Immerse yourself in the world of Oscar Wilde with the collection: «The Plays of Oscar Wilde.» Containing all of Wilde’s plays, this collection is a must-have for every bookshelf. Oscar Wilde was born in mid-1800’s Dublin to highly intellectual parents. He found a niche in the growing trend of aestheticism and was mentored by Walter Pater and John Ruskin. Although he dabbled in short stories and poems at the beginning of his career, Wilde was tak ...
Benjamin Jonson (1572-1637) was a Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor, known best for his satirical plays and lyric poems. His career began in 1597 when he held a fixed engagement in the «Admiral's Men», and although he was unsuccessful as an actor, his literary talent was apparent and he began writing original plays for the troupe. Jonson had a knack for absurdity and hypocrisy, a trait that made him immensely popular in the 17th century ...
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) is revered as one of the great British dramatists, credited not only with memorable works, but the revival of the then-suffering English theatre. Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland, left mostly to his own devices after his mother ran off to London to pursue a musical career. He educated himself for the most part, and eventually worked for a real estate agent. This experience founded in him a concern for social injus ...
Although one of his lesser known one-act plays, «The Hairy Ape,» written in 1922, followed the success of his first two Pulitzer Prize-winning plays. This drama follows the disturbing dehumanization of Yank, a ship's fireman and a representation of the lower class. He feels superiority from his brute strength until he meets Mildred, the well-intentioned daughter of an extremely wealthy steel magnate. She initiates Yank's uncertainty an ...
"The Electra of Euripides has the distinction of being, perhaps, the best abused, and, one might add, not the best understood, of ancient tragedies. «A singular monument of poetical, or rather unpoetical perversity;» «the very worst of all his pieces;» are, for instance, the phrases applied to it by Schlegel. Considering that he judged it by the standards of conventional classicism, he could scarcely have arrived at any different conclusion ...
This Comedy, which was produced by its author the year after the performance of 'The Clouds,' may be taken as in some sort a companion picture to that piece. Here the satire is directed against the passion of the Athenians for the excitement of the law-courts, as in the former its object was the new philosophy. And as the younger generation—the modern school of thought—were there the subjects of the caricature, so here the older citize ...
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799) was an exceptional French writer of prose comedy during the eighteenth century. He is best known for his theatrical works of the three Figaro plays. Beaumarchais had an action-filled career as a watchmaker, musician, secret agent, businessman, diplomat and a financer of revolutions. His literary career was as turbulent as his personal life. After a series of lawsuits in Paris, the accounts of his ...
Considered by some to have contributed to the birth of modernism, «Ubu Roi» is a comical play that is at once a wild and bizarre work which overturned the cultural rules, norms, and conventions of its day. A precursor to the «Theatre of the Absurd», the play satirizes the complacency, greed and abuse of power by the ruling class. In addition to «Ubu Roi,» Alfred Jarry wrote two sequels, «Ubu Cuckolded,» and «Ubu in Chains,» which were never perf ...
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an instrumental figure in the «Irish Literary Revival» of the 20th Century that redefined Irish writing. It can be difficult to characterize Yeats. He was a complicated man whose work reflected the internal struggle he felt between art and life. In 1899 Yeats helped found the Irish National Theatre Society, which later became the famous Abbey Theatre of Dublin. «On Baile's Strand» was first performed her ...
