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Das Buch lotet die Beziehungen zwischen Literatur, Religion, Politik und (Kriegs)gewalt um 1800 aus. Im Zentrum steht Friedrich Schillers Tragödie „Die Jungfrau von Orleans“. Dieses Drama dient als Brennspiegel, umgekehrt auch als Prisma für eine Untersuchung der Revolutionsepoche, die die Interferenzen von Französischer Revolution, Koalitionskriegen, Religion und Literatur in neuem Licht erscheinen lässt. Diskutiert werden das komplexe Verhältnis des Autors Schiller zur Religion, die politische Theologie, die populare Religiosität und die Religionskritik im Aufklärungszeitalter sowie die Dialektik von (theatralisierter) Dechristianisierung und Resakralisierung im ersten Revolutionsjahrzehnt. Besondere Schwerpunkte bilden eine politisierte Marienfrömmigkeit und das literarische Nachleben von Märtyrerdrama und Heiligenlegende um 1800.

In the 18th century Italian theatre and its artists became vital to Russian rulers, who employed Italian musico-dramatic works to advance their political agendas and emphasize Russia's cultural uniqueness and its cosmopolitan character. Innumerable playwrights and composers, actors and singers were active at the Russian court. Usually considered at best peripheral to Europe, the faraway Russian Empire represents a particularly powerful example of the mobility of theatre agents and the circulation of artistic practices. This book sets a new regional accent on imperial Russia, thus mitigating the traditional historiographical emphasis on Western Europe, and adopts a transnational approach to theatre and music history. Its aim is twofold. First, to explore Italian music-theatrical repertoires that occupied a crucial position within the spectacle of absolutism in Russia. Second, to investigate careers and travel routes of the Italian theatre professionals. The examination of their activities at the Russian court aims not only to provide a fuller understanding of their vital role in the transmission of socio-political and artistic ideas, but also to more firmly situate Russia in the broader arena of European cultural production.

This book shows that Eugene O'Neill's modern American drama is a survey on the politics of desire, the power of doom, and the variable configurations of the polis. It highlights that the modern American city, or polis, is the stage on which the antithetic categories of doom and desire are re-enacted in different undertones. The text notes that desire, doom, schizophrenia, and the archeology of the polis are reconceived by the playwright, while legacy, sexuality, lucre, and the volatility of the free flow of capital entrap the American subject in a maze of qualms and queries. Subjection and resistance give birth to schizorevolutionary subjects, seeking lines of flight. Indeed, as noted here, O'Neill's plays portray their protagonists as desiring machines, trying to evade the modern closed circles of power, and various modes of becoming, to use Gilles Deleuze's concept. O'Neill encounters Deleuze at the level of thoughts and sensations, anticipating postmodern plateaus for the human subject to grow into a rhizome.

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 featured crisp new translations by co–artistic director Joseph Shragge, large casts, and full-throated sung choruses. Scapegoat Carnivale's trilogy of these familiar but rarely performed plays is at the core of this volume, which includes all three novel play scripts, the company's stage directions, and helpful annotations that elucidate Greek names and cultural references and place the textual choices in the context of the productions themselves as well as the long manuscript traditions germane to each tragedy. The result sheds light on both the ancient Greek texts and contemporary performance practice, as do accompanying essays introducing the reader to Greek tragedy in fifth-century Athens, reception theories, each play's themes and cultural resonances, and how Scapegoat's approach to each play fits into broader global trends of performance and reception.Scapegoat Carnivale's Tragic Trilogy invites readers from all backgrounds to encounter these plays, whether they are looking at Greek tragedy for the first time or the fiftieth. It gives everyone the tools to understand where these plays came from, offers insights into how they can and should be performed now, and shows why they are more relevant than ever in contemporary theatre and in life.

