Product Description: Book by Kirsch, Arthur C.

Introduces the modern reader and playgoer to many of Shakespeare's habits as a playwright for Elizabethan audiences

Product Description: Book by Wiersma, Stanley M.

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Certain works of Romantic drama--- Prometheus Unbound, Cain, The Cenci-- have received a good deal of critical attention, by as a whole the genre has been misunderstood and only slightly considered. Alan Richardson redresses a tradition of critical neglect by considering the works of Romantic drama not as failed stage-plays ("closet drama") but as constituting a new, distinctively Romantic genre. In turning from the contemporary stage--which was marked by spectacle, rant, and melodrama--the Romantic poets developed an altogether new kind of drama, one which they hoped could recapture the intensity of Shakespearean tragedy that Neoclassical writers had scarcely approached.Richardson class this genre (after Byron) "mental theater," both because its works are concerned with portraying the development of self-consciousness and because it fuses the subjectivity of lyric with the interaction of dramatic poetry. Moreover, these works are addressed directly to the mind of the reader, bypassing the medium of stage representation. This study places Romantic self-consciousness in a fundamentally new light. Far from uncritically pursuing an egoistic stance, the Romantics criticize through their poetic drama the attempt to attain psychic autonomy. The protagonists of Romantic drama are seduced by their antagonists into entering such a condition only to find in it a hollow, deathly isolation. They find in self-consciousness not their promised liberation, but a tormented fate modeled after that of their betrayers. Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley delineate the limitations of "Romantic" self-consciousness in their works of mental theater; Shelley alone envisions their transcendence through his radical transformation of consciousness in the conclusion to Prometheus Unbound.This interpretation of mental theater will lead to a new evaluation of the Romantics as dramatic poets. It brings back to critical attention neglected but challenging works such as Byron's Heaven and Earth and Bedd

Product Description: Shelley has long been viewed as a dreamer isolated from reality, a "beautiful and ineffectual angel," in Arnold's words. In contrast, Stuart Sperry's book emphasizes the life forces originating in the poet's childhood that impelled and shaped his career, and reasserts Shelley's relevance to the social and cultural dilemmas of contemporary life...read more

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Product Description: A collection bringing together in a single volume a number of the best twentieth-century essays on Byron’s dramas, together with comprehensive bibliographies on each of them.

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Product Description: The versatility of Shakespeare's performances on the keyboards of blank verse and prose has attracted critical attention. But the contribution of the third keyboard -- his rhymed verse -- has fallen on deaf ears. This analysis of rhyme in individual passages chosen from a variety of plays argues that Shakespeare's correlation of perfect and imperfect rhyme makes a subtly significant contribution to the total dramatic effect of every performance of every play...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Introduces the modern reader and playgoer to many of Shakespeare's habits as a playwright for Elizabethan audiences

Product Description: 'Dramatic Difference' argues that early modern women writers manipulated the class-based exclusivity of closet drama to justify their own contributions to this highly political genre. The book situates women writers' work in the context of their male peers' use of the genre and looks at how the genre's social and political orientation changed from the late sixteenth century through the Restoration...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: This four-volume academic set covers the subject of aging from a social, cultural, sociological, biological, medical, anthropological, religious/philosophical, and economic point of view. Special attention has been paid to cross-national differences in policies and approaches related to aging...read more