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Essays on a wide range of topics including the role of early modern chess in upholding Aristotelian virtue; readings of Sidney, Wroth, Spenser, and Shakespeare; and several topics involving the New World.Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The present volume opens with an essay on early modern chess, arguing that it covertly upheld an Aristotelian concept of virtue against the destabilizing ethical views of writers such as Machiavelli. This provocative opening is followed by iconoclastic discussions of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Wroth's Urania, and Spenser's Fairie Queen. The next essay investigates the mystery surrounding editorship of the 1571 printing of The Mirror for Magistrates. The essays then pivot into the exotic world of Hermetic'statue magic'in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale and the even more exotic worlds of alchemy, Aztec war gods, and conversion in sixteenth-century Mexico. Two further essays remain in the New World, the first examining the representational connections between the twelve Caesars and the twelve Inca kings, the second taking stock of Thomas Harriot's contribution to the understanding of Amerindian languages. The penultimate essay looks at Holbein's depiction of Henry VIII's ailing body, and the volume concludes with a complex analysis of guilt and shame in Molière's L'École des Femmes.Contributors: Jean Marie Christensen, William Coulter, Christopher Crosbie, Shepherd Aaron Ellis, Scott Lucas, Fernando Martinez-Periset, Timothy Pyles, Rachel Roberts, Jesse Russell, Janet Stephens, Weiao Xing. The journal is edited by Jim Pearce of North Carolina Central University and Ward Risvold of Georgia College and State University.

Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. This volume examines the sacred and the profane in the early modern period.The 2023 volume features essays from the conference held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The opening essay juxtaposes Socratic irony and Hermeticism in its exploration of the Neoplatonic influences in Spenser's Faerie Queene. It is followed by three analyses of religious poems; the first demonstrates the ways in which William Baldwin resurrects Edward the sixth in his'Funeralles of King Edward'to promote his own evangelical agenda; the second takes a close look at Herrick's'Rex Tragicus,'arguing that it is a powerful expression of'English religious identity.'The final essay in this group seeks to complicate the history of the early modern female sonneteer. Returning to the secular, the next essay compares a work by Polish writer Andrzej Modrzewski to Sir Thomas More's Utopia. Art history is the focus of the following triad of essays, which illuminate the visual cultures of the Netherlands and Spain; they address the collaborative organization of the Spanish sculptor Alonso Berruguete's workshop, the related phenomenon of fiction, faith, and spectacle in Maarten van Heemskerck's religious imagery, and the political dimensions of the aesthetics of Habsburg portraiture. The volume concludes with an exuberant analysis of the role of fiction in the art of biographical writing, using the example of Katherine Rundell's Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. Contributors: Sunmin Cha, Ilenia Colón Mendoza, Scott Lucas, Gerardo Rappazzo Amura, Mary Ruth Robinson, Jesse Russell, Paul J. Stapleton, John Wall, Vaclav Zheng.

Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The theme of this year's volume is'sacred places, secular spaces.'It begins with a'who is it'mystery, examining two portraits by Raphael that embody the sacred and the profane, respectively. The next essay engages both the sacred and pictorial innovationsin Holbein's predella The Dead Christ; while the following one views the sacred through the critical lens of race, arguing that Northern European churchmen normalized views on race by strategically placing racialized artifacts in their churches. The scene then shifts to 16th century Venice, where the Greek community contended with local authorities over the right to establish a sacred site for interring their dead. The next two essays swing the pendulum toward the secular: an essay on ecocriticism suggests that the early modern period expelled the sacred from nature and presents a Rabelaisian antidote, while an essay on Spenser's The Faerie Queene presents it as a blueprint for colonization. The volume concludes with Contributors: Julie Fox-Horton, Lorenz A. Hindrichsen, Heather Hirschfeld, Elizabeth Lisot-Nelson, Jesse Russell, Victor Velázquez, John N. Wall, Jennifer Wu.The journal is edited by Jim Pearce of North Carolina Central University and Ward Risvold of Georgia College and State University.

In a brilliant coda to the play Copenhagen, Michael Frayn receives mysterious letters that take him back to the theme of his bestselling novel, Headlong -- human folly, this time his own.Michael Frayn's Copenhagen has established itself as one of the finest pieces of drama to grace the stage in recent years. The subject of the Tony-winning play is the strange visit the German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg made to his former mentor, scientist Niels Bohr, in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen and the quarrel that ensued. Heisenberg's intentions on that visit, for good or for evil, have long intrigued and baffled historians and scientists. One day, during the British run of Copenhagen, Frayn received a curious package from a suburban housewife, which contained a few faded pages of barely legible German writings. These pages, which she claimed to have found concealed beneath her floorboards, seemed to cast a remarkable new light on the mystery at the heart of play. As more material emerged -- specifically notes that appeared to give instructions on how to put up a table-tennis table but perhaps containing important encoded information -- actor David Burke, who was playing Niels Bohr, began to display extreme, even suspicious interest in Frayn's growing obsession with cracking the riddle of the papers. And Frayn, for his part, lost all sense of certainty. Was he the victim of an elaborate hoax? By turns comic and profound, The Copenhagen Papers explores the conundrum that is always at the heart of Frayn's work -- human gullibility and the eternal difficulty of knowing why we do what we do.

Collection of the best scholarly essays from the 2020 Southeastern Renaissance Conference plus essays submitted directly to the journal. Topics run from the epic to influence studies to the perennial problem of love and beyond.Renaissance Papers 2020 features essays from the conference held virtually at Mercer University, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The volume opens with an essay that discusses the'ultimate story,'the epic, and argues, pointing to the Henriad and The Faerie Queen, that some of the most ambitious remain unfinished; an essay on'just war'and Henry V follows, suggesting why such epic inconclusion may not be such a bad thing. A trio of influence studies investigate post-Marian virginity, Miltonic environmentalism, and cross-dressing knights. Three essays then interrogate the perennial problem of love: in popular ballads, in Hero and Leander, and in The Rape of Lucrece. An essay argues counterintuitively for Amelia Lanyer and Margaret Cavendish as exemplars of the Cavalier Ideal of the Bonum Vitae; it is followed by an equally provocative reconsideration of the role of Claudio D'Arezzo's rhetorical works for Sicilian national identity. The last essay analyzes the formal signatures of three sixteenth-century queens and how they sought to represent themselves on the public stage.

