Drama History Criticism category: 905 books

Encompassing nearly a century of drama, this is the first book to provide students and scholars with a truly comprehensive guide to the early modern soliloquy. Considering the antecedents of the form in Roman, late fifteenth and mid-sixteenth century drama, it analyses its diversity, its theatrical...

Introducing readers to the key texts, theatrical practice and context of late seventeenth-century drama, David Roberts combines literary and theatrical approaches to show how Restoration plays were written, performed, received and printed. Structured according to the 'life cycle' of the dramatic text,...

Replay: Classic Modern Drama Reimagined spans over a century of great theatre to explore how iconic plays have been adapted and versioned by later writers to reflect or dissect the contemporary zeitgeist. Starting with A Doll's House, Ibsen's much-reprised masterpiece of marital relations from...

First published in 2006, Alek's Sierz's The Theatre of Martin Crimp provided a groundbreaking study of one of British theatre's leading contemporary playwrights. Combining Sierz's lucid prose and sharp analysis together with interviews with Martin Crimp and a host of directors and actors who have...

Collects leading scholars’ insight on the plays, production, music, audiences, and political and aesthetic concerns of modern Yiddish theater.

George Farquhar (1677–1707) is one of the most successful and enduringly popular Restoration playwrights. His two masterpieces*, The Recruiting Officer* and The Beaux' Stratagem, are still regularly performed today. Yet aspects of Farquhar's biography, and in particular his Irish roots and family...

Since the premiere of his play FOB in 1979, the Chinese American playwright David Henry Hwang has made a significant impact in the U. S. and beyond. The Theatre of David Henry Hwang provides an in-depth study of his plays and other works in theatre. Beginning with his "Trilogy of Chinese...

In this classic work, acclaimed Shakespeare critic C. L. Barber argues that Elizabethan seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night are the key to understanding Shakespeare's comedies. Brilliantly interweaving anthropology, social history, and literary criticism, Barber traces the inward...

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, Gao Xingjian is the first Chinese writer to be so lauded for his prose and plays. Since relocating to France in 1987, in a voluntary exile from China, he has assembled a body of dramatic work that has best been understood neither as expressly Chinese...

Hailed by critics during the 1980s as the decade's 'Great American Playwright', Sam Shepard continued to produce work in a wide array of media including short prose, films, plays, performances and screenplays until his death in 2017. Like Samuel Beckett and Tennessee Williams in their autumnal years,...

Space: it's everywhere, all around, a given. It's abstract and yet not abstract at all, because it governs all human relations, shapes the way we understand our place on the planet, and orients us toward others (for better and for worse). How do theatre scholars understand space and place in performance?...

This volume explores the development of literary culture in sixteenth-century England as a whole and seeks to explain the relationship between the Reformation and the literary renaissance of the Elizabethan period. Its central theme is the 'common' in its double sense of something shared and something...

The spellbinding premiere of The Weir at the Royal Court in 1997 was the first of many works to bring Conor McPherson to the attention of the theatre-going public. Acclaimed plays followed, including Shining City, The Seafarer, The Night Alive and Girl from the North Country, garnering international...

The immediate post-war period marks a pivotal moment in the internationalization of American theatre when Tennessee Williams' plays became some of Broadway's most critically acclaimed and financially lucrative exports. Dirk Gindt offers a detailed study of the production and reception of Williams'...