Best Drama Literary Criticism Books
Here you will get Best Drama Literary Criticism Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. A Streetcar Named Desire (New Directions Paperbook)
Author: by Tennessee Williams
0811216020
New Directions
English
The Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Circle Award winning playreissued with an introduction by Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), and Williams’ essay “The World I Live In.” It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays.
The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the careers of Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, and solidified the position of Tennessee Williams as one of the most important young playwrights of his generation, as well as that of Elia Kazan as the greatest American stage director of the ’40s and ’50s.
Who better than America’s elder statesman of the theater, Williams’ contemporary Arthur Miller, to write as a witness to the lightning that struck American culture in the form of A Streetcar Named Desire? Miller’s rich perspective on Williams’ singular style of poetic dialogue, sensitive characters, and dramatic violence makes this a unique and valuable new edition of A Streetcar Named Desire.
2. The Tempest (Folger Shakespeare Library)
Author: by William Shakespeare
0743482832
Simon & Schuster
English
The authoritative edition of The Tempest from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for both students and general readers. Putting romance onstage, The Tempest gives us a magician, Prospero, a former duke of Milan who was displaced by his treacherous brother, Antonio.
Prospero is exiled on an island, where his only companions are his daughter, Miranda, the spirit Ariel, and the monster Caliban. When his enemies are among those caught in a storm near the island, Prospero turns his power upon them through Ariel and other spirits.
The characters exceed the roles of villains and heroes. Prospero seems heroic, yet he enslaves Caliban and has an appetite for revenge. Caliban seems to be a monster for attacking Miranda, but appears heroic in resisting Prospero, evoking the period of colonialism during which the play was written.
Miranda’s engagement to Ferdinand, the Prince of Naples and a member of the shipwrecked party, helps resolve the drama. This edition includes: -Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play -Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play -Scene-by-scene plot summaries -A key to the play’s famous lines and phrases -An introduction to reading Shakespeare’s language -An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play -Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s vast holdings of rare books -An annotated guide to further reading Essay by Barbara A.
3. Animal Farm
Author: by George orwell
B097PHB9LB
July 10, 2021
English
Animal Farm is an Allegorical novella by George Orwell, first Published in England on 17 August 1945. According to Orwell, the Fable reflects events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Then on into the Statilinst era of the Soviet Union.
4. Twelve Angry Men (Penguin Classics)
Author: by Reginald Rose
Penguin Classics
English
96 pages
A landmark American drama that inspired a classic film and a Broadway revivalfeaturing an introduction by David MametA blistering character study and an examination of the American melting pot and the judicial system that keeps it in check, Twelve Angry Men holds at its core a deeply patriotic faith in the U.S.Legal system.
The play centers on Juror Eight, who is at first the sole holdout in an 11-1 guilty vote. Eight sets his sights not on proving the other jurors wrong but rather on getting them to look at the situation in a clear-eyed way not affected by their personal prejudices or biases.
Reginald Rose deliberately and carefully peels away the layers of artifice from the men and allows a fuller picture to form of themand of America, at its best and worst. After the critically acclaimed teleplay aired in 1954, this landmark American drama went on to become a cinematic masterpiece in 1957 starring Henry Fonda, for which Rose wrote the adaptation.
More recently, Twelve Angry Men had a successful, and award-winning, run on Broadway. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines.
5. The Shakespeare Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained
Author: by DK
B00TTD0MIE
DK (March 10, 2015)
March 10, 2015
“All the world’s a stage”, William Shakespeare wrote, “And all the men and women merely players.” Sit back as the curtain goes up on the dramas, sonnets, and life of one of the greatest writers in the English language. Shakespeare wrote or contributed to more than 40 plays, ranging from romantic comedies to the profound tragedy King Lear, as well as 154 sonnets.
The Shakespeare Book has visual plot summaries of each one, with diagrams to show the intricate web of relationships in plays such as A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Commentaries explain Shakespeare’s sources and set each drama in context, revealing, for instance, how the warring Protestants and Catholics of his day are mirrored in Romeo and Juliet’s Montagues and Capulets.