Sixty-sixth annual volume, taking in a range of topics relating to the literature of the period, from the power of naming to Shakespeare and Spenser, Herbert, Margaret Tyler and Margaret Cavendish, and Ben Jonson.Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2019 volume, the sixty-sixth annual, features essays from the conference held at North Carolina StateUniversity, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The volume opens with an essay on the power of naming in creating early modern subjectivities, followed by a pair of provocative discussions of Shakespeare's plays:the first addresses temporal gaps in A Winter's Tale; the second is a reading of misogyny in The Taming of the Shrew in which Petruchio is no longer seen as'the true tamer.'The two essays at the epicenter of thisyear's volume focus on religious topics, with a consideration of the mystical, specifically the notion of ascesis, in the work of Shakespeare and Spenser, followed by a more sublunary presentation of religious themes in George Herbert's estate poems. The next essay proposes a novel source for Margaret Tyler's reference to'the Jews'in her'Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood'and is followed by a reconsideration of the variety of epitaphic subgenres available in the seventeenth century. The penultimate essay addresses Margaret Cavendish, Ben Jonson, and humanist dramaturgy, and the essay that concludes the journal examines Jonson's attempts to construct a hierarchy of literaryvalue within the complex constraints of the early modern marketplace. Contributors: Faith Acker, William A. Coulter, Sonia Desai, Kristen N. Gragg, Kara McCabe, Robert Lanier Reid, Ward Risvold, Rachel M. De Smith Roberts, Deneen M. Senasi.

Sixty-fifth annual volume, focusing notably on Shakespearean drama and the poetry of early modern England but with essays on a variety of other topics relevant to the period.Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2018 volume features essays presented at the conference at Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The volume opens with four essays on Shakespearean drama, offering readings ranging from the heteroglossia in Henry VIII to the limits of language in King Lear, social networks in Anthony and Cleopatra, and epiphanic excursions in the Shakespearean corpus. The next essays look at iconology, agency, and alterity on the early modern stage and colonial Peruvian art. The journal then returns us to the poetry of early modern England. The first of this group explores the perils of poor reading in The Countess of Montgomery's Uriana and is followed by essays investigating the aesthetic connection between Spenser and Catullus and the sacred circularities in John Donne's'Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward.'The volume concludes with an extended consideration of meritocracy and misogyny in the works of Ben Jonson. Contributors: Nathan Dixon, Lisandra Estevez, Melissa J. Rack, Robert Lanier Reid, Rachel M. De Smith Roberts, Deneen Senasi, Jonathon Shelley, Kendall Spillman, John Wall, and Don E. Wayne. The journal is edited by Jim Pearce of North Carolina Central University and Ward Risvold of the University of California, San Diego.

This year's volume offers many contributions on early modern drama alongside essays probing identity, iconography, and devotional imagery in religious spaces and artworks.Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2017 volume opens with a trio of essays probing identity, iconography, and devotional imagery in connection with the sacred spaces of St. Paul's Cathedral and of the Bichi Chapel frescoes in the Church of St. Agostino in Siena, as well as with Francisco de Zurburán's Crucifixion with a Painter. The majority of the volume'sessays concern early modern drama: botany and the body in Titus Andronicus; Ovidian sleep in Romeo and Juliet, The Winter's Tale, and Othello; chivalry in Richard II and 1 Henry IV; transhumanist discourse in Othello; obedience and devils in Dr. Faustus, and domesticity and commerce in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. The focus then shifts to the non-dramatic with reconsiderations of the intertextualities in Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece and the paratextualities in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. The final essay, on the Faerie Queene, explores the intended and unintended literary consequences of pairing humor with death. Contributors: Jasmin W. Cyril, Lisandra Estevez, Tony Perrello, Emily Johnson Roberts, Rachel M. De Smith Roberts, Deneen M. Sensai, Margaret Simon, Elisha Sircy, Susan C. Staub, Frances Teague, John N.Wall, Lewis Walker. The journal is edited by Jim Pearce of North Carolina Central University and Ward J. Risvold of the University of California, San Diego.

Annual volume of the best essays submitted to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, this year with an emphasis on Shakespeare, reading practices, and the visual arts.Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2016 volume features essays from the conference held at Wake Forest University, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The first essay looks at early modern reading practices in the Durham Folio and the prayer book of Lady Jane Grey. The interest in reading practices resurfaces in the next essay on the importance ofreading in the artistic life of Velasquez. The majority of the contributions address the plays of Shakespeare: one essay reflects on the way in which collaboration between audience and actors creates the theatrical experience ofA Midsummer Night's Dream; another proposes a new chronology in Measure for Measure; next is an essay on space and globalism in Antony and Cleopatra; and the last offering in this section looks at rhetoric andits subversions in King Lear. These are followed by an essay on class antagonism and murderous antifeminism in The Revenger's Tragedy and The Duchess of Malfi. The volume concludes with an essay that examinesthe contrasting prologues of parts one and two of Don Quixote. Contributors: Bernadine Barnes, Harry Berger Jr., Geraldo U. de Sousa, Nathan Dixon, Emily Donahoe, Lisandra Estevez, Deneen M. Sensai, Emily Stockard, and John Wall. The journal is edited by Jim Pearce of North Carolina Central University and Ward Risvold of the University of Georgia.

Annual volume of the best essays submitted to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, this year with an emphasis on English drama and the cultural anxieties it expresses.Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2015 volume features essays from the conference held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The volume opens with a trio of reconsiderations of the impact of patronage on theater under the Stuarts, the role of the audience in Hamlet, and the role of King Arthur in The Faerie Queene. The heart of this year's journal is English drama, featuring essays on anxieties about nationhood in The Spanish Tragedy, generic anomalies and Chaucerian echoes in All's Well That Ends Well, the inversion of the hagiographical tradition in Shakespeare's Richard III, and the complexities coalescing around authorial identity under the Stuarts. In the penultimate essay, the focus shifts to the non-dramatic with a reconsideration of Milton's Paradise Regained and its relationship to the court masque. The last offering is a historical essay on the intersection of the personal and the political in John Wray's The Pilgrim'sJournal. The volume concludes with four book reviews. Contributors: David M. Bergeron, William A. Coulter, Timothy D. Crowley, Melissa Geil, Lainie Pomerleau, Robert Lanier Reid, Emily Stockard, Lewis Walker, John N. Wall. The journal is edited by Jim Pearce of North Carolina Central University and Ward Risvold of the University of Georgia.

