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A century ago this year, productions of W. B. Yeats' The Countess Cathleen and Edward Martyn's The Heather Field inaugurated the Irish Literary Theatre, which was to take its name from its home in Abbey Street, Dublin. Despite riot, fire, and critical controversy, the Abbey Theatre has housed Ireland's National Theatre ever since. This is the first history of the Abbey to discuss the plays and the personalities in their underlying historical and political context, to give due weight to the theatre's work in Irish, and to take stock of its artistic and financial development up to the present. The research for the book draws extensively on archive sources, especially the manuscript holdings on the Abbey at the National Library of Ireland. Many outstanding plays are examined, with detailed analysis of their form and their affective and emotional content; and persistent themes in the Abbey's output are identified — visions of an ideal community; the revival of Irish; the hunger for land and money; the restrictions of a society undergoing profound change. But these are integrated with accounts of the Abbey's people, from Yeats, Martyn, and Lady Gregory, whose brainchild it was, to the actors, playwrights, directors, and managers who have followed — among them the Fays, Synge, O'Casey, Murray, Robinson, Shiels, Johnston, Murphy, Molloy, Friel, McGuiness, Deevy, Carr, and many others. The role of directors and policy-makers, and the struggle for financial security, subsidy, and new-style ‘partnerships’, is discussed as a crucial part of the theatre's continuing evolution.

This book examines why early modern drama’s response to English settlement in the New World was muted, even though the so-called golden age of Shakespeare coincided with the so-called golden age of exploration: no play is set in the Americas; few plays treat colonization as central to the plot; and a handful feature Native American characters (most of whom are Europeans in disguise). However, advocates of colonialism in the seventeenth century denounced playing companies as enemies on a par with the Pope and the Devil. Instead of writing off these accusers as paranoid cranks, this book takes as its starting point the possibility that they were astute playgoers. By so doing we can begin to see the emergence of a “picture of America,” and of the Virginia colony in particular, across a number of plays performed for London audiences: Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, The Staple of News, and his collaboration with Marston and Chapman, Eastward Ho!; Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso; Massinger’s The City Madam; Massinger and Fletcher’s The Sea Voyage; Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl; Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Fletcher and Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. We can glean the significance of this picture, not only for the troubled Virginia Company, but also for London theater audiences. And we can see that the picture that was beginning to form was, as the anti-theatricalists surmised, often slanderous, condemnatory, and, as it were, anti-American.

From seduced maidens to adulterous wives, bigamists, courtesans, kept women, and streetwalkers, the so-called ‘fallen woman’ was a ubiquitous and enduring figure on the Victorian and Edwardian stage. Acts of Desire traces the theatrical representation of illicit female sexuality from early nineteenth-century melodramas, through sensation dramas, Ibsenite sex-problem plays, and suffrage dramas, to early social realism and the well-made plays of Pinero, Jones, Maugham, and Coward. This study reveals and analyses enduring plot lines and tropes that continue to influence contemporary theatre and film. Women’s illicit desires became a theatrical focus for anxieties and debates surrounding gender roles, women’s rights, sexual morality, class conflict, economics, eugenics, and female employment. The theatre played a central role in both establishing and challenging sexual norms, and many playwrights exploited the ambiguities and implications of performance to stage disruptive spectacles of female desire, agency, energy, and resourcefulness, using ingenuity and skill to evade the control of that ever watchful state censor, the Lord Chamberlain. Acts of Desire challenges the currency and validity of the long-established critical term ‘the fallen woman’. Encompassing a vast range of published and unpublished plays, archival material, censorship records, social and political texts, and contemporary reviews, it reveals the surprising continuities, covert meanings, and exuberant spectacles which marked the history of theatrical representations of female sexuality. Engaging with popular and ‘high art’ performances, this study also reveals the vital connections and exchange of influences between Victorian drama, narrative painting, and the novel, and shows theatre to be a crucial but neglected element in the cultural history of women’s sexuality.