What distinguishes modern tragedy from other forms of drama? How does it relate to contemporary political and social conditions? To what ends have artists employed the tragic form in different locations during the 20th century? Partly motivated by the urgency of our current situation in an age of ecocidal crisis, Modern Tragedy encompasses a variety of drama from throughout the 20th century. James Moran begins this book with John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea (1904), which shows how environmental awareness might be expressed through tragic drama. Moran also looks at Brecht's reworking of Synge's drama in the 1937 play Señora Carrar's Rifles, and situates Brecht's script in the light of the theatre practitioner's broader ideas about tragedy. Brecht's tragic thinking – informed by Hegel and Marx – is contrasted with the Schopenhauerian approach of Samuel Beckett. The volume goes on to examine theatre makers whose ideas were partly motivated by applying an understanding of the tragic narrative of Synge's Riders to the Sea to postcolonial contexts. Looking at Derek Walcott's The Sea at Dauphin (1954), and J.P. Clark's The Goat (1961), Modern Tragedy explores how tragedy, a form that is often associated with regressive assumptions about hegemony, might be rethought, and how aspects of the tragic may coincide with the experiences and concerns of authors and audiences of colour.

CHOSEN AS ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: TIME, NPR, The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers WeeklyAs we witness monuments of white Western history fall, many are asking how is Shakespeare still relevant? Professor Farah Karim-Cooper has dedicated her career to the Bard, which is why she wants to take the playwright down from his pedestal to unveil a Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. If we persist in reading Shakespeare as representative of only one group, as the very pinnacle of the white Western canon, then he will truly be in peril. Combining piercing analysis of race, gender and otherness in famous plays from Antony and Cleopatra to The Tempest with a radical reappraisal of Elizabethan London, The Great White Bard asks us neither to idealize nor bury Shakespeare but instead to look him in the eye and reckon with the discomforts of his plays, playhouses and society. In inviting new perspectives and interpretations, we may yet prolong and enrich his extraordinary legacy.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1956.

The Play about the Antichrist (Ludus de Antichristo) was composed around 1160 at the imperial Bavarian abbey of Tegernsee, at a critical point in the power-struggle between the papacy and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. This new translation and commentary reveals this drama to be strikingly representative of the role that theatrical performance played in shaping contemporary politics, diplomacy, and public opinion. It also shows how drama functioned as an integral component of the educational curricula of elite monastic institutions like Tegernsee, where political administrators and diplomats were trained, and how performance served as a common, connective lingua franca among monasteries in twelfth-century Bavaria. In this new translation, Carol Symes provides the first full and faithful rendering of the play's dynamic language, maintaining the meter, rhyme scheme, and stage directions of the Latin original and restoring the liturgical elements embedded in the text. Kyle A. Thomas, whose fully-staged production tested the theatricality of this translation, provides a new historical and dramaturgical analysis of the play's rich interpretive and performative possibilities.

French Drama of the Revolutionary Years (1990) examines the years following the Revolution which saw an explosion both in the number of theatres and in the number of dramatic representations written and performed. It describes this turbulent period of theatre history, placing it firmly within the context of French social and political life, and illustrating the discussion with examinations of contemporary texts. It focuses on the political and philosophical themes of the plays, and the light they throw on events of the time.

Dramaturgues catalanes. Ètiques i estètiques reivindica l'escriptura dramàtica d'autora en català. Els diversos capítols que conformen el volum aborden, a banda d'una aproximació de caire historicista, algunes de les temàtiques en auge que les dramaturgues actuals –Alejo, Aymar, Barceló, Cedó, Cunillé, de Cos, Pardo, Sarrias, Szpunberg, Tornero o Vizcarro entre d'altres– plantegen en les seves obres. Així, s'hi desenvolupen aspectes transversals referits al tractament de l'humor, a la memòria democràtica o a les dificultats derivades de l'embaràs o de ser mare o no ser-ho, per exemple. Finalment, el llibre aporta un epíleg que recull les opinions de dotze dramaturgues, referides a l'evolució i la inserció de la dona en l'àmbit teatral català.

