief.

Harold Bloom is one of the most influential—and controversial—of contemporary Shakespeare critics. These essays examine the sources and impact of his Shakespearean criticism. Through focused and sustained study of this writer as literary icon and his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, the essays address a wide range of issues, from the cultural role of Shakespeare to the ethics of literary theory and criticism.

Turning Turk looks at contact between the English and other cultures inthe early modern Mediterranean, and analyzes the representation of thatexperience on the London stage. Vitkus's book demonstrates that theEnglish encounter with exotic alterity, and the theatrical representationsinspired by that encounter, helped to form the emergent identity of an English nation that was eagerly fantasizing about having an empire but was still in the preliminary phase of its colonizing drive. Vitkus' research shows how plays about the multi-cultural Mediterranean participated in this process of identity formation, and how anxieties about religious conversion, foreign trade and miscegenation were crucial factors in the formation of that identity.

In his close study of Romeo and Juliet Matt Simpson takes up the gauntlet thrown down by critic John Wain who once dismissively asserted that the play posed no questions.

Taking a wide-ranging intertextual approach, Richard Hillman produces fresh readings of some familiar Early Modern English plays by setting them against political and cultural discourses concerning France, as the latter informed contemporary English consciousness. The English works explored go beyond those directly representing French affairs, on the premise that dramatic treatments of English historical topics, notably by Shakespeare and Marlowe, were inflected by events across the Channel.

The American political theatre from the Depression to the present is the subject of this unique new study. Richard Scharine examines issues that shaped the development of the United States during this period, as they were portrayed in selected American plays first produced between 1933 and 1985. Drawing upon fifty years of social, political, and theatrical history, he provides an understanding of the events, ideas, and emotional matrices out of which the plays were born, as well as offering an analysis of human documents that are a reflection of the political events of a time. Along the way, Scharine illustrates how the dramatic representation of American inequalities has evolved in recent decades from the concerns of class to the way class is predetermined by caste. The work begins with an introductory essay that defines political theatre and shows how it varies from standard drama in plot structure, character, theme, and expectations of its audience. The body of the book is then divided into seven historically labelled chapters, each of which provides a history of the period in relation to an evolving principle; a detailed analysis of particular dramas that illustrate that evolution; and a suggestion of other plays in which the evolution can be further studied. The periods that make up the chapters are the Great Depression, World War II, the cold war, Vietnam, and the civil rights movement. The plays of each period are discussed, with particular emphasis placed on their derivation from the assumptions about class and caste of the preceding era. Among the works analyzed are Waiting for Lefty, Watch on the Rhine, The Crucible, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, In White America, Black Elk Speaks, and As Is. This work will be a valuable reference source for courses in American theatre history, popular culture, and women's and ethnic studies, and a welcome addition to college, university, and public libraries.

Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun" (1959) was a major dramatic success and brought to the world's attention the potential talent of African American women playwrights. But in spite of Hansberry's landmark contribution, both the theater and the literary world have often failed to include contemporary African American female playwrights within the circle of production, publication, and criticism. In African American drama anthologies, female playwrights are seldom given the degree of attention that is accorded their male counterparts. And because of space constraints, anthologies of works by women playwrights are forced to exclude numerous female dramatists, including African Americans. Meanwhile, some scholars have argued that the works of African American female playwrights are seldom produced in the mainstream theater because these plays frequently challenge the views of white America. But as "A Raisin in the Sun" demonstrates, plays by African American women dramatists can have a powerful message and are worthy of attention.

A comprehensive research tool, this annotated bibliography sheds light on the often neglected works of contemporary African American female playwrights. Included within its scope are those dramatists who have had at least one work published since 1959, the year of Hansberry's monumental achievement. The first section provides a listing of anthologies that include one or more plays written by an African American female dramatist. The second gives entries for reference works and for scholarly and critical studies of the dramatists and their plays. The third presents a listing of published plays by individual dramatists, along with a summary of each drama; the works of each playwright that are related to drama; and secondary sources that treat the dramatists and their plays. Entries are accompanied by concise but informative annotations, and the volume closes with a list of periodicals that frequently publish criticism of African American female playwrights, a section of brief biographical sketches of the dramatists, and extensive indexes.

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.

This book argues broadly that any historical narrative about republicanism needs to place Marlowe at the front of its genealogy, and that his interest in republican ideals is sustained from the beginning to the end of his meteoric career. More specifically, this study will nonetheless argue that it is difficult to discern a clear republican form of government in Marlowe's works. What we can discern is 'republican representation', the author's representational foregrounding of his own republican frame of art. This study is the first to situate the complex Marlowe corpus within the context of the advent of English Republicanism.