Written in plain English and packed with graphics and illustrations, The Shakespeare Book illumines the Bard’s world – his marriage, businesses, and friends – and explains how his works became an enduring phenomenon. Whether you need a guide through complex plots and unfamiliar language, or you’re looking for a fresh perspective on his well-loved plays and sonnets, this indispensable guide will help you fully appreciate Shakespeare, the man, and the writer.
6. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Author: by Tom Stoppard
Grove Press
English
128 pages
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is one of the most enduring and frequently performed plays of contemporary theater and has firmly established itself in the dramatic canon. Acclaimed as a modern masterpiece, it is the fabulously inventive tale of Hamlet as told from the worm’s-eye view of the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters in Shakespeare’s play.
In Tom Stoppard’s best-known work, this Shakespearean Laurel and Hardy finally get a chance to take the lead role, but do so in a world where echoes of Waiting for Godot resound, where reality and illusion intermix, and where fate leads our two heroes to a tragic but inevitable end.
Revised and reissued to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the play’s first performance, this definitive edition includes a new introduction and previously unpublished ancillary material.
7. The Portable Dante (Penguin Classics)
Author: by Dante Alighieri
Penguin Classics
English
704 pages
The famed Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s two masterworksThe Divine Comedy and La Vita Nuovain one volumeA Penguin ClassicAs a philosopher, he wedded classical methods of inquiry to a Christian faith. As an autobiographer, he looked unsparingly at his own failures to depict universal struggles.
As a visionary, he dared draw maps of Hell, with Purgatory and Paradise, and populate all three realms with recognizable human beings. As a passionate lover, he became a poet of bereavement and renunication. As all of these, Dante Alighieri paved the way for modern literature, while creating verse and prose that remain unparalleled for formal elegance, intellectual depth, and emotional grandeur.
The Portable Dante captures the scope and fire of Dante’s genius as thoroughly as any single volume can. It contains complete verse translations of The Divine Comedy and La Vita Nuova, as well as a bibliography, notes, and an introduction by the eminent scholar and translator Mark Musa.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
8. The Piano Lesson
Author: by August Wilson
Plume
English
144 pages
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, this modern American classic is about family, and the legacy of slavery in America. August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences.
In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned perhaps his most haunting and dramatic work. At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family’s prized, hard-won possession, has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles’s Pittsburgh home.
When Boy Willie, Berniece’s exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash he needs to stake his future.
9. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Author: by Tennessee Williams
0811216012
New Directions
English
The definitive text of this American classicreissued with an introduction by Edward Albee (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And A Delicate Balance) and Williams’ essay “Person-to-Person.”Cat on a Hot Tin Roof first heated up Broadway in 1955 with its gothic American story of brothers vying for their dying father’s inheritance amid a whirlwind of sexuality, untethered in the person of Maggie the Cat.
The play also daringly showcased the burden of sexuality repressed in the agony of her husband, Brick Pollitt. In spite of the public controversy Cat stirred up, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Circle Award for that year.
Williams, as he so often did with his plays, rewrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for many yearsthe present version was originally produced at the American Shakespeare Festival in 1974 with all the changes that made Williams finally declare the text to be definitive, and was most recently produced on Broadway in the 2003-04 season.
This definitive edition also includes Williams’ essay “Person-to-Person,” Williams’ notes on the various endings, and a short chronology of the author’s life. One of America’s greatest living playwrights, as well as a friend and colleague of Williams, Edward Albee has written a concise introduction to the play from a playwright’s perspective, examining the candor, sensuality, power, and impact of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof then and now.
10. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Author: by Edward Albee
Berkley (March 1, 1983)
English
272 pages
NOTE: This ISBN has been Revised by the Author for The 2005 Broadway Revival. Twelve times a week, answered Uta Hagen, when asked how often she’d like to play Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Like her, audiences and critics alike could not get enough of Edward Albee’s masterful play.