In American Dramatists in the 21st Century: Opening Doors, Christopher Bigsby examines the careers of seven award-winning playwrights: David Adjmi, Julia Cho, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Will Eno, Martyna Majok, Dominique Morisseau and Anna Ziegler. In addition to covering all their plays, including several as yet unpublished, he notes their critical reception while drawing on their own commentary on their approach to writing and the business of developing a career. The writers studied come from a diverse range of racial, religious and immigrant backgrounds. Five of the seven are women. Together, they open doors on a changing theatre and a changing America, as ever concerned with identity, both personal and national.This is the third in a series of books which, together, have explored the work of twenty-four American playwrights who have emerged in the current century.

The deaths of husbands radically changed women's lives in the early modern period. While losing male protection, widows acquired rare opportunities for social and economic independence. Placed between death and life, female submissiveness and male audacity, chastity and sexual awareness, or tragedy and comedy, widows were highly problematic in early modern patriarchal society. They were also popular figures in the theatre, arousing both male desire and anxiety. Now how did Shakespeare and his contemporaries represent them on the stage? What kind of costume, props, and gestures were employed? What influence did actors, spectators, and play-space have? This book offers a fresh and incisive examination of the theatrical representation of widows by discussing the material conditions of the early modern stage. It is also the only comprehensive study of this topic covering all three phases of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1942.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.

Portrayals of Masculinity in Nigerian Plays explores Nigerian people's notions of masculinity as portrayed in twelve Nigerian plays, written by three generations of Nigerian playwrights. She argues that hegemonic masculinity and other forms, which are referred to as “alternative masculinities,” exist in traditional Nigerian society. By analyzing plays written by first, second, and third-generation Nigerian playwrights, Onuoha tracks how notions about masculinity have evolved over the years. Further, she discusses the malleability of masculinity by exploring how women manifest qualities associated with masculinity within Nigerian plays. Through a review of critical studies on gender constructions, Onuoha examines not only the negative experiences of women within an African patriarchal system, but also the negative experiences of the men who are also direct or indirect victims of such a system.

This book explores how humorous depictions of the Great War worked to familiarise, domesticate, and tame the conflict. While well-known examples of First World War literature often emphasize enormous emotional disruption and the war's extremes, other writers used humour to encourage a gentle, mild amusement, drawing on familiar, popular genres and forms used before 1914. In humorous portrayals of the war, tameness outdoes the unmanageable and the temperate exceeds the extraordinary. Humour in British First World War Literature is based on little-known primary material uncovered from detailed archival research, as well as works that, though written by celebrated authors, tend not to be placed in the canon of Great War literature. Each chapter examines key examples of literary texts, ranging from short stories and poetry to theatre and periodicals, in doing so investigating the complex representational, political, and social significance of the tame strand in humorous Great War literature.

This book is a study of the forensic theatricality of human rights claims in literary texts about slavery in the sixteenth and the nineteenth century in the Spanish Empire. The book centers on the question: how do literary texts use theatrical, multisensorial strategies to denunciate the violence against enslaved people and make a claim for their rights? The Spanish context is particularly interesting because of its early tradition of human rights thinking in the Salamanca School (especially Bartolomé de Las Casas), developed in relation to slavery and colonialism. Taking its point of departure in forensic aesthetics, the book analyzes five forms of non-narrative theatricality: allegorical, carnivalesque, tragicomic, melodramatic and tragic.

This new edition of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus offers the complete 1604 A-text with embedded selections from the 1616 B-text. Its innovative format will make it easier for readers to note differences between these texts and to consider what is gained and lost in viewing them both separately and together. A full Introduction to the play, notes, and a rich selection of related texts further enhance the value of this edition to students of Renaissance drama, Reformation theology, magic, and occult philosophy.

