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‘O Light! May I never look on you again, Revealed as I am, sinful in my begetting, Sinful in marriage, sinful in shedding of blood!’  The legends surrounding the royal house of Thebes inspired Sophocles (496–406 BC) to create a powerful trilogy of mankind’s struggle against fate. King Oedipus tells of a man who brings pestilence to Thebes for crimes he does not realise he has committed, and then inflicts a brutal punishment upon himself. With profound insights into the human condition, it is a...

Based at Shepherd University, in West Virginia, the Contemporary American Theater Festival is nationally and internationally recognized as a home for playwrights and the development and production of new plays. The Festival makes it a priority to celebrate and produce playwrights with strong, distinct voices, with a core value to tell diverse stories. This anthology of work provides plays that speak to one of the most compelling virtues of artists everywhere – freedom of speech. A necessary vol...

Renaissance comedy, first performed in 1605. Includes complete text in modernized English, critical and explanatory notes and Introduction. From the Yale Ben Jonson edition.

Going to see a 'Shakespeare' and want a quick run-down on the plot? Studying Shakespeare and want to know who's who? Teaching the 'Henrys' and need a handy guide to all the histories?A Pocket Guide to Shakespeare's Plays gives all this and more: -an introduction to Shakespeare and his times -a note on the sources -cast lists -a synopsis for each play -main character descriptions -an essay on each play.

The first in a series on Shakespeare's original texts, including facsimile pages, this version of "Hamlet" is claimed to be, in some ways, the most authentic version of the play that we have. Included are an introduction, notes, and a theoretical, historical and contextual critique. This text has been rejected by scholars as a "bad Quarto" - corrupt and pirated text printed without the permission of the playwright or his company. Nonetheless, it was the first version of the play to be published...

Sexual types on the early modern stage are at once strange and familiar, associated with a range of "unnatural" or "monstrous" sexual and gender practices, yet familiar because readily identifiable as types: recognizable figures of literary imagination and social fantasy. From the many found in early modern culture, Mario DiGangi here focuses on six types that reveal in particularly compelling ways, both individually and collectively, how sexual transgressions were understood to intersect with s...

This cutting-edge collection of essays offers provocative studies of ancient history, literature, gender identifications and roles, and subsequent interpretations of the republican and imperial Roman past. The prose and poetry of Cicero and Petronius, Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid receive fresh interpretations; pagan and Christian texts are re-examined from feminist and imaginative perspectives; genres of epic, didactic, and tragedy are re-examined; and subsequent uses and re-uses of the ancient h...

Poison's Dark Works in Renaissance England considers the ways sixteenth- and seventeenth-century fears of poisoning prompt new models for understanding the world even as the fictive qualities of poisoning frustrate attempts at certainty. Whether English writers invoke literal poisons, as they do in so many revenge dramas, homicide cases, and medical documents, or whether poisoning appears more metaphorically, as it does in a host of theological, legal, philosophical, popular, and literary works,...

The main problem facing critics of Sophokles' Elektra has always been understanding the presentation of the vengeance and the nature of justice it represents. This volume addresses the ethical issues of this play through an analysis of the language and argumentation which the characters use to explain and justify their behaviour. The focus is on the examination of the themes of aidos and dolos, and the way in which each contributes to our overall understanding of the vengeance as an act which, f...

Alyssa Quint focuses on the early years of the modern Yiddish theater, from roughly 1876 to 1883, through the works of one of its best-known and most colorful figures, Avrom Goldfaden. Goldfaden (ne Goldenfaden, 1840-1908) was one of the first playwrights to stage a commercially viable Yiddish-language theater, first in Romania and then in Russia. Goldfaden's work was rapidly disseminated in print and his plays were performed frequently for Jewish audiences. Sholem Aleichem considered him as a...

Ireland, and in particular Dublin, was Samuel Beckett's cradle, a place, in Eoin O'Brien's words, he revisited 'with the same intensity that Proust went back to Combray'. It was fitting, then, shortly after Beckett's death, that his birthplace - through the good offices of the Gate Theatre, Trinity College and Radio Telefis Eireann - should have decided to honour the 1969 Nobel prize-winner by staging all of his dramatic productions over three weeks during October 1991 and hosting a series of vi...