Annual volume of the best essays submitted to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, this year with an emphasis on English drama, particularly Jonson and Marlowe.Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2014 volume opens and closes with essays on historically based explorations of identity: the first onthe circle of Jane Scroop in Skelton's Philip Sparrow, and the last on dogs and horses as symbols of national identity in early modern England. The heart of this year's journal is English drama, especially Jonson and Marlowe: there are essays on Puritan logic in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair; grotesque sex in Jonson's Volpone; the role of anti-Catholicism in the creation of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus; and the relationship between puppetry and the Faust legend. Marlowe and Jonson also surface in two reconsiderations of their non-dramatic works; first an essay on Ovidian resonances in Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and second a reflection on Spenserian echoesin Jonson's Epode. The next essay shifts to the poetics of religious literature, arguing for clothing as an important metaphor for renewal in Herbert's The Temple, and the penultimate essay addresses imaginative resources in the Martin Marprelate pamphlets. Contributors: William Coulter, Philip Goldfarb, Chris Hill, Joanna Kucinski, Pamela Macfie, Sara Mayo, Barry Shelton, Emily Stockard, Lisa Ulevich, Emma Annette Wilson.The journal is edited by Jim Pearce of North Carolina Central University and Ward Risvold of the University of Georgia.

The best essays submitted to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference in 2008, with a focus on the performance history of Renaissance drama.Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2008 volume, in keeping with the Conference's meeting at the new Blackfriars Playhouse at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, has a special emphasis on the performance history of Renaissance drama. It includes essays on the use of trap doors in London theaters, on the staging of dismemberment in Renaissance plays, on the economics of the boys'companies, and on Jonson's engagement with changing patterns of theatrical patronage in Volpone. An essay on Troilus and Cressida and the history play rounds out the volume's studiesin drama. Three essays treat epic from a variety of perspectives, considering in turn Spenser's techniques for leading readers to doubt his narrator in Book Three of the Faerie Queene, Marlowe's allusions to Lucan in Hero and Leander, and Milton's treatment of names and materialism in Paradise Lost. Two essays examine decidedly different incidents of sixteenth-century religious controversy: Wolsey's use of Italian models to display his magnificence through his building program, and Thomas Stapleton's translation of Bede during the Great Controversy to refute Protestant claims about the origins of the English Church. Contributors: Jane Blanchard, Kevin M. Carr, Nicholas Crawford, Sara Nair James, Claire Kimball, C. Bryan Love, Pamela Royston Macfie, James J. Mainard O'Connell, Paul J. Stapleton, and Lewis Walker. Christopher Cobb is Assistant Professor of Englishat Saint Mary's College.

Eight new essays on topics from Shakespeare and Dryden to Donne, Bronzino, Sidney, Hutchinson, and Milton.Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. In the 2005 volume, two essays focus on Shakespeare: one on'choric juxtaposition'in his twinned characters and one on the rhetoric of The Tempest; another essay on drama considers Dryden's critical response to Epicoene. There are two essays on John Donne, one on the choir space in his conduct of worship in St. Paul'sand the other on the revisions to his Elegies. Other essays consider the influence of Castiglione on the paintings of Bronzino, the metaphor of the horse and horsemanship in Sidney's poetics, and the role of conversation inHutchinson and Milton. Contributors: George Walton Williams, Sara Van Den Berg, Jennifer Brady, John N. Wall, Ernest W. Sullivan II, Heather L. Holian, Anne Lake Prescott, and Boyd Berry M. Thomas Hester isProfessor of English, and Christopher Cobb is Assistant Professor of English, both at North Carolina State University.

This volume gathers 16 papers originally written for the occasion of the 49th Colston Symposium, held in Bristol in 1997, and substantially revised for this publication. They reflect on some of the key developments in the discipline of Theatre Studies over the past fifty years and combine this with a discussion of new trends and approaches, especially in the fields of Performance Studies, reception analysis, interculturalism, sociocultural analysis, theatre anthropology, dance and movement analysis, computer-assisted reconstruction of performance venues, street theatre, guerilla theatre, ritual theatre, etc.

Plautine Trends: Studies in Plautine Comedy and its Reception, a collective volume published as a Festschrift in honour of Prof. D. Raios (University of Ioannina), aims to contribute to the current, intense discussion on Plautine drama and engage with most of the topics which lie at the forefront of recent scholarship on ‘literary Plautus'. 13 papers by experts on Roman Comedy address issues concerning a) the structure of Plautine plot in its social, historical and philosophical contexts, b) the interfaces between language and comic plot, and c) plot and language as signs of reception. Participants include (in alphabetical order): A. Augoustakis, R.R. Caston, D.M. Christenson, M. Fontaine, S. Frangoulidis, M. Hanses, E. Karakasis, D. Konstan, K. Kounaki–Philippides, S. Papaioannou, A. Sharrock, N.W. Slater, and J.T. Welsh. The papers of the volume are preceded by an introduction offering a review of the extensive literature on the subject in recent years and setting the volume in its critical context. The preface to the volume is written by R.L. Hunter. The book is intended for students or scholars working on or interested in Plautine Comedy and its reception.

This is a paper on two pairs of twinned plays by Shakespeare. The role of nature as healing agent is described. A comparison between green and human nature shows that in an Elizabethan view assumed female properties can be matched to properties of nature. Performing a spacial analysis we find an enormous potenial for creativity in intermediate spaces. Be it between patriarchal and natural space or between what was seen in Shakespeare´s time as male or female behaviour.

Activated Script Analysis engages theatre students in traditional formative script analysis through a fusion of devised theatre and various modes of creative expression, dispelling the notion of script analysis as an isolated pen-to-paper task and reimagining it as a captivating and collaborative process.This book uses diverse, contemporary plays to model the script analysis process for each of four Theatrical Elements: Given Circumstances; Character; Setting; and Structure. By considering each of these elements, readers can uncover patterns and themes within a dramatic text. Woven throughout the study of each theatrical element are'Connections': Personal Connections, which encourage readers to explore a theatrical element within their own lives, as though their lives were a script; Play Connections, which make abstract ideas presented in script analysis concrete through theatre-based play; Professional Connections, which examine how a theatre professional might analyze a script within their own work; and Performative Connections, which provide the opportunity for students to explore a theatrical element through performance using devised theatre strategies. At the end of each chapter, readers are given the opportunity to analyze a text through the lens of a Theatrical Element and to express their findings through a variety of digital, written, visual, and performance-based modes of expression.Activated Script Analysis is designed for undergraduate theatre students and educators, to be used as the primary text in Script Analysis coursework or as a supplemental text in Acting or Directing courses.The book includes access to downloadable templates and example videos, available at www.routledge.com/9781032125398.

