First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"Stephens writes dramas set in uncaring, uncompromising worlds, whose characters speak in a language at once naturalistic and yet artificially pared-down and whose uncertain attempts to assert their own identities sometimes lead to gratuitous and brutal acts of violence." - Financial Times A fifth collection of plays by one of Britain's most prolific contemporary playwrights, Simon Stephens, charting his work from 2011-2016, ranging from London's Royal Court Theatre, Manchester's Royal Exchange and Broadway. Wastwater (2011) "Metaphoric, allusive, and thoroughly disturbing in its evocation of suspicion and uncertainty, Wastwater is a thought-provoking play whose quiet intensity stays with you for days - its effect is like that of a ugly stone dropped into a pool, which results in constant ripples of dirty water lapping at your subconscious" (Aleks Sierz) Birdland (2014) "Mega-fame and limitless cash can turn a man into a monster, and Simon Stephens's new play excellently evokes its hero's spiritually shrunken world" (Michael Billington, Guardian) Blindsided (2014) "the dialogue has a rare quality of moment-by-moment intensity" (Telegraph) Song From Far Away (2015) "a meditative monologue - a searching study of impotently self-aware emotional insufficiency" (Independent) Heisenberg (2016) "Mr. Stephens ... is an uncannily subtle dramatist who never wears his depths on the surface ... he probes cliches until they fall apart, before reassembling them into solid but transformed shapes, reminding us why such cliches have become enduring elements of our collective mythology." (Ben Brantley, New York Times)

Fifty Modern and Contemporary and Dramatists is a critical introduction to the work of some of the most important and influential playwrights from the 1950s to the present day. The figures chosen are among the most widely studied by students of drama, theatre and literature and include such celebrated writers as: * Samuel Beckett * Caryl Churchill * Anna Deavere Smith * Jean Genet * Sarah Kane * Heiner Muller * Arthur Miller * Harold Pinter * Sam Shephard Each short essay is written by one of an international team of academic experts and offers a detailed analysis of the playwright's key works and career. The introduction provides an historical and theatrical context to the volume, which provides an invaluable overview of modern and contemporary drama.

This is the first volume to focus specifically on Rabindranath Tagore's dramatic literature, visiting translations and adaptations of Tagore's drama, and cross-cultural encounters in his works. As Asia's first Nobel Laureate, Tagore's highly original plays occupy a central position in the Indian theatrescape. Tagore experimented with dance, music, dance drama, and plays, exploring concepts of environment, education, gender and women, postcolonial encounters, romantic idealism, and universality. Tagore's drama plays a generous host to experimentations with new performance modes, like the writing and staging of an all-women play on stage for the first time, or the use of cross-cultural styles such as Manipuri dance, Thai craft in stage design, or the Baul singing styles. This book is an exciting re-exploration of Tagore's plays, visiting issues such as his contribution to Indian drama, drama and environment, feminist readings, postcolonial engagements, cross-cultural encounters, drama as performance, translational and adaptation modes, the non-translated or the non-translatable Tagore drama, Tagore drama in the 21st century, and Indian film. The volume serves as a wide-ranging and up-to-date resource on the criticism of Tagore drama, and will appeal to a range of Theatre and Performance scholars as well as those interested in Indian theatre, literature, and film.

Neil LaBute: A Casebook is the first book to examine one of the most successful and controversial contemporary American playwrights and filmmakers. While he is most famous, and in some cases infamous, for his early films In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, Labute is equally accomplished as a playwright. His work extends from the critique of false religiosity in Bash to examinations of opportunism, irresponsible art, failed parenting, and racism in later plays like Mercy Seat, The Shape of Things, The Distance From Here, Fat Pig, Autobahn, and the very recent This Is How It Goes and Some Girls. Like David Mamet, an acknowledged influence on him, and Conor McPhereson, with whom he shares some stylistic and thematic concerns, LaBute tends to polarize audiences. The angry voices, violent situations, and irresponsible behavior in his works, especially those focusing on male characters, have alienated some viewers. But the writer's religious affiliation and refusal to condone the actions of his characters suggest he is neither exploitive nor pornographic. This casebook explores the primary issues of the writer's style, themes, and dramatic achievements. Contributors describe, for example, the influences (both classical and contemporary) on his work, his distinctive vision in theater and film, the role of religious belief in his work, and his satire. In addition to the critical introduction by Wood and the original essays by leading dramatic and literary scholars, the volume also includes a bibliography and a chronology of the playwright's life and works.

