Download or read book Eugene O Neill s Creative Struggle written by Doris Alexander and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle, Doris Alexander gives us a new kind of inside biography that begins where the others leave off. It follows O'Neill through the door into his writing room to give a blow-by-blow account of how he fought out in his plays his great life battles&—love against hate, doubt against belief, life against death&—to an ever-expanding understanding. It presents a new kind of criticism, showing how O'Neill's most intimate struggles worked their way to resolution through the drama of his plays. Alexander reveals that he was engineering his own consciousness through his plays and solving his life problems&—while the tone, imagery, and richness of the plays all came out of the nexus of memories summoned up by the urgency of the problems he faced in them. By the way of O'Neill, this study moves toward a theory of the impulse that sets off a writer's creativity, and a theory of how that impulse acts to shape a work, not only in a dramatist like O'Neill but also in the case of writers in other mediums, and even of painters and composers. The study begins with Desire Under the Elms because that play's plot was consolidated by a dream that opened up the transfixing grief that precipitated the play for O'Neill, and it ends with Days Without End when he had resolved his major emotional-philosophical struggle and created within himself the voice of his final great plays. Since the analysis brings to bear on the plays all of his conscious decisions, ideas, theories, as well as the life-and-death struggles motivating them, documenting even the final creative changes made during rehearsals, this book provides a definitive account of the nine plays analyzed in detail (Desire Under the Elms, Marco Millions, The Great God Brown, Lazarus Laughed, Strange Interlude, Dynamo, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness!, and Days Without End, with additional analysis of plays written before and after.

Download or read book Shakespeare written by Kiernan Ryan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first collection of criticism on Shakespeare's romances to register the impact of modern literary theory on interpretations of these plays. Kiernan Ryan brings together the most important recent essays on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, the greatest of the `last plays', staging a dynamic debate between feminist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and new historicist views of the masterpieces Shakespeare wrote at the close of his career. The book aims not only to anthologise accounts of the last plays by leading Shakespearean critics, including Stephen Greenblatt, Janet Adelman, Leah Marcus, Howard Felperin and Steven Mullaney, but also to dramatise what is at stake in the choice of a particular critical approach. It allows the student to compare the strengths and limitations of a deconstructive and a feminist reading of the same romance, or to test the plausibility of one psychoanalytic angle on the last plays against another. The headnotes that preface the essays highlight their distinctive slants on Shakespearean romance, unpack the theoretical assumptions that steer their interpretations, and throw into relief the key points at which their authors collide or converge. The editor's introduction places the essays in the context of twentieth-century criticism of the last plays and makes a powerful case for a fundamental reappraisal of Shakespearean romance. The comprehensive, fully annotated bibliography provides an unrivalled guide to further reading on all four plays.

Download or read book Shakespeares Last Plays written by F.A. Yates and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is Volume VI in the selected works of Frances Yates, providing a new approach to Shakespeare's last plays. First published in 1975, these are a collection of lectures that offer the new thinking about certain ideas concerning Shakespeare's relation to the problemsand thought currents of his times.

Download or read book Shakespeare s Last Plays written by Stephen W. Smith and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What were Shakespeare's final thoughts on history, tragedy, and comedy? Shakespeare's Last Plays focuses much needed scholarly attention on Shakespeare's "Late Romances." The work--a collection of newly commissioned essays by leading scholars of classical political philosophy and literature--offers careful textual analysis of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, All is True, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The essays reveal how Shakespeare's thought in these final works compliments, challenges, fulfills, or transforms previously held conceptions of the playwright and his political-philosophical views.

Download or read book Last Operas and Plays written by Gertrude Stein and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1995-05-22 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When I see a thing it is not a play for me, but when I write something that somebody else can see then it is a play for me." —Gertrude Stein In the more than seventy-five plats Gertrude Stein wrote between 1913 and 1946, she envisioned a new dramaturgy, beginning with her pictorial conception of a play as a landscape. She drew into her plays the daily flow of life around her—including the natural world—and turned cities, villages, parts of the dramatic structure, and even her own friends into characters. She made punctuation and typography part of her compositional style and chose words for their joyful impact as sound andwordplay. For Strin, the writing process itself was always important in delevoping the "continuous present" at the heart of her work. Long out of print, Last Opera and Plays again makes available many of Stein's most important and most-produced works. As a special feature, it also included her thought-provoking essay "Plays," in which she reflects on the experience in the theater of seeing and hearing, and on emotion and time. "Now nearly a half century after her deathe," writes Bonnie Marranca in her introduction, "it is indisputable that Gertrude Stein is the great American modernist mind. No American author has been more influential for more generations of artists in the worlds of theater, dance, music, poetry, painting, and fiction."

