Shakespeare's plays feature events of extreme violence. Investigating the ways in which the original early modern audiences might have reacted to their scenes of violence, this volume reveals too the complex web of factors that shape our present-day responses to violence and suffering.Drawing on a mixed methodology, Rebecca Yearling combines close textual analysis with insights from the history of emotions, early modern theatre and cultural history, performance stu...

This book examines the influence of John Marston, typically seen as a minor figure among early modern dramatists, on his colleague Ben Jonson. While Marston is usually famed more for his very public rivalry with Jonson than for the quality of his plays, this book argues that such a view of Marston seriously underestimates his importance to the theatre of his time. In it, the author contends that Marston's plays represent an experiment in a new kind of satiric drama, with origins in the hum...

We wept at his Oscar-winning role in Marty. . .we gasped when he took on Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity. . .we were riveted by his compelling performances in The Dirty Dozen, Bad Day at Black Rock, and Ice Station Zebra. . .and we laughed at his television sitcom McHale's Navy. We loved all of Ernest Borgnine's many portrayals, but what did we know about the man behind the famous roles? Now for the first time, he tells us in his own word...

Slowly I learnt the ways of humans: how to ruin, how to hate, how to debase, how to humiliate. And at the feet of my master I learnt the highest of human skills, the skill no other creature owns: I finally learnt how to lie.Childlike in his innocence but grotesque in form, Frankenstein's bewildered creature is cast out into a hostile universe by his horror-struck maker. Meeting with cruelty wherever he goes, the friendless Creature, increasingly desperate and vengeful, det...

This chronicle of vaudeville is "an essential (and very funny) history of American popular entertainment" (Greg Kotis, creator of Urinetown ).When Groucho Marx and Charlie Chaplin were born, variety entertainment had been going on for decades in America, and like Harry Houdini, Milton Berle, Mae West, and countless others, these performers got their start on the vaudeville stage. From 1881 to 1932, vaudeville was at the h...

Theatre as we know it started in Manitoba almost a century and a half ago. During that time it has produced some shining moments, some unforgettable characters, and some great stories: how two visionaries, Tom Hendry and John Hirsch, convinced Manitoba to embrace a theatre centre that became a model for the rest of the world, how Prairie Theatre Exchange inspired Manitobans to create their own theatre, how Nellie McClung used theatre to help women get the vote, and how a fire at the first ...

Full of inspiration and practical advice, Playwriting: A Writers' & Artists' Companion is a comprehensive companion to writing for the stage.PART 1 includes reflections on the art and the craft of playwriting, guidance on writing for a full range of genres and spaces and a brief history of playwriting itself.PART 2 contains inspiring advice and reflections from leading playwrights:April De Angelis, Bryony Lavery, David Greig, Christina Reid, Dennis Kelly, Frank McG...

Oedipus, king of Thebes, is one of the giant figures of ancient mythology. Through the centuries, his story has inspired works of epic poetry, lyric poetry, tragedy, opera, a gospel musical and more. The myth has been famously deployed in psychology by Sigmund Freud. It may not be too bold to claim that Oedipus is the name from Greco-Roman mythology best known beyond the academy at the present time, thanks to Freud's famous phrase 'the Oedipus complex'. The most famous version of the Oedip...

On the afternoon of December 30, 1903, during a sold-out matinee performance, a fire broke out in Chicago’s Iroquois Theatre. In the short span of twenty minutes, more than six hundred people were asphyxiated, burned, or trampled to death in a panicked mob’s failed attempt to escape. In Chicago Death Trap: The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903, Nat Brandt provides a detailed chronicle of this horrific event to assess not only the titanic tragedy of the fire itself but also the municip...

Bertolt Brecht's silent Kattrin in Mother Courage, or the disability performance lessons of his Peachum in The Threepenny Opera; Tennessee Williams' limping Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie and hard-of-hearing Bodey in A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur; Samuel Beckett's blind Hamm and his physically disabled parents Nagg and Nell in Endgame – these and many further examples attest to disability's critical place in modern drama. This...

Examining the ways in which contemporary Western theatre protests against the ‘War on Terror’, this book analyses six twenty-first century plays that respond to the post-9/11 military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. The plays are written by some of the most significant writers of this century and the last including Elfriede Jelinek, Caryl Churchill, Hélène Cixous and Tony Kushner.Anti-war Theatre After Brecht grapples with the problem of how to make...

This book argues that US theatre in the 20th century embraced the theories and practices of internationalism as a way to realize a better world and as part of the strategic reform of the theatre into a national expression. Live performance, theatre internationalists argued, could represent and reflect the nation like no other endeavour.