In Collecting Shakespeare, Stephen H. Grant recounts the American success story of Henry and Emily Folger of Brooklyn, a couple who were devoted to each other, in love with Shakespeare, and bitten by the collecting bug. Shortly after marrying in 1885, the Folgers started buying, cataloging, and storing all manner of items about Shakespeare and his era. Emily earned a master's degree in Shakespeare studies. The frugal couple worked passionately as a tight-knit team during the Gilded Age, financing their hobby with the fortune Henry earned as president of Standard Oil Company of New York, where he was a trusted associate of John D. Rockefeller Sr. While a number of American universities offered to house the collection, the Folgers wanted to give it to the American people. Afraid the price of antiquarian books would soar if their names were revealed, they secretly acquired prime real estate on Capitol Hill near the Library of Congress. They commissioned the design and construction of an elegant building with a reading room, public exhibition hall, and the Elizabethan Theatre. The Folger Shakespeare Library was dedicated on the Bard's birthday, April 23, 1932. The library houses 82 First Folios, 275,000 books, and 60,000 manuscripts. It welcomes more than 100,000 visitors a year and provides professors, scholars, graduate students, and researchers from around the world with access to the collections. It is also a vibrant center in Washington, D.C., for cultural programs, including theater, concerts, lectures, and poetry readings. The library provided Grant with unprecedented access to the primary sources within the Folger vault. He draws on interviews with surviving Folger relatives and visits to 35 related archives in the United States and in Britain to create a portrait of the remarkable couple who ensured that Shakespeare would have a beautiful home in America.

Over the last twenty five years, scholarship on Early Modern women writers has produced editions and criticisms, both on various groups and individual authors. The work on Mary Wroth has been particularly impressive at integrating her poetry, prose and drama into the canon. This in turn has led to comparative studies that link Wroth to a number of male and female writers, including of course, William Shakespeare. At the same time no single volume has attempted a comprehensive comparative analysis. This book sets out to explore the ways in which Wroth negotiated the discourses that are embedded in the Shakespearean canon in order to develop an understanding of her oeuvre based, not on influence and imitation, but on difference, originality and innovation.

In both feminist theory and Shakespearean criticism, questions of sexuality have consistently been conflated with questions of gender. First published in 1992, this book details the intersections and contradictions between sexuality and gender in the early modern period. Valerie Traub argues that desire and anxiety together constitute the erotic in Shakespearean drama circulating throughout the dramatic texts, traversing masculine and feminine sites, eliciting and expressing heterosexual and homoerotic fantasies, embodiments, and fears. This is the first book to present a non-normalizing account of the unconscious and the institutional prerogatives that comprise the erotics of Shakespearean drama. Employing feminist, psychoanalytic, and new historical methods, and using each to interrogate the other, the book synthesises the psychic and the social, the individual and the institutional."

