Classic and pre-20th century plays Books

'Adrian Noble vigorously highlights the extraordinary rhythmic, linguistic patterns Shakespeare gives the speaker. Any actor will find this book invaluable. For any student of Shakespeare it should be essential.' (From the Foreword by Ralph Fiennes)'How...

Between 2010 and 2017, Canada experienced an efflorescence of Greek tragedy, led by independent Montreal theatre company Scapegoat Carnivale's energetic performances of Euripides's Medea and Bacchae and Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus. The performances...

In this new monograph, Claire Hansen demonstrates how Shakespeare can be understood as a complex system, and how complexity theory can provide compelling and original readings of Shakespeare's plays. The book utilises complexity theory to illuminate...

Richard IIIAn in palace drama with King Richard the 3rd, Queen Elizabeth, and Queen Margret. Onto a haunting reunion, as the state processes royal executions.  61+ Characters*Overall contents was translated from poem form to play form, as basis for...

Hellenic Common argues that theatrical adaptations of Greek tragedy exemplify the functioning of a cosmopolitan cultural commonwealth.

This book explores the ways in which the early modern hobby-horse featured in different productions of popular culture between 1580s-1630s. The book will appeal to those with interest in early modern drama and theatre, dramaturgy, popular culture,...

Callan Davies presents "strangeness" as a fresh critical paradigm for understanding the construction and performance of Jacobean drama-one that would have been deeply familiar to its playwrights and early audiences. This study brings together cultural...

Shakespeare Company: When Action is Eloquence is the first comprehensive insight into this internationally acclaimed company founded in 1978 in Lenox, Massachusetts, by actor-director Tina Packer and voice pioneer Kristin Linklater, with the...

For its eighteenth volume, The Shakespearean International Yearbook surveys the present state of Shakespeare studies, addressing issues that are fundamental to our interpretive encounter with Shakespeare's work and his time, across the whole spectrum of...

The "Shakespearean Originals" series aims to provide readers of modern drama with 16th- and 17th-century playtexts which have been treated as historical documents, and are reproduced as closely to their original printed forms as the conditions of modern...

This volume addresses dealings with the wondrous, magical, holy, sacred, sainted, numinous, uncanny, auratic, and sacral in the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, produced in an era often associated with the irresistible rise of a thinned-out...

This volume explores Shakespeare's interest in pity, an emotion that serves as an important catalyst for action within the plays, even as it generates one of the audience's most common responses to tragic drama in the theater.

Seismic shifts in the theatrical meanings of The Merry Wives of Windsor have taken place across the centuries as Shakespeare's frequently performed play has relocated to Windsor's across the world, journeying along the production/ adaptation/...

'Asinaria' reveals the play as a key to Roman social relations centered on many kinds of slavery: to sex, money, and family structure; to masculinity and social standing; to senility and partying; and to jokes, lies, and idiocy. This work includes...

Oedipus at Colonus is the third in Sophocles' trilogy of plays about the famous king of Thebes and his unhappy family. It dramatizes the mysterious death of Oedipus, by which he is transformed into an immortal hero protecting Athens. This was Sophocles'...

In recent decades literary approaches to drama have multiplied: new historical, intertextual, political, performative and metatheatrical, socio-linguistic, gender-driven, transgenre-driven. New information has been amassed, sometimes by re-examination of...

This fascinating title, first published in 1922, presents a detailed overview of the life and works of Shakespeare. Alden first considers Shakespeare's Elizabethan context, alongside exploring the Classical and Italian foundations, political theories,...

Falls Ende - Quintus is book five in this fast-paced medieval series.Haunted by his father's troubled past, Odo's life is in imminent danger when he journeys to Dover Castle to attend to the king and queen. Shaken by revelations shared with him by...

The comedies of the Athenian dramatist Menander (c. 342-291 BC) and his contemporaries were the ultimate source of a Western tradition of light drama that has continued to the present day. Yet for over a millennium, Menander's own plays were thought to...

Shakespeare, the Renaissance and Empire presents Shakespeare as both a local and global writer, investigating Shakespeare's trans-cultural writing through the interrelations and interactions of binaries including theory and practice, past and present,...

Mystery Comedy George M. Cohan Characters: 10 male, 4 female Interior Set One of the most famous of Cohan's plays happens in a lonely tavern on a wild stormy night where a mysterious vagabond, a woman and the State Governor and his family who have been...

This volume provides modern, uncensored translations of Aristophanes' Acharnians, Knights, and Wasps. These plays, originally a series, are the world's earliest political satires, and are made available here for the first time in one volume, augmented by...

This book explores the notion that the emergent language of contemporary theatre, and more generally of modern culture, has links to much earlier forms of storytelling and an ancient worldview.

These essays of Sarah Carpenter have been selected to reflect her career's close focus on the relationship of performance and audience. They are drawn from the last 25 years of her writing, and this has enabled the editors to organise them not...

This book argues that in the course of grappling with skepticism, Shakespeare and Donne revolutionize the art of memory and discover an art of doubt. Topics important to students of Renaissance literature-such as mimesis, exemplarity, pastoral and...

This collection covers varied perspectives on both canonical and lesser-known Catholic women writers, all focusing on unruliness in what is commonly thought of as a restrictive site of writing for women: Catholicism. This volume is comprised of fourteen...

An investigation of the many ways that Shakespeare uses the defiant voice of the shrew. Kamaralli explores how modern performance practice negotiates the possibilities for staging these characters who refuse to conform to standards of acceptable...

Merely Players? marks a groundbreaking departure in Shakespeare studies by giving direct voice to the Shakespearean performer. It draws on three centuries worth of actors' written reflections on playing Shakespeare and brings together the dual worlds of...

Long before the economist Amartya Sen proposed that more than 100 million women were missing-lost to disease or neglect, kidnapping or forced marriage, denied the economic and political security of wages or membership in a larger social order-Shakespeare...

This interdisciplinary, transhistorical collection brings together international scholars from English literature, Italian studies, performance history, and comparative literature to offer new perspectives on the vibrant engagements between Shakespeare...

Henry IV, Part 1King Henry the 4th, from Palace to Pub, onto the battle fields again. Until there is no rebellion.*Overall contents was translated from poem form to play form, as basis for copyright ownership. Meaning all words are used, the form was...

Henry IV, Part 2Henry IV, from Palace, Priest and then tavern, he nevertheless finds some peace, after reflection. King Henry IV, and then King Henry V as fashionable by the end.*Overall contents was translated from poem form to play form, as basis for...

King Henry the 5th King Henry 5 fight his way toward France, they reach the peaceful and loving responses of a French King.*Overall contents was translated from poem form to play form, as basis for copyright ownership. Meaning all words are used, the...

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...

The Agamemnon of Aeschylus is a play written by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, and was first performed in Athens in 458 BCE. The play is the first part of a trilogy known as the Oresteia, which tells the story of the house of Atreus and the...

The monastic order of fighting monks, the Knights Templar, was home to Sir Odo Brus, and he'd taken strict vows of obedience, chastity, and poverty. His brother knights were like family, and without thought, he'd sacrafice his life for them. The...

In this lavishly illustrated book, one of the most important and influential scholars of the Renaissance stage brings together essays that have changed the way we think about the age of Shakespeare. His subjects are varied and interconnected: the...