How many hit musicals are based on films that were shot in two days at a budget of $30,000? The answer is one: Little Shop of Horrors. Roger Corman's monster movie opened in 1960, played the midnight circuit, and then disappeared from view. Two decades later, Little Shop of Horrors opened Off-Broadway and became a surprise success. Attack of the Monster Musical: A Cultural History of Little Shop of Horrors chronicles this unlikely phenomenon. The Faustian tale of Seymour and his man-eating plant transcended its humble origins to become a global phenomenon, launching a popular film adaptation and productions all around the world. This timely and authoritative book looks at the creation of the musical and its place in the contemporary musical theatre canon. Examining its afterlives and wider cultural context, the book asks the question why this unlikely combination of blood, annihilation, and catchy tunes has resonated with audiences from the 1980s to the present. At the core of this in-depth study is the collaboration between the show's creators, Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. Told through archival research and eyewitness accounts, this is the first book to make extensive use of Ashman's personal papers, offering a unique and inspiring study of one of musical theatre's greatest talents.

A unique play anthology featuring five gripping docudramas originally commissioned by L.A. Theatre Works that each explore pivotal moments in 20th century U.S history.With ensemble casts and innovative staging potential these plays are perfect for theatre companies, schools and educational groups looking to stage familiar historical stories in new and original ways. Each play is accompanied by dramaturgical notes that help contextualize and analyze both the events themselves and the dramatic form in which they are presented.The scripts included are:The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial by Peter GoodchildThe Real Dr. Strangelove by Peter Goodchild RFK: The Journey to Justice by Murray Horwitz and Jonathan EstrinThe Chicago Conspiracy Trial by Peter GoodchildTop Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers by Geoffrey Cowan and Leroy Aarons (Winner of theCorporation for Public Broadcasting Best Live Entertainment Award, 1992)As well as five scripts this anthology includes a foreword by Professor Michael Hackett, professor of directing and theatre history at UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.

This book, newly updated, contains now several HTML tables of contents that will make reading a real pleasure! The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work. 1. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) 2. The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri) 3. Meditations (Marcus Aurelius) 4. Emma (Jane Austen) 5. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) 6. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (L. Frank Baum) 7. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) 8. Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë) 9. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne Brontë) 10. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes) 11. The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Agatha Christie) 12. The Richest Man in Babylon (George S. Clason) 13. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle) 14. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) 15. A Tale Of Two Cities (Charles Dickens) 16. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) 17. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas) 18. Middlemarch (George Eliot) 19. The Innocence of Father Brown (G. K. Chesterton) 20. The Border Legion (Zane Grey) 21. The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne) 22. Think And Grow Rich (Napoleon Hill) 23. The Odyssey (Homer) 24. The Iliad (Homer) 25. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Victor Hugo) 26. Les Misérables (Victor Hugo) 27. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett) 28. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Washington Irving) 29. The Turn of the Screw (Henry James) 30. The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka) 31. The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling) 32. The Call Of The Wild (Jack London) 33. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy) 34. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy) 35. At the Mountains of Madness (H.P Lovecraft) 36. The Call of Cthulhu (H.P Lovecraft) 37. Anne of Green Gables (Lucy Maud Montgomery) 38. The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (Joseph Murphy) 39. Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson) 40. The Fall Of The House Of Usher (Edgar Allan Poe) 41. Swann's Way (Marcel Proust) 42. The Federalist Papers (Publius) 43. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) 44. Dracula (Bram Stoker) 45. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Mark twain) 46. The Art of War (Sun Tzu) 47. Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu) 48. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (Lew Wallace) 49.The Science of Getting Rich (Wallace D. Wattles) 50. The War of the Worlds (H. G. Wells)

The papers of the present volume investigate the potential of the metaphor of life as theater for literary, philosophical, juridical and epistemological discourses from the Middle Ages through modernity, and focusing on traditions as manifold as French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian and Latin-American.

Acknowledgements — Preface by Maria Anita Stefanelli — 1. Making Visible. Theatrical Form as Metaphor: Marina Carr and Caryl Churchill by Cathy Leeney — 2. Obscene Transformations: Violence, Women and Theatre in Sarah Kane and Marina Carr by Melissa Sihra — 3. Can the Subaltern Dream? Epistemic Violence, Oneiric Awakenings and the Quest for Subjective Duality in Marina Carr's Marble - Interview with Marina Carr - Excerpt from Marble by Marina Carr by Valentina Rapetti — 4. “The house is a battlefield now”: War of the Sexes and Domestic Violence in Van Badham's Kitchen and Warren Adler's The War of the Roses - Interview with Van Badham - Excerpt from Kitchen by Van Badham by Barbara Miceli — 5. Serial Killers, Serial Lovers: Raquel Almazan's La Paloma Prisoner - Interview with Raquel Almazan - Excerpt from La Paloma Prisoner by Raquel Almazan by Alessandro Clericuzio — 6. “To Put My Life Back into the Main Text”: Re-Dressing History in The Second Coming of Joan of Arc by Carolyn Gage - Interview with Carolyn Gage - Excerpt from The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays by Carolyn Gage by Sabrina Vellucci — 7. Turning Muteness into Performance in Erin Shields'If We Were Birds - Interview with Erin Shields - Excerpt from If We Were Birds by Erin Shields by Maria Anita Stefanelli — 8. Afterword: Vocal and Verbal Assertiveness by Kate Burke — Contributors An extraordinary complexity characterizes the encounter between theatre, mythology, and human rights when gender-based violence is on the platform. Another encounter enhances the cross-disciplinary and transnational dynamics in this book: the one between the scholar and the playwright, who exchange views to pursue a theme demanding due attention at an emergence that needs being explored to be understood and combated, and finally turned into a priority action. Through the analysis of a repertoire of contemporary plays and performance practices from English-speaking countries, the contributors explore in detail the asymmetrical relations that exist between men and women, the crimes involved, and the ways in which the protagonists'minds work differently. The unconventional format adopted for the five central sections that follow two papers centered on Marina Carr's theatre in comparison with two noteworthy British playwrights', and that forerun the final stringent remarks about woman's (like man's) fundamental right to speak and need for words, offers not just single chapters, however provocative, on an aspect of the theme, but a tripartite session boasting a critical inquiry into the text, the playwright's response to criticism, and a sample of the author's creative expression. What emerges is a prismatic, complex, and visceral vision of the plays offered to the public for further elaboration and critique. Beside Carr, those involved are Raquel Almazan, Van Badham, Carolyn Gage and Erin Shields – all of them champions of today's feminist commitment to denounce, through their art, violence against women.

