Drama History Criticism category: 905 books

This CliffsNotes guide includes everything you’ve come to expect from the trusted experts at CliffsNotes, including analysis of the most widely read literary works.

Closer emerged as one of the most successful plays of the 1990s, and one with a continuing afterlife through the academy award nominated film adaptation in 2004. Although the work of dramatists such as Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill initially attracted the most critical and academic attention, Patrick...

Shakespeare in Birds and Music is a pairing of the two oddest works ever written about Shakespeare.  The first, entitled The Ornithology of Shakespeare and written by James Edmund Harting, describes all the allusions to birds that appear in Shakespeare’s works. The second, entitled...

This CliffsNotes guide includes everything you’ve come to expect from the trusted experts at CliffsNotes, including analysis of the most widely read literary works.

The second set of volumes in the eighteen-volume series Great Shakespeareans, covering the work of nineteen key figures who influenced the global understanding of Shakespeare

Cruce de caminos entre un pasado de tentativas, un presente de evidencias y un futuro de indudables repercusiones, el Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (1609) resume el pulso dramático de una época y la posición estética y vital de su autor. Considerado el primer manifiesto del teatro...

This CliffsNotes guide includes everything you’ve come to expect from the trusted experts at CliffsNotes, including analysis of the most widely read literary works.

In the Alexander Lectures for 1965-66 at the University of Toronto, Dr. Frye describes the basis of the tragic vision as "being in time," in which death as "the essential event that gives shape and form to life ... defines the individual, and marks him off from the continuity of life...

From the "angry young man" who wrote Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in 1962, determined to expose the emptiness of American experience to Tiny Alice which reveals his indebtedness to Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco's Theatre of the Absurd, Edward Albee's varied work makes it difficult...

Upon initial publication in 1956, this book was an attempt to re-state certain problems concerning the aesthetics and ethics of the tragic form; to examine these in relation to contemporary work in psychology and anthropology; to enquire into the significance of ‘the fact or experience called tragedy’...

This CliffsNotes guide includes everything you’ve come to expect from the trusted experts at CliffsNotes, including analysis of the most widely read literary works.

While successful plays tend to share certain storytelling elements, there is no single blueprint for how a play should be constructed. Instead, seasoned playwrights know how to select the right elements for their needs and organize them in a structure that best supports their particular story. Through...

This Victorian comedy of manners sparkles with Wilde's trademark repartee, epigrams, and witty dialogue. Arch-moralist Lady Windermere, shattered by the suspicion of her husband’s infidelity, contemplates running off with a roué until her rival illustrates the difference between morality and its appearance. A comic masterpiece, studded with humorous quips and clever paradoxes.

In his final play, Sophocles returns to the ever-popular character of Oedipus, the blind outcast of Thebes, the ultimate symbol of human reversal, whose fall he had so memorably treated in the 'Oedipus Tyrannus'. In this play, Sophocles brings the aged Oedipus to Athens, where he seeks succour and...