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Subject Area: Drama-Specific Playwright(s)

How to Understand Shakespeare's Dramas in the Context of Their Time (1590-1610): The Beginnings of Modern Theater (hardcover)
 Snare, Gerald
2023 1-4955-1147-2 236 pages
(Hardcover Edition) "It is almost a rule of logic that anyone who doesn't need helpful directions should never consult a how-to book like this one. The subject here is not 'introduction to Shakespeare,' for which there is scarcely any need since there are plenty of them, and very good ones, too. This particular 'how-to' is also not to be taken as an academic book. ...It is, however, a book on ...the problem of reading. Here I have narrowed that wide issue to one particular kind of reading--the drama--and to one particular writer, William Shakespeare, the dramatist taken to be the most famous in the world, and who seems to present certain problems for those who want to read his work." -Gerald Snare (Preface)

How to Understand Shakespeare's Dramas in the Context of Their Time (1590-1610): The Beginnings of Modern Theater (softcover)
 Snare, Gerald
2023 1-4955-1215-0 236 pages
(Softcover Edition) "It is almost a rule of logic that anyone who doesn't need helpful directions should never consult a how-to book like this one. The subject here is not 'introduction to Shakespeare,' for which there is scarcely any need since there are plenty of them, and very good ones, too. This particular 'how-to' is also not to be taken as an academic book. ...It is, however, a book on ...the problem of reading. Here I have narrowed that wide issue to one particular kind of reading--the drama--and to one particular writer, William Shakespeare, the dramatist taken to be the most famous in the world, and who seems to present certain problems for those who want to read his work." -Gerald Snare (Preface)

Selected Plays of Irish Playwright Teresa Deevy, 1894-1963
 Deevy, Teresa
2003 0-7734-6635-5 276 pages
This volume is a welcome re-issuing of the dramatic writings of one of Ireland’s most important women writers. Teresa Deevy’s plays provided a viable female viewpoint on the tensions between individual selfhood and nationhood in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s. This volume includes her most critically acclaimed writing for Dublin’s Abbey Theatre: The King of Spain’s Daughter, Katie Roche and The Wild Goose. It also publishes, for the first time, her compelling radio drama, Supreme Dominion. Deevy’s plays have continued to attract popular interest since her death in 1963, and her importance in terms of modern theatre, Irish studies, and women’s studies cannot be underestimated.

Staging Yeats in the Twenty-First Century: A Reception History
 Lapisardi, Frederick S.
2006 0-7734-5570-1 432 pages
An avant garde playwright whose theories of stagecraft evolved through performance experience, W.B. Yeats left a complex body of dramatic materials. This book establishes dramaturgical criteria, based on the playwright’s own words, by which all productions of his plays might be judged. Then, through an analysis of Yeats’s plays in performance, it suggests how new stage productions might best engage audiences without violating either texts or theories. Based on fifty years of study and publication about Yeats’s stagecraft and on direct experience with the plays in production both in America and in Ireland, this study develops dramaturgical plans for new productions and shares with readers behind-the-scenes notes from the author’s American Yeats production and from the first three years of James W. Flannery’s International W.B. Yeats Theatre Festival at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Its basic premise turns on the belief that with new technology and with directors who accept the text as living theatre worthy of imaginative stage productions for a more general audience, rather than period pieces intended for an elite few, Yeats could finally emerge as a dramatist on a scale with Beckett, Strindberg, O’Neill and other major innovators of the modern stage.