Maria Irene Fornes is the most influential female American dramatist of the 20th century. That is the argument of this important new study, the first to assess Fornes's complete body of work.

Scott T. Cummings considers comic sketches, opera libretti and unpublished pieces, as well as her best-known plays, in order to trace the evolution of her dramaturgy from the whimsical Off-Off Broadway plays of the 1960s to the sober, meditative work of the 1990s. The book also reflects on her practice as an inspirational teacher of playwriting and the primary director of her own plays.

Drawing on the latest scholarship and his own personal research and interviews with Fornes over two decades, Cummings examines Fornes's unique significance and outlines strategies for understanding her fragmentary, enigmatic, highly demanding theater.

How has the media, beginning with the Persian Gulf War, altered political analysis and how has this alteration in turn affected socially-critical art? Jeanne Colleran examines more than forty plays, most of which were written in direct response to the emergent New World Order and the subsequent 1991 war in Iraq as well as to the 9/11 attacks and the retaliatory actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. These works are drawn primarily from the British and American stage - the principal partners in these conflicts. The writers include prominent figures (Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, David Hare, Trevor Griffiths, Naomi Wallace, and Neil LaBute), work by theatre groups and artistic directors (San Francisco Mime Troupe, Nicolas Kent and the Tricycle Theatre, and Alan Buchman and Culture Project), and plays by emerging playwrights and by writers who work primarily as journalists or in other media (Anne Nelson, Lawrence Wright, George Packer, Robin Soans, and others).

Tracing the history of tragedy and comedy from their earliest beginnings to the present, this book offers readers an exceptional study of the development of both genres, grounded in analysis of landmark plays and their context. It argues that sacrifice is central to both genres, and demonstrates how it provides a key to understanding the grand sweep of Western drama. For students of literature and drama the volume serves as an accessible companion to over two millennia of drama organised by period, and reveals how sacrifice represents a through-line running from classical drama to today's reality TV and blockbuster movies. Across the chapters devoted to each period, Day explores how the meanings of sacrifice change over time, but never quite disappear. He charts the influences of religion, social change and politics on the status and purposes of theatre in each period, and on the drama itself. But it is through a close study of key plays that he reveals the continuities centred around sacrifice that persist and which illuminate aspects of human psychology and social organisation. Among the many plays and events considered are Aeschylus' trilogy The Oresteia, Aristophanes' Women at the Thesmorphia, Menander's The Bad-Tempered Man, the spectacles of the Roman Games, Seneca's The Trojan Women, Plautus's The Rope, the Cycle plays and Everyman from the Middle Ages, Shakespeare's King Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream, Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, Thomas Otway's The Orphan, William Wycherley's The Country Wife, Wilde's A Woman of No Importance, Beckett' Waiting for Godot, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog, Sarah Kane's Blasted and Charlotte Jones' Humble Boy. A conclusion examines the persistence of ideas of sacrifice in today's reality TV and blockbuster movies.

First published in 1936, The Jacobean Drama is a brilliant interpretation of the drama written between the last years of Elizabeth I and the first years of Charles I. Professor Una Mary Ellis-Fermor's book traces the evolution of thought and mood from the end of Marlowe's career, through the works of Ben Jonson, Marston, Chapman, Middleton, Tourneur, Webster, Greville, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ford. The author then discusses a culminating phase in the plays of Shakespeare and the modifications of his successors. She finally looks into the Jacobean stage and in her Appendix considers the 'theatre war'.

First published in 1939, The Irish Dramatic Movement is a critical study of the dramatic work of W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, their contemporaries and some of their successors. Professor Ellis-Fermor relates each to the movement as a whole, discussing the nature of poetic drama in the hands of Yeats and Synge, while attempting to describe the remarkable contribution made by Irish drama to the literature of the early twentieth century. In her appendices, the author includes a chronological table of the main events in the first years of the movement, a list of plays produced in London in the last decade of the nineteenth century and a subject index to some of the main critical opinions of W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory.