Charles Edward Montague was born in London on New Year's Day, 1867 and educated at the City of London School and then Balliol College, Oxford. At university, Montague, a keen writer, wrote several literary reviews for the Manchester Guardian and was then invited for a month's trial and, after impressing, to work there. Montague and the editor, C. P. Scott shared the same political views and between them they turned the Manchester Guardian into a vibrant and campaigning newspaper. They were for Irish Home Rule and against the Boer War and the First World War. But now that the war had begun. Montague believed that it was important to give full and unequivocal support to the British government. Despite his age, 47, he was determined to serve. Montague was soon promoted to the rank of second lieutenant and with it a transfer to Military Intelligence. The war also brought about a crisis in his faith and it was resolved by Montague temporarily putting it to one side and carrying on with the fighting. In November 1918 the war was over and Montague could now return home to his wife and family and also to the Manchester Guardian where he would continue to work until retirement in 1925. For Montague the war had been corrosive but it had given him much to write about both for the paper but also for his books which he now hoped to also spend more time on. Among those to flow from his pen are the novels A Hind Let Loose and Rough Justice as well as collections of short stories, other essays and a travel book. He finally retired in 1925, and settled down to become a full-time writer in the last years of his life. Charles Edward Montague died in Manchester on May 28th, 1928 at the age of 61.

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 1642 marked an end to theatrical production in England until the playhouses were reopened in 1660 is a product of post-Restoration re-writing of the English civil wars and the representations of royalists and parliamentarians that emerged in the 1640s and 1650s. These retellings of recent events in dramatic form mean that drama is central to civil-war discourse. Staging the revolution examines the ways in which drama was used to rewrite the civil war and commonwealth period and demonstrates that, far from marking a clear cultural demarcation from the theatrical output of the early seventeenth century, the Restoration is constantly reflecting back on the previous thirty years.

This study explores the theater actually known and frequented by Dickens in order to show in terms of concrete structural analysis of his novels the nature of the predominantly'dramatic'or'theatrical'quality of his genius. Author William F. Axton finds that the three principal dramatic modes or'voices'that were characteristically Victorian were burlesquerie, grotesquerie, and the melodramatic, and that the novelist's vision of the world around him was drawn from ways of seeing transformed from those elements in the popular playhouse of his day—as revealed in the structure and theme of Sketches by Boz, Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and other novels.The last half of the study analyzes representative passages from the novels to illustrate the way in which the principal modes of nineteenth-century theatrical style are transmuted into the three important'voices'of the novelist's prose style. The first two voices—the burlesque and the grotesque—are identified by their exploitation of the stylistic features of farce, extravaganza, and harlequinade, of incongruous likeness and deliberate confusion between realms. The melodramatic voice, on the other hand, seeks to exploit in prose the musically rhythmic and poetic resources of the theater for the purpose of atmosphere, moral commentary, and structural unity.

Essays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the Middle Ages, with a particular focus on its relationship with business and finance.In the wake of the many passionate responses to its predecessor, Studies in Medievalism 22 also addresses the role of corporations in medievalism. Amid the three opening essays, Amy S. Kaufman examines how three modern novelists have refracted contemporary corporate culture through an imagined and highly dystopic Middle Ages. On either side of that paper, Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz explore how the Woolworth Company and Google have variously promoted, distorted, appropriated, resisted, and repudiated post-medieval interpretations of the Middle Ages. And Clare Simmons expands on that approach in a full-length article on the Lord Mayor's Show in London. Readers are then invited to find other permutations of corporate influence in six articles on the gendering of Percy's Reliques, the Romantic Pre-Reformation in Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth, renovation and resurrection in M.R. James's'Episode of Cathedral History', salvation in the Commedia references of Rodin's Gates of Hell, film theory and the relationship of the Sister Arts to the cinematic Beowulf, and American containment culture in medievalist comic-books. While offering close, thorough studies of traditional media and materials, the volume directly engages timely concerns about the motives and methods behind this field and many others inacademia. Karl Fugelso is Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland. Contributors: Aida Audeh, Elizabeth Emery, Katie Garner, Nickolas Haydock, Amy S. Kaufman, Peter W. Lee, Patrick J. Murphy, Fred Porcheddu, Clare A. Simmons, Mark B. Spencer, Richard Utz.

Charles Morgan was the dramatic critic of The Times for most of the years between 1922 and 1939.The reviews for this small selection are taken from thousands written for The Times and from his weekly articles for the New York Times on the London theatre. Morgan was widely regarded as the most influential critic of his day. His fellow critic, James Agate, wrote'When Morgan is on form he has us all beat.'Though most were written overnight for the following day's paper, they were given space allowed to no modern critic.Beautifully written, they bring to life many of the great actors and actresses and the dramatists, old and new, as the theatre moved from the frivolous Twenties into the shadow of another war and towards the modern theatre of today. As they mirror the development of English theatrical taste in the inter-war years, they are as much a delight to read, both witty and erudite, as they are an important historical record.

Drama in India is as old as its Customs starting right from the Vedic era. The distinct style of Indian dramaturgy evolved as an illustration of the rich mores of Indian traditions rituals, customs and ethnicity from Bharat Muni's Natya Shastra which is also known as the fifth veda. It is said to have taken recitation from Rig Veda, imitation from Yajur Veda, melody from Sama Veda, and aesthetics from Atharva Veda as a means to subtly communicate significant experiences. Drama flourished in ancient India but with the decline of Sanskrit language it slipped into oblivion. However, the folk tradition continued unhampered in its various regional forms for a long time and kept the dramatic tradition alive. In the pre-independence era, playwrights like Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo and Harindranath Chattopadhyaya contributed significantly to the growth of Indian English drama. With time the nature of English drama changed once again from being a depiction of the European lifestyle to showcasing culture and traditions and propagating ideas of independence and after independence to being a broader representation of the social political and economic life of the country. In the meanwhile drama in regional languages also started to emerge as an important genre and writers like Dharamvir Bharati, Badal Sircar, Mohan Rakesh, Vijay Tendulkar and Girish Kamad began to experiment with and use remarkable innovations in themes, treatment and technique. Eminent theatre personalities like Habib Tanvir, Girish Kamad, Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Dattani, Marijula Padmanabhan and many others are responsible for the movement of English drama in India towards maturity making it stand apart as a distinct art form which is both serious and dignified. Drama today has emerged as a powerful resurgent medium to project the problematic of the social, cultural, political, traditional and historical changes that the Indian society faces besides the issues related to gender, class, caste and communities. Present anthology contains twenty three scholarly papers looking at Indian English drama from a variety of critical positions providing useful insights. The collection will certainly prove to be useful to students, research scholars teachers and others with interest in English Literature especially drama.

