This edition contains only the text of the play.

    Acclaimed as the most complete and intellectually satisfying analysis of the Wagner operas, the book has met with unreserved enthusiasm from specialist and casual music lover alike. Here, available for the first time in a single paperback volume, is the perfect companion for listening to, or attending, The Flying Dutchman, Tannh�user, Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, Die Meistersinger, the four operas of the Ring Cycle, and Parsifal. Newman enriches his treatment of the stories, texts, and music of the operas with biographical and historical materials from the store of knowledge that he acquired while completing his numerous books on Wagner, including the magisterial Life of Richard Wagner. The text of The Wagner Operas is filled with hundreds of musical examples from the scores, and all the important leitmotifs and their interrelationships are made clear in Newman's lucid prose. This is as fine an introduction as any ever written about a major composer's masterpieces. Newman outlines with unfailing clarity and astuteness each opera's dramatic sources, and he takes the student through the completed opera, step by step, with all manner of incidental insight along the way.--Robert Bailey, New York University

    He recorded the experience in a book, "The Human Nature of Playwriting". The introduction expresses Raphaelson’s deep regard for language so visible in his writing: "This course does not aim directly to teach writing. Whether you write or not after you finish school means nothing to me as a teacher. In fact, I don’t think it is important from any viewpoint. But whether you live or not is important; and how you live. You may become businessmen or women, office workers, farmers, or wives, and as such you will be, whether you know it or not, deeply related to the culture of your age. That culture is largely expressed by creative writers through the written word. And if from this course you get a notion of how that written word comes into being, of the connection between a writer and his own life and between his life and all lives, then this course will be successful indeed.""The Human Nature of Playwriting" offers a "case history" method as a means of exploring human experience, and explains the means by which such experience may be adapted to the dramatists' craft.

    First series of two which includes famous greek dramas by Aeshylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes.

    But of almost equal importance in this great book is the city of London itself – that brilliant, lively, creative city in which Shakespeare's art was rooted and through which it flourished. As John Mason Brown has said, "… I will tell you the truth. I have never read a book which gave so vivid a picture of the times, the theatre companies, the outstanding personalities, or the background of Shakespeare's own life.""If I were to recommend one book on Shakespeare, his life, his England, to the average student or layman, this would be the one." - George Freedley, The Library Journal