A dark comedy, it portrays husband and wife George and Martha in a searing night of dangerous fun and games. By the evening’s end, a stunning, almost unbearable revelation provides a climax that has shocked audiences for years. With the play’s razor-sharp dialogue and the stripping away of social pretense, Newsweek rightly foresaw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
As a brilliantly original work of artan excoriating theatrical experience, surging with shocks of recognition and dramatic fire [that] will be igniting Broadway for some time to come.
11. Othello (No Fear Shakespeare) (Volume 9)
Author: by SparkNotes
1586638521
English
320 pages
Read Shakespeare’s plays in all their brillianceand understand what every word means! Don’t be intimidated by Shakespeare! These popular guides make the Bard’s plays accessible and enjoyable. Each No Fear guide contains:The complete text of the original playA line-by-line translation that puts the words into everyday languageA complete list of characters, with descriptionsPlenty of helpful commentary
12. A Streetcar Named Desire (Modern Classics (Penguin))
Author: by Tennessee Williams
Penguin Books
English
111 pages
A Streetcar Named Desire
13. Arden Shakespeare Third Series Complete Works (The Arden Shakespeare Third Series)
Author: by Ann Thompson
English
1504 pages
147429636X
This new Complete Works marks the completion of the Arden Shakespeare Third Series and includes the complete plays, poems and sonnets, edited by leading international scholars. New to this edition are the ‘apocryphal’ plays, part-written by Shakespeare: Double Falsehood, Sir Thomas More and King Edward III.
The anthology is unique in giving all three extant texts of Hamlet from Shakespeare’s time: the first and second Quarto texts of 1603 and 1604-5, and the first Folio text of 1623. With a simple alphabetical arrangement the Complete Works are easy to navigate, and the reader’s understanding and enjoyment are enhanced by the general introduction, short individual introductions to each text, a glossary and a bibliography.
This handsome volume is ideal for readers keen to explore Shakespeare’s work and for anyone building their literary library.
14. North by Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar's Quest for the Truth Behind the Bard's Work
Author: by Michael Blanding
English
480 pages
0316493244
Winner of the 2021 International Book Award in Narrative Non-Fiction*The true story of a self-taught Shakespeare sleuth’s quest to prove his eye-opening theory about the source of the world’s most famous plays, taking readers inside the vibrant era of Elizabethan England as well as the contemporary scene of Shakespeare scholars and obsessives.
Acclaimed author of The Map Thief, Michael Blanding presents the twinning narratives of renegade scholar Dennis McCarthy, called the Steve Jobs of the Shakespeare community, and Sir Thomas North, an Elizabethan courtier whom McCarthy believes to be the undiscovered source for Shakespeare’s plays.
For the last fifteen years, McCarthy has obsessively pursued the true origins of Shakespeare’s works. Using plagiarism software, he has found direct links between Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and other plays and North’s published and unpublished writingsas well as Shakespearean plotlines seemingly lifted straight from North’s colorful life.
15. Romeo and Juliet: Oxford School Shakespeare (Oxford School Shakespeare Series)
Author: by William Shakespeare
019832166X
Oxford University Press
English
This edition of Romeo and Juliet is especially designed for students, with accessible on-page notes and explanatory illustrations, clear background information, and rigorous but accessible scholarly credentials. This edition includes illustrations, preliminary notes, reading lists (includingwebsites) and classroom notes, allowing students to master Shakespeare’s work.
About the Series:Newly redesigned and easier to read, each play in the Oxford School Shakespeare series includes the complete and unabridged text, detailed and clear explanations of difficult words and passages, a synopsis of the plot, summaries of individual scenes, and notes on the main characters.
Also includedis a wide range of questions and activities for work in class, together with the historical background to Shakespeare’s England, a brief biography of Shakespeare, and a complete list of his plays.