Shakespeare’s characters are thought to be his greatest achievement—imaginatively autonomous, possessed of depth and individuality. This view has survived the deconstruction of ‘Shakespeare as Author’ and has been revitalized by the recent emphasis on the collaborative nature of early modern theatre. But belief in the autonomous imaginative life of Shakespeare’s characters depends on another unexamined myth: the myth that Shakespeare rejected neoclassicism, playing freely with theatrical time and place. This book explodes these critical commonplaces. Drawing on classical and sixteenth-century rhetorical pedagogy, it reveals the importance of topics of circumstance (Time, Place, and Motive, etc.) in the conjuring of compelling narratives and vivid mental images (enargeia). ‘Circumstances’—which we now think of as incalculable contingencies—were originally topics of forensic enquiry into human intention or passion. Shakespeare used these topics to imply offstage actions, times, and places in terms of the motives and desires we attribute to the characters. The book discusses Romeo and Juliet, Lucrece, Lear, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Macbeth, as well as Gorboduc, The Maid’s Tragedy, and plays by Lyly and Jonson. It reveals the importance of circumstantial proof to various dramatists and highlights Shakespeare’s distinctive use of circumstances to create vivid and coherent dramatic worlds and a sense of the unconscious feelings of characters inhabiting them. The book engages with eighteenth-century and contemporary Shakespeare criticism, semiotics of theatre, forensic rhetoric, humanist pedagogy, the prehistory of probability, psychoanalytic criticism, and sixteenth-century constitutional thought.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the authorities in the German Democratic Republic always denied that they practised censorship. Their denial had a major impact on the language and experience of theatre censorship. It left theatre practitioners doubly exposed: they remained officially responsible for their productions, even if the productions had passed pre‐performance controls. In the absence of a fixed set of criteria, cultural functionaries had to make difficult judgements about which plays and productions to allow, and where to draw the line between constructive criticism and subversion. Drawing on a wealth of new archive material, the book explores how theatre practitioners and functionaries negotiated these challenges between 1961 and 1989. The chapters in Part I explore theatre censorship in East Berlin, asking how the controls affected different genres and how theatre practitioners responded to the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Prague Spring, and the expatriation of Wolf Biermann. Part II broadens the focus to the regions, investigating why theatre practitioners complained of strong regional variations in theatre censorship, and how they responded to Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika. By examining a range of case studies, from banned stagings to those that met with official approval, the book puts high‐profile disputes back into context. It shows how censorship operated through human negotiation, illuminating the patterns of cooperation and conflict that influenced the space available for theatrical experimentation.

Folk performances reflect the life-worlds of a vast section of subaltern communities in India. What is the philosophy that drives these performances, the vision that enables as well as enslaves these communities to present what they feel, think, imagine, and want to see? Can such performances challenge social hierarchies and ensure justice in a caste-ridden society? In Cultural Labour, the author studies bhuiyan puja (land worship), bidesia (theatre of migrant labourers), Reshma-Chuharmal (Dalit ballads), dugola (singing duels) from Bihar, and the songs and performances of Gaddar, who was associated with Jana Natya Mandali, Telangana: he examines various ways in which meanings and behaviour are engendered in communities through rituals, theatre, and enactments. Focusing on various motifs of landscape, materiality, and performance, the author looks at the relationship between culture and labour in its immediate contexts. Based on an extensive ethnography and the author’s own life experience as a member of such a community, the book offers a new conceptual framework to understand the politics and aesthetics of folk performance in the light of contemporary theories of theatre and performance studies.

This book aims to solve two problems of the Shakespeare canon. It makes the case for adding Arden of Faversham, first published anonymously in 1592, to editions of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, as a play to which Shakespeare contributed. It shows that he was largely responsible for scenes 4–9, which constitute Act III in editions divided into acts. So it adds to the mounting evidence that early in his career Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights in the writing of scripts, as was common at the time. The second half of the volume provides grounds for accepting that publisher Thomas Thorpe’s inclusion of A Lover’s Complaint within the 1609 quarto entitled Shakespeare Sonnets was justified. The poem’s authenticity has been vigorously challenged in recent years. Its status is crucial to how critics assess the authority of the quarto’s ordering of sonnets and interpret the structure of the sequence as a whole. These two problems of attribution are each addressed in five separate chapters that describe the converging results of different approaches and rebut counter-arguments. Stylometric techniques, using the resources of computers and electronic databases, are applied and the research methodologies of other scholars explained and evaluated. Quantitative tests are supplemented with traditional literary-critical analysis.

