Kategoria BISAC: Drama >> European - Spanish & Portuguese

Life Is a Dream is a work many hold to be the supreme example of Spanish Golden Age drama. Imbued with highly poetic language and humanist ideals, it is an allegory that considers contending themes of free will and predestination, illusion and reality, played out against the backdrop of court intrigue and the restoration of personal honor.

In the mountainous barrens of Poland, the rightful heir to the kingdom has been imprisoned since birth in an attempt by his father to thwart fate. Meanwhile,...

Newly repackaged, three plays by Federico Garcia Lorca

In these three plays, Federico Garcia Lorca's acknowledged masterpieces, he searched for a contemporary mode of tragedy and reminded his audience that dramatic poetry--or poetic drama--depends less on formal convention that on an elemental, radical outlook on human life. His images are beautiful and exact, but until now no translator had ever been able to make his characters speak unaffectedly on the American stage. Michael Dewell of the National Repertory Theatre and Carmen Zapata of the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts...

In recent years, the English-language theatre has rediscovered Pedro Calderon De La Barca and a number of highly successful productions have been staged. These translations by Gwynne Edwards capture the ferocious spirit of his work in sharp and speakable translation.

The three plays included in Calderon Plays 1 represent Calderon's most celebrated work, in which he explores the extent of man's freedom in a hierarchical society often bound by anachronistic codes of conduct. The plays are The Surgeon of Honour, described by Michael Billington as 'one of the most disquieting plays in...

One of the most significant playwrights and novelists of the early twentieth century

This volume of translations contains Divine Words, a play that draws on pagan, Celtic traditions of the playwright's native Galicia and the repressive Catholicism of Spain to present a distorted picture of rustic life at its cruellest and most hypocritical; Bohemian Lights, the play which first expounded Valle-Inclan's theory of the grotesque (esperpento) and Silver Face, the first in the trilogy of Savage Plays, distinguished by a similar sense of anarchy and amorality.
"Ramon del Valle Inclan...

A product of the golden age of Spanish drama, Life Is a Dream (La vida es sueno) is the masterpiece of Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681), a contemporary of Lope de Vega and one of Spain's greatest literary figures.
Acclaimed for his superb dramatic instincts and philosophical seriousness as well as his extraordinary imagination, Calderon exercised his best qualities in this allegorical play, an exploration of the mysteries of human destiny, the illusory nature of earthly existence, and the struggle between predestination and free will. The story revolves around the...

Although Pedro Calderon de la Barca was one of the greatest and most prolific playwrights of Spain's Golden Age, most of his nonallegorical comedias -- 118 in all -- have remained unknown. Robert ter Horst presents here the first full-length study of these works, a sustained, meditative analysis dealing with more than 80 plays, conveying a sense of the whole of Calderon's secular theater.

To approach so vast a body of literature, Mr. ter Horst examines the meaning and function in Calderon of three broad subjects -- myth, honor, and history -- the warp threads across which the...

An aristocrat named Nobile invites several society friends to his house after the opera. But even as the dinner preparations are underway, servants feel compelled to leave. Despite threats of dismissal, the footman also leaves, and, as the guests arrive other servants escape. Dinner is served and hours pass, but the guests do not leave. Finally, each refusing to be the first to leave the party, distrust sets in, and the guests turn on their host, blaming him for their self-induced captivity.

One of Bunuel s most sardonically humorous and visually dazzling of movies, "Exterminating Angel...