Faust is ever frustrated in his quest for knowledge and the true essence of life. By this, he attracts the attention of the Devil, Mephistopheles. Faust makes a deal with the Devil for more knowledge and power, agreeing to give his soul to Mephistopheles...

Book jacket/back: The setting of Jean Genet's celebrated play is a brothel that caters to refined sensibilities and peculiar tastes. Here men from all walks of life don the garb of their fantasies and act them out: a man from the gas company wears the...

In the family of passions none is more patient than hate. This masterpiece of the Elizabethan stage, first published in 1607, is a study of debauchery, deep offense, and the high cost of revenge. It is often compared to Hamlet for its relentless tension...

Text: English, French (translation)

Tom Stoppers's play "Jumpers" is both a high-spirited comedy and a serious attempt to debate the existence of a moral absolute, of metaphysical reality, of God. Michael Billington in "The Guardian" described the play succinctly: "The new Radical Liberal...

The two plays collected in this volume represent Genet's first attempts to analyze the mores of a bourgeois society he had previously been content simply to vilify. In The Maids, two domestic workers, deeply resentful of their inferior social position,...

"In form, it flows as freely as an improvisation, with fantasy, allegory and intimations of reality mingled into a weird, stirring unity. . . . Genet's investigation of the color black begins where most plays of this burning theme leave off. . . . This...

"Now may I have, by the reputation of an eunuch, the privileges of one. . . and be seen in a lady's chamber in the morning as early as a husband. . . ." In 17th-century London, a notorious womaniser plans an outageous deception to gain unrivalled...

Why was England the only country in Europe to maintain an all-male public theater in the Renaissance? Stephen Orgel uses this question as the starting point of a fresh and stimulating exploration of the representation of gender in Elizabethan drama and...

First presented by the Royal Court Theatre in London in September of 1996, Ashes to Ashes is a triumph of power and concision. In the living room of a pleasant house in a university town outside of London, Devlin, threatened by his wife Rebecca's...

“Wilson’s melody here is the mournful sound of what might have been, a blues-tinged tale about a driven, almost demonic man. He’s a petty thief named King who will stop at nothing for a better life. . . . King Hedley is a big play, filled with big...

“It took courage to do what Spalding did—courage to make theatre so naked and unadorned, to expose himself in this way and fight the demons in public. In doing so, he entered our hearts—my heart—because he made his struggle my struggle. His life became...

Hailed by The Washington Post as "a definitive synthesis of the best editions" and by The Times of London as "a monument to Shakespearean scholarship," The Oxford Shakespeare is the ultimate anthology of the Bard's work: the most authoritative edition of...

The three plays collected in this volume depict the faults, errors and foibles of ordinary people with exuberant humour, savage satire and acute observations. Volpone portrays a rich Venetian who pretends to be dying so that his despised acquaintances...

"Caroline is a breakthrough--a story so grounded in the ordinary details of life that it almost seems to have discovered a new genre." -Richard Zoglin, Time "Acute, smart and witty: a telling snapshot focusing with sharp clarity on characters captured...

Folger Shakespeare Library The world's leading center for Shakespeare studies Each edition includes: • Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play • Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of...

It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared--57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story...

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof first heated up Broadway in 1955 with its gothic American story of brothers vying for their dying father's inheritance amid a whirlwind of sexuality, untethered in the person of Maggie the Cat. The play also daringly showcased the...

Family relationships are at the center of Henry IV, Part 1. King Henry IV and Prince Hal form one major father-son pair, with Henry in despair because Hal lives a dissolute life. The father-son pair of Hotspur (Lord Henry Percy) and his father, the Earl...

The authoritative edition of King Lear from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers.Shakespeare’s King Lear challenges us with the magnitude, intensity, and sheer duration of the...