Dramat

Three of Strindberg's most famous plays, including Miss Julia, the basis for the major motion picture Miss Julie, starring Jessica Chastain and Colin Farrell

The plays in this volume focus on the tumultuous relationships between men and women, whether they are father and daughter, brother and sister, or lovers. Miss Julia is a ruthlessly realistic depiction of an upper-class woman's seduction of a servant, emphasizing the differences and the antagonism between them. In The Father a mom is brought to madness and driven out of his home by the suspicion...

Aeschylus (525-456 BC) brought a new grandeur and epic sweep to the drama of classical Athens, raising it to the status of high art. In Prometheus Bound the defiant Titan Prometheus is brutally punished by Zeus for daring to improve the state of wretchedness and servitude in which mankind is kept. The Suppliants tells the story of the fifty daughters of Danaus who must flee to escape enforced marriages, while Seven Against Thebes shows the inexorable downfall of the last members of the cursed family of Oedipus. And The Persians, the only Greek tragedy to deal with...

Three plays by Racine

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Brilliantly adapting Greek New Comedy for Roman audiences, the sublime comedies of Plautus (c. 254-184 BC) are the earliest surviving complete works of Latin literature. The four plays collected here reveal a playwright in his prime, exploring classic themes and developing standard characters that were to influence the comedies of Shakespeare, Moliere and many others. In The Ghost, a dissolute son who has squandered his father's money is thrown into disarray when he returns from abroad, a theme that is explored further in the comedy of errors A Three-Dollar Day. In The...

Features plays written during the long battles with Sparta that were to ultimately destroy ancient Athens. This title contains: The Children of Heracles, Andromache, The Suppliant Women, Phoenician Women, Orestes and Iphigenia in Aulis.

Although their Mongol overlords (beginning with the founding of the Yuan dynasty by Kublai Khan in 1280) tyrannized the Chinese in nearly every area of life, the arts enjoyed a new-found freedom. On the one hand oppressed, on the other released from the straight-jacket of Confucianism, the Chinese made the most of recent developments in poetry and drama. Yuan plays were a tonic, an amazing spectacle colorful outbursts of singing, dancing, music, acting and mime. They poured new life into old stories oppressors were ridiculed, servants became masters, scenes changed, day followed night in the...

This volume compiles three of Corneille's most lauded plays: The Cid, Corneille's masterpiece set in medieval Spain, was the first great work of French classical drama; Cinna, written three years later in 1641, is a tense political drama; and The Theatrical Illusion, an earlier work, is reminiscent of Shakespeare's exuberant comedies.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history...

The Roman dramatist Terence (c. 186-159 BC) adapted many of his comedies from Greek sources, rendering them suitable for audiences of his own time by introducing subtler characterization and more complex plots. In his romantic play, The Girl from Andros, Terence portrays a love affair saved by a startling discovery. The Self-Tormentor focusses on a man's remorse after sending his son to war, and The Eunuch depicts a case of mistaken identity. Phormio is as rich in intrigue as a French farce, while The Mother-in-Law shows two families striving to save a marriage and...

Features the play Robbers that presents a passionate consideration of liberty, fraternity and deep betrayal; and Wallenstein that explores a flawed general's struggle to bring the Thirty Years War to an end against the will of his Emperor.

Written between 42 and 37 b.c., ten pastoral poems believed to be the first authentic work by Virgil are presented with the original Latin on the left-hand page and the translation on the right.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and...

Menander (c. 341-291 BC) was the foremost innovator of Greek New Comedy, a dramatic style that moved away from the fantastical to focus upon the problems of ordinary Athenians. This collection contains the full text of Old Cantankerous (Dyskolos), the only surviving complete example of New Comedy, as well as fragments from works including The Girl from Samos and The Rape of the Locks, all of which are concerned with domestic catastrophes, the hazards of love and the trials of family life. Written in a poetic style regarded by the ancients as second only to Homer, these polished...

Collected 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 Buchner's letters and philosophical writings.

Racine's play Phedre--which draws on Euripides' tragedy Hippolytus--is the supreme achievement of French neoclassic theater. In her amusing foreword, Margaret Rawlings explains how this particular translation--made specifically from the actor's point-of-view--evolved from the 1957 Campbell Allen production.

Containing both the French and English texts on facing pages, as well as Racine's own preface and notes on his contemporary and classical references, this edition of Phedre is a favorite among modern readers and is of special value to students, amateur companies, and...

This volume of Moliere's dramatic commentaries on society presents The Miser, a misguided hero who obsessively disrupts the lives of those around him. The School for Wives is newly translated for this edition and was fiercely denounced as impious and vulgar. Moliere's response to his detractors became The School for Wives Criticized. Even more alarming to critics was his version of Don Juan. In The Hypochondriac, he produced an outrageous expose of medicine.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman's deferred American dream

Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity--and a play that compresses epic extremes of humor and...

This collection of contemporary scenes provides the student actor, as well as professional and untrained performers, with material from some of the best plays ever written. Each selection contains critical information on characters, setting, and background to give a clear sense of what the play is about. Contemporary Scenes for Student Actors accommodates a wide variety of acting styles, from naturalistic to poetic to highly stylized, spanning a range of ages and a variety of locales, and incorporating excerpts of various lengths.

Includes scenes from plays by
- Woody...

Often called the most autobiographical of Arthur Miller's plays, After the Fall probes deeply into the psyche of Quentin, a man who ruthlessly revisits his past to explain the catastrophe that is his life. His journey backward takes him through a troubled upbringing, the bitter death of his mother, and a series of failed relationships.

Jimmy Porter, frustrated and bitter in his drab flat, lives with his middle-class wife, Alison. Also sharing the flat is Cliff who keeps things tenuously together. Alison's friend Helen arrives and persuades her to leave Jimmy only to fall for him herself. When Alison becomes pregnant, Helen leaves the couple. This play originally opened at the Royal Court Theatre in 1956 and has since proved to be a milestone in the history of theater.

In Vichy France in 1942, eight men and a boy are seized by the collaborationist authorities and made to wait in a building that may be a police station. Some of them are Jews. All of them have something to hideif not from the Nazis, then from their fellow detainees and, inevitably, from themselves. For in this claustrophobic antechamber to the death camps, everyone is guilty. And perhaps none more so than those who can walk away alive.

In Incident at Vichy, Arthur Miller re-creates Dante's hell inside the gaping pit that is our history and populates it with sinners whose crimes are...

Now a Broadway play starring Mark Ruffalo, Tony Shalhoub, Danny DeVito, and Jessica Hecht, Miller's riveting story about family, sacrifice, and the struggle to make peace with the past.
Years after an angry breakup, Victor and Walter Franz are reunited by the death of their father. As they sort through his possessions in an old brownstone attic, the memories evoked by his belongings stir up old hostilities. The Price was nominated for two Tony Awards, including best play.