Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969; his literary output of plays, novels, stories and poetry has earned him an uncontested place as one of the greatest writers of our time. Endgame, originally written in French and...

For some 20 years at the beginning of the century J M Barrie enjoyed enormous commercial success with a wide variety of plays, but he is best known for Peter Pan. It retains its popularity today, both in the original and in adaptations. As well as being...

This volume contains three of Ben Jonson's greatest plays - Sejanus (1603), Volpone (1606) and Epicoene, or The Silent Woman (1609). Sejanus, an experimental tragedy written in the classical manner, was labelled a seditious work at the time of its first...

Twelfth Night is one of the most popular of Shakespeare's plays in the modern theatre, and this edition places particular emphasis on its theatrical qualities throughout. Peopled with lovers misled either by disguises or their own natures, it combines...

A Midsummer Night's Dream is perhaps the best loved of Shakepeare's plays. It brings together aristocrats, workers, and fairies in a wood outside Athens, and from there the enchantment begins. Simple and engaging on the surface, it is none the less a...

Dramatist, scriptwriter, short story writer, novelist, poet, director, and actor, Harold Pinter has earned universal praise for his distinctive style and imagination. In this, the most recent of four volumes, Pinter's work echoes many of his earlier...

For more than twenty years, Mel Gussow, a drama critic for the New York Times, has been meeting Harold Pinter to talk about work and life, plays and people. At the core of this book is a series of lengthy interviews - some of the most extensive that...

Picasso at the Lapin Agile, Steve Martin's first full-length play, opened at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater before moving on to Los Angeles (where it was the longest-running show in the history of the Westwood Playhouse) and, finally, to New York. An...

British Theatre in the Great War deals with a theatrical phase customarily dismissed by those charting twentieth-century developments. What becomes clear is that assessment by unsuitable literary criteria has masked the importance of the war years in...

Georg Biichner is the only German dramatist of his period whose plays have not only survived both as theater and as literature, but have grown more important, more relevant with the passage of time, observes Michael Hamburger.Biichner, who died in 1837...

'Cuckolds like lovers should themselves deceive'So concludes one of Wycherley's most revived and much discussed plays. It is a satirical comedy sharply focussed on the follies, vices and hypocrisies of Restoration London through its central characters:...

Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff's collaboration on this new translation combines the strengths that have recently distinguished both as translators of Greek tragedy: expert knowledge of the Greek and of the needs of the teaching classicist, intimate...

Widely recognized as the standard history of Japanese theatre for Western readers, this work by Benito Ortolani is now available for the first time in paperback. From ancient folk and ritual performances to modern dance theatre, it provides concise...

Now in paperback.Euripides, the last of the three great tragedians of ancient Athens, reached the height of his renown during the disastrous Peloponnesian War, when democratic Athens was brought down by its own outsized ambitions. “Euripides,” the...

In 1952, Hellman joined the ranks of intellectuals and artists called before Congress to testify about political subversion. Terrified yet defiant, Hellman refused to incriminate herself or others, and managed to avoid trial. Nonetheless the experience...

"A close reading of the plays that tries to map the creases and folds in Shakespeare's mysterious, elusive brain."-- New York Times Book Review A. D. Nuttall's study of Shakespeare's intellectual preoccupations is a literary tour de force and comes to...

The authoritative edition of Henry VI, Part 1 from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers.Henry VI, Part 1 is an uncompromising celebration of early English nationalism that...

Celebrated prose retellings of Shakespeare's plays Charles and Mary Lamb have delighted generations of adults as well as children with their famed prose renderings of Shakespeare's originals. Bringing the plays to life in a form that encourages readers...

Sunrise, a four-act play, was written in 1935 by Taso Yu, one of China's leading playwrights.As the Chinese publisher said in 1960, ''It describes the people's hellish life from 1931 to 1935 under Kuomintang reactionary rule. Among the many types who...