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,...

The introduction reviews the few known facts about this early Shakespeare play and discusses the puzzling problems of its date and authorship. The text has been freshly edited with the aim of presenting the play as revised for the first recorded...

A pioneering scholar of Shakespeare and early modern letters provides an overview of work in the fieldFor more than twenty-five years, Karen Newman has brought her critical acumen to bear on early modern studies. In this collection of her essays on...

In Rhinoceros, as in his earlier plays, Ionesco startles audiences with a world that invariably erupts in explosive laughter and nightmare anxiety. A rhinoceros suddenly appears in a small town, tramping through its peaceful streets. Soon there are two,...

The chairs: An old married couple are alone waiting for guests to arrive. The Old Man tells a favourite story from their past, and the Old Woman, who seems to be both wife and mother, says he could have been much more in life than a caretaker. He says he...

This teaching edition of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew responds to the needs of instructors using a variety of approaches to Shakespeare, including feminist, historical, and cultural studies approaches. The play is accompanied by four sets of...