Literary Studies: Plays & Playwrights

Brayton Polka takes both a textual and theoretical approach to seven plays of Shakespeare: Macbeth, Othello, Twelfth Night, All’s Well That Ends We...

Sophocles' Theban Plays- Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone-lie at the core of the Western literary canon. They are extensively tra...

A ForeWord magazine Book of the Year for 2007 Charismatic, highly intelligent, and splendidly talented, Fanny Kemble (1809-93) was a Victorian cele...

The sea for Shakespeare is both a location and a metaphor; and either way it affords him an extraordinary freedom of invention, releasing whatever ...

This book investigates generic change in early modern theatre across multiple genres, unlike much other scholarship, attempting to understand chang...

This book focuses on the influence of classical authors on Ben Jonson’s dramaturgy, with particular emphasis on the Greek and Roman playwrights and...

This book offers a new, accurate and actable translation of one of Euripides’ most popular plays, together with a commentary which provides insight...

The first biography of Henry and Emily Folger, who acquired the largest and finest collection of Shakespeare in the world.In Collecting Shakespeare...

This study provides a new model for the construction of mentalities and intermental thought of characters in playscripts. It introduces a model th...

This pioneering study investigates the connection between Shakespeare and Catholic education. Its authors contend that Shakespeare’s plays explore ...

Questioning whether the impulse to adapt Shakespeare has changed over time, Lynne Bradley argues for restoring a sense of historicity to the study ...

Women’s Deliberation: The Heroine in Early Modern French Women’s Theater (1650–1750) argues that women playwrights question traditional views on wo...

Encompassing a wide variety of genres, media and art forms across a broad historical scope, this open access book identifies central strategies of ...

This title was first published in 2000. This book offers a wide-ranging account of tragic drama from the Greeks to Arthur Miller. It puts forward a...

Seeing Shakespeare’s Style offers new ways for readers to perceive Shakespeare and, by extension, literary texts generally. Organized as a series o...

Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England is the first book-length study of early modern English playbook typography. It tells a new hist...

While the baroque remains a foundational concept for other European literary and aesthetic traditions, scholars have largely elided the word from B...

Unpicking the ecopolitics of Shakespeare's plays at the Stuart court, Shakespeare Beyond the Green World establishes that the playwright was remark...

Can theatre change the world? If so, how can it productively connect with social reality and foster spectatorial critique and engagement? This open...

This study aims at examining the contemporary stage adaptations of «Othello» by the four noteworthy contemporary playwrights Ann Marie MacDonald, D...

This book argues that Shakespeare turned staging problems into opportunities for complex characterization by mobilizing the semiotic potential of p...

The One-Hour Shakespeare series is a collection of abridged versions of Shakespeare’s plays, designed specifically to accommodate both small and la...

Th e troubled reign of a fourteenth-century sultan of Delhi helps dramatize the crisis of secular nationhood in post-Independence India. A twelft h...

The domination of the state over the lives of individuals is, arguably, a problem of the present-day world. In this book, first published in 1971, ...

Goethe's Faust reworks the late-medieval myth of Dr Faust, a brilliant scholar so disillusioned he resolves to make a contract or wager with the de...

Vasileios Balaskas explores the revival of classical drama at ancient venues as a sociopolitical apparatus of the European nation-states in the nin...

This book is the first comprehensive examination of commercial drama as a reading genre in early modern England. Taking as its focus pre-Restoratio...

A survey, within one volume, of the history of critical responses to LGBTQ literature from the beginning to the present day, this book explores ch...

This study contends that folly is of fundamental importance to the implicit philosophical vision of Shakespeare’s drama. The discourse of folly’s w...

A systematic transnational investigation of post-war literary experiments in Europe and the Americas Clarifies concepts, provides a well-defined m...

Before William Shakespeare wrote world-famous plays on the themes of power and political turmoil, the Shakespeare family of Stratford-upon-Avon and...

Battista Guarini’s pastoral tragicomedy Il pastor fido (1589) began its life as a play, but soon was transformed through numerous musical settings ...

This powerful reinterpretation of Greek tragedy focuses on the performative - the physical and civic - dimension of tragedy. It challenges the idea...

First published in 1988, this books argues with received accounts to reclaim Brecht’s emphasis on his self-described ‘dialectical theatre’, re-exam...

Argues that playwrights looked to fencing theory and performance for physical cues and formal structure Demonstrates alternate historical understa...

National Abjection explores the vexed relationship between "Asian Americanness" and "Americanness” through a focus on drama and performance art. Ka...

What kinds of critical insights are made possible only or especially via creative strategies? This volume examines how creative modes of writing ...

While eighteenth-century playwright and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing made numerous contributions in his lifetime to the theater, the text that b...

Contemporary Australian Playwriting provides a thorough and accessible overview of the diverse and exciting new directions that Australian Playwrit...

Making a unique intervention in an incipient but powerful resurgence of academic interest in character-based approaches to Shakespeare, this book b...

Contemporary Australian Playwriting provides a thorough and accessible overview of the diverse and exciting new directions that Australian Playwrit...

Where is the pleasure in tragedy? This question, how suffering and sorrow become the stuff of aesthetic delight, is at the center of Charles Segal...

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare's England offers a new approach to evaluating the psychological 'loss' of the Virgin Mary in post-Re...

Irish Studies and the Dynamics of Memory presents the latest research from Irish studies scholars across a variety of disciplines, including histor...

This first book-length study to trace the evolution of the comic old man in Italian and English Renaissance comedy shows how English dramatists ado...