Literary studies: plays and playwrights

This book lays bare the dialogue between Shakespeare and critics of the stage and positions it as part of an ongoing cultural, ethical, and psychological debate about the effects of performance on actors and on spectators.

The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Performance brings together a selection of particularly memorable performances, beginning with Nell Gwyn in a 1668 staging of Secret Love, and moving chronologically towards the final performance of John Philip Kemble's controversial adaptation of Thomas Otway's Venice Presever'd in October 1795.

This is a study of particular aspects of particular works in a particular context.

What makes a Shakespeare production political?

In this volume, Kathleen Jeffs draws on first-hand experience of the Royal Shakespeare Company's rehearsal room for the 2004-05 Spanish Golden Age season to put forth a collaborative model for translating, rehearsing, and performing Spanish Golden Age drama.

This book employs the concept of ''nonsense'' to explore those parts of Greek comedy perceived as ''just silly'' and therefore ''not meaningful''.

Mae West, wise-cracking vaudeville performer, was one of the most controversial figures of her era.

The figure of Sakuntala appears in many forms throughout South Asian literature, most famously in the Mahabharata and in Kalidisa's fourth-century Sanskrit play, Sakuntala and the Ring of Recollection.

This book features a selection of the best essays from the last forty years on Shakespeare''s use of language.

A work of startling originality when it debuted in 1938, Thornton Wilder's Our Town evolved to be seen by some as a vintage slice of early 20th Century Americana, rather than being fully appreciated for its complex and eternal themes and its deceptively simple form.

As Noah D.

Henry Fielding is most well-known for his monumental novel Tom Jones.

Identifying the stage as a primary site for erotic display, these essays take eroticism in Renaissance culture as a paradigm for issues of sexuality and identity in early modern culture.

Staging Detection reveals how the new figure of the stage detective emerged in nineteenth-century Britain.

This title is part of UC Presss Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact.

Olga Mukhina is one of the most talented, young playwrights in Russia.

The first of its kind, this volume offers the most ambitious and wide-ranging English-language history of Polish theatre to date.

This volume provides an accessible and engaging guide to the study of American dramatic literature.

In the seventeenth century, Moli re raised comedy to the pitch of great art and, three centuries later, his plays are still a source of delight.

The aesthetic exception theorises anew the relation between art and politics.

Garrett Sullivan offers a new approach to cinematic adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare at a watershed moment in British history.

Ben Jonson was the greatest of Shakespeare's contemporaries.

"e;Club toilets have taught me more about sisterhood than any book.

Alternative temporalities have often emerged as a reaction to the normativizing force of time, demonstrating that time can be used as an instrument of power and oppression, but also as a means to resist this very oppression.

This first study to discuss the important ideological role of the military in the early political life of the nation examines the relationship between revolutionary doctrine and the practical considerations of military planning before and after the American Revolution.

This collection of published and unpublished essays connects antiquity with the present by debating the current prohibiting conceptions of performance theory and the insistence on a limited version of 'the contemporary'.

The discovery on papyrus of plays by Menander, the greatest writer of Greek New Comedy, at last makes possible an evaluation on his own terms of an ancient author who, through the adaptations of Plautus and Terence, profoundly influenced the course of western drama.

This volume offers new insight into the contextual background and literary-historical impact of Norman Mailer''s body of work.

The theme for Volume 75 is ''Othello''.

A bold play collection representing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex and Queer (LGBTIQ+) experiences, from Black British perspectives, this anthology contains seven radical plays by Black writers that change the face of theatre in Britain.

Deanne Williams offers the very first study of the medieval and early modern girl actor.

Greek tragedy is one of the most important cultural legacies of the classical world, with a rich and varied history and reception, yet it appears to have its roots in a very particular place and time.

Shortlisted for The TaPRA David Bradby Monograph Prize 2023As the first full-length study to analyse utopian plays in Western drama from antiquity to the present, Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre offers an illuminating appraisal of the objectives of utopianism as manifested in drama through the ages, and carefully ascertains the added value that live performance brings to the persuasion of utopian thought.

The late D.

This book examines the French theatricalization of India from 1770 to 1865 and how a range of plays not only represented India to the French viewing public but also staged issues within French culture including colonialism, imperialism, race, gender, and national politics.

Discussing the actor mutiny of 1733, theatre censorship, controversial plays and Fielding's forgery of an actor's biography, the book contends that some subversive Augustan and Georgian artists were early Brechtians.

This volume posits and explores an intermedial genre called theatre-fiction, understood in its broadest sense as referring to novels and stories that engage in concrete and sustained ways with theatre.

It is a fact that today's British stages resound with powerfully innovative voices and that, very often, these voices have been those of young women playwrights.

The Duchess of Malfi is generally regarded as John Webster's finest play, a masterpiece of tragic depth and emotional complexity.

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals.

This essential guide provides a deeply informed survey of the criticism of all the plays and major stories authored by Brian Friel.

With a rare blend of grace, warmth, and scholarship, Leslie Stainton raises the stakes of our appreciation for the greatest of Spain's modern poets, Federico Garca Lorca.

The Routledge Handbook of African Theatre and Performance brings together the very latest international research on the performing arts across the continent and the diaspora into one expansive and wide-ranging collection.