This 'lamentable and true tragedy', as it is announced on its titlepage, dramatises a domestic murder of the sort that nowadaysscandalises and thrills the readers of tabloid newspapers. Although thetitle advertises 'the great malice and dissimulation of a wicked woman'and her 'unsatiable desire of filthie lust', the unknown playwrightwith great dramatic skill and psychological insight manages to balancethe motivations of all the main characters. Thomas Arden, one of therapacious landlords so reviled in mid-Elizabethan social drama, wasmurdered at his own house in Faversham, Kent, in 1551. His ... View More...
Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year is not just for Christmas, but for all time. --Helena Bonham Carter A magnificent collection of 365 passages from Shakespeare's works, for the Shakespeare scholar and neophyte alike. Make Shakespeare a part of your daily routine with Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year, a yearlong collection of passages from Shakespeare's greatest works. Drawing from the full spectrum of plays and sonnets to mark each day of the year, whether it's a scene from Hamlet to celebrate Christmas or a Sonnet in June to help you enjoy a summer's day. There are also passages to m... View More...
The most comprehensive one-volume collection of unabridged opera lyrics ever published. It features virtually all of the operas that are being performed in the foremost opera houses and concert halls today. The text is presented in its original language as well as in an English translation. To enrich the experience, a short synopsis precedes each libretto. 101 Opera Librettos is indispensable for opera lovers and everyone curious about the literary richness of the worlds most beloved vocal musical performances. View More...
With his magisterial and ingenious re-creations of the lives of Chaucer, Dickens, T.S. Eliot, William Blake, and Sir Thomas More, Peter Ackroyd has long been recognized as today's foremost practitioner of the literary biography. Now, in Shakespeare: The Biography, Ackroyd delivers his crowning achievement. Young Adult. View More...
"These authoritative translations consign all other complete collections to the wastebasket." Robert Brustein, "The New Republic" "This is it. No qualifications. Go out and buy it everybody." Kenneth Rexroth, "The Nation" "The translations deliberately avoid the highly wrought and affectedly poetic; their idiom is contemporary....They have life and speed and suppleness of phrase." "Times Education Supplement" "These translations belong to our time. A keen poetic sensibility repeatedly quickens them; and without this inner fire the most academically flawless rendering is dead." Warren D. Anders... View More...
Meineck's translation is faithful and supple; the language employed is modern without betraying the grandeur and complexity--particularly the images--of the Aeschylean text. After reading this translation, one has but one further wish: to see it and hear it at Delphi, Epidaurus or Syracuse. --Herman Van Looy, L'Antiquite Classique
Winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for best play, as well as a number of other prestigious awards, Three Tall Woman has been called Albee's finest achievement. In his triumphant return to the New York and London stages, Albee demonstrates insight and vision with a moving look at mortality. Stunning . . . nuanced and breathtaking.--Time. View More...
You take your seat in the theatre. You are given a remote control. The play begins. An urban couple are on a getaway to visit her father at his vast rural estate. But when they arrive, they find him missing and a local Indigenous man staying there instead. They ask him to leave ... and with an anonymous click of your remote, you choose what happens next. When it's revealed that the colonial rights to this entire property are actually up for grabs, you must continue to decide how the story unfolds, ultimately determining how the land will be stewarded, and by whom. With humour, suspense, and a ... View More...
The celebrated Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal, who lived in Madrid under the oppression of the Franco regime, writes passionately of human atrocity and of hope. This collection of plays embodies Arrabal's "theatre of panic," named after the god Pan. The homme panique is a man who refuses to take risks, who avoids danger and therefore heroism, who avoids the irreparable act, but who, ironically, is caught up in a world of chance that forces him to make choices. The collection includes Guernica, an earthy verbal re-creation of Picasso's famous painting, in which an old Basque couple is caug... View More...
I am the man, wrote Artaud, who has best charted his inmost self. Antonin Artaud was a great poet who, like Poe, Holderlin, and Nerval, wanted to live in the infinite and asked that the human spirit burn in absolute freedom.To society, he was a madman. Artaud, however, was not insane but in luciferian pursuit of what society keeps hidden. The man who wrote Van Gogh the Man Suicided by Society raged against the insanity of social institutions with insight that proves more prescient with every passing year. Today, as Artaud's vatic thunder still crashes above the larval confusion he despised, wh... View More...
Set in medieval Italy during a crisis in the Church, Sunsets and Glories is a work of the highest and most thrilling theatrical energy (Independent on Sunday) Sunsets and Glories is set in the late thirteenth-century Italy where power struggles between Church and State inspire such characters as the spineless Charles 11, paid killer Montefelto and 'madwoman' Maifreda. Into this maelstrom steps Peter de Morrone, the saintly Pope Celestine V, provoking a bitter crisis of faith in the abiding values of violence and corruption. Once again, Peter Barnes' mordant wit takes history and imbues it with... View More...
