A magnificent new biography of Henrik Ibsen, among the greatest of modern playwrights Henrik Ibsen (1820–1908) is arguably the most important playwright of the nineteenth century.
This engaging study explores how the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, and others were taken up by caricaturists as a means of helping the eighteenth-century British public make sense of political issues, outrages, and personalities.
The art and craft of playwriting as explored in candid conversations with some of the most important contemporary dramatists Edward Albee, Lanford Wilson, Lynn Nottage, A.
A masterful, highly engaging analysis of how Shakespeare’s plays intersected with the politics and culture of Elizabethan England With an ageing, childless monarch, lingering divisions due to the Reformation, and the threat of foreign enemies, Shakespeare’s England was fraught with unparalleled anxiety and complicated problems.
A many-faceted examination of how Shakespeare brought Rome alive for his readers through a masterful manipulation of ancient rhetoric Renaissance plays and poetry in England were saturated with the formal rhetorical twists that Latin education made familiar to audiences and readers.
This anthology of plays from the Spanish Golden Age brings together the work of canonical writers, female writers who are rapidly achieving canonical status, and lesser-known writers who have recently gained critical attention.
In an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show in 1980, the critic Mary McCarthy glibly remarked that every word author Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, "e;including 'and' and 'the.
In this elegant book, modernism is illuminated through little-known but striking works by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others who revived the “closet drama”—plays written largely for private reading—as a means of exploring forbidden sexualities.
Treacherous, power-hungry, untempered by moral restraint, and embittered by physical deformity, Richard, the younger brother of King Edward IV, is ablaze with ambition to take England’s throne.
In this lively comedy of love and money in sixteenth-century Venice, Bassanio wants to impress the wealthy heiress Portia but lacks the necessary funds.
In one of Shakespeare’s bawdier comedies, contemporary audiences still take great pleasure in the rapid-fire verbal battles between the shrewish Katharina and the canny Petruchio, determined to subdue Katharina’s legendary temper and win her dowry.
In the Golden Age of Spanish Theater, an age of highly dramatized coronations and regal spectacles, Alban Forcione has discovered a surprising but persistent preoccupation with the disrobing of the king.
A major figure in the world of theater as critic, playwright, scholar, teacher, director, actor, and producer, Robert Brustein offers a unique perspective on the American stage and its artists.
King Lear, one of Shakespeare's darkest and most savage plays, tells the story of the foolish and Job-like Lear, who divides his kingdom, as he does his affections, according to vanity and whim.
Readers of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies have long noted the absence of readily explainable motivations for some of Shakespeare’s greatest characters: why does Hamlet delay his revenge for so long?
Jaime Manrique weaves into his own memoir the lives of three important twentieth-century Hispanic writers: the Argentine Manuel Puig, author of Kiss of the Spider Woman; the Cuban Reinaldo Arenas, author of Before Night Falls; and Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garca Lorca.
Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence.
I'm just worried because I think what I'm being turned on by is the fact that you're imagining a stable future with me, whereas what you're being turned on by is the potential potency of your own sperm.
The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy is a rich exploration of the evolution, dynamics, and cultural underpinnings of comedy during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.
Great halls and hovels, dove-houses and sheepcotes, mountain cells and seaside shelters-these are some of the spaces in which Shakespearean characters gather to dwell, and to test their connections with one another and their worlds.
A TALE OF RACISM, REVENGE, BETRAYAL AND JEALOUSYOne of Shakespeare's most performed tragedies written in approximately 1603, Othello still resonates today with its themes of racism, revenge, betrayal and jealousy.
A reticent personnel manager living with his mother, Mr Newman shares the prejudices of his times and of his neighbours - and neither a Hispanic woman abused outside his window nor the persecution of the Jewish store owner he buys his paper from are any of his business.
A THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019'The best introduction to the plays I've read, perhaps the best book on Shakespeare, full stop' Alex Preston, Observer'It makes you impatient to see or re-read the plays at once' Hilary MantelA genius and prophet whose timeless works encapsulate the human condition like no others.
Arthur Miller's penultimate play, Resurrection Blues, is a darkly comic satirical allegory that poses the question: What would happen if Christ were to appear in the world today?