In the first book-length study of Annie Baker, one of the most critically acclaimed playwrights in the United States today and winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur “genius” grant, Amy Muse analyzes Baker's plays and other work. These include The Flick, John, The Antipodes, the Shirley Vermont plays, and her adaptation of Uncle Vanya. Muse illuminates their intellectual and ethical themes and issues by contextualizing them with the other works of theatre, art, theology, and psychology that Baker read while writing them. Through close discussions of Baker's work, this book immerses readers in her use of everyday language, her themes of loneliness, desire, empathy, and storytelling, and her innovations with stage time. Enriched by a foreword from Baker's former professor, playwright Mac Wellman, as well as essays by four scholars, Thomas Butler, Jeanmarie Higgins, Katherine Weiss, and Harrison Schmidt, this is a companionable guide for students of American literature and theatre studies, which deepens their knowledge and appreciation of Baker's dramatic invention.Muse argues that Baker is finely attuned to the language of the everyday: imperfect, halting, marked with unexpressed desires, banalities, and silence. Called “antitheatrical,” these plays draw us back to the essence of theatre: space, time, and story, sitting with others in real time, witnessing the dramatic in the ordinary lives of ordinary people. Baker's revolution for the stage has been to slow it down and bring us all into the mystery and pleasure of attention.

This volume is the seventeenth in a series dedicated to presenting the latest findings in the fields of comparative drama and performance. Featuring eleven essays from the 2021 Comparative Drama Conference in Orlando, it includes new research on contemporary plays by Anne Washburn, Will Arbery, Matthew Lopez, Anna Deveare Smith and Qui Nguyen. Chapters also present new research for classic plays such as Measure for Measure and Cyrano, arguments for teaching science through drama, changing approaches for training actors, and using the insights of neuroscience to lure audiences back to live theatre. This year's volume also features a new interview with playwright Anne Washburn and seven book reviews centered on drama and theatre studies.

Examines the discourses around the role of bloodlines and kinship in the social hierarchies of early modern Europe “Blood is thicker than water,” goes the old proverb. But do common bloodlines in fact demand special duties or prescribe affections? Thicker than Water examines the roots of this belief by studying the omnipresent discourse of bloodlines and kindred relations in the literature of early modern Europe. Early modern discourses concerning kinship promoted the idea that similar bloodlines dictated greater love or affinity, stabilizing the boundaries of families and social classes, as well as the categories of ethnicity and race. Literary representations of romantic relationships were instrumental in such conceptions, and Lauren Weindling examines how drama from England, France, and Italy tests these assumptions about blood and love, exposing their underlying political function. Among the key texts that Weindling studies are Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet¸ Othello, and The Merchant of Venice, Pierre Corneille's Le Cid, Giambattista della Porta's La Sorella and its English analog, Thomas Middleton's No Wit/Help Like a Woman's, John Ford's'Tis Pity She's a Whore, and Machiavelli's La Mandragola. Each of these plays offers an extreme limit case for early modern notions of belonging and exclusion, through plots of love, courtship, and marriage, including blood feuds and incest. Moreover, they feature the voices of marginalized groups, unprivileged by these metrics and ideologies, and thus offer significant counterpoints to this bloody worldview. While most critical studies of blood onstage pertain to matters of guilt or violence, Thicker Than Water examines the work that blood does unseen in arbitrating social and emotional connections between persons, and thus underwriting our deepest forms of social organization.