Download or read book Shakespeare s Last Plays written by Eustace M. Tillyard and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-01-13 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's Last Plays was the first of E. M. W. Tilyard's influential works on Shakespeare. In it, Dr Tilyard argues that the last plays – Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest – develop patterns found in the earlier works. He shows how Shakespeare intertwines reconciliation (the final phase of the tragedies) with an awareness of possible worlds (where the 'natural' and supernatural have equal status), and concludes that The Tempest, by subordinating his tragic pattern, is his greatest achievement.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare s Last Plays written by Catherine M. S. Alexander and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-16 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Which plays are included under the heading 'Shakespeare's last plays', and when does Shakespeare's 'last' period begin? What is meant by a 'late play', and what are the benefits in defining plays in this way? Reflecting the recent growth of interest in late studies, and recognising the gaps in accessible scholarship on this area, in this book leading international Shakespeare scholars address these and many other questions. The essays locate Shakespeare's last plays - single and co-authored - in the period of their composition, consider the significant characteristics of their Jacobean context, and explore the rich afterlives, on stage, in print and other media of The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII. The volume opens with a historical timeline that places the plays in the contexts of contemporary political events, theatrical events, other cultural milestones, Shakespeare's life and that of his playing company, the King's Men.

Download or read book Eugene O Neill s Last Plays written by Doris Alexander and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study draws on research concerning the lives of Eugene O'Neill, his family and his circle. It corrects and expands the biographical record on him and distinguishes the man and his life from the creations that were inspired by, and drew on, that life. Included are his attempted suicide, his tuberculosis, and his relationship with his parents.

Download or read book Last Things and Last Plays written by Cynthia Marshall and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first sustained examination of Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, and The Tempest in the context of English Renaissance discussions of death, judgment, and afterlife, Cynthia Marshall contends that the late plays of Shakespeare represent the active concerns of a culture heavily imbued with apocalypticism. Only recently has there been wide recognition of how thoroughly apocalyptic thought pervaded the culture of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Millenarians, Puritans, Anglicans, and Roman Catholics all shared a concern for last things. Even King James I, speaking in Star Chamber, referred to "the latter days drawing on." In fact, these four plays, considered in themselves, exhibit distinctive qualities of "lastness." They contain, Marshall argues, an alternative theatrical eschatology, representing anxieties about judgment, hopes for personal reunion, and transcendent perspectives on time.

Download or read book Shakespeare Survey With Index 1 10 Volume 11 The Last Plays written by Allardyce Nicoll and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1958-01-02 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first fifty volumes of this yearbook of Shakespeare studies are being reissued in paperback.

Download or read book Mythic Patterns in Ibsen s Last Plays written by Orley I. Holtan and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1970-12-30 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mythic Patterns in Ibsen's Last Plays was first published in 1970. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Until recently critics have tended to regard Ibsen principally as a social dramatist, one who was concerned primarily with the political, social, and moral questions of his time. Radical though he was in the Victorian era, his ideas, with the passage o time, ceased to be avant garde,and for this reason many critics have dismissed him as outdated. Professor Holtan examines a major portion of Ibsen's work, his last eight plays, in a new perspective, however, and finds much that is of lasting significance and interest. Ibsen's initial impact came with the publication in 1879 of A Doll's House,the play which seemingly advocates a woman's right to leave her husband and children. His reputation as a social dramatist was only furthered by the appearance of his next two plays, Ghosts and An Enemy of the People. But Professor Holtan's study of the plays which came after these identifies in the later plays values which transcend the social problems of their time, penetrating questions of the human spirit itself. The eight last plays which Professor Holtan examines in this study are The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, and When We Dead Awaken. In these plays he identifies a mythic pattern and unity based in elements of symbolism and mysticism which have puzzled or annoyed readers and critics for years. In his mythic vision Ibsen's lasting contribution far exceeds that of his invention of the social-problem drama, Professor Holtan concludes.

