William Butler Yeats was encouraged from a young age to pursue a life in the arts. He attended art school for a short while, but soon found that his talents and interest lay in poetry rather than painting. Born and educated in Dublin, Ireland, Yeats discovered early in his literary career a fascination with Irish folklore and the occult. He felt an internal struggle with the contradictions he felt in his nature and in life, and spent much of his ...
Benjamin Jonson (1572-1637) was a Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor, known best for his satirical plays and lyric poems. Jonson worked shortly as an actor in «The Admiral's Men», but soon moved on to writing original plays for the troupe. His works are particularly recognizable because of their consistencies in style, intricacy of plot, characterization and setting. One of his early comedies, «The Case is Altered,» strays from the playw ...
The medieval morality play, which became popular in Europe during the 15th and 16th century, is a allegorical drama in which personal attributes are personified and the moral of choosing good over evil is generally conveyed. In this volume you will find one of the most famous examples of this genre in the play «Everyman» along with the following other plays: «The Deluge», «Abraham, Melchisedec, And Isaac», «The Wakefield Second Shepherds' P ...
This is the first of the series of three Comedies—'The Acharnians,' 'Peace' and 'Lysistrata'—produced at intervals of years, the sixth, tenth and twenty-first of the Peloponnesian War, and impressing on the Athenian people the miseries and disasters due to it and to the scoundrels who by their selfish and reckless policy had provoked it, the consequent ruin of industry and, above all, agriculture, and the urgency of ...
Thomas Middleton (1580-1627), a bricklayer's son, rose to become one of the most eminent playwrights of the Jacobean period. Along with Ben Johnson he helped shape the dynamic course of drama in Renaissance England. His range is broad, as his work successfully covers comedy, tragedy, and history. Praised during his life as well as today, Middleton remains relevant and influential. Set in opulent 17th century Italy, «Women Beware Women» (165 ...
"The Rivals" was Richard Brinsley Sheridan's first play and while at first it was not well received it would go on to prove to be a great success and establish Sheridan as a major talent. «The Rivals» satirizes the pretentiousness of English society in the late 18th century. As witty and accessible today as when it was first written, «The Rivals» sparkles with the humor that Sheridan and his writing are known for. ...
"In his clear preface, Gilbert Murray says with truth that The Trojan Women, valued by the usage of the stage, is not a perfect play. «It is only the crying of one of the great wrongs of the world wrought into music.» Yet it is one of the greater dramas of the elder world. In one situation, with little movement, with few figures, it flashes out a great dramatic lesson, the infinite pathos of a successful wrong. It has in it the very soul of ...
The 17th century dramatist Jean Racine was considered, along with Moliere and Corneille, as one of the three great playwrights of his era. The quality of Racine's poetry has been described as possibly his most important contribution to French literature and his use of the alexandrine poetic line is one of the best examples of such use noted for its harmony, simplicity and elegance. While critics over the centuries have debated the worth of ...
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an instrumental figure in the «Irish Literary Revival» of the 20th Century that redefined Irish writing. His father's love of reading aloud exposed him early on to William Shakespeare, the Romantic poets and the pre-Raphaelites, and developed an interest in Irish myths and folklore. Yeats was a complex man, who struggled between beliefs in the strange and supernatural, and scorn for modern science. He wa ...
