Literary studies: plays and playwrights Books

We live in times of crisis. How has the theatre responded? Has the theatre lived up to its essential purpose: to "hold up the mirror" to our turbulent times?This book will look at the courageous responses from dozens of playwrights over the past hundred...

Many early modern plays use poison, most famously Hamlet, where the murder of Old Hamlet showcases the range of issues poison mobilises. Its orchard setting is one of a number of sinister uses of plants which comment on both the loss of horticultural...

Elisa Gabbert's L'Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems, goes inside the mind of Judy, one of three characters in Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner, a play about the dissolution of a marriage in the midst of political revolution. In these poems, Gabbert...

The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio offers the first comprehensive biography of the earliest collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. In November 1623, the book arrived in the bookshop of the London publisher Edward Blount at the Black Bear. Long in...

When Falstaff calls upon the sky to rain potatoes in The Merry Wives of Windsor, he is highlighting the late sixteenth-century belief that the exotic vegetable, recently introduced to England from the Americas, was an aphrodisiac. In Romeo and Juliet,...

Within Shakespeare's lifetime there was already some curiosity about what the writer of such brilliant poems, sonnets and plays looked like. Yet like so much else about him, Shakespeare's appearance is mysterious.Why is it so difficult to find images of...

The books collects Daniel T. O'Hara's half century of essays and review-essays on Yeats and his major poetry an drama and how leading critics and theorists have sought to revise their reception for their periods of time and indeed for the future. Its aim...

This book argues that theatre and drama help us to understand the concern about 'fake news'. Moran shows that 'fake news' has arisen in the twenty-first century throughwhat are essentially a series of performance contexts. Although the concept of 'fake...

Was Shakespeare a snob? Poor Naked Wretches challenges the idea that our greatest writer despised working people, and shows that he portrayed them with as much insight, compassion and purpose as the rich and powerful. Moreover, they play an important...

'Rabindranath Tagore's Drama in the Perspective of Indian Theatre' maps Tagore's place in the Indian dramatic/performance traditions by examining unexplored critical perspectives on his drama such as his texts as performance texts; their exploration in...

William Congreve was deeply involved in the events of his turbulent times. That involvement reveals itself in works which have sometimes been regarded as entirely unengaged with the realities of his society. This book attempts to read Congreve's plays...

During Shakespeare's lifetime, John Lyly was repeatedly described as the central figure in contemporary English literature. This book takes that claim seriously, asking how and why Lyly was considered the most important writer of his time.Kesson traces...

Dialogues on Beckett is a collection of 12 conversations about 12 plays by Samuel Beckett, discussions about the meaning of life and the universe between an agnostic and a Christian, based on a close reading of the text. It is also based on the...

Immerse yourself in Shakespeare's magical world, filled with supernatural encounters with faeries, ghosts and witches. Frolic with royalty, wander through forests, and experience love layered with enchantment. The Bard's use of these fantastical...

Aristotle and theArc of Tragedyis the latestof Leon Golden's books to connect Ancient Greece to modern culture. In a world facing many pressing issues Classics professor Golden wants to champion the values and achievements of Classical Civilization. He...

This groundbreaking work of scholarship explores convergences between performance and science through an investigation of new technologies that drive computer-mediated, interactive art. Wide-ranging and richly illustrated essays uncover shifts that have...

Three sixteenth-century dietaries makes a significant contribution to our understanding of early modern culture. It provides the first modern edition of three of the most important dietaries of the time - with the texts offering advice on the best ways...

This engaging study appreciably advances recent critical developments in the way the playwright created his worlds to reflect concurrent cartographic, geopolitical and social anxieties.In seeking to expose the dynamics and fluctuations of power on the...

Shakespeare's tutor: The influence of Thomas Kyd adds to the critical and scholarly discussion that seeks to establish the early modern playwright Thomas Kyd's dramatic canon, and indicates where and how Kyd contributed to the development of...

Geoffrey Bullough's The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (1957-75) established a vocabulary and a method for linking Shakespeare's plays with a series of texts on which they were thought to be based. Shakespeare's Resources revisits and...