Download or read book Les Blancs The Collected Last Plays written by Lorraine Hansberry and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1994-12-13 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here are Lorraine Hansberry's last three plays--Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers?--representing the capstone of her achievement. Includes a new preface by Jewell Gresham Nemiroff and a revised introduction by Margaret B. Wilkerson.

Download or read book The Happiest Song Plays Last written by Quiara Alegría Hudes and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 61 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: In a barrio living room in North Philly, an activist-turned-music-professor moonlights as the local soup kitchen queen, cooking free rice and beans for any hungry neighbor. Halfway around the world, her cousin relives his military trauma on the set of a docudrama that's filming in Jordan. With the Egyptian revolution booming in the distance, these two young adults try to sing a defiant song of legacy and love in the face of local and global unrest.

Download or read book The Complete Works of William Shakespeare written by William Shakespeare and published by . This book was released on 1907 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Shakespeare s Lyric Stage written by Seth Lerer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to have an emotional response to poetry and music? And, just as important but considered less often, what does it mean not to have such a response? What happens when lyric utterances—which should invite consolation, revelation, and connection—somehow fall short of the listener’s expectations? As Seth Lerer shows in this pioneering book, Shakespeare’s late plays invite us to contemplate that very question, offering up lyric as a displaced and sometimes desperate antidote to situations of duress or powerlessness. Lerer argues that the theme of lyric misalignment running throughout The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Henry VIII, and Cymbeline serves a political purpose, a last-ditch effort at transformation for characters and audiences who had lived through witch-hunting, plague, regime change, political conspiracies, and public executions. A deep dive into the relationship between aesthetics and politics, this book also explores what Shakespearean lyric is able to recuperate for these “victims of history” by virtue of its disjointed utterances. To this end, Lerer establishes the concept of mythic lyricism: an estranging use of songs and poetry that functions to recreate the past as present, to empower the mythic dead, and to restore a bit of magic to the commonplaces and commodities of Jacobean England. Reading against the devotion to form and prosody common in Shakespeare scholarship, Lerer’s account of lyric utterance’s vexed role in his late works offers new ways to understand generational distance and cultural change throughout the playwright’s oeuvre.

Download or read book The Last Touchy feely Drama on the American Stage written by Greg Gamble and published by Dramatic Publishing. This book was released on 1999 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A collection of three bizarre comedies that will never let you view live theatre, childbirth, or political correctness the same way again. The Last Touchy-Feely Drama on the American Stage: A ludicrously slow-moving father and son reconciliation theatre piece is broken down and overanalyzed by a trio of cruelly detached sportscasters. Every cross, pause and pretentious utterance is cause for an exuberant shout and a lengthy dissection. Even the characters' gray hair paint and bedroom slippers are chatted over excitedly. Deliver Us Not! (or Birth, Where Is Thy Sting?): Three fetuses sharing a womb debate the possibilities of life-after-birth, trying to come to terms with their impending due-date. This festival-winning, easy-to-stage crowd-pleaser combines witty palaver and thought-provoking banter to form a marriage of mirth and meaning. The characters represent a trio of philosophies, including an atheist fetus who is convinced that "you're conceived, you live, you're born and that's it! There's nothing after birth!" It's Tough to Be Somebody!: An apathetic high school "Fame Awareness Education" class learns a hard lesson from a washed-up, wet-brained silver screen maven. This in-your-face hoot is a brashly insensitive look at sensitivity that touches on modern tolerance-mania with all the politeness of a cattle prod. The script swaggers with every insolent line, mocking without remorse as the overly caring teacher apologizes profusely for uttering such a bigoted and insensitive phrase as 'Good morning, students.'"--Publisher website

Download or read book The Last Sunday in June written by Jonathan Tolins and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 2004 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: It is the last Sunday in June, the day of the annual Gay Pride Parade through New York's Greenwich Village. Tom and Michael, his partner of seven years, intend to spend the day planning their impending move from the Big Apple to the upst