Literary Studies: Plays & Playwrights

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

In the early seventeenth century, the London stage often portrayed a ruler covertly spying on his subjects. Traditionally deemed 'Jacobean disguise...

Massinger’s Italy: Re-Imagining Italian Culture in the Plays of Philip Massinger offers the first book-length account of the pervasive influence of...

A student edition of this challenging and popular tragedy with notes and commentary. The most controversial of the Greek tragedians, Euripedes is a...

This is Volume V out of eleven that form a collection on India, its History, Economy and Society. First published in 1930, this book looks at the ...

Kanadehon Chushingura has been one of the most popular bunraku and kabuki plays. This fascinating study explores the full spectrum of ukiyo-e (floa...

First published in 1973, this book is about Shakespeare, language and drama. The first part introduces some common ideas of anthropology and lingui...

Historian Tom Holland, actor Simon Callow, Brazil′s controversial director Roberto Alvim and Bollywood′s Aparna Sen all talk Shakespeare, protest a...

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

Kanadehon Chushingura has been one of the most popular bunraku and kabuki plays. This fascinating study explores the full spectrum of ukiyo-e (floa...

In this study, the author offers new interpretations of Shakespeare's works in the context of two major contemporary notions of collectivity: the c...

Engaging with fiction and history-and reading both genres as texts permeated with early modern anxieties, desires, and apprehensions-this collectio...

This volume offers John Webster's two great Jacobean tragedies, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, together with his brilliant tragicomedy, ...

Combines historical rigour with an analysis of dramatic contexts, themes and forms The 17 contributors explore the longstanding and vibrant Scottis...

Shakespeare: A Life in Art brings together in a single volume Fraser's previously published two-volume biography (Young Shakespeare, 1988, and Shak...

Contributors to this collection delve into the relationship between Rome and Shakespeare. They view the presence of Rome in Shakespeare's plays no...

Exploring how readers received and responded to literary works in the long eighteenth century, M-C. Newbould focuses on the role played by Laurence...

Paula Vogel’s plays, including the Pulitzer–prizewinning How I Learned to Drive, initiate a conversation with contemporary culture, staging vexed i...

First published in 1989, this title explores the relationship between theater and power in the English Renaissance. Shakespeare’s Henry V, Richard ...

The Oxford Shakespeare General Editor: Stanley Wells The Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed t...

Throwing fresh light on a much discussed but still controversial field, this collection of essays places the presence of Italian literary theories ...

Shakespeare’s two Venetian plays are dominated by the discourse of embarrassment. The Merchant of Venice is a comedy of embarrassment, and Othello ...

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), perhaps best known as a dramatic theorist, is an important but extremely difficult writer. This book studies the develo...

An introductory guide to studying ShakespeareThis book is a 'one-stop-shop' for the busy undergraduate studying Shakespeare. Offering detailed guid...

This collection of essays and interviews is the first book about the drama of American playwright Terrence McNally; it examines his career to date ...

This book considers the hundred years of re-writes of Anton Chekhov’s work, presenting a wide geographical landscape of Chekhovian influences in dr...

Join a band of curious cats for an adorable reading of William Shakespeare's 154 sonnets. Whether it's friendship, beauty, love or something more s...

Without Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), we simply would not understand Shakespeare in the way we do. In fact, much literature and art besides ...

This new guide to the English renaissance's most erudite and yet most street-wise dramatist strongly asserts the theatrical brilliance of his great...

This book was shortlisted for the ESSE Book Awards This volume analyses the endeavours of early Elizabethan playwrights to examine the narrative p...

Racine the practising dramatist had been in some danger of being crowded out from the numerous books on his psychology and style.In this critical s...

What is tragedy? What does the term imply? The word had outgrown its original context of literature and art and acquired wider and looser meanings....

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy presents fifty-four essays by a range of scholars from all parts of the world. Together these essays o...

Although younger than most European theatrical traditions, the Russian professional theater has generated an exciting body of criticism and theory...

This book provides a thorough analysis of terpsichorean lexis in Renaissance drama. Besides considering not only the Shakespearean canon but also t...

This book considers melancholy as an “assemblage,” as a network of dynamic, interpretive relationships between persons, bodies, texts, spaces, stru...

Drawing from early modern plays and treatises on the precepts and practices of the acting process, this study shows how the early modern Spanish ac...

Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) was a writer of great versatility, and his career as a London dramatist spans the most productive, innovative, and exc...

Shakespeare’s Grammatical Style is the first full-scale, systematic study using an examination of Shakespeare’s syntax as a key to the interpretati...