This wide-ranging "Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama" offers challenging analyses of a range of plays in their political contexts. It explores the cultural, social, economic and institutional agendas that readers need to engage with in order to appreciate modern theatre in all its complexity.
An authoritative guide to modern British and Irish drama.Engages with theoretical discourses challenging a canon that has privileged London as well as white English males and realism.Topics covered include: national, regional and fringe theatres; post-colonial stages and multiculturalism; feminist and queer theatres; sex and consumerism; technology and globalisation; representations of war, terrorism, and trauma.

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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).

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.

CHORUS. Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life; Whose misadventur'd piteous overthrows Doth with their death bury their parents' strife. The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love, And the continuance of their parents' rage, Which, but their children's end, naught could remove, Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage; The which if you with patient ears attend, What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

The comic grotesque is a powerful element in a great deal of Elizabethan literature, but one which has attracted scant critical attention. In this study, first published in 1980, Neil Rhodes examines the nature of the grotesque in late sixteenth-century culture, and shows the part it played in the development of new styles of comic prose and drama in Elizabethan England. In defining 'grotesque', the author considers the stylistic techniques of Rabelais and Aretino, as well as the graphic arts. He discusses the use of the grotesque in Elizabethan pamphlet literature and the early satirical journalists such as Nashe, and argues that their work in turn stimulated the growth of satirical drama at the end of the century. The second part of the book explains the importance of Nashe's achievement for Shakespeare and Jonson, concluding that the linguistic resources of English Renaissance comedy are peculiarly - and perhaps uniquely - physical.

Focusing on the core assessment objectives for A-Level English Literature, The Quotation Bank takes 25 of the most important quotations from the text and provides detailed material for each quotation, covering interpretations, literary techniques and detailed analysis. Furthermore, The Quotation Bank A-Level Guides analyse 10 essential critical quotations to utilise in your own essays. Also included are detailed contextual materials, revision activities and a comprehensive glossary of relevant literary terminology, all in a clear and practical format to enable effective revision and ultimate exam confidence.

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.

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.

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.

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 Stagecraft in Euripides, first published in 1985, Professor Michael Halleran examines certain aspects of the dramaturgy of the most extensively preserved Attic tragedian. Although the ancient dramatic texts do not contain performance directions, they do imply stage actions. This work explores the ways Euripides utilises the latter to make a point: to underline some issue, to suggest a contrast, or to shift the focus of the drama. Specifically, Halleran investigates the rearrangement of characters on stage at the major structural junctures of the play: entrances and their announcements; preparation for and surprise in entrances; and dramatic connections between exits and entrances. Three plays from the same era - Herakles, Trojan Women and Ion - are discussed in greater detail to reveal the potential of this approach for illuminating Euripides' 'grammar of dramatic technique'. Stagecraft in Euripides will thus appeal to students of theatre and drama as well as classicists.

When actors perform Shakespeare, what do they do with their bodies? How do they display to the spectator what is hidden in the imagination? This is a history of Shakespearean performance as seen through the actor's body. Tunstall draws upon social, cognitive and moral psychology to reveal how performers from Sarah Siddons to Ian McKellen have used the language of gesture to reflect the minds of their characters and shape the reactions of their audiences. This book is rich in examples, including detailed analysis of recent performances and interviews with key figures from the worlds of both acting and gesture studies. Truly interdisciplinary, this provocative and original contribution will appeal to anyone interested in Shakespeare, theatre history, psychology or body language.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.