He wants me to fuck about with paper clips in some office with a smile on my face, fuck him... but there's just one thing I've got to take care of first. I've got to do something to make this right.Four years on from the collapse of the Lehman Brothers and still we find ourselves in crisis. It's time to work out what's wrong. It's time to look at the heart of the system.You Can Still Make A Killing is the story of the normal men and women who fill the City's institutions, of a world radically altered when right became wrong, and of the private worlds that fall apart when there are no alternatives in sight. This production reunites director Matthew Dunster with playwright Nicholas Pierpan, following their collaboration in 2010 on Pierpan's play The Maddening Rain (Old Red Lion and Soho Theatre). The cast includes Alecky Blythe (writer of London Road), which marks her much-anticipated return to acting, and Kellie Bright (Love and Money, Royal Exchange and Young Vic). It will run at the Southwark Playhouse in its main house (which holds 150 seats) from 10 October until 3 November 2012. A German production will open at Theatre Ulm in April, 2013.

In this unique and engaging collection, twelve essays celebrate the legacy of one of America's most important playwrights and investigate Williams's enduring effect on America's cultural, theatrical, and literary heritage. Like Faulkner before him, Tennessee Williams gave universal appeal to southern characters and settings. His major plays, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie to A Streetcar Named Desire and Night of the Iguana, continue to capture America's popular imagination, a significant legacy. Though he died in 1983, only recently have Williams's papers become available to the public, bringing to light a number of intriguing discoveries—letters, drafts, and several unpublished and unproduced plays. These recent developments make a reassessment of Williams's life and work both timely and needed. The essays in this collection originated as presentations at the 27th annual Alabama Symposium on English and American Literature at The University of Alabama in 1999. The book addresses a wide range of topics, among them the influence of popular culture on Williams's plays, and, in turn, his influence on popular culture; his relationship to Hollywood and his struggles with censorship, Hollywood standards, and the competing vision of directors such as Elia Kazan; his depictions of gender and sexuality; and issues raised by recently discovered plays. Anyone interested in American literature and drama will find this collection of fresh, accessible essays a rewarding perspective on the life, work, and legacy of one of the bright stars of American theatre.

The tragic love story of Romeo and Juliet has touched the hearts of young and old for nearly four hundred years. In this work, Alan Hager has compiled a rich collection of primary materials and contemporary ranging from information about the earliest performances of Romeo and Juliet to discussions of suicide in the 1990s. Designed to help students of the play, Understanding Romeo and Juliet highlights many different aspects of the play's context. Such aspects include a discussion about religions of love in the East and West, and examination of vendetta and collective violence, and an analysis of the play in the context of classical and medieval thought. Hager relates the work to issues as recent as the so-called Werther Syndrome (copycat suicide based on fictional models) and as remote as the notion of reincarnated love such as that of Rama and Sita in the Sanskrit epic Ramayana.Following a literary analysis of the play, the casebook provides commentary and primary documents on the narrative backgrounds and sources of the play and selections from those sources; a discussion of its performance history on stage, in opera and film; the historical context of the play as an exploration of the nature of love, with selections from poetry of the period; and selections on real-life parallels, such as present-day Bosnia, the recent Leonardo DiCaprio-Claire Danes film of the play, and teen suicide in the 1990s, all of which will help readers to relate to the play. Each section of the work closes with topics for class discussion and papers and suggested works for further reading.

The volume presents perspectives in the theory of drama and theatre that are new for the following reasons: 1) the contributions reflect the international cooperation in developing drama and theatre as well as its theories; 2) this collection is the first attempt of presenting papers within the context of (Analytical) Theory of Science; 3) it is the first consistent set of papers starting from semiotics a s a meta-theory. The volume is divided into four sections: I Fundamental of Theatre Research, II Theory of Drama and Theatre, III Descriptive Theatre Research, IV Applied Theatre Research. Th.

Links early modern English drama and empire studies, exploring how staged scenes of maritime peril created a new form of economic uncertaintyImperial Ventures links early modern English drama and empire studies, exploring how staged scenes of maritime peril created a new form of economic uncertainty around the turn of the seventeenth century, amid London's explosion in commercial colonialism.While the hazards of global maritime trade became increasingly apparent during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the word “risk” did not enter English usage until around 1660. The prevailing scholarly narrative has linked uncertainty to concepts such as “chance,” “accident,” and “providence,” but this book reveals that these fragmentary concepts were reordered into an economic abstraction, and that the theater was a key site for that process. Playwrights reached for ways to represent this new uncertainty, and audiences watched perilous voyages set in colonial contexts and dramatized in increasingly typical forms. Imperial Ventures is organized by these forms, with five chapters examining scenes of shipwreck, pirates, enslavement, colonial subjection, and perilous news across a wide range of early modern plays.Benjamin VanWagoner shows how maritime drama connected English venturing to economic vulnerability in increasingly systematic ways, helping to develop the economic logic that would come to be codified as risk. In revealing this process, Imperial Ventures establishes the unique protocolonial status of early modern England—in the theater and at sea—and demonstrates how risk became a perverse instrument for justifying Anglophone imperialism.

Revisiting Shakespeare's Italian Resources is about the complex dynamics of transmission and transformation of the Italian sources of twelve Shakespearean plays, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to Cymbeline. It focuses on the works of Sir Giovanni Fiorentino, Da Porto, Bandello, Ariosto, Dolce, Pasqualigo, and Groto, as well as on commedia dell'arte practices. This book discusses hitherto unexamined materials and revises received interpretations, disclosing the relevance of memorial processes within the broad field of intertextuality vis-à-vis conscious reuses and intentional practices.

While British drama of the long eighteenth century remains largely unexamined as registering ecological fears, its visual spectacle and settings allow the audience to grasp threats to environments across the globe. In plays from 1682-1799, The Theatres of Eighteenth-Century Weather: Spectacle and Climatological Reckoning in English Drama examines how the “little world” of the theatre enables the British to conceptualize and experience how scientific and technological innovations, industrialization, imperial enterprises, and the increasing scale and reach of the British military affect the climate. In fact, the book attributes the drama of Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, Joseph Addison, Nahum Tate, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and other playwrights as pivotal to maintaining an audience's discernment of climatological processes and variability.

Four years on from George Floyd's murder, this volume asks if and how Shakespeare might be relevant—whether in performance, in the classroom, or in scholarship—to the pressing issues of social and climate justice. This question, however, is accompanied by the acute and uncomfortable recognition that there have been other consequences to the awakening of the world since Floyd's death, including the call to cancel Shakespeare altogether. This volume, however, is not an apology for Shakespeare but rather an engagement with him. From the perspective of the scholars who contribute here, questions about Shakespeare in our current context are not only deeply enmeshed with issues about his historical, geographical, and performance context and its attendant alterity, but crucially also to the specifically literary forms and structures with which he worked. Even as these essays resist the idea of a “timeless,” universalist Shakespeare, they insist upon the “poetics,” the creative framework, the specifically literary dimensions of the plays that cannot be reduced to any paraphrasable content. These are precisely the features that facilitate and enable the “relevance” of Shakespeare's works even across the chasm of the centuries since he composed them.

