Originally published in 1943, this book contains an edited French edition of Paul Claudel's 1910 drama L'annonce faite a Marie. The play, which deals with a young French peasant woman who contracts leprosy in the medieval era, is accompanied by critical notes at the end of the volume and a biographical note on Claudel's life and career. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in French drama.

HAB is happy to re-propose after many years Paul Claudel's play The Tidings Brought to Mary, a play in a translation by Louise Morgan Sill. A significant introduction by Luigi Giussani, founder of the Catholic lay ecclesial movement of Communion and Liberation, helps the reader to be drawn more deeply into the drama of the play and to find described there the drama which faces each of us. Pope Benedict XVI once made the point that world history is a struggle between two kinds of love: "self-love to the point of hatred for God, and love of God to the point of self-renunciation. This second love brings the redemption of the world and the self." This is the claim, the proposal of the play The Tidings Brought to Mary. After nearly a hundred years, as we watch this Infinite Love generate the play's heroic characters, we find ourselves begging in turn: "Please let me meet You. Please let your love take hold of my life. Please let me be embraced by a love that shows me where my place is-that draws everything in my life to Yourself. Please let me obey that love."

Break of Noon (Partage de midi) is a collaborative attempt, edited by Anthony Rudolf, at preparing an English-language edition of Paul Claudel's remarkable and complex play, an unstable text which gave Claudel many problems throughout his life. These are explored in essays by David Furlong of Exchange Theatre in London, which put on a production of the play in 2018 and John Naughton, a leading authority on Claudel. The critical apparatus is completed by the late Susannah York's essay on her own involvement with the play and recounts her interaction with her fellow translator, Jonathan Griffin. The instability of this strange and compelling work in its various original versions is mirrored by the three critical essays in the present work, which do not always see eye to eye. It is thirty years since Jonathan Griffin died and nearly fifty years since Pierre Rouve's Ipswich production of Jonathan's translation, starring Ben Kingsley and Annie Firbank.

This is a new release of the original 1943 edition.