Recent work in Shakespeare studies has brought to the forefront a variety of ways in which the collaborative nature of Shakespearean drama can be investigated: collaborative performance (Shakespeare and his fellow actors); collaborative writing (Shakespeare and his co-authors); collaborative textual production (Shakespeare and his transcribers and printers). What this leaves unaccounted for is the form of collaboration that affects more than any other our modern reading experience of Shakespeare's plays: what we read as Shakespeare now always comes to us in the form of a collaborative enterprise - and is decisively shaped by the nature of the collaboration - between Shakespeare and his modern editors.Contrary to much recent criticism, this book suggests that modern textual mediators have a positive rather than negative role: they are not simply 'pimps of discourse' or cultural tyrants whose oppressive interventions we need to 'unedit' but collaborators who can decisively shape and enable our response to Shakespeare's plays.Erne argues that any reader of Shakespeare, scholar, student, or general reader, approaches Shakespeare through modern editions that have an endlessly complicated and fascinating relationship to what Shakespeare may actually have intended and written, that modern editors determine what that relationship is, and that it is generally a very good thing that they do so. "Shakespeare Now!" is a series of short books that engage imaginatively and often provocatively with the possibilities of Shakespeare's plays. It goes back to the source - the most living language imaginable - and recaptures the excitement, audacity and surprise of Shakespeare. It will return you to the plays with opened eyes.

Modern plays are strikingly diverse and, as a result, any attempt to locate an underlying unity between them encounters difficulties: to focus on what they have in common is often to overlook what is of primary importance in particular plays; to focus on their differences is to note the novelty of the plays without increasing their accessibility. In this study, first published in 1985, Austin E. Quigley takes as his paradigm case the relationship between the world of the stage and the world of the audience, and explores various modes of communication between domains. He asks how changes in the structure of the drama relate to changes in the structure of the theatre, and changes in the role of the audience. Detailed interpretations of plays by Pinero, Ibsen, Strindberg, Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett and Pinter question principles about the modern theatre and establish links between drama structure and theatre structure, theme, and performance space.

Martin Garrett's comprehensive collection presents and explains the history of the critical reception to Massinger's work from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. The volume includes extensive selections from the writings of Pepys, Goldsmith, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb and Swinburne, as well as briefer comments from Scott, Byron and Keats. Responses to Massinger's plays from writers as diverse as Boswell, Mrs Thrale, Dickens and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are discussed in Martin Garrett's introduction, which also includes an account of the plays' original political and theatrical context.

First published in 1951.
'The book has the sterling qualities of shrewd sense and acumen that mark the 'rational' classical school of Shakespeare criticism.' Notes and Queries
'Professor Duthie's approach is direct and extremely objective. With no axe to grind, he pays impartial court to most of the great schools of Shakespearian criticism.' Cambridge Daily News
'Professor Duthie has much to say that is wise and judicious'. Times Literary Supplement.
Contents include: Shakespeare's Characters and Truth to Life; Shakespeare and the Order-Disorder Antithesis; Comedy; Imaginative Interpretation and Troilus and Cressida; History; Tragedy; The Last Plays.

Parsing the City updates our understanding of Jacobean city comedy's discursive role in its London society. Working with three major plays by Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, this book develops an updated reading of Jacobean city comedy as a dramatic subgenre whose engagement with early modern London was centrally linguistic and semiotic-- its plays staging and interrogating the city as a series of languages and language problems.

First published in 1989, this title explores the relationship between theater and power in the English Renaissance. Shakespeare s "Henry V, Richard II, "and "Macbeth" are examined alongside a range of cultural materials, including philosophical and historical accounts of sovereignty, royal portraiture and representations of treason and punishment. Renaissance theater was far more than a vehicle for the expression of a political content: it played a constitutive role in forming the distinctive theory of sovereignty and the distinctive political subjectivity of the era. By reading Shakespeare s plays in conjunction with other, ideologically charged forms of representation, the book continues new-historicist efforts to uncover the complex relations between literary texts and cultural contexts. Providing an interesting and detailed analysis, this reissue will be of value to students of Shakespeare and the English Renaissance, and those concerned with exploring the intersection between cultural analysis, post-structuralism, and psychoanalytic interpretation."