This book is the first full-length study of apes and monkeys on the early modern stage. It broadens the scope of existing scholarship by situating the apes glimpsed in Shakespeare's plays in the wider context of the many uncelebrated uses by other playwrights, c. 1603-1659. The book investigates the theatrical appearances of real monkeys, actors dressed up as apes, and characters mistaken for them, arguing that the ape trope is so insistent in early modern drama that it becomes a structural metaphor. It addresses both plays and masques across the period, arguing that the ways of seeing in these different kinds of theatre make apes mean differently in their generic contexts. Grounded in historicist readings, this book also draws significantly on the field of ritual studies and the new intersectional discipline of animal performance studies.

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 across the world, journeying along the production/adaptation/appropriation continuum.This (eco-)performance history of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor not only offers the first in-depth analysis of the play in production, with a particular focus on the representation of merry women, but also utilises the comedy's forest-aware dramaturgy to explore Mistress Page's concept of being ‘frugal in my mirth'in relation to sustainable theatre practices. Herne's Oak – the fictitious tree in Windsor Forest where everyone meets in the final scene of the play – is utilised to enable a maverick but ecologically based reframing of the productions of Merry Wives analysed here.This study engages with gender, physical comedy, and cultural relocations of Windsor across the world to offer new insight into Merry Wives and its theatricality.

Originally published in 1992, Music in English Children's Drama of the Later Renaissance is the first book-length study to examine the Elizabethan and Jacobean children's drama, not only from a musicological perspective, but also drawing on the histories of literature, culture, and the theater. It gives the children's companies new historical significance, showing that they were an integral and ultimately influential part of the London theatrical world. These companies originated important features of later drama, such as music before and between acts, and the exploitation of different timbres for specific effects.Those interested in music history, English literature, theater history, and cultural history will find this a comprehensive and fascinating study. Of special note are the appendices, which offer a unique and important reference source by providing the only definitive list of the plays and songs used by the children.

Compares monumental designs and performance spaces of Christian, Buddhist, and related sanctuaries, exploring how brain networks, animal-human emotions, and cultural ideals are reflected historically and affected today as'inner theatre'elements. Integrating research across the humanities and sciences, this book explores how traditional designs of outer theatrical spaces left cultural imprints for the inner staging of Self and Other consciousness, which each of us performs daily based on how we think others view us. But believers also perform in a cosmic theatre. Ancestral spirits and gods (or God) watch and interact with them in awe-inspiring spaces, grooming affects toward in-group identification and sacrifice, or out-group rivalry and scapegoating. In a study of over 80 buildings – shown by 40 images in the book, plus thousands of photos and videos online – Pizzato demonstrates how they reflect meta-theatrical projections from prior generations. They also affect the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended (4E) cognition of current visitors, who bring performance frameworks of belief, hope, and doubt to the sacred site. This involves neuro-social, inner/outer theatre networks with patriarchal, maternal, and trickster paradigms. European Churches and Chinese Temples as Neuro-Theatrical Sites investigates performative material cultures, creating dialogs between theatre, philosophy, history, and various (cognitive, affective, social, biological) sciences. It applies them to the architecture of religious buildings: from Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant in Europe, plus key sites in Jerusalem and prior “pagan” temples, to Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, and imperial in China. It thus reveals individualist/collectivist, focal/holistic, analytical/dialectical, and melodramatic/tragicomic trajectories, with cathartic poetics for the future.

What are the contexts (political, social, legal, cultural) of theatre censorship in twenty-first-century Europe? Given the abolition of state-sanctioned and institutional forms of stage censorship in the late twentieth century, the prevalence of authoritarian and populist politics, and the escalation of so-called ‘culture wars', in what ways and to what extent does stage censorship manifest and proliferate today? How does censorship respond (or not) to governmental, economic, moral, and religious circumstances? And how have theatre-makers in Europe contested or countered censorial prohibitions in the recent past? This edited collection is the first pan-European study of contemporary theatre censorship. An international range of scholars assess how new forms of censorship operate to silence artists and control performances; they explore how theatre artists respond to constraints placed upon their work across territories, and analyse how age-old political, religious, and moral taboos impact on theatrical creation and reception. Readers are invited to consider not only the varied mechanisms of censorship, including its more covert iterations, but also what is censored, when, how, and why, particularly in relation to the sensitive issues of religion, race, sexuality, and nationalism. By focusing on the work of key European theatre practitioners, as well as significant productions and performances, contributors reflect on the impact of censorship on artistic policies and cultural activity, and the forms of protest mobilized against it.

“Art has a lot to answer for.” So says Sarah Bernhardt in Ronald Harwood's play After the Lions. Harwood's own career can be summarized by that same quote as well. Ronald Harwood's Tragic Vision offers the first critical analysis of prolific and award-winning British author Ronald Harwood (1934–2020). Though he received an Oscar for The Pianist, a knighthood, and numerous other awards and nominations, Harwood worked as a ghostwriter, script doctor, and veritable unknown for many years. As he became successful, many critics still misread his works and positioned him as a less-fashionable counterpart to his lifelong friend Harold Pinter. This study proposes a conceptual framework to approach his, and others', work based on the genre of tragedy, offering a greater appreciation for and understanding of the Harwood canon.

This book examines the adaptations of Amleth, a legendary Danish prince, in different works including Ur-Hamlet, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard, and Haider by Vishal Bhardwaj. The book employs various adaptation theories proposed by critics such as Linda Hutcheon, Thomas Leitch, and others to thoroughly analyze these adaptations in the context of intertextuality and adaptation studies.Throughout the book, the analysis is supported by a comprehensive review of existing scholarship on the topic, including critical essays, books, and articles written by various scholars. The book provides a thorough examination of the adaptations of Amleth in the context of intertextuality and adaptation theories, shedding new light on their interpretations, transformations, and cultural significance.

