The play revolves around Amal, a child confined to his adopted uncle's house by an incurable disease who, inspired by the construction of a local post office, fantasizes about receiving a letter from the king or being a postman. The play was translated into English by W. B. Yeats, and was performed in English for the first time in 1912, by the 'Irish Theatre Company' in London with Tagore in attendance. The Bengali original was staged in Calcutta in 1917. Rabindranath Tagore (1861 1941) was a Bengali polymath who reformed Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We are republishing this antiquarian volume now complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author."

    This volume contains every play written by Joe Orton, who emerged in the 1960s as the most talented comic playwright in recent English history and was considered the direct successor to Wilde, Shaw, and Coward.

    But as Moses Hadas writes in his introduction to this volume, 'His true claim upon our attention is as the most brilliant and artistic and thoughtful wit our world has known.' Includes The Acharnians, The Birds, The Clouds, Ecclesiazusae, The Frogs, The Knights, Lysistrata, Peace, Plutus, Thesmophoriazusae, and The Wasps.

    When the woman becomes involved with another man, her husband must choose between forgiving his wife or abandoning the relationship, & Europe, forever.

    "By turns hilarious and chilling....the culmination of this playwright's work to date....Riveting theater."-Frank Rich, New York Times; "A brilliant black comedy, a dazzling dissection of Hollywood cupidity and another tone poem by our foremost master of the language of moral epilepsy... On its deepest level it belongs with the darker disclosures of movie-biz pathology like Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon. In a sense Speed-the-Plow distills all of these to a stark quintessence: there's hardly a line in it that isn't somehow insanely funny or scarily insane... [It is a] scathingly comic play."-Jack Kroll, Newsweek

    

    

    Set in Louis XIII's reign, it is the moving and exciting drama of one of the finest swordsmen in France, gallant soldier, brilliant wit, tragic poet-lover with the face of a clown. Rostand's extraordinary lyric powers gave birth to a universal hero--Cyrano De Bergerac--and ensured his own reputation as author of one of the best-loved plays in the literature of the stage.This translation, by the American poet Brian Hooker, is nearly as famous as the original play itself, and is generally considered to be one of the finest English verse translations ever written.

    With this act of violence--which is loosely based on the notorious 1955 killing of Emmett Till--James Baldwin launches an unsparing and at times agonizing probe of the wounds of race. For where once a white storekeeper could have shot a boy like Richard Henry with impunity, times have changed. And centuries of brutality and fear, patronage and contempt, are about to erupt in a moment of truth as devastating as a shotgun blast.In his award-winning play, Baldwin turns a murder and its aftermath into an inquest in which even the most well-intentioned whites are implicated--and in which even a killer receives his share of compassion.

    But this play-within-a-play is not historical drama. Its thought is as modern as today's police states and The Bomb; its theatrical impact has everywhere been called a major innovation. It is total theatre: philosophically problematic, visually terrifying. It engages the eye, the ear, and the mind with every imaginable dramatic device, technique, and stage picture, even including song and dance. All the forces and elements possible to the stage are fused in one overwhelming experience. This is theatre such as has rarely been seen before. The play is basically concerned with the problem of revolution. Are the same things true for the masses and for their leaders? And where, in modern times, lie the borderlines of sanity?

    When it is announced that the Inspector General is coming to visit incognito, Anton, the chief of police, hastens to clean up the town before his arrival. Local officials scurry to hide evidence of bribe-taking and other misdeeds, setting the stage for the arrival from St. Petersburg of Ivan, a penurious gambler and rake who is promptly taken by the townspeople to be the dreaded Inspector General. Ivan, and his servant, Osip, soon take advantage of the situation with hilarious results. First performed in 1836, the play transcends regional and national boundaries to offer a biting, highly entertaining glimpse of universal human foibles and failings.

    Many were considerably revised; some were completely rewritten. The editors give composition histories and discuss publication difficulties. Appendixes record manuscript revisions for three stories and give complete, unpublished early versions of four. Notes elucidate literary allusions and give biographical information. An unpublished fragment A Pure Witch is also included.

    The Navy lawyer, a callow young man more interested in softball games than the case, expects a plea bargain and a cover up of what really happened. Prodded by a female member of his defense team, the lawyer eventually makes a valiant effort to defend his clients and, in so doing, puts the military mentality and the Marine code of honor on trial.

    "Once in a Lifetime" is a satire about three small-time vaudevillians who set out for Hollywood as films move from silents into sound.The 1936 Pulitzer Prize winner "You Can’t Take It With You" is about a zany family of hobby-horse enthusiasts. For thirty-five years Grandpa has done nothing but hunt snakes, throw darts, and avoid income-tax payments; his son-in-law makes fireworks in the basement, and other assorted family members write plays, operate amateur printing presses, and play the xylophone. They live in playful eccentricity until daughter Alice brings home her Wall Street boyfriend."The Man Who Came to Dinner" (1939) became a long-running hit. It portrays an eminent lecturer (based on Alec Woollcott) who accepts a dinner invite in a small Ohio town, slips on the ice outside his hosts’ home, and is forced to their sickbed. Convalescing he turns the house into bedlam with his wacky friends and diabolic pranks.Also included in this volume are “Men at Work” and “Forked Lightning,” two essays Kaufman and Hart wrote about each other.

    Her short story, "A Jury of Her Peers", was adapted from the play a year after its debut. It was first performed by the Provincetown Players at the Wharf Theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts on August 8, 1916. In the original play, Glaspell played the role of one of the characters, Mrs. Hale. It is frequently anthologized in American literature textbooks. The play begins as the county attorney, the sherrif, Mr. Hale, Mrs. Peters, and Mrs. Hale enter the Wright's empty farm house. On prompting from the county attorney, Mr. Hale recounts his visit to the house the previous day, when he found Mrs. Wright behaving strangely and found her husband upstairs with a rope around his neck, dead. Mr. Hale notes that, when he questioned her, Mrs. Wright claimed that she was fast asleep when someone strangled her husband.Often hailed as one of the quintessential feminist plays, 'Trifles' earned Glaspell a Pulitzer Prize and renewed literary recognition.