First published in 1930, in Tamburlaine the Great - in Two Parts, Professor Ellis-Fermor discusses early editions of the work and considers how far the spelling and punctuation of the 1590 octavo should be retained in modern editions. The author discusses the date that the play was written and its authorship and sources. She then goes on to look at the stage history of Tamburlaine before presenting the play itself in two parts. Professor Ellis-Fermor retains the spelling of the majority of proper names. She also keeps the old stage directions where they occur, as these are, she says, picturesque and succinct, and there appears no reason to discard them in favour of the more modern forms used by subsequent editors. In her appendices, she includes extracts from other accounts of Tamburlaine and looks at later editions of the work.

First published in 1927, this book aims to trace the development of Christopher Marlowe's mind and art as these are revealed in the surviving parts of his work, while portraying the personality thus perceived. Professor Ellis-Fermor begins by looking at Marlowe's life and early works, before making a more detailed study of Tamburlaine, Faustus, The Plays of Policy, and finaly Hero and Leander. She then goes on, in the appendix of this work, to consider contention and true tragedy before concluding with a study of Marlowe in the eyes of his contemporaries. The author has followed the text of the Oxford Edition of Marlowe's works (1910), except in a few quotations, where she has preferred the reading of another early edition.

First published in 1964, this arresting and original work is a study of the relations between content and form in drama; the conflict between and ultimate reconciliation of certain kinds of material that life presents to the poet and the demands inherent in dramatic form and technique. There are chapters on Shakespeare's historical plays, on Troilus and Cressida, on Milton's Samson Agonistes and on general dramatic problems.

Now in its third edition Shakespeare: The Basics is an insightful and informative introduction to the work of William Shakespeare. Exploring all aspects of Shakespeare s plays including the language, cultural contexts, and modern interpretations, this text looks at how a range of plays from across the genres have been understood. Updates in this edition include:

• Ecocritical, queer, presentist and gendered discussions of Shakespeare s work
• Studies of new performances including Tennant and Tate s Much Ado About Nothing
• Critical discussions of race and politics in Othello and King Lear
• Case studies of modern film versions of Shakespeare s works
• A chronology of Shakespeare s work and contemporary events

With fully updated further reading throughout and a wide range of case studies and examples, this text is essential reading for all those studying Shakespeare s work.

What are Shakespeare's uses of the conceptual space of conflict? And what has been the role played by principles, patterns and situations of conflict in the construction of the Shakespeare myth, and in its European and then global spread? This collection looks, from a truly pan-European vantage point, at the variety of conflictive and conflicting dimensions embedded in Shakespeare's texts (Part I); at the way Shakespeare's universe of discourse has been enlisted to address and dramatize conflicts of a socio-political, cultural or aesthetic nature (Part II); and at how Shakespearean meanings have been renegotiated through reception and reproduction in actual historical contexts of strife or outright belligerence (Part III). The fascinatingly complex picture that emerges from the original studies gathered here provides new insight into Shakespeare's unique position in world literature and culture.

This book explores shifting representations and receptions of the arms-bearing woman on the British stage during a period in which she comes to stand in Britain as a striking symbol of revolutionary chaos. The book makes a case for viewing the British Romantic theatre as an arena in which the significance of the armed woman is constantly remodelled and reappropriated to fulfil diverse ideological functions. Used to challenge as well as to enforce established notions of sex and gender difference, she is fashioned also as an allegorical tool, serving both to condemn and to champion political and social rebellion at home and abroad. Magnifying heroines who appear on stage wielding pistols, brandishing daggers, thrusting swords, and even firing explosives, the study spotlights the intricate and often surprising ways in which the stage amazon interacts with Anglo-French, Anglo-Irish, Anglo-German, and Anglo-Spanish debates at varying moments across the French revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. At the same time, it foregrounds the extent to which new dramatic genres imported from Europe -notably, the German Sturm und Drang and the French-derived melodrama- facilitate possibilities at the turn of the nineteenth century for a refashioned female warrior, whose degree of agency, destructiveness, and heroism surpasses that of her tragic and sentimental predecessors.