John Fletcher's Rome is the first book to explore John Fletcher's engagement with classical antiquity. Examines Fletcher's Roman plays and identifies disorientation as the unifying principle of his portrayal of imperial Rome. The book sheds new light on...

Despite the steady rise in adaptations of Samuel Beckett's work across the world following the author's death in 1989, Beckett's afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to this creative phenomenon. The collection employs interrelated concepts...

Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. These concerns about sleep, and the intersecting medical and moral discourses with which they engage, have been overlooked by studies more interested in...

This original and innovative book proposes 'dismemory' as a new form of intertextual engagement with Shakespeare by modern and contemporary Irish writers.Through reflection on these canonical writers and ranging across thirteen Shakespeare plays,...

Samuel Beckett and trauma, the collection of eight essays by leading academics, broadens and enriches the present fields of both trauma studies and Beckett studies by illuminating the uniqueness of the trauma in Beckett's work in relation to historical...

This collection of essays stages a dialogue between leading Beckett scholars and media theorists and offers the first sustained critical enquiry into Beckett as a media artist and his intermedial work.Beckett and media provides the first sustained...

English Literary Afterlives traces life narratives of early modern authors created for them after their deaths by readers or publishers, who retrospectively tried to make sense of the author's life and works. In a series of case-studies of the reception...

This book analyses three Shakespearean plays that particularly deal with abusive forms of banishment: King Richard II, Coriolanus, and King Lear. In these plays, the abuses of power are triggered by fearless speeches that question the legitimacy of power...

This engaging and stimulating book argues that Shakespeare's plays significantly influenced movie genres in the twentieth century, particularly in films concerning love in the classic Hollywood period. Shakespeare's 'green world' has a close functional...

The book presents a systematic method of interpreting Shakespeare film adaptations based on their cinematic genres. Its approach is both scholarly and reader-friendly, and its subject is fundamentally interdisciplinary, combining the findings of...

This volume opens a window onto a unique culture of politicised working-class drama by offering four plays that highlight the diversity of Chartist performance: a verse tragedy concerning the Newport rising; a Gothic melodrama; a frequently reenacted...

The first in-depth consideration of Thomas Heywood's engagement with the classical world, this is a timely reappraisal of the notably diverse output of Heywood, his better-known works are discussed alongside critically neglected ones Illuminates the role...

Staging the revolution offers a reappraisal of the weight and volume of theatrical output during the commonwealth and early Restoration, both in terms of live performances and performances on the paper stage. It argues that the often-cited notion that...

This book is a study of twenty stage productions, adaptations and screen versions of Shakespeare's final Roman play. It makes available for the first time sustained discussions of major productions of the play in four languages and five countries, and...

Michael D. Friedman's second edition of this stage history of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus adds an examination of twelve major theatrical productions and one film that appeared in the years 1989-2009. Friedman identifies four lines of descent in the...

Precarious spectatorship is about the relationship between emergencies and the spectator. In the early twenty-first century, 'emergencies' are commonplace in the newsgathering and political institutions of western industrial democracies. From terrorism...

Shakespeare's London 1613 offers for the first time a comprehensive 'biography' of this crucial year in English history. The book examines political and cultural life in London, including the Jacobean court and the city, which together witnessed an...

The thirteen chapters in this collection open up new horizons for the study of biblical drama by putting special emphasis on multitemporality, the intersections of biblical narrative and performance, and the strategies employed by playwrights to rework...

This volume proposes new insights into the uses of classical mythology by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, focusing on interweaving processes in early modern appropriations of myth. Its 11 essays show how early modern writing intertwines diverse myths...

A fully annotated, modern-spelling edition of entertainments performed for the monarch during her summer progress, the collection affords an insight into a neglected area of Elizabethan cultural activity. Designed to introduce the student or...

This edited collection of twelve essays from an international range of contemporary Shakespeare scholars explores the supernatural in Shakespeare from a variety of perspectives and approaches.Supernatural elements are of central significance in many of...

The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920) is a collection of essays by T.S. Eliot. Although Eliot is primarily recognized as one of the twentieth century's leading English poets, he was also a prolific and highly influential literary critic...