Published by Methuen Drama, the collected dramatic works of Bertolt Brecht are presented in the most comprehensive and authoritative editions of Brecht's plays in the English language.Volume One of Brecht's Collected Plays contains Brecht's first performed stage works. Baal is inspired by Brecht's student life in Augsburg and follows the life of a young poet on the rocky road to inspiration; Drums in the Night was written in response to Brecht's experience as a me...

Published by Methuen Drama, the collected dramatic works of Bertolt Brecht are presented in the most comprehensive and authoritative editions of Brecht's plays in the English language.This second volume of Brecht's Collected Plays brings together some of his most glittering Berlin successes including The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The Seven Deadly Sins, Man Equals Man and The Elephant Calf. The Thre...

The most comprehensive and authoritative editions of Brecht's plays in the English languageVolume Three of Brecht's Collected Plays includes St Joan of the Stockyards - a play which recasts St Joan as Joan Dark springing hope into the hearts of factory workers at the mercy of meatpacker king Pierpont Mauler threatening cuts in the Depression; and the Lehrstücke or short 'didactic' pieces written during the years 1929 to 1933, are some of his most experimental work. Lindbergh's Flig...

Now in paperback, the long-awaited volume of Brecht's classic plays from the 1930sVolume 4 of Brecht's Collected Plays contains works from the 1930s, straddling fateful years in German political and cultural history - as well as in Brecht's own life. Round Heads and Pointed Heads, based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, is a powerful political allegory on Nazi racial policy and conditions in the Germany Brecht had to leave in 1933. The Trial of Lucullus

Written in the late sixteenth century, at the pinnacle of the English Renaissance, the rich and ingenious works of Thomas Nashe uniquely reveal the ambivant nature of the Elizabethan era. Mingling the devout and the bawdy, scholarship and slang, they express throughout an irrepressible, inexhaustible wit and an astonishing command of language. This collection of Nashe's finest works includes The Unfortunate Traveller, the sharp and grotesque tale of Jack Wilton, an Englishman travelling th...

In her long-awaited book, the legendary acting teacher Stella Adler gives us her extraordinary insights into the work of Henrik Ibsen (“The creation of the modern theater took a genius like Ibsen . . . Miller and Odets, Inge and O’Neill, Williams and Shaw, swallowed the whole of him”), August Strindberg (“He understood and predicted the forces that would break in our lives”), and Anton Chekhov (“Chekhov doesn’t want a play, he wants what happened in life. In life, people don’t usually kill...

'What is poetry, how many kinds of it are there, and what are their specific effects?' Aristotle's Poetics is the most influential book on poetry ever written. A founding text of European aesthetics and literary criticism, from it stems much of our modern understanding of the creation and impact of imaginative writing, including poetry, drama, and fiction. For Aristotle, the art of representation conveys universal truths which we can appreciate more easily than th...

The Routledge Companion to Actors’ Shakespeare is a window onto how today’s actors contribute to the continuing life and relevance of Shakespeare’s plays.The process of acting is notoriously hard to document, but this volume reaches behind famous performances to examine the actors’ craft, their development and how they engage with playtexts. Each chapter relies upon privilieged access to its subject to offer an unparalleled insight into contemporary practice.This v...

A dynamic new study in literary and dramatic influence, Misreading Shakespeare defines and explores the relation between two modern playsEdward Bonds Lear and Tom Stoppards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Deadand Shakespeares King Lear and Hamlet. While some see the modern plays as derivative, others claim that they are as original as the Shakespearean plays. The effort to define and explore this relationship is a challenge for critics and readers alike. Here, Wagdi Zeid, a playwright and...

This book reads tragedy as a genre in which the protagonist is estranged from the world around him, and, displaced in time, space, and language, comes to inhabit a milieu which is no longer shared by other characters. This alienation from others also entails a decomposition of the integrity of the individual, which is often seen in tragedy's uncertainty about the protagonists' autonomy: do they act, or do the gods act through them? Where are the boundaries of the self, and the boundaries o...

Aristotle's 'Poetics' is the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory.

In this fascinating new exploration of Samuel Beckett’s work, Pascale Casanova argues that Beckett’s reputation rests on a pervasive misreading of his oeuvre, which neglects entirely the literary revolution he instigated. Reintroducing the historical into the heart of this body of work, Casanova provides an arresting portrait of Beckett as radically subversive—doing for writing what Kandinsky did for art—and in the process presents the key to some of the most profound enigmas of Beckett’s ...