In this remarkable book, Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, author of Shakespeare in a Divided America, explains when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote his plays.For more than two hundred years after William Shakespeare’s...

'In the region of Washington Square or Greenwich Village, or ... among the sand dunes of Cape Cod we must look for the real birthplace of the New American Drama.' So William Archer, first translator of Ibsen and the most influential critic of his day,...

Living in Rome under Caligula and later a tutor to Nero, Seneca witnessed the extremes of human behaviour. His shocking and bloodthirsty plays not only reflect a brutal period of history but also show how guilt, sorrow, anger and desire lead individuals...

George C. Wolfe's iconic play on the black experience of the 1980s. The Colored Museum has electrified, discomforted, and delighted audiences of all colors, redefining our ideas of what it means to be black in contemporary America. Its eleven "exhibits"...

Nominated for the Tony Award when it was first produced in 1984, Hurlyburly was immediately hailed as a classic American drama. This edition is the definitive version of the prize-winning author's most celebrated work, reflecting his continued...

Jean Genet was one of the world's greatest contemporary dramatists, and his last play, The Screens, is his crowning achievement. It strikes a powerful, closing chord to the formidable theatrical work that began with Deathwatch and continued, with even...

Wycherley's four comedies are admired for their satirical wit, farcical humour, vivid characterization, and social criticism.Love in a Wood, a lively comedy of intrigue, established him as a brilliant new dramatist.The Gentleman Dancing-Master, in...

This unique volume includes eight early dramas that mirror American literary, social, and cultural history: Royall Tylers The Contrast (1789); William Dunlap'sAndre (1798); James Nelson Barker's The Indian Princess (1808); Robert Montgomery Bird's The...

Performed across the globe by some of the world's most iconic performers, Samuel Beckett's indelible masterpiece remains an unwavering testament of what it means to be human.From an inauspicious beginning at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone in...

Three decades of controversy in Shakespeare studies can be summed up in a single question: Was Shakespeare one of a kind? On one side of the debate are the Shakespeare lovers, the bardolatrists, who insist on Shakespeare’s timeless preeminence as an...

Shakespeare lived in a world of absolutes—of claims for the absolute authority of scripture, monarch, and God, and the authority of fathers over wives and children, the old over the young, and the gentle over the baseborn. With the elegance and verve for...

Renaissance plays and poetry in England were saturated with the formal rhetorical twists that Latin education made familiar to audiences and readers. Yet a formally educated man like Ben Jonson was unable to make these ornaments come to life in his two...

The most celebrated plays of ancient Athens in vivid and dynamic new translations by award-winning poets Robert Bagg and James Scully The dominant Athenian playwright in fifth-century-BCE Athens, Sophocles left us seven powerful dramas that still...

Newly repackaged, three plays by Federico García LorcaIn these three plays, Federico García Lorca's acknowledged masterpieces, he searched for a contemporary mode of tragedy and reminded his audience that dramatic poetry—or poetic drama—depends less on...

A vital resource for scholars, students and actors, this book contains glosses and quotes for over 14,000 words that could be misunderstood by or are unknown to a modern audience. Displayed panels look at such areas of Shakespeare's language as...

The authoritative edition of Romeo and Juliet from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers.In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare creates a violent world, in which two young people fall in...

A brilliant and companionable tour through all thirty-eight plays, Shakespeare After All is the perfect introduction to the bard by one of the country’s foremost authorities on his life and work. Drawing on her hugely popular lecture courses at Yale and...

*Winner of the Tony Award for Best Play* *A Broadway production starring Richard Griffiths and Daniel Radcliffe* An explosive play that took critics and audiences by storm, Equus is Peter Shaffer's exploration of the way modern society has destroyed our...

A king foolishly divides his kingdom between his scheming two oldest daughters and estranges himself from the daughter who loves him. So begins this profoundly moving and disturbing tragedy that, perhaps more than any other work in literature, challenges...

Iphigenia among the Taurians Bacchae Iphigenia at Aulis Rhesus The four plays newly translated in this volume are among Euripides' most exciting works. Iphigenia among the Taurians is a story of escape and contrasting Greek and barbarian civilization,...