The essays in this book, first published in 1975, suggest how best to approach Beckett, how to read him, how to get closer to the concrete experience offered by this most concrete of writers. It aims to bring out the full diversity of Beckett's art as dramatist and story-teller. His astonishing flexibility and inventiveness is stressed throughout, either in studies of single novels, or from the whole range of the fiction and stage drama, or from the experiments in other media: the solitary film, the radio plays. Beckett's bilingualism, one of the strangest aspects of his Proteanism, is examined through a comparison of the French and English texts of some of his stage plays. The emphasis of the essays is literary rather than philosophical: they explore narrative and dramatic processes, the strange partial transitions between them, the fine relations of form and feeling which Beckett aims at through whatever medium he is using, and his humaneness, expressed through the many nuances of his humour. The shorter fiction and the later writings also receive close attention.

The essays in this book, first published in 1975, suggest how best to approach Beckett, how to read him, how to get closer to the concrete experience offered by this most concrete of writers. It aims to bring out the full diversity of Beckett's art as dramatist and story-teller. His astonishing flexibility and inventiveness is stressed throughout, either in studies of single novels, or from the whole range of the fiction and stage drama, or from the experiments in other media: the solitary film, the radio plays. Beckett's bilingualism, one of the strangest aspects of his Proteanism, is examined through a comparison of the French and English texts of some of his stage plays. The emphasis of the essays is literary rather than philosophical: they explore narrative and dramatic processes, the strange partial transitions between them, the fine relations of form and feeling which Beckett aims at through whatever medium he is using, and his humaneness, expressed through the many nuances of his humour. The shorter fiction and the later writings also receive close attention.

This study provides a European perspective on the drama of Yeats and of the Irish playwrights - Wilde and Synge, O'Casey and Beckett - who share in the achievement of creating a modern 'drama of the interior'. Professor Worth traces in particular the influence of Maeterlinck, examining his 'static drama' in some detail. A dominant theme is the importance of total theatre techniques to the playwrights of the interior from Wilde in Salome to O'Casey in plays like Cock-a-Doodle Dandy. Yeats is seen as the great pioneer, assimilating inspiration from the French, with Arthur Symons as guide, from Synge, from Gordon Craig and from the No drama, and evolving a modern technique for a drama of complex self-consciousness."

This is part of a series of books that explores the work of dramatists. This particular book looks at the lasting appeal of Sheridan and Goldsmith's comedies, showing how they operate on a profound imaginative level and draw on their author's experiences as Irish wits on an English scene. Their dramatic technique's are examined in relation to physical features of the 18th century stage. A chapter on sentimental comedy relates plays such as Hugh Kelly's "False Delicacy" to the balance of irony and sentiment in Goldsmith's "The Good Natur'd Man" and Sheridan's "A Trip to Scarborough". The continuing freshness of the comedy of mistakes, masks and harlequin-like role playing which the two playwrights draw from the operatic and theatrical conventions of their day is illustrated by comparison with modern productions.

In this uniquely personal account of Samuel Beckett's theatre, Katharine Worth draws on a wealth of remarkable material - her own work producing and directing productions of Beckett's plays, often with leading actors such as Patrick Magee, but also with students; the experience of watching other productions; her successful adaptation of Beckett's novella, Company, for the stage; and conversations and correspondence with Beckett himself. Among the critical insights into his theatre that she brings to bear is the closeness to common experience of the life-journeys undertaken on Beckett's stage.

In this uniquely personal account of Samuel Beckett's theatre, Katharine Worth draws on a wealth of remarkable material - her own work producing and directing productions of Beckett's plays, often with leading actors such as Patrick Magee, but also with students; the experience of watching other productions; her successful adaptation of Beckett's novella, Company, for the stage; and conversations and correspondence with Beckett himself. Among the critical insights into his theatre that she brings to bear is the closeness to common experience of the life-journeys undertaken on Beckett's stage.

First published in 1903, Where There Is Nothing was never reprinted in the author's lifetime. It lost its place in collected editions of Yeats's plays to a new version, The Unicorn from the Stars, in which Lady Gregory had a major share. There has long been a need for an edition of Where There Is Nothing to restore to general view an interesting play which, unusually for Yeats, has a modern setting, a middle-class hero, and a predominantly naturalistic technique. Yeats gave various reasons for abandoning the original play. Perhaps one he did not mention was his doubt whether its open and direct style and modem Irish background might not identify the author too closely with the visionary central character, Paul Ruttledge. Many of Yeats's deepest preoccupations are reflected in Paul's pursuit of his apocalyptic vision: he abandons a life of bourgeois comfort for hard freedom among the tinkers, follows a religious life in a monastery, and finally dies a martyr at the hands of a mob who cannot understand his ecstatic message: "Where there is nothing, there is God." The drastically revised version, The Unicorn from the Stars, changes the period and social milieu and introduces new characters and plot complications which bear the marks of Lady Gregory's distinctive style. Both plays are included in this volume to allow comparison of the plays themselves and to throw light on the characteristic methods of these two preeminent playwrights.