Friedrich Hlderlin translated Sophocles into German, Brecht adapted Hlderlin, and now Judith Malina has rendered Brecht's version into a stunning English incarnation. Available for the first time in English.

    A short critical essay which considers the significance of the title.

    

    

    A moving and hilarious account of a spring day in a small Welsh coastal town, Under Milk Wood is "lyrical, impassioned and funny, an Our Town given universality" (The New Statesman and Nation).

    Warren's Profession-Shaw challenges his audiences' moral complacency in the face of serious social problems and inequities.Author Bio: George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was one of the most prolific writers of the modern theater. He invented the modern comedy of ideas, expounding on social and political problems with a razor-sharp tongue, yet never sacrificing the comic vitality that ensures regular revivals of his plays. He also wrote several important political works, including The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. Dan H. Lawrence, edited Shaw's Collected Letters, his Collected Plays with their Prefaces, and Shaw's Music and (with Daniel Leary) The Complete Prefaces. He is Series Editor for the works of Shaw in Penguin.David Edgar is a playwright, critic, and professor of Playwriting Studies at the University of Birmingham.

    Cavendish is the author of many poems, short stories, biographies, memoirs, letters, philosophical and scientific works (including The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World, the first work of science fiction by a woman), and nineteen plays."The Convent of Pleasure" and Other Plays collects four of Cavendish's dramatic works that are among the most revealing of her attitudes toward marriage and her desire for fame. Loves Adventures (1662) centers on a woman succeeding in war and diplomacy by passing as a man. Similarly, the heroine of Bell in Campo (1662) rescues her husband at the head of an army of women in this tale of a marriage of near equals. The Convent of Pleasure (1668) proposes a separatist community of women and has received attention for its suggestion of lesbian sexuality. The Bridals (1662), a more typical restoration comedy satirizing marriage, rounds out the collection.Edited with notes and annotation by Anne Shaver, "The Convent of Pleasure" and Other Plays also contains a timeline, biography and bibliography of the Duchess, an appreciation of Cavendish's life and work, and a bibliography of critical essays. Also included are all of Cavendish's epistles To the Reader as well as Other Preliminary Matter from Playes (1662), and Cavendish's original preface to Plays Never Before Printed (1668). A valuable collection from an extraordinary writer, "The Convent of Pleasure" and Other Plays raises important issues about women and gender.

    (doubling possible.) / 5 ints. or unit set. Recently revived on Broadway to great acclaim, this is the rollicking tale of three down and out troupers who decide to head for Hollywood and try their luck with the newly invented talkies. Due to a series of consistent blunders, the most stupid of the three is carried to pinnacles of fame and fortune until he's literally made a god of the industry. It's a fast paced and wild romp and a marvelous spoof of tinsel land.

    Only two characters appear on stage; Hughie, the third and most important one, is dead. It is Hughie's innocence, gullibility, and need to believe in a far more exciting existence than he ever knew which gives some kind of purpose to the shabby lives of the two who remain. O'Neill here again writes of the defeated and the courage that comes by way of illusions reflecting still other illusions in a world that needs them all.Hughie, the only surviving manuscript from a series of eight one-act monologue plays that O'Neill planned in 1940, was completed in 1941.

    In a critical preface, Bentley finds all four works to be a Gogolian treatment of love - or the lack of love - and by the same token, thoroughly original works of dramatic art. Also includes a piece on Gamblers by the eminent Polish critic Jan Kott.

    

    Possessed of an unshakeable sense of entitlement and a boundless sense of self-worth, assured of the adoration of all, Matilda can break men's hearts for fun. Agnes-diffident, careworn and poor-can only gape in astonishment at the figure her pupil cuts in the world. Employed to lead and form her, she is instead buffeted about in Matilda's tumultuous wake. She loves her young student-it is impossible not to. But it is hard not to wonder if Matilda's good fortunes will ever end.

    

    The aged, abused monarch—a man in his eighties, like Harold Bloom himself—is at once the consummate figure of authority and the classic example of the fall from majesty. He is widely agreed to be William Shakespeare’s most moving, tragic hero. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Lear with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Emma Bovary or Hamlet when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of Lear, so that this book also explores an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity. Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make. He delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy, pathos, and clarity in Lear.

    Prompted by the prophecies of three mysterious witches and goaded by his ambitious wife, the Scottish thane Macbeth murders Duncan, King of Scotland, in order to succeed him on the throne. This foul deed soon entangles the conscience-stricken nobleman in a web of treachery, deceit and more murders that ultimately spells his doom.