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A Companion to Shakespeare
by David S. KastanA Companion to Shakespeare is an indispensable book for readers of Shakespeare and anyone with an interest in his works. In 28 newly commissioned essays, this volume offers a remarkably innovative and comprehensive picture of the theatrical, literary, intellectual and social worlds in which Shakespeare wrote and produced his plays. <P>Each individual essay stands as an authoritative account of the state of knowledge in its field, and provides a new and compelling portrait of the historical conditions, both imaginative and institutional, that enabled (and in some cases inhibited) Shakespeare's great art. <P>Topics covered include the organization and regulation of Elizabethan playing, printing, and publication; the circulation of the play-texts: Shakespeare's reading; religion and political thought in England in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England: and the linguistic and literary environment in which he wrote.
Company Of Wayward Saints
by George HermanComedy / 6m, 3f / Platform stage / The company is a commedia dell' arte group who wander by mistake into the eye of an allegory. They are humanity, wayward saints all, who are far from home and without means. A nobleman may be their salvation if they can put on a good show for him. Surprisingly, the Company chooses to present the history of man, from the Garden of Eden through Everyman in birth, adolescence, marriage and death. Along the way they enact other wayward adventures such as the assassination of Julius Caesar and the homecoming of Odysseus. It is a fine mosaic of life redeemed by humor and human understanding.
Competing Germanies: Nazi, Antifascist, and Jewish Theater in German Argentina, 1933–1965 (Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought)
by Robert KelzFollowing World War II, German antifascists and nationalists in Buenos Aires believed theater was crucial to their highly politicized efforts at community-building, and each population devoted considerable resources to competing against its rival onstage. Competing Germanies tracks the paths of several stage actors from European theaters to Buenos Aires and explores how two of Argentina's most influential immigrant groups, German nationalists and antifascists (Jewish and non-Jewish), clashed on the city's stages. Covered widely in German- and Spanish-language media, theatrical performances articulated strident Nazi, antifascist, and Zionist platforms. Meanwhile, as their thespian representatives grappled onstage for political leverage among emigrants and Argentines, behind the curtain, conflicts simmered within partisan institutions and among theatergoers. Publicly they projected unity, but offstage nationalist, antifascist, and Zionist populations were rife with infighting on issues of political allegiance, cultural identity and, especially, integration with their Argentine hosts.Competing Germanies reveals interchange and even mimicry between antifascist and nationalist German cultural institutions. Furthermore, performances at both theaters also fit into contemporary invocations of diasporas, including taboos and postponements of return to the native country, connections among multiple communities, and forms of longing, memory, and (dis)identification. Sharply divergent at first glance, their shared condition as cultural institutions of emigrant populations caused the antifascist Free German Stage and the nationalist German Theater to adopt parallel tactics in community-building, intercultural relationships, and dramatic performance.Its cross-cultural, polyglot blend of German, Jewish, and Latin American studies gives Competing Germanies a wide, interdisciplinary academic appeal and offers a novel intervention in Exile studies through the lens of theater, in which both victims of Nazism and its adherents remain in focus.
Competition Piece
by John WellsComedy, Short Play /10-21 m or f / Bare stage / This clever comedy is an ideal high school competition play. Three groups of students are preparing for a drama competition. One has lots of rehearsal time and chooses a romance. The meatheads decide to do a typical teen problem play. The arty clique wants to do a one act version of King Lear as a Japanese Noh drama. Winner of several competitions, this play is certain to delight your students, your audience and those hard to please judges.
The Complaisant Lover: A Play
by Graham GreeneA “delicious . . . champagne cocktail” of a stage comedy about a sporting British couple’s marital—and extramarital—propositions (New York Herald Tribune). Victor Rhodes, a hearty and amiable dentist in North London, has what he thinks is a happy marriage. It’s stable, routine, and comfortably platonic. Five years and counting, his wife, Mary, feels the same way. That’s why she’s taken a secret lover—their good friend, Clive Root, an antiquarian bookseller for whom relieving complaisant husbands of their duty is a pleasure. But when Mary and Clive connive a rendezvous in Amsterdam, their getaway takes a surprising turn with a visit from Victor. What’s now at risk for Mary is more than a marriage to a man she genuinely loves but also a perfectly fulfilling affair with a man she truly desires. In this “sin-and-tonic work of art,” Mary isn’t about to give up either of them (Spectator). “An expert at badinage full of quiet English verve, Mr. Greene writes with smooth sophistication” in his last play—a comedy of lies, cheats, and betrayals—produced by Sir John Gielgud at the Globe Theatre, London, in 1959 (The New York Times). Two years later, it debuted on Broadway, with a cast including Sandy Dennis, Michael Redgrave, and Gene Wilder.