What distinguishes documentary theatre from other forms of drama? How has it integrated different media across the years, and to what effect? What is its relationship to truth and reality, and defining moments of civic unrest and political change? In this short, authoritative book, Andy Lavender surveys a century of documentary theatre and performance and analyses key productions. Arranged in 3 sections that take a broadly chronological approach, the volume considers the nature of documenting, forms of intervention through theatre, the presentation of lived experience, and issues of truth, reality and representation.The book includes a variety of case studies, beginning with Piscator's In Spite of Everything! (1925) and tracing the work that followed in Europe and America, including the tribunal and testimony plays of the 1990s and 2000s. It examines the relationship of 3 key productions to moments of civic and political crisis: Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights Brooklyn and Other Identities (1992), Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993) and The Colour of Justice: The Stephen Lawrence Enquiry (1999). Finally, it looks at the impact of digital technologies, social media and hybrid artforms in the 21st century, to explore the engagement of documentary performance with mediations and experiences of cultural change and shifting identities across a range of case studies.

A new account of Shakespearean tragedy as a response to life in an uncertain worldIn Shakespeare's Tragic Art, Rhodri Lewis offers a powerfully original reassessment of tragedy as Shakespeare wrote it—of what drew him toward tragic drama, what makes his tragedies distinctive, and why they matter.After reconstructing tragic theory and practice as Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew them, Lewis considers in detail each of Shakespeare's tragedies from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus. He argues that these plays are a series of experiments whose greatness lies in their author's nerve-straining determination to represent the experience of living in a world that eludes rational analysis. They explore not just our inability to know ourselves as we would like to, but the compensatory and generally unacknowledged fictions to which we bind ourselves in our hunger for meaning—from the political, philosophical, social, and religious to the racial, sexual, personal, and familial. Lewis's Shakespeare not only creates tragedies that exceed those written before them. Through his art, he also affirms and invigorates the kinds of knowing that are available to intelligent animals like us.A major reevaluation of Shakespeare's tragedies, Shakespeare's Tragic Art is essential reading for anyone interested in Shakespeare, tragedy, or the capacity of literature to help us navigate the perplexities of the human condition.

In this groundbreaking book, Matsuoka Shinpei—a leading scholar of noh theater—provides a detailed account of the birth of one of Japan's most celebrated art forms. Although noh has often been associated with the elite, Embodied Performance explores its links to a wider popular culture, revealing a rich and colorful public space where courtiers and commoners mingled.Matsuoka traces noh's connections to popular and religious dances, linked verse, and chigo (beautiful temple boy) culture, emphasizing performance and the body. He describes the world of noh playwright Zeami as well as his views on dramaturgy and performance—and argues that Zeami was once a chigo. Matsuoka shows how religious rituals and cultural forms like ecstatic dance prayer and plays about demons in hell attracted people on the margins. Such activities, Matsuoka contends, drew on the tension between wild acrobatic movement and corporeal restraint, influencing the development of noh as well as the art of flower arranging and the tea ceremony. Janet Goff's translation makes available in English a classic work of Japanese scholarship that will be invaluable to those interested in medieval Japanese culture, noh, and theatrical practice.

Whilst Shakespearean drama provides eloquent calls to war, more often than not these are undercut or outweighed by compelling appeals to peaceful alternatives conveyed through narrative structure, dramatic context and poetic utterance. Placing Shakespeare's works in the history of pacifist thought, Robert White argues that Shakespeare's plays consistently challenge appeals to heroism and revenge and reveal the brutal futility of war. White also examines Shakespeare's interest in the mental states of military officers when their ingrained training is tested in love relationships. In imagery and themes, war infiltrates love, with problematical consequences, reflected in Shakespeare's comedies, histories and tragedies alike. Challenging a critical orthodoxy that military engagement in war is an inevitable and necessary condition, White draws analogies with the experience of modern warfare, showing the continuing relevance of Shakespeare's plays which deal with basic issues of war and peace that are still evident.

A study of Shakespeare's child figures in relation to their own political moment, as well as our own. Politicians are fond of saying that “children are the future.” How did the child become a figure for our political hopes? Joseph Campana's book locates the source of this idea in transformations of childhood and political sovereignty during the age of Shakespeare, changes spectacularly dramatized by the playwright himself. Shakespeare's works feature far more child figures—and more politically entangled children—than other literary or theatrical works of the era. Campana delves into this rich corpus to show how children and childhood expose assumptions about the shape of an ideal polity, the nature of citizenship, the growing importance of population and demographics, and the question of what is or is not human. As our ability to imagine viable futures on our planet feels ever more limited, and as children take up legal proceedings to sue on behalf of the future, it behooves us to understand the way past child figures haunt our conversations about intergenerational justice. Shakespeare offers critical precedents for questions we still struggle to answer.

Decentered Playwriting investigates new and alternative strategies for dramatic writing that incorporate non-Western, Indigenous, and underrepresented storytelling techniques and traditions while deepening a creative practice that decenters hegemonic methods.A collection of short essays and exercises by leading teaching artists, playwrights, and academics in the fields of playwriting and dramaturgy, this book focuses on reimagining pedagogical techniques by introducing playwrights to new storytelling methods, traditions, and ways of studying, and teaching diverse narratological practices.This is a vital and invaluable book for anyone teaching or studying playwriting, dramatic structure, storytelling at advanced undergraduate and graduate levels, or as part of their own professional practice.

Reveals the theatrical dimensions of civilian support for the revolutionary GI Movement of the 1960s-70sPerformance played a role both crucial and complicated in the antiwar activism of the 1960s and 1970s. As soldiers and civilian actors, activists, and celebrities worked together to end the Vietnam War, their theatrical acts of solidarity and resistance connected liberation struggles across the lines of race, gender, enlisted status, and nationality.F•ck The Army! offers the first, fully narrated history of the FTA, an antiwar variety show featuring Jane Fonda that played to tens of thousands of active-duty troops over the course of nine months in 1971. From its very conception, the civilian-led show was directed towards the project of making visible the growing antiwar movement organized by GIs, inspired by but also acting as a rebuttal to the increasingly out-of-touch USO tours presented by Bob Hope. Through an analysis of the FTA's tactical performances of solidarity and resistance, Lindsay Goss brings into view the theatrical dimensions of the GI movement itself, revealing it as representative of the revolutionary and theatrical politics and tactics of the period. The volume highlights how, due to the movement's subsequent historical erasure, a renewed anti-theatricality emerged from the 1960s and became a potent feature of contemporary political discourse.The author's deft methodological and analytic strategies, in tandem with her elegantly accessible style demonstrate how seemingly little-known performance practices can activate consequential understandings of what we thought we knew about the recent past. At the same time, she encourages essential conversations about pressing contemporary issues that demand our attention. At its core, F•ck The Army! reveals the fundamentally theatrical character of radical activism when it seeks to challenge the status quo.