Ferdinand is an army major and son of President von Walter, a high-ranking noble in a German duke's court, while Luise Miller is the daughter of a middle-class musician. The couple fall in love with each other, but both their fathers tell them to end their affair. The President instead wants to expand his own influence by marrying Ferdinand to Lady Milford, the duke's mistress, but Ferdinand rebels against his father's plan and tries to persuade Luise to elope with him. "There are truly magnificent scenes and the characters are admirably put into effect." -Carl Wilhelm Ettinger (on the first...

Nikolai Gogol's classic and hilarious satire of bureaucratic ineptness and corruption in a first-class translation by Laurence Senelick. "The emperor deigned to attend the premiere with the heir apparent: he was extremely pleased and laughed heartily. The play is very entertaining but an intolerable insult to the nobility, the civil service, and the merchantry." -Khrapovitsky's diary, 1836 "Everybody got his and me first of all " -Tsar Nicholas I (allegedly), 1836 "The audience, struck by the novelty, laughed enormously, but I expected a better reception ... One of my friends explained the...

Originally written to protest thoughtless urban renewal, THE MADWOMAN OF CHAILLOT has remained remarkably up-to-date. When it was first revived, the actor Georges Wilson wrote, "It is a prophetic play in the sense that the dangers denounced more than twenty years ago have become true and immediately observable in everyday life. The theme is alienation. The Madwoman tells us, 'Poor fools, take the time to breathe, you soon will be the living dead, mindless robots.'" Today, the play speaks to environmental concerns, the destruction of the natural world, and the manipulation of world financial...

Of the hundred or so plays Euripides wrote in his lifetime only nineteen survive. Not all of them won first prize at the festivals, but BAKKHAI did. "From the outset, it is essential to understand that in Greek theater, as in fact in Shakespearean theater, the self that is really at stake is to be identified with the male, while the woman is assigned the role of the radical other." -Froma I Zeitlin "Intoxicatingly beautiful, coldly sordid, at one moment baffling, at the next thrilling us with the mystic charm of wood and hillside, this drama stands unique among Euripides's works." -Gilbert...