The state is at its most volatile when supreme power changes hands. This book studies five such moments of transfer in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, from Henry VIII to the English Revolution, with particular attention to the political function and agency of drama in smoothing the transition. Masques and civic pageants served as an art form by which incoming authority could declare its power, and subjects could express their willing subordination to the new regime. The book contains vivid case studies of these dramatic works, some of which have never before been identified, and the circumstances for which they were written: the use of London street theatre in 1535 to promote Henry VIII's arrogation of Royal Supremacy; the aggressively Protestant court masque of 1559 which marked the accession of Elizabeth I, and the censorship which resulted when the same mode of dramatic discourse spread to more plebeian stages; the court masques and progress entertainments of James I's initial year on the English throne, through which the new Stuart dynasty asserted its legitimacy and individual courtiers made their bids for influence; and the formal coronation entry to London, furnished with dramatic pageants, which London paid for but Charles I refused to undertake. The final chapter describes how, in 1642, a very different incoming regime planned to ignore drama altogether, until some surprisingly contingent circumstances forced its hand.

Most philosophy has rejected the theater, denouncing it as a place of illusion or moral decay; the theater in turn has rejected philosophy, insisting that drama deals in action, not ideas. Challenging both views, this book shows that theater and philosophy have always been crucially intertwined. Plato is the presiding genius of this alternative history, not only as a theorist of drama, but also as a dramatist himself, one who developed a dialogue-based dramaturgy that differs markedly from the standard, Aristotelian view of theater. This book discovers scores of dramatic adaptations of Platonic dialogues, the most immediate proof of Plato's hitherto unrecognized influence on theater history. Plato was central to modern drama as well, with figures such as Wilde, Shaw, Pirandello, Brecht, and Stoppard using Plato to create a new drama of ideas. The book also considers complementary developments in philosophy, offering a theatrical history of philosophy that includes Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Burke, Sartre, Camus, and Deleuze. These philosophers use theatrical terms, concepts, and even dramatic techniques in their writings. The book mobilizes this double history of philosophical theater and theatrical philosophy to subject current habits of thought to critical scrutiny. In dialogue with contemporary thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum, Iris Murdoch, and Alain Badiou, the book formulates the contours of a “dramatic Platonism”. This new Platonism does not seek to return to an idealist theory of forms, but it does point beyond the reigning philosophies of the body, of materialism and of cultural relativism.

Writers of fiction have always confronted topics of crime and punishment. This age-old fascination with crime on the part of authors and readers is not surprising, given that criminal justice touches on so many political and psychological themes essential to literature and comes equipped with a trial process that contains its own dramatic structure. This volume explores this profound and enduring literary engagement with crime, investigation, and criminal justice. The collected essays explore three themes that connect the world of law with that of fiction. First, defining and punishing crime is one of the fundamental purposes of government, along with the protection of victims by the prevention of crime. And yet criminal punishment remains one of the most abused and terrifying forms of political power. Second, crime is intensely psychological and therefore an important subject with which a writer can develop and explore character. A third connection between criminal justice and fiction involves the inherently dramatic nature of the legal system itself, particularly the trial. The ongoing public conversation about crime and punishment suggests that the time is ripe for collaboration between law and literature in this troubled domain.

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages argues that ancient Greek plays exerted a powerful and uncharted influence on early modern England’s dramatic landscape. Drawing on original research to challenge longstanding assumptions about Greek texts’ invisibility, the book shows not only that the plays were more prominent than we have believed, but that early modern readers and audiences responded powerfully to specific plays and themes. The Greek plays most popular in the period were not male-centered dramas such as Sophocles’ Oedipus, but tragedies by Euripides that focused on raging bereaved mothers and sacrificial virgin daughters, especially Hecuba and Iphigenia. Because tragedy was firmly linked with its Greek origin in the period’s writings, these iconic female figures acquired a privileged status as synecdoches for the tragic theater and its ability to conjure sympathetic emotions in audiences. When Hamlet reflects on the moving power of tragic performance, he turns to the most prominent of these figures: “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba/ That he should weep for her?” Through readings of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists, this book argues that newly visible Greek plays, identified with the origins of theatrical performance and represented by passionate female figures, challenged early modern writers to reimagine the affective possibilities of tragedy, comedy, and the emerging genre of tragicomedy.