In recent years there has been a massive upsurge in academic, professional and lay interest in mortality. This is reflected in academic and professional literature, in the popular media and in the proliferation of professional roles and training courses associated with aspects of death and dying.
Until now the majority of reference material on death and dying has been designed for particular disciplinary audiences and has addressed only specific academic or professional concerns. There has been an urgent need for an authoritative but accessible reference work reflecting the multidisciplinary nature of the field. This Encyclopedia answers that need.
The Encyclopedia of Death and Dying consolidates and contextualizes the disparate research that has been carried out to date. The phenomena of death and dying and its related concepts are explored and explained in depth, from the approaches of varied disciplines and related professions in the arts, social sciences, humanities, medicine and the sciences.
In addition to scholars and students in the field-from anthropologists and sociologists to art and social historians - the Encyclopedia will be of interest to other professionals and practitioners whose work brings them into contact with dying, dead and bereaved people. It will be welcomed as the definitive death and dying reference source, and an essential tool for teaching, research and independent study.

Lucy Prebble is one of Britain's foremost writers for the stage and screen. This eagerly anticipated play collection brings together her landmark plays for the first time, showcasing her work from 2003 to 2019. Beginning with her George Devine Award-winning play The Sugar Syndrome it continues through her explosive look at the biggest financial scandal in history, concluding with her pointed dramatization of the one of the most shocking news stories of the 2010s. The Sugar Syndrome (2003) Dani is on a mission. She's just 17, hates her parents, skives college and prefers life in the chatrooms. What she's looking for is someone honest and direct. Instead she finds Tim, a man twice her age, who thinks she is 11 and a boy. What seems at first to be a case of crossed wires, ends up as an unlikely, and unsettling friendship between the two, which culminates in a shocking, and morally challenging revelation. Enron (2009) One of the most infamous scandals in financial history became a theatrical epic in Enron, a dazzling exposition of the shadowy mechanisms of economic deceit. Mixing classical tragedy with savage comedy and surreal metaphor, Enron follows a group of flawed men and women in a narrative of greed and loss which reviews the tumultuous 1990s, and the financial chaos which has spilled over into the new century. The Effect (2012) a clinical romance. Two young volunteers, Tristan and Connie, agree to take part in a clinical drug trial. Succumbing to the gravitational pull of attraction and love, however, Tristan and Connie manage to throw the trial off course, much to the frustration of the clinicians involved. A Very Expensive Poison (2019) A shocking assassination in the heart of London. In a bizarre mix of high-stakes global politics and radioactive villainy, a man pays with his life. At this time of global crises and a looming new Cold War, A Very Expensive Poison sends us careering through the shadowy world of international espionage from Moscow to Mayfair.

While the past decade proved to be some of the most tumultuous times in modern US history, the Black community has been resilient, opening up dialogues and sustaining advocacy. Nowhere has this been more apparent than at the Obie Award-winning The Fire This Time Festival in New York City. Since being founded in 2009, this theater festival has become the destination for emerging and early career playwrights from the African diaspora. Inequality in education and healthcare, skewed and negative images of Black people in mainstream media, racism in policing, widespread gentrification and its effects on multi-generational Black neighbourhoods, and the growth of Black love; these conversations have been happening in the US, and The Fire This Time Festival has borne witness. 25 Plays from The Fire This Time Festival: A Decade of Recognition, Resistance, Resilience, Rebirth, and Black Theater reflects this fantastic legacy, containing 25 ten-minute plays originally produced by the eponymous festival. Together, these pieces bookend the Black experience in the US from 2009 to the present day: from the hope for further progress and equity under the Obama administration, to the existential threat faced by Black people under the Trump presidency. Edited and curated by Kelley Nicole Girod, the anthology divides the plays into seven thematic sections concerning multi-faceted aspects of the Black experience, featuring work by seminal writers such as Katori Hall, Antoinette Nwandu, Dominique Morisseau, C.A. Johnson, and Marcus Gardley. Both timely and timeless, 25 Plays from The Fire This Time Festival presents an exciting, eclectic mix of 21st century theater that is perfect for study, performance, and reflection.

This anthology reproduces six plays based on stories of King Arthur from a variety of periods. Originally published in 1991, it offers a comprehensive discussion of Arthurian Drama in introduction and also provides an appendix listing printed scripts in English that address Arthurian legend.

This eighth volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook presents a special section on 'European Shakespeares', proceeding from the claim that Shakespeare's literary craft was not just native English or British, but was filtered and fashioned through a Renaissance awareness that needs to be recognized as European, and that has had effects and afterlives across the Continent. Guest editors Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo have constructed this section to highlight both how the spread of 'Shakespeare' throughout Europe has brought together the energies of a wide variety of European cultures across several centuries, and how the inclusion of Shakespeare in European culture has been not only a European but also a world affair. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Contributors to this issue come from the US and the UK, Spain, Switzerland and South Africa, Canada, The Netherlands, India, Portugal, Greece, France, and Hungary. In addition to the section on European Shakespeares, this volume includes essays on the genre of romance, issues of character, and other topics.

What is the relation between the language being heard and the picture being simultaneously exhibited on the stage? Typically there is an identity between sound and sight, but often there is a divergence between what the audience hears and what is sees. These divergences are 'insets' and examines the motives, mechanics and poetic qualities of these narrative poems embedded in the plays.

First published in 1937.
This study argues that the plays of Shakespeare must be studied by comparison with each other and not as separate entities; that they must be related to one another, to the poems and to the Sonnets; that each individual play acquires a deeper significance from its setting in the corpus. Muir and O'Loughlin's critical analysis takes place against the personality of Shakespeare, asserting that that despite all their diversities a single mind and a single hand dominate them and that they are the outcome of one man's critical and emotional reactions to life.

First published in 1979.
How do the elements of swearing and perjury work in Shakespeare's plays? What effect did Shakespeare intend when he wrote them? How did they contribute to the delineation of character? These questions are investigated by combining a history of ideas approach with close textual analysis.
The book begins by bringing together material from a wide range of contemporary sources in order to create a sense of popular awareness of oaths in Queen Elizabeth's time. Out of this emerges a scale of the relative strength of various oaths, an awareness of the ways in which people regarded perjury, and an appreciation of the attempts to prohibit profanity. Shakespeare's work is then examined against this background.

First published in 1961.
Critiquing the critics, and examining the vocabulary of twentieth century criticism of the Shakespearean tragedies, John Holloway's book covers Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens and the themes of Shakespearean Tragedy and the idea of human sacrifice and the concepts of myth and ritual in literature.

That Shakespeare thematized time thoroughly, almost obsessively, in his plays is well established: time is, among other things, a 'devourer' (Love's Labour's Lost), one who can untie knots (Twelfth Night), or, perhaps most famously, simply out of joint (Hamlet). Yet most critical commentary on time and Shakespeare tends to incorporate little focus on time as an essential - if elusive - element of stage praxis. This book aims to fill that gap; Wagner's focus is specifically performative, asking after time as a stage phenomenon rather than a literary theme or poetic metaphor. His primary approach is phenomenological, as the book aims to describe how time operates on Shakespearean stages. Through philosophical, historiographical, dramaturgical, and performative perspectives, Wagner examines the ways in which theatrical activity generates a manifest presence of time, and he demonstrates Shakespeare s acute awareness and manipulation of this phenomenon. Underpinning these investigations is the argument that theatrical time, and especially Shakespearean time, is rooted in temporal conflict and thickness (the heightened sense of the present moment bearing the weight of both the past and the future). Throughout the book, Wagner traces the ways in which time transcends thematic and metaphorical functions, and forms an essential part of Shakespearean stage praxis.

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The International Shakespeare Association meeting, held in Tokyo in August of 1991, was regarded by many of the participating academics as a milestone in terms of the quality of the papers given and extent to which the intercultural and cross-cultural study of Shakespeare had been developed. This volume contains the principal contributions (10) to the panel on Acting and Language in Shakespeare and Eastern Drama, specially edited for publication by Minoru Fujita who teaches at the Graduate School of Culture, University of Osaka, and Leonard Pronko, Professor of Theatre at Pomona College, Claremont, California. The papers are presented in three sections: Playhouses and Performances, Literary History, and Interpretation and Theoretical Issues.