Methuen Drama imprint: 1030 books

The Alchemist is set during a plague epidemic in the Liberty of Blackfriars in 1610 - and was first performed on tour in 1610 by the company whose London home at Blackfriars was temporarily closed due to a plague epidemic. The play is a sublimely accomplished satirical farce about people's diverse...

Early modern London - too foggy and Protestant to have a carnival - offered its inhabitants commercial events during which to indulge their need for bodily delights and festival exuberance. The fair of St Bartholmew, held anually in Smithfield on 24 August, served Jonson as an opportunity to dissect...

Bringing together four of the most popular and widely studied of Ben Jonson's plays, this anthology focuses on the city comedies for which Jonson is best known today: The Alchemist (edited by Elizabeth Cook), Volpone (edited by Robert N. Watson), Bartholmew Fair (edited by G.R. Hibbard) and Epicoene...

'A silent and loving woman is a gift of the lord' This 'excellent comedy of affliction' enjoyed enormous prestige for more than a century after its first performance: for John Dryden it had 'the greatest and most noble construction of any pure unmixed comedy in any language'. Its title signals...

Although it was written shortly before or after Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603 and performed by the boy company at Blackfriars, this play foreshadows the light ladies and callous gallants of Restoration comedy. Passion is a scourge, love is humiliation, and friends might as well be enemies. Freevill...

"This Malevole is one of the most prodigious affections that ever conversed with nature: a man, or rather a monster, more discontent than Lucifer." The Malcontent is a striking example of the new satiric tone and moral seriousness in English comedy of the early 1600s. The play's vision...

What does it take to control your performance nerves, to feel confident when facing audiences, and to acquire mastery of your talent? How can you feel secure in the knowledge that you are giving your best? This second edition of Secrets of Performing Confidence helps you to find solutions to...

This Jacobean city comedy is a curiosity in that it presents a real-life character, the notorious cross-dresser Moll Frith, who probably was among the first audiences of 'her' play before she was taken up for public misconduct. Middleton and Dekker's 'roaring girl' may outrage her society with her...

But that's what this is, isn't it? The ultimate bitch fight. When John takes a break from his boyfriend, his accidentally meets the girl of his dreams. Filled with guilt and indecision, he decides there is only one way to straighten this out . . . Mike Bartlett's metrosexual play about...

During the Apartheid years in South Africa, a copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare was smuggled around the prison on Robben Island. The book's significance resides in the fact that the book's owner, Sonny Venkatratham, passed it to a number of his fellow political prisoners in the single...

Like all of Jonson's city comedies, this play - here given in the 1616 Folio version, in which Jonson rewrote and set it in England, not Italy - is a kind of dramatised Do-It-Yourself kit on how to bluff one's way in Elizabethan London. Although Roman New Comedy, in which a crafty slave helps a wild...

Along with Mother Courage, the character of Galileo is one of Brecht's greatest creations, immensely live, human and complex. Unable to resist his appetite for scientific investigation, Galileo's heretical discoveries about the solar system bring him to the attention of the Inquisition. He is scared...

This version of Brecht's great anti-war play by playwright David Hare was premiered by the National Theatre, London, in November 1995. It adopts a freer approach to the text than many editions, adapting the original rather than offering a close translation. In this chronicle of the Thirty Years War,...

Described by Brecht as 'a gangster play that would recall certain events familiar to us all', Arturo Ui is a witty and savage satire of the rise of Hitler - recast by Brecht into a fictional, small-time Chicago gangster's takeover of the city's greengrocery trade in the 1930s. The satirical allegory...