"Includes the plays Joan of Arc and William Tell Two plays about historical characters whose fame has also raised them to the level of myth. In Joan of Arc (1801), Schiller allows his heroine a more glorious death than her historical execution at the stake, and imbues her with more passion, and compassion, than is usually ascribed to the actual Joan. In William Tell (1805), often regarded as his greatest play, Schiller creates a vivid sense of time and place - medieval Switzerland - and in his troubled hero, the accidental revolutionary Tell, create a complex and fascinating figure. One of the great figures in German literature, Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) was in some ways the most significant playwright of his day, numbering among his devotees Coleridge and Carlyle. His plays are known for their originality of form, vivid stage imagery and powerful language, faithfully rendered in Robert David MacDonald's acclaimed translations. "

The power and magic of the Faust story, the man who, in a pact with the Devil, trades his soul in return for a period of total knowledge and absolute power, is one of the most potent of all European myths. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) worked on this poetic drama in bursts from his twenties until the end of his life. He reshaped the perpetually fascinating legend, probing the nature and process of human striving and questioning the assumed divisins between the forces of good and evil. His Faust has become a landmark in world literature. Robert David MacDonald's translation of Faust, used in acclaimed productions in Scotland (Glasgow Citizens') and England (Lyric Hammersmith), offers access to the play in the English language for readers and playgoers alike and opens up the extraordinary range and pace of Goethe's language, rhythms, imagery and ideas, without sacrificing any of the play's humour. The Open University has adopted the translation as a set book for the course entitled 'From Enlightenment to Romanticism'.

Adapted by Robert David MacDonald from Gitta Sereny's Into That Darkness "Robert David MacDonald’s In Quest of Conscience, based on Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness, a record of her interviews with death camp commandant Franz Stangl, takes it for granted that the Holocaust was a shocking crime against humanity; what it wants to know, with an urgency amounting to desperation, is how it happened, and how it can be prevented from happening again." - Joyce Macmillan, Scotland on Sunday "Stangl... bureaucrat of death who administered as massive an evil as the Holocaust in the same routine spirit in which he would have administered butter rationing ... What manner of man can be responsible for the slaughter of 1,200,000 of his fellows in the space of 14 months?" - Joseph Farrell, The Scotsman "Plays such as In Quest of Conscience are messengers of the unspeakable, which is why they should be listened to as this powerful, dignified piece was in complete moral silence." - John Peter, The Sunday Times "A brilliant and important play which is based on the actual interviews with the death camp commandant Franz Stragl by Gitta Sereny searching desperately to discover how the Holocaust happened, how one worked and lived with it, and how to prevent it occurring again" Blanche Marvin

This work contains three masterpieces by one of the most important French dramatists of the 17th century. "Berenice" is a tale of love and personal happiness in conflict with public duty. "Phedre" concerns a princess with an overwhelming infatuation with her stepson. "Britannicus" lays bare the relationships at the heart of power as a world slips into moral chaos. These new versions by two of the country's most distinguished director-translators prove that Racine is far from untranslatable; they offer blisteringly effective poetry, urgent plotting and powerhouse roles for both actors and actresses.

Premiered in this translation by the Citizens Theatre Company, Glasgow. Pirandello's study of perceptions has become a twentieth-century classic which invites us to consider our personal madness in offering a different face to everyone we meet.

Carlo Goldoni (1707 - 1793) was one of the most prolific and versatile playwrights of his century, even though most of his vast output deals with life confined to a few square miles of Northern Italy. This new edition contains two comedies about women surviving precariously in a man's world, but each taking a distinctly different approach to her problems. Mirandolina believes open dealing is essential; Valentina wants to have her cake and eat it, and uses intrigue to further her interests. Both are eager to win some kind of equality in a world in which they have no equality, only certain advantages, and almost come to grief. But these are worldly comedies and Goldoni does not deny us the satisfaction of seeing the women triumph.

"Includes the plays Don Carlos and Mary Stuart Major historical upheavals of the Sixteenth Century illuminate Schiller's increasingly troubled reaction to the present in these two plays. The huge epic Don Carlos (1787), a 'play expressing a view of life', marries the ideological battle between Philip II of Spain and his son Don Carlos to a gripping narrative. In Mary Stuart (1800), Schiller, sickened by the excesses of a revolution he had once supported, brings together two monarchs - the English Elizabeth Tudor and the Scottish Mary Stuart, cousins who in reality never met - when Mary, falsely accused of conspiracy, finds herself at Elizabeth's mercy."

Includes the plays The Robbers and Passion and Politics Two plays concerned with tyranny and freedom. Schiller's first play, The Robbers (1781), was written in great secrecy under the prison like conditions of Wurttenberg's Karlsschule: Karl, the son of a count, is disinherited through the machinations of his brother Franz, and, turning his back on a social order he finds unjust and corrupt, becomes the leader of a band of robbers. In Passion and Politics (1784), a 'bourgeoise tragedy', the love between Louise, a musician's daughter, and Ferdinand, a politician's son, crosses an unbridgeable social divide. One of the great figures in German literature, Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) was one of the most significant playwright of his day, numbering among his devotees Coleridge and Carlyle. His plays are known for their originality of form, vivid stage imagery and powerful language, faithfully rendered in Robert David MacDonald's acclaimed translations.

As witty as they are alarming, these three plays cover a considerable range of settings and offer unusual and rewarding opportunities to the actors. De Sade Show presents a gruesome picture of the notorious philosopher and his intimate friends, Salto Mortale take the audience by tortuous route to the circus, while Persons Unknown examines the whys and wherefores of one of the 19th century's most celebrated and puzzling unsolved crimes. All in all, a disturbing and funny trio, and another instance of a remarkable individual voice in the theatre.

Goethe's classical verse play Tasso (1790) examines, in his own words, 'the disproportion of talent to life' and the predicament of the artist at odds with the world around him. In Clavigo (1774), a play which Goethe claimed only took him a week to write, we find the first of the double-portraits which culminates in two souls wrestling for dominion in the breast of Faust. Both these translations were premiered at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow.

"Carlo Goldoni was Italy's greatest playwright of the eighteenth century and wrote at least one hundred and fifty plays, although only a handful; of these have been performed since his time. Working for theatres in both Venice and Paris, he took much of his inspiration from 'commedia dell'arte'. This collection focuses on Goldoni's more serious side and includes the plays Don Juan, Friends and Lovers and The Battlefield. The first published English-language edition of Goldoni's worldly vision of the Don Juan legend, in verse, alongside translations of the naturalistic Friends and Lovers and The Battlefield, all of which were first seen at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow. "

Robert David MacDonald's majestic version of Ibsen's poem-drama about the triumph of will over compromise. Brand, a fiery priest-hero, urges his flock to sacrifice their lives to save their souls.

The Robbers (1781) was written in great secrecy under the prison-like conditions of Wurttenberg's Karlsschule: Karl, the son of a count, is disinherited through the machinations of his brother Franz, and, turning his back on a social order he finds unjust and corrupt, becomes the leader of a band of robbers.

These two tragedies, written at the peak of Schiller's career as a dramatist, contain his most telling, and touching, portrayals of women. His heroines are propelled, by birth or a sense of divine mission, into exalted political positions, where their qualities as human beings, and particularly as women, are put to the severest tests, from which they emerge triumphant, but doomed. Schiller's breadth of sentiment, combined with his consummate stagecraft, and Shakespearean mastery of verse and nobility of language, ensure his position as Germany's greatest dramatist, and these translations, prepared for, and performed by Glasgow's famous Citizens Company, should go far to ensure his long overdue acceptance in Britain as a master of the European Theatre.