The Complete Aeschylus
by AeschylusAeschylus' Oresteia, the only ancient tragic trilogy to survive, is one of the great foundational texts of Western culture. It begins with Agamemnon, which describes Agamemnon's return from the Trojan War and his murder at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra, continues with her murder by their son Orestes in Libation Bearers, and concludes with Orestes' acquittal at a court founded by Athena in Eumenides. The trilogy thus traces the evolution of justice in human society from blood vengeance to the rule of law, Aeschylus' contribution to a Greek legend steeped in murder, adultery, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and endless intrigue.
The Complete Book of Hand Shadows: Instructions for Shadowgraphy
by Louis NikolaGenerations of entertainers have amused audiences of children and adults with the art of hand shadows, using only a light source and their own two hands to form immediately recognizable profiles of people and animals. Lovers of nostalgia and aspiring hand shadow artists will delight in this facsimile of a 1913 book, which features more than 50 hand shadows. These quaint illustrations depict many different types of shadows, from swans, rabbits, and other animals to historic figures and fictional characters. Each hand shadow is accompanied by a description of specific hand positioning and an illustration. Additional helpful tips include instructions on lighting, projection screens, and hand exercises.
The Complete Euripides Volume II
by Peter Burian Alan ShapiroPlays: ELECTRA; IPHIGENIA IN TAURIS; ORESTES; IPHIGENIA AT AULIS
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Amateur Theatricals: Your Ticket to Staging a Successful Play, from Start to Final Curtain
by John KenrickThe one and only book on successfully staging amateur productions. In this book, drama teachers and community directors are given everything they need to know about picking the right show; licensing, casting, and budgeting; organizing a schedule; costumes, makeup, staging, lighting, and music; tickets, fundraising, programs, cast parties, and more. Illustrated with help plans and photos from actual productions. • Perfect for nonprofit organizations&’ fundraising theater events and community theater groups • Complete with an extensive resource section • Illustrated with help plans and great photos from actual productions
The Complete Plays
by Anton Chekhov Laurence Senelick"The most complete collection of the Russian playwright's repertoire."--Vogue This stunning new translation presents the only truly complete edition of the plays of one of the greatest dramatists in history. Anton Chekhov is a unique force in modern drama, his works interpreted and adapted internationally and beloved for their brilliant wit and understanding of the human condition.This volume contains work never previously translated, including the newly discovered farce The Power of Hypnotism, the first version of Ivanov, Chekhov's early humorous dialogues, and a description of lost plays and those Chekhov intended to write but never did.
The Complete Plays
by Christopher MarloweMarlowe's seven plays dramatise the fatal lure of potent forces, whether religious, occult or erotic. In the victories of Tamburlaine, Faustus's encounters with the demonic, the irreverence of Barabas in THE JEW OF MALTA, and the humiliation of Edward II in his fall from power and influence, Marlowe explores the shifting balance between power and helplessness, the sacred and its desecration.
The Complete Plays
by John M. SyngeThis volume includes the complete texts of all the plays by J.M. Synge. Produced at the Abbey Theater which Synge founded. Represents one of the major dramatic achievements of the 20th century.From the Paperback edition.
Complete Plays, Lenz and Other Writings
by Georg BuchnerCollected in this volume are powerful dramas and psychological fiction by the nineteenth-century iconoclast now recognized as a major figure of world literature. Also included are selections from Büchner's letters and philosophical writings.
The Complete Plays of Frances Burney: Full-text Database: Macintosh Format (The Pickering Masters)
by Tristanne J CookeThe complete plays of Fanny Burney, taken from the original manuscripts of her work. The work includes a general introduction, headnotes to each play, explanatory notes and variant readings.
