Kategoria BISAC: Drama >> European - General

An Enemy of the People concerns the actions of Doctor Thomas Stockmann, a medical officer charged with inspecting the public baths on which the prosperity of his native town depends. He finds the water to be contaminated. When he refuses to be silenced, he is declared an enemy of the people. Stockmann served as a spokesman for Ibsen, who felt that his plays gave a true, if not always palatable, picture of life and that truth was more important than critical approbation.

Frank McGuinness presents scintillating new versions of two of August Strindberg's plays -- one a major work, the other less well known. Miss Julie is Strindberg's examination of power, sex, and class, set on a midsummer's eve in a nobleman's house and focusing on the shifting relationship between Miss Julie, the daughter of the house, and Jean, her father's manservant. The Stronger is a short play that explores the complex range of emotions felt by Madame X when she encounters Mademoiselle Y, her husband's former mistress, at a fashionable cafe. Calling Mademoiselle Y worn...

Although it was written shortly before or after Queen Elizabeth's deathin 1603 and performed by the boy company at Blackfriars, this playforeshadows the light ladies and callous gallants of Restorationcomedy. Passion is a scourge, love is humiliation, and friends might aswell be enemies. Freevill discards his concubine Franceschina and, fora joke, sets his straight-laced friend Malheureux on to her, who fallsfor her and promises to carry out her revenge on Freevill by killinghim. The play in the theatre, which is fully imagined in theintroduction to this edition, impresses on the audience...

Esteemed in France as the leading writer of Romantic dramas, Victor Hugo created a body of work that revolutionized the dramatic canon of his time. In this book, Albert W. Halsall presents the first complete treatment in English of Hugo's plays.

This valuable synthesis offers a history, plot summary, and detailed analysis of all the dramas, from Cromwel and Torquemada to the juvenilia and the epic melodrama Les Burgraves. Particular attention is given to Hugo's practical experiments in staging his own plays, which he nearly always directed himself in the 1830s. Also documented are...

The texts of Luigi Pirandello, one of the literary giants of this century, have been subject to widely different readings by successive generations of critics. These essays present an up-to-date re-evaluation of Pirandello's works, which include poetry, novels, short stories, plays, essays, letters, and memoirs.

Arranged in four sections - Introduction, Structures, Meanings, and Innovations - the volume presents a variety of provocative viewpoints and offers an accurate picture of the network of issues inhabiting the author's oeuvre. In the introductory section the editors provide an...

Les Kurbas - director, actor, playwright, filmmaker, and translator - was the first artist to introduce Shakespeare to the Ukrainian stage. Creating the foundations of Soviet Ukrainian theatre and cinema, he was also responsible for its avant-garde direction. Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn is the first book-length study in English of Kurbas's modernist productions of Shakespeare and the first book on Soviet Shakespeare productions in Ukraine in any language.

Situating Shakespeare within the ideological and cultural debates and conflicts of the early Soviet period, Irena...

The manner in which a play is published often says as much about the culture that it comes from as the play itself. Using the example of nineteenth-century Spanish theatre, The Stages of Property argues that there is a great deal one can learn about a nation by examining its publication standards.

Lisa Surwillo discusses the ways in which notions of intellectual property transformed Spain's theatre - its agents, performance practices, and reception - over a period of fifty years, from 1830 to 1880. For three centuries, theatre had been the cultural arm of the monarchy. After the...