SHAKESPEARE: increasingly irrelevant or lone literary genius of the Western canon?'Powerful and illuminating'James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, winner of the Baillie Gifford'Winner of Winners'2023 Professor Farah Karim-Cooper grew up loving the Bard, perhaps because Romeo and Juliet felt Pakistani to her. But why was being white as a ‘snowy dove'essential to Juliet's beauty? Combining piercing analysis of race, gender and otherness in beloved plays from Othello to The Tempest with a radical reappraisal of Elizabethan London, The Great White Bard entreats us neither to idealise nor to fossilise Shakespeare but instead to look him in the eye and reckon with the discomforts of his plays, playhouses and society. If we persist in reading Shakespeare as representative of only one group, as the very pinnacle of the white Western canon, then he will truly be in peril. But if we dare to bring Shakespeare down from his plinth, we might unveil a playwright for the twenty-first century. We might expand and enrich his extraordinary legacy. We might even fall in love with him all over again. ••• A TIME MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023'Insightful, passionate, piled with facts and has a warm, infectious love for theatre and Shakespeare running through every chapter.'ADRIAN LESTER, CBE'Dive in and your whole cultural landscape will be refreshed and reframed... A challenging, riveting read, The Great White Bard reminds us how powerful the stories we tell can be on our lives.'ADJOA ANDOH'Vivid… a thorough analysis but also a kind of love letter… Karim-Cooper sees Shakespeare as holding a mirror to this society, with his plays interrogating live issues around race, identity and the colonial enterprise… Her arguments come to feel essential and should be absorbed by every theatre director, writer, critic, interested in finding new ways into the work.'GUARDIAN'There are plenty of books on Shakespeare: but this one is different. This is Shakespeare as we've (most of us) never been willing to see him – and the works emerge from the analysis as newly complicit, powerful and yet recuperative.'EMMA SMITH, AUTHOR OF PORTABLE MAGIC

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1947.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.

This book discusses the mechanisms and patterns of staging in nineteenth-century France. Often associated with theatre and performance, staging also applies to visual arts. It is thoroughly embedded in a more general cultural development comprising the dissemination of knowledge, political awareness and consumerism. The notion of staging applies to a process of appearing, revealing and disappearing that puts forward new ways for the individual to be seen and to make the self (and the other) visible.Staging determines and questions the process of appearing and disappearing by generating connections and interactions between multiple layers of reality (i.e., artistic, theatrical, literary, and visual) – but according to what criteria, through what mechanisms and with what materials? What are the repercussions of staging, and, even more important, what does staging not show? This book argues that the notion of staging goes beyond interdisciplinarity. Looking at the different ways staging was used and conceived introduces new approaches to understanding visual culture in nineteenth-century France.

Defining class broadly as an identity categorization based on status, wealth, family, bloodlines, and occupation, Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama e xplores class as a complicated, contingent phenomenon modified by a wider range of social categories apart from those defining terms, including, but not limited to, race, gender, religion, and sexuality. This collection of essays – featuring a range of international contributors – explores a broad range of questions about the intersectional factors influencing class status in early modern England, including how cultural behaviors and non-class social categories affected status and social mobility, in what ways hegemonies of elite prerogatives could be disrupted or entrenched by the myriad of intersectional factors that informed social identity, and how class position informed the embodied experience and expression of affect, gender, sexuality, and race as well as relationships to place, space, land, andthe natural and civic worlds.

Sagittae Angelorum,'arrows of angels,'offers a collection of literary works in poetry, short stories, and drama by four innovative authors--Jeremy Joosten, Joelle Joosten, Dominic Nootebos, and Lucas Smith. Jeremy Joosten engages his readers by creating narratives with animal and nature metaphors. The reader/listener cannot escape his call to existential reflection on life and relationships. He achieves personal self-examination in his one-act play, Kintsugi. Joelle Joosten explores spatial form and structure as part of metaphor in her poetry. In her short story Turbulence, she draws us into the powerful emotions of love and betrayal; and in her historical fiction on Ludwig van Beethoven, the intensity of music reinforces Beethoven's interior tension. When it comes to love, Dominic Nootebos confronts his audience with the rawness of love and death in both his provocative poetry and his gothic love story, Lost Love of the Haunted and Hollow. Lucas Smith offers us poems where he explores space, syntax, and images leading his reader to a spiritual ascent. In the drama genre, he constructs his play based on the life of Pier Giorgio Frassati. He ends this collection bringing his readers to Mars, then back to Earth, in his sci-fi piece with a spiritual twist.

