What was Shakespeare? For Edward Pechter, the question does not concern the time-worn mystery of identity--whether the Bard was the glover's son from Stratford or the Earl of Oxford or any of the other pretenders. Instead, Pechter examines how our talk...

Receptive to influences of such diverse theorists as Derrida, Jameson, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lacan and Althusser, materialist Shakespeare criticism has long since left behind the days of ‘vulgar’ Marxism and has emerged as a rich interpretive...

Just at the moment when conflicts between critical "isms" are threatening to turn the study of English literature into a game park for endangered texts, Bradshaw arrives with a work of liberating wit and insight. His subject is double: the Shakespeare he...

Artists and writers in early twentieth-century England engaged in a variety of ways with the cultural traditions of Shakespeare as a means of defining and relating what they understood to be their own unique historical experience. In Shakespeare and...

If Eugene O’Neill represents the tragic mask of American drama, then George S. Kaufman can easily lay claim to its smiling counterpart. No other comic dramatist in America has enjoyed more popular success and perennial influence or been more fortunate in...

"In David Hare's "greatest play" (City Limits) two sisters, Isobel, a serene and good person, and Marion, an ambitious Tory Junior Minister, gather at the home of their late father for his funeral. Katherine, the sisters' young, alcoholic, stepmother,...

Under the editorship of the late Robert Nemiroff, with a provocative and thoughtful introduction by preeminent African-American scholar Margaret B. Wilkerson and a commentary by Spike Lee, this completely restored screenplay is the accurate and...

The inspiration for the musical film adaptation starring Peter Dinklage and directed by Joe WrightPoet and soldier, brawler and charmer, Cyrano de Bergerac is desperately in love with Roxane, the most beautiful woman in Paris. But there is one very large...

What do we mean by 'tragedy' in present-day usage? When we turn on the news, does a report of the latest atrocity have any connection with the masterpieces of Sophocles, Shakespeare and Racine? What has tragedy been made to mean by dramatists,...

Based on events that took place in Oyo, an ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria, in 1946, Wole Soyinka's powerful play concerns the intertwined lives of Elesin Oba, the king's chief horseman; his son, Olunde, now studying medicine in England; and Simon...

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 author,...

An illustrative selection of German dramas from the baroque age and the early Enlightenment (i.e. prior to Lessing), by Sachs, Gryphius, Schlegel, and others.

“The concluding work in one of the most ambitious dramatic projects ever undertaken . . . a play that could well be Mr. Wilson’s most provocative.”—Ben Brantley, The New York Times“Radio Golf is a rich, carefully wrought human tapestry that is colorful,...

Homer's Odyssey is not the only version of the story. Mythic material was originally oral, and also local -- a myth would be told one way in one place and quite differently in another. I have drawn on material other than the Odyssey, especially for the...

In Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign renowned Brecht scholar Antony Tatlow uses drama to investigate cultural crossings and to show how intercultural readings or performances question the settled assumptions we bring to interpretations of...

“No one except perhaps Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams has aimed so high and achieved so much in the American theater.”—John Lahr, The New Yorker“A swelling battle hymn of transporting beauty. Theatergoers who have followed August Wilson’s career...

The Dramatic Imagination is one of the few enduring works written about set design. Robert Edmond Jones's innovations in set design and lighting brought new ideas to the stage, but it is greater understanding of design - its role at the heart of theater...

In Bodies in Dissent Daphne A. Brooks argues that from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, black transatlantic activists, actors, singers, and other entertainers frequently transformed the alienating conditions of social and political...

An inspiring and no-nonsense guide for aspiring artists of all stripes—from “the most exciting individual in American theater” (Newsweek). In vividly anecdotal letters to the young BZ, Anna Deavere Smith addresses the full spectrum of issues that all...

A newly revised edition of an American classic, Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize—winning Buried Child is as fierce and unforgettable as it was when it was first produced in 1978.A scene of madness greets Vince and his girlfriend as they arrive at the squalid...