The Complete Plays of Jean Racine: Volume 5: Britannicus
by Jean RacineThis is the fifth volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays. Geoffrey Alan Argent’s translations faithfully convey all the urgency and keen psychological insight of Racine’s dramas, and the coiled strength of his verse, while breathing new vigor into the time-honored form of the “heroic” couplet. Complementing this translation are the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary—particularly detailed and extensive for this volume, Britannicus being by far Racine’s most historically informed play. Also noteworthy is Argent’s reinstatement of an eighty-two-line scene, originally intended to open Act III, that has never before appeared in an English translation of this play. Britannicus, one of Racine’s greatest plays, dramatizes the crucial day when Nero—son of Agrippina and stepson of the late emperor Claudius—overcomes his mother, his wife Octavia, his tutors, and his vaunted “three virtuous years” in order to announce his omnipotence. He callously murders his innocent stepbrother, Britannicus, and effectively destroys Britannicus’s beloved, the virtuous Junia, as well. Racine may claim, in his first preface, that this tragedy “does not concern itself at all with affairs of the world at large,” but nothing could be further from the truth. The tragedy represented in Britannicus is precisely that of the Roman Empire, for in Nero Racine has created a character who embodies the most infamous qualities of that empire — its cruelty, its depravity, and its refined barbarity.
The Complete Plays of Jean Racine: Volume 4: Athaliah
by Jean RacineAs Voltaire famously opined, Athaliah, Racine’s last play, is “perhaps the greatest masterwork of the human spirit.” Its formidable antagonists, Athaliah, queen of Judah, and Jehoiada, high priest of the temple of Jerusalem, are engaged in a deadly struggle for dominion: she, fiercely determined to maintain her throne and exterminate the detested race of David; he, no less fiercely determined to overthrow this heathen queen and enthrone the orphan Joash, the scion of the house of David, whom Athaliah believes she slew as an infant ten years earlier. This boy represents the sole hope for the survival of the royal race from which is to spring the Christ. But in this play, even God is more about hate and retribution than about love and mercy.This is the fourth volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays—only the third time such a project has been undertaken. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has rendered these plays in the verse form that Racine might well have used had he been English: namely, the “heroic” couplet. Argent has exploited the couplet’s compressed power and flexibility to produce a work of English literature, a verse drama as gripping in English as Racine’s is in French. Complementing the translation are the illuminating Discussion, intended as much to provoke discussion as to provide it, and the extensive Notes and Commentary, which offer their own fresh and thought-provoking insights.
The Complete Plays of Jean Racine: Volume 3: Iphigenia
by Jean Racine Geoffrey Alan ArgentThis is the third volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays—only the third time such a project has been undertaken. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has rendered these plays in the verse form that Racine might well have used had he been English: namely, the “heroic” couplet. Argent has exploited the couplet’s compressed power and flexibility to produce a work of English literature, a verse drama as gripping in English as Racine’s is in French. Complementing the translation are the illuminating Discussion, intended as much to provoke discussion as to provide it, and the extensive Notes and Commentary, which offer their own fresh and thought-provoking insights.In Iphigenia, his ninth play, Racine returns to Greek myth for the first time since Andromache. To Euripides’s version of the tale he adds a love interest between Iphigenia and Achilles. And dissatisfied with the earlier resolutions of the Iphigenia myth (her actual death or her eleventh-hour rescue by a dea ex machina), Racine creates a wholly original character, Eriphyle, who, in addition to providing an intriguing new denouement, serves the dual dramatic purpose of triangulating the love interest and galvanizing the wholesome “family values” of this play by a jolt of supercharged passion.
The Complete Plays of Jean Racine: Volume 1: The Fratricides
by Jean Racine Geoffrey Alan ArgentThis is the first volume of a planned translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays—a project undertaken only three times in the three hundred years since Racine’s death. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has taken a fresh approach: he has rendered these plays in rhymed "heroic" couplets. While Argent’s translation is faithful to Racine’s text and tone, his overriding intent has been to translate a work of French literature into a work of English literature, substituting for Racine’s rhymed alexandrines (hexameters) the English mode of rhymed iambic pentameters, a verse form particularly well suited to the highly charged urgency of Racine’s drama and the coiled strength of his verse. Complementing the translations are the illuminating Discussions and the extensive Notes and Commentaries Argent has furnished for each play. The Discussions are not offered as definitive interpretations of these plays, but are intended to stimulate readers to form their own views and to explore further the inexhaustibly rich world of Racine’s plays. Included in the Notes and Commentary section of this translation are passages that Racine deleted after the first edition and have never before appeared in English.The full title of Racine’s first tragedy is La Thébaïde ou les Frères ennemis (The Saga of Thebes, or The Enemy Brothers). But Racine was far less concerned with recounting the struggle for Thebes than in examining those indomitable passions—in this case, hatred—that were to prove his lifelong focus of interest. For Oedipus’s sons, Eteocles and Polynices (the titular brothers), vying for the throne is rather a symptom than a cause of their unquenchable hatred—so unquenchable that by the end of the play it has not only destroyed these twin brothers, but has also claimed the lives of their mother, their sister, their uncle, and their two cousins as collateral damage. Indeed, as Racine acknowledges in his preface, “There is hardly a character in it who does not die at the end.”