Die im vorliegenden Band versammelten dreizehn Beiträge untersuchen interkonfessionelle Aushandlungsprozesse auf Reisen. Am Beispiel der Italienreisen von Adligen aus dem Alten Reich, aber auch von italienischen Adligen, die den deutschen Sprachraum besuchen, wird die Kontaktnahme mit der jeweils anderen Konfession im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert beschrieben. Fragen nach dem konfessionellen Gehalt von Landkarten gelangen dabei ebenso ins Blickfeld wie die interkonfessionelle Extremsituationen der Konversion oder der Tod im konfessionsfremden Territorium. Die zentrale Rolle, die den Künsten beim interkonfessionellen Austausch zukommt, wird am Beispiel der Kunst- und Wunderkammern und des Kolosseums behandelt.

Die als „Schlegel/Tieck'bekannt gewordene Übersetzung sämtlicher Dramen William Shakespeares – sie wurde 1797 von August Wilhelm Schlegel begonnen und in den 1820er Jahren von Ludwig Tieck, seiner Tochter Dorothea und Wolf Heinrich von Baudissin fortgeführt – ist zu einem klassischen Text der deutschen Literatur geworden. Die Beiträge nehmen eine Neubewertung dieser Übertragungen vor, indem sie nach ihren Kontexten fragen: nach den Bedingungen, der Theorie und der Praxis des Übersetzens, nach der Bedeutung innerhalb des frühromantischen Programms sowie nach dem Konzept einer „romantisch-poetischen'Übersetzung. Außerdem werden die Unterschiede in den Verfahren August Wilhelm Schlegels bzw. des Tieck-Kreises, schließlich die intensive Rezeption bis in die Gegenwart vorgestellt und diskutiert; auch soll es um die Frage gehen, wie der „Schlegel/Tieck'heute am sinnvollsten historisch-kritisch ediert werden kann, welche Anforderungen dabei zu beachten sind und welche digitalen Verfahren bei einer solchen dringend notwendigen Edition zum Einsatz kommen müssen. Der Vorliegende Band versammelt jene Beiträge, die während einer Tagung an der SLUB in Dresden vom 13. bis 16. Juni 2022 vorgetragen wurden.

Das Horváth-Handbuch ermöglicht einen ersten oder vertiefenden Einstieg in Leben, Werk und Wirken Ödön von Horváths. Dabei werden zunächst biographische und editionsphilologische Konstellationen geklärt, dann die unterschiedlichen Werkgruppen einer genauen Darstellung unterzogen. Ein besonderer Fokus gilt den Spezifika der Horváth'schen Poetik. Der Band schließt mit einem Blick auf die Rezeption Horváths und einem Personen- und Werkregister.

The world of theatre, like the world of law and the world of psychology, deals with the human soul. These are fascinating worlds, which are often found in internal contradictions. They teach us that we must not only see what is presented superficially in front of our faces, but also look inward and thus see ourselves as well.This book deals with six plays, originally written in Yiddish, but translated into many different languages, which have been staged with great success around the world, thus showing the universal power of the text. It examines these texts for the first time from a legal and psychological perspective, which sheds light on the theatrical work as well as the conflicts between the characters.

The name Joseph Addison was once synonymous with the finest of English prose. Eminent writers from Voltaire to Lord Macaulay to John Steinbeck considered him a consummate master to be studied and emulated. According to Benjamin Franklin, Addison's writings'contributed more to the improvement of the minds of the British nation, and polishing their manner, than those of any other English pen whatever.'While his influence lives on in the sound and style of English today, the fame of this literary role model has faded from popular awareness. The Addisonian spirit, which ushered in an exceptional era of domestic peace in Britain and provided inspiration for the French and American Revolutions, coded many of the constitutional, political, and social agreements we continue to live with today. This book, the first comprehensive monograph of Addison in half a century, considers Addison's contribution through an in-depth exploration of his writings, political work, social life, and theatrical stagings.

