"These authoritative translations consign all other complete collections to the wastebasket."—Robert Brustein, The New Republic"This is it. No qualifications. Go out and buy it everybody."—Kenneth Rexroth, The Nation"The translations deliberately avoid...

'It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.' The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) proclaims that it is 'A Trivial Play for Serious People'. In fact, collected here alongside Lady Windermere's Fan (1892),...

Winner of the 2016 Tony Award for Best Play Finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama Winner of the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Broadway Play Winner of the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play "THE BEST...

An award-winning scholar and teacher explores how Shakespeare's greatest characters were built on a learned sense of empathyWhile exploring Shakespeare's plays with her students, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that teaching and discussing his plays...

"“Incandescent. . . . The scary, exhilarating brightness of raw adolescence emanates from every scene of this uncannily assured first play.” —Bent Brantley, New York TimesOne of the most-talked about new Off-Broadway plays of the last twenty years, and a...

This Roman play is one of Shakespeare's last tragedies, best known for its political and military themes. Its hero, Coriolanus, is a proud General who does not hesitate to show his arrogant and outspoken contempt of the Roman rabble. The Tribunes banish...

Come along backstage and peek inside the spectacular and sometimes scandalous world of musical theatre.From The Wizard of Oz and The Sound of Music to Mamma Mia and Les Misérables, fall in love all over again with selections from every era of musical...

Based on John Gay's eighteenth century Beggar's Opera, The Threepenny Opera, first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, is a vicious satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian...

"Greenblatt knows more about [Shakespeare] than Ben Jonson or the Dark Lady did."―John Leonard, ?Harper's A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of...

The legend of Faust grew up in the sixteenth century, a time of transition between medieval and modern culture in Germany. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) adopted the story of the wandering conjuror who accepts Mephistopheles's offer of a pact,...

To illuminate the mysterious greatness of Anton Chekhov’s writings, Janet Malcolm takes on three roles: literary critic, biographer, and journalist. Her close readings of the stories and plays are interwoven with episodes from Chekhov’s life and framed...

Set in a typical, old Beijing teahouse, this classic play spans fifty years and has a cast of over sixty characters drawn from all levels of society. They reflect, through changes in their own lives, the changes that were taking place in Chinese society...

Collected in this volume are powerful dramas and psychological fiction by the nineteenth-century iconoclast now recognized as a major figure of world literature. Also included are selections from Büchner's letters and philosophical writings.

Latin Numbers is a work of performance history, examining the way in which Latino actors on the twentieth-century stage and screen communicated and influenced American ideas about race and ethnicity. Brian Eugenio Herrera looks at how these performances...

Tom Stoppard's magnificent trilogy, "The Coast of Utopia," was the most keenly awaited and successful drama of 2007. Now "Stoppard's crowning achievement" (David Cote, "Time Out New York") has been collected in one volume, with an introduction by the...

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare stages the workings of love. Theseus and Hippolyta, about to marry, are figures from mythology. In the woods outside Theseus’s Athens, two young men and two young women sort themselves out into couples—but not...

This second edition of Othello has a new, illustrated introduction by leading American scholar Ayanna Thompson, which addresses such key issues as race, religion and gender, as well as looking at ways in which the play has been adapted in more recent...