Canadians have enjoyed a long history of encounters with Shakespeare, from the visual arts to creative new adaptations, from traditional and nontraditional interpretations to distinguished critical scholarship. We have in over two centuries remade Shakespeare in ways that are distinctly Canadian. The Oxford Shakespeare Made in Canada series offers a unique vantage on these histories of production and encounter with attention to accessibility and presentation. These editions explore how a given country can inform the interpretation and pedagogy associated with individual plays. Canadians, or more properly British North Americans from both Upper and Lower Canada, have been interacting with Shakespeare since no less than the 1760s in a tradition that is at once rich and robust, indigenous and international. The Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare project at the University of Guelph has created a multimedia database of hundreds of adaptations, developed from Guelph's world-class theatre archives and a host of independent sources that reflect on a long tradition - from pre-Confederation times and heading vibrantly into the future - of playing Shakespeare in Canada.These are the first editions of the plays of William Shakespeare to place key insights from the world's best scholarship alongside the specific contexts associated with a dynamic Canadian tradition of productions and adaptations. Specially research images, never printed before, from a range of Canadian productions of Shakespeare will be featured in every play In additional to a scholarly edition of the playtext complete with original new annotation, these books will include both short introductions by noted scholars and prefaces by well-known Canadians who have experience with Shakespeare. In addition, each play will include act and scene summaries, dramatis personal, and recommended reading/resources.

Euripides' Electra opened up for its audience an opportunity to become self-aware as to the appeal of tragic Kunstsprache: it both reflected and sustained traditional, aristocratically-inflected assumptions about the continuity of appearance and substance, even in a radical democracy. A complex analogy between social and aesthetic valuation is played out and brought to light. The characterization of Orestes early in the play demonstrates how social appearances made clear the identity of well-born, and how they were still assumed to indicate superior virtue and agency. On the aesthetic side of the analogy, one of the functions of tragic diction, as an essential indication of heroic character and agency, comes into view in a dramatic and thematic sequence that begins with Achilles ode and ends with the planning of the murders. Serious doubts are created as to whether Orestes will realize the assumed potential inherent in his heroic genealogy and, at the same time, as to whether the components of his character as an aesthetic construct are congruent with such qualities and agency. Both sides of this complex analogy are thus problematized, and, at a metapoetic level, its nature and bases are exposed for reflection.

Hyde Park (1632) is one of the best-loved comedies of James Shirley, considered to be one of the most important Caroline dramatists. The play showcases strong female characters who excel at rebuking the outlandish courtship of various suitors. Shirley's comic setting, London's Hyde Park, offers ample opportunity for witty dialogue and sport - including foot and horse races - across three love plots. This is the first critical edition of the play, including a wide-ranging introduction and extensive commentary and textual notes. Paying special attention to the culture of Caroline London and its stage, the Revels Plays edition unpicks Shirley's politics of courtship and consent while also underlining the play's dynamics of class and power. A detailed performance history traces productions from 1632, across the Restoration to the present day, including that of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987. A textual history of the play's first quarto determines how it was printed and what relationship Hyde Park has to other texts by Shirley from the same publishers. -- .

Shakespeare's four-hundred-year performance history is full of anecdotes - ribald, trivial, frequently funny, sometimes disturbing, and always but loosely allegiant to fact. Such anecdotes are nevertheless a vital index to the ways that Shakespeare's plays have generated meaning across varied times and in varied places. Furthermore, particular plays have produced particular anecdotes - stories of a real skull in Hamlet, superstitions about the name Macbeth, toga troubles in Julius Caesar - and therefore express something embedded in the plays they attend. Anecdotes constitute then not just a vital component of a play's performance history but a form of vernacular criticism by the personnel most intimately involved in their production: actors. These anecdotes are therefore every bit as responsive to and expressive of a play's meanings across time as the equally rich history of Shakespearean criticism or indeed the very performances these anecdotes treat. Anecdotal Shakespeare provides a history of post-Renaissance Shakespeare and performance, one not based in fact but no less full of truth.