Why are readers who are generally at home with narrative and discursive prose, and even readily responsive to poetry, far less confident and intuitive when it comes to plays? The complication lies in the twofold character of the play as it exists on the page — as a script or score to be realised, and as literature. This engaging account of how we read play plays on the page shows that the path to the fullest imaginative response is an understanding of how plays work. What is entailed is something like learning a language — vocabulary, grammar, syntax — but learning also how the language operates in those concrete situations where it is deployed. This book begins with a look at matters often taken for granted in coding and convention, and then — under ‘Beginnings’ — at what is entailed in establishing and entering the invented world of the play. Each succeeding chapter is a gesture at enlarging the scope: ‘Seeing and Hearing’, ‘The Uses of Place’, ‘The Role of the Audience’, ‘The Shape of the Action’, and ‘The Action of Words’. The final chapters, ‘Reading Meanings’ and ‘Primal Attractions’, explore ways in which both the drive for significant understanding and the appetite for wonder can and do find satisfaction and delight.

Johannesburg’s location in the Southern Hemisphere and status as the wealthiest city in a middle-income country grappling with a growing wealth gap, many languages and cultures unevenly matched with English, and scarce resources place it in the global south, but it is a modern city whose representation in fiction, film, performance and poetry, and built environments is both uncivil and innovative. This book examines writing, performing, building, and urban spatial practices and their agents, whose cosmopolitan diversity and capacity for invention challenge the normativity of modernity in the global north . It begins with the Empire Exhibition of 1936, and moves on to explore artistic creative responses to the rise of apartheid particularly in Sophiatown around 1956; poetry and performance around the Soweto uprising of 1976, and fictional and visual responses to the crime and disorder of 1996. It concludes with an evaluation of artists and planners collaborating in urban renewal projects in 2012. It considers urban spatial practices including class and racial conflict and the treatment of migrants and other foreigners, as well as the imagination and practice of hospitality. Theoretical coordinates include Mumford’s urban scenes, Lefebvre’s structures of enchantment in the city as art and social ensemble, Certeau’s pedestrian enunciations, Soja’s post-metropolis, Simone’s people as infrastructure, Robinson’s ordinary urban modernity, Foster’s socio-nature, Weber’s de-enchantment of the world, Titlestad’s pyscho-geography, and Landau’s tactical cosmopolitan.

This book approaches Ulster Protestantism through its theatrical and cultural intersection with politics, re-establishing a forgotten history and engaging with contemporary debates. Anchored by the perspectives of ten writers–some of whom have been notably active in political life—it uniquely examines tensions going on within. Through its exploration of class division and drama from the early twentieth century to the present, the book restores the progressive and Labour credentials of the community’s recent past along with its literary repercussions, both of which appear in recent decades to have diminished. Drawing on over sixty interviews, unpublished scripts, as well as rarely-consulted archival material, we can see—contrary to a good deal of clichéd polemic and safe scholarly assessment—that Ulster Protestants have historically and continually demonstrated a vigorous creative pulse as well as a tendency towards Left wing and class politics. St John Ervine, Thomas Carnduff, John Hewitt, Sam Thompson, Stewart Parker, Graham Reid, Ron Hutchinson, Marie Jones, Christina Reid, and Gary Mitchell profoundly challenge as well as reflect their communities. Illuminating a diverse and conflicted culture stretching beyond Orange Order parades, the weaving together of the lives and work of each of the writers considered highlights mutual themes and insights on the identity, as if part of some grander tapestry of alternative twentieth century Protestant culture. Ulster Protestantism’s consistent delivery of such dissenting voices counters its monolithic and reactionary reputation.