Best