The Complete Plays of Jean Racine: Volume 5: Britannicus (G - Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects)
by Jean Racine Geoffrey Alan ArgentThis is the fifth volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays. Geoffrey Alan Argent’s translations faithfully convey all the urgency and keen psychological insight of Racine’s dramas, and the coiled strength of his verse, while breathing new vigor into the time-honored form of the “heroic” couplet. Complementing this translation are the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary—particularly detailed and extensive for this volume, Britannicus being by far Racine’s most historically informed play. Also noteworthy is Argent’s reinstatement of an eighty-two-line scene, originally intended to open Act III, that has never before appeared in an English translation of this play. Britannicus, one of Racine’s greatest plays, dramatizes the crucial day when Nero—son of Agrippina and stepson of the late emperor Claudius—overcomes his mother, his wife Octavia, his tutors, and his vaunted “three virtuous years” in order to announce his omnipotence. He callously murders his innocent stepbrother, Britannicus, and effectively destroys Britannicus’s beloved, the virtuous Junia, as well. Racine may claim, in his first preface, that this tragedy “does not concern itself at all with affairs of the world at large,” but nothing could be further from the truth. The tragedy represented in Britannicus is precisely that of the Roman Empire, for in Nero Racine has created a character who embodies the most infamous qualities of that empire — its cruelty, its depravity, and its refined barbarity.
The Complete Plays of Jean Racine: Volume 2: Bajazet
by Jean Racine Geoffrey Alan ArgentThis is the second volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays—only the third time such a project has been undertaken in the three hundred years since Racine’s death. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has taken a fresh approach: he has rendered these plays in rhymed “heroic” couplets. While Argent’s translation is faithful to Racine’s text and tone, his overriding intent has been to translate a work of French literature into a work of English literature, substituting for Racine’s rhymed alexandrines (hexameters) the English mode of rhymed iambic pentameters, a verse form particularly well suited to the highly charged urgency of Racine’s drama and the coiled strength of his verse. Complementing the translation are the illuminating Discussion, intended as much to provoke discussion as to provide it, and the extensive Notes and Commentary, which clarify obscure references, explicate the occasional gnarled conceit, and offer their own fresh and thought-provoking insights.Bajazet, Racine’s seventh play, first given in 1672, is based on events that had taken place in the Sultan’s palace in Istanbul a mere thirty years earlier. But the twilit, twisting passageways of the Seraglio merely serve as a counterpart to the dim and errant moral sense of the play’s four protagonists: Bajazet, the Sultan’s brother; Atalide, Bajazet’s secret lover; Roxane, the Sultaness, who is madly in love with Bajazet and dangles over his head the death sentence the Sultan has ordered her to implement in his absence; and Akhmet, the wily, well-intentioned Vizier, who involves them all in an imbroglio in the Seraglio, with disastrous consequences. Unique among Racine’s plays, Bajazet provides no moral framework for either protagonists or audience. We watch as these benighted characters, cut adrift from any moral moorings, with no upright character at hand to serve as an ethical anchor and no religious or societal guidelines to serve as a lifeline, flail, flounder, and finally drag one another down. Here, Racine has presented us with his four most mercilessly observed, most subtly delineated, and most ambiguously fascinating characters. Indeed, Bajazet is certainly Racine’s most undeservedly neglected tragedy.
