The Compact Bedford Introduction to Drama by
Offering a carefully chosen selection of plays from the ancient Greeks to the present -- including many new contemporary prize-winners -- The Compact Bedford Introduction to Drama has the plays you want to teach and the features students need at a compact size and an affordable price. Twenty-eight chronologically arranged plays are illuminated by insightful commentaries and casebooks that enrich students' contextual understanding and encourage critical thinking. Concise introductions for each historical period and play emphasize theater design, staging, and acting style, and a wealth of photographs and illustrations help students visualize plays in performance. A fresh new design highlights the contextual features and additional help for students including a guide to writing about drama, a glossary, and new cross-references to a robust companion Web site.
Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare's Theatre by
What skills did Shakespeare's actors bring to their craft? How do these skills differ from those of contemporary actors? Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare's Theatre: Thinking with the Body examines the 'toolkit' of the early modern player and suggests new readings of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of their many skills. Theatre is an ephemeral medium. Little remains to us of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries: some printed texts, scattered documents and records, and a few scraps of description, praise, and detraction. Because most of what survives are printed playbooks, students of English theatre find it easy to forget that much of what happened on the early modern stage took place within the gaps of written language: the implicit or explicit calls for fights, dances, military formations, feats of physical skill, song, and clowning. Theatre historians and textual editors have often ignored or denigrated such moments, seeing them merely as extraneous amusements or signs that the text has been 'corrupted' by actors. This book argues that recapturing a positive account of the skills and expertise of the early modern players will result in a more capacious understanding of the nature of theatricality in the period.
Elizabethan Drama by
Critical essays discuss the works of the major dramatists of the Elizabethan age in this comprehensive volume.
Greek Drama by
This volume examines the development of comedy and tragedy in early Greek drama, with essays that explore the works of many of the original dramatists, including Aristophanes, Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides.
Living Theatre by
Living Theatre: A History conveys the excitement and variety of theatre throughout time, as well as the dynamic way in which our interpretation of theatre history is informed by contemporary scholarship. Rather than presenting readers with a mere catalog of historical facts and figures, it sets each period in context through an exploration of the social, political and economic conditions of the day, creating a vivid study of the developments in theatre during that time.
Modern African Drama by
"Backgrounds and Criticism" presents documents on modern African drama generally and on the assembled texts and authors specifically, including little-known materials. Featured are essays on Tawfik al-Hakim, Kateb Yacine, Athol Fugard, Wole Soyinka, Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, and Femi Osofisan. A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included.
The Use of Asian Theatre for Modern Western Theatre by
This book is a historical study of the use of Asian theatre for modern Western theatre as practiced by its founding fathers, including Aurélien Lugné-Poe, Adolphe Appia, Gordon Craig, W. B. Yeats, Jacques Copeau, Charles Dullin, Antonin Artaud, V. E. Meyerhold, Sergei Eisenstein, and Bertolt Brecht. It investigates the theories and practices of these leading figures in their transnational and cross-cultural relationship with Asian theatrical traditions and their interpretations and appropriations of the Asian traditions in their reactional struggles against the dominance of commercialism and naturalism. From the historical and aesthetic perspectives of traditional Asian theatres, it approaches this intercultural phenomenon as a (Euro)centred process of displacement of the aesthetically and culturally differentiated Asian theatrical traditions and of their historical differences and identities. Looking into the displaced and distorted mirror of Asian theatre, the founding fathers of modern Western theatre saw, in their imagination of the 'ghostly' Other, nothing but a (self-)reflection or, more precisely, a (self-)projection and emplacement, of their competing ideas and theories preconceived for the construction, and the future development, of modern Western theatre.