Massinger's Italy: Re-Imagining Italian Culture in the Plays of Philip Massinger offers the first book-length account of the pervasive influence of Italian culture on the canon of Philip Massinger, one of the most successful playwrights of the post-Shakespearean period.This volume explores the relationships between Massinger and Italian literary, dramatic and intellectual culture in the larger context of Anglo-Italian cultural exchanges. The book investigates the influence of Italian culture, considering Massinger's engagement and appropriation of Italian texts, dramatic and political theories and ideas related to the country and his use of Italy as a setting. Massinger's Italy offers a fresh and unexpected perspective on the development of Anglo-Italian discourse on the early modern English stage, showing to what extent Massinger contributed to the myth of Italy and to the circulation of Italian culture and shedding light on the complex system of Anglo-Italian interconnections within the corpus of Massinger's plays as well as with the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Tragedy is one of the oldest and most resilient forms of narrative. Considering texts from ancient Greece to the present day, this comprehensive introduction shows how tragedy has been re-imagined and redefined throughout Western cultural history.Tragedy offers a concise history of tragedy tracing its evolution through key plays, prose, poetry and philosophical dimensions. John Drakakis examines a wealth of popular plays, including works from the ancient Greeks, Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Sarah Kane and Tom Stoppard. He also considers the rewriting and appropriating of ancient drama though a wide range of authors, such as Chaucer, George Eliot, Ted Hughes and Colm Tóibín. Drakakis also demystifies complex philosophical interpretations of tragedy, including those of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Benjamin.This accessible resource is an invaluable guide for anyone studying tragedy in literature or theatre studies.

Arriving in New York at the tail end of what has been termed the “Golden Age” of Broadway and the start of the Off-Broadway theater movement, Terrence McNally (1938–2020) first established himself as a dramatist of the absurd and a biting social critic. He quickly recognized, however, that one is more likely to change people's minds by first changing their hearts, and—in outrageous farces like The Ritz and It's Only a Play—began using humor more broadly to challenge social biases. By the mid-1980s, as the emerging AIDS pandemic called into question America's treatment of persons isolated by suffering and sickness, he became the theater's great poet of compassion, dramatizing the urgent need of human connection and the consequences when such connections do not take place. Conversations with Terrence McNally collects nineteen interviews with the celebrated playwright. In these interviews, one hears McNally reflect on theater as the most collaborative of the arts, the economic pressures that drive the theater industry, the unique values of music and dance, and the changes in American theater over McNally's fifty-plus year career. The winner of four competitive Tony Awards as the author of the Best Play (Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class) and author of the book for the Best Musical (Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime), McNally holds the distinction of being one of the few writers for the American theater who excelled in straight drama as well as musical comedy. In addition, his canon extends to opera; his collaboration with composer Jake Heggie, Dead Man Walking, has proven the most successful new American opera of the last twenty-five years.

This book focuses on the influence of classical authors on Ben Jonson's dramaturgy, with particular emphasis on the Greek and Roman playwrights and satirists. It illuminates the interdependence of the aspects of Jonson's creative personality by considering how classical performance elements, including the Aristophanic ‘Great Idea,'chorus, Terentian/Plautine performative strategies, and ‘performative'elements from literary satire, manifest themselves in the structuring and staging of his plays. This fascinating exploration contributes to the ‘performative turn'in early modern studies by reframing Jonson's classicism as essential to his dramaturgy as well as his erudition. The book is also a case study for how the early modern education system's emphasis on imitative-contaminative practices prepared its students, many of whom became professional playwrights, for writing for a theatre that had a similar emphasis on recycling and recombining performative tropes and structures.

After the strikingly beautiful Peony Pavilion, how could one write about love and the ideal of emotional authenticity (qing) in the chuanqi genre? This book presents a group of creative dramatists who confronted this challenge by giving the romantic theme of chuanqi their unique comic twists. This book demonstrates how their comic articulations bring the qing ideal down to the mundane world of family obligations, political ambitions, commercial interests, and gender frustrations. By highlighting the crucial but understudied role that the comic plays, this book enriches our understanding of the intellectual depth and critical scope of the chuanqi genre.