The Complete Plays of Jean Racine: Volume 4: Athaliah
by Jean Racine Geoffrey Alan ArgentAs Voltaire famously opined, Athaliah, Racine’s last play, is “perhaps the greatest masterwork of the human spirit.” Its formidable antagonists, Athaliah, queen of Judah, and Jehoiada, high priest of the temple of Jerusalem, are engaged in a deadly struggle for dominion: she, fiercely determined to maintain her throne and exterminate the detested race of David; he, no less fiercely determined to overthrow this heathen queen and enthrone the orphan Joash, the scion of the house of David, whom Athaliah believes she slew as an infant ten years earlier. This boy represents the sole hope for the survival of the royal race from which is to spring the Christ. But in this play, even God is more about hate and retribution than about love and mercy.This is the fourth volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays—only the third time such a project has been undertaken. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has rendered these plays in the verse form that Racine might well have used had he been English: namely, the “heroic” couplet. Argent has exploited the couplet’s compressed power and flexibility to produce a work of English literature, a verse drama as gripping in English as Racine’s is in French. Complementing the translation are the illuminating Discussion, intended as much to provoke discussion as to provide it, and the extensive Notes and Commentary, which offer their own fresh and thought-provoking insights.
The Complete Plays of Sophocles: A New Translation
by Robert Bagg James ScullyThe most celebrated plays of ancient Athens in vivid, dynamic new translations by award-winning poets Robert Bagg & James Scully.The dominant Athenian playwright in fifth-century BCE Athens, Sophocles left us seven powerful dramas that still shock as they render the violence that erupts within divinity and humankind. Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Kolonos, and Antigone trace three generations of a family manipulated by the inscrutably vindictive god Apollo to commit patricide, incest, and kin murder. Elektra and Women of Trakhis begin as studies of women obsessed with hatred and desire but become dissenting critiques of the Greeks’ enthusiasm for revenge and ego-crazed heroics. Two hard-hitting dramas set in war zones, Aias and Philoktetes, use conflicts among Greek warriors at Troy to thrash out political and ethical crises confronting Athenian society itself.These translations, modern in idiom while faithful to the Greek and already proven stageworthy, preserve depth and subtlety of Sophocles’ characters and refresh and clarify his narratives. Their focus on communities under extreme stress still resonates deeply for us here and now. This is Sophocles for a new generation entering the turbulent arena of ancient Greek drama.Praise for The Complete Plays of Sophocles“Bagg’s Oedipus plays and Scully’s remarkable Aias are as finely wrought as one could desire, but they have a spare impact which gets across the moment-by-moment emotion of the plays, and makes plain the moral or political themes.” —Richard Wilbur, former U.S. Poet Laureate, winner of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize“Bagg and Scully’s renderings strike me as the most performable versions of Sophocles I’ve ever encountered . . . if you’re looking for the translation that best reflects the emotional force and expressive range of the original plays, you would be hard pressed to do better.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
The Complete Plays Of Sophocles
by Moses Hadas SophoclesOedipus the King * Antigone * Electra * Ajax Trachinian Women * Philoctetes * Oedipus at Colonus The greatest of the Greek tragedians, Sophocles wrote over 120 plays, surpassing his older contemporary Aeschylus and the younger Euripides in literary output as well as in the number of prizes awarded his works. Only the seven plays in this volume have survived intact. From the complex drama of Antigone, the heroine willing to sacrifice life and love for a principle, to the mythic doom embodied by Oedipus, the uncommonly good man brought down by the gods, Sophocles possessed a tragic vision that, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, "saw life steadily and saw it whole." This one-volume paperback edition of Sophocles' complete works is a revised and modernized version of the famous Jebb translation, which has been called "the most carefully wrought prose version of Sophocles in English."
The Complete Plays of Sophocles
by SophoclesThe 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 shock as they render the violence that erupts within divinity and humankind. Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Kolonos, and Antigone trace three generations of a family manipulated by the inscrutably vindictive god Apollo to commit patricide, incest, and kin murder. Elektra and Women of Trakhis begin as studies of women obsessed with hatred and desire but become dissenting critiques of the Greeks' enthusiasm for revenge and ego-crazed heroics. Two hard-hitting dramas set in war zones, Aias and Philoktetes, use conflicts among Greek warriors at Troy to thrash out political and ethical crises confronting Athenian society itself. These translations, modern in idiom while faithful to the Greek and already proven stageworthy, preserve the depth and subtlety of Sophocles' characters and refresh and clarify his narratives. Their focus on communities under extreme stress still resonates deeply for us here and now. This is Sophocles for a new generation entering the turbulent arena of ancient Greek drama.