Exile defines the Shakespearean canon, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to The Two Noble Kinsmen. This book traces the influences on the drama of exile, examining the legal context of banishment (pursued against Catholics, gypsies and vagabonds) in early modern England; the self-consciousness of exile as an amatory trope; and the discourses by which exile could be reshaped into comedy or tragedy. Across genres, Shakespeare's plays reveal a fascination with exile as the source of linguistic crisis, shaped by the utterance of that word "Banished".

First published in English 1961, this reissue relates the problems of form and style to the development of dramatic speech in pre-Shakespearean tragedy. The work offers positive standards by which to assess the development of pre-Shakespearean drama and, by tracing certain characteristics in Elizabethan tragedy which were to have a bearing on Shakespeare's dramatic technique, helps to illuminate the foundations on which Shakespeare built his dramatic oeuvre.

How did Shakespeare sound to the audiences of his day? For the first time this disc offers listeners the chance to hear England's greatest playwright performed by a company of actors using the pronunciation of his time. Under the guidance of Ben Crystal, actor, author of Shakespeare on Toast and an expert in original Shakespearian pronunciation, the company performs some of Shakespeare's best-known poems, solo speeches and scenes from the plays. Hear new meanings uncovered, new jokes revealed, poetic effects enhanced. The CD is accompanied by an introductory essay by Professor David Crystal. An essential purchase for every student and lover of Shakespeare.

Arguably the first play in a Shakespearean tetralogy, Richard II is a unique and compelling political drama whose themes still resonate today. It is one of the few Shakespeare plays written entirely in verse and its format presents unique theatrical challenges. Politically engaged and controversial, it raises crucial debates about the relationship between early modern art, audience response and state power. This collection provides a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the critical and theatrical history of the play. The substantial introduction surveys the history of critical interpretations of Richard II since the eighteenth century. The eleven newly written critical essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field then adopt an eclectic range of critical approaches that encourage scholars and students to pursue new and imaginative directions with the text.

This book is an account of the history and continuation of plague as a potent metaphor since the disease ceased to be an epidemic threat in Western Europe, engaging with twentieth-century critiques of fascism, anti-Semitic rhetoric, the Oedipal legacy of psychoanalysis and its reception, and film spectatorship and the zombie genre.

This collection of 15 essays surveys the work of some of the most major British and Irish dramatists since 1960. Included are four dramatists - Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Peter Shaffer and Peter Nichols - who began writing plays before 1960, and whose work has since continued to develop. Most of the dramatists considered, however, are those who have begun writing more recently, and who illustrate some of the distinctive characteristics of British and Irish drama of the present.;James Acheson is co-editor of "Beckett's Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company" and editor of "The British and Irish Novel since 1960".

Weyward Macbeth, a volume of entirely new essays, provides innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to the various ways Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' has been adapted and appropriated within the context of American racial constructions. Comprehensive in its scope, this collection addresses the enduringly fraught history of 'Macbeth' in the United States, from its appearance as the first Shakespearean play documented in the American colonies to a proposed Hollywood film version with a black diasporic cast. Over two dozen contributions explore 'Macbeth's' haunting presence in American drama, poetry, film, music, history, politics, acting, and directing - all through the intersections of race and performance.

LEONATO. I learn in this letter that Don Pedro of Arragon comes this night to Messina. MESSENGER. He is very near by this. He was not three leagues off when I left him. LEONATO. How many gentlemen have you lost in this action? MESSENGER. But few of any sort, and none of name. LEONATO. A victory is twice itself when the achiever brings home full numbers. I find here that Don Pedro hath bestowed much honour on a young Florentine called Claudio.

This collection brings together a group of distinguished and original theater historians engaged in rethinking the nature of early modern theater history as a discipline. Whether focusing on the relation between scripts and performance practice, the structure of theatrical companies, the social dimensions of drama, or the archaeology of the stage, all are concerned with basic questions of evidence and interpretation, and offer significant, and often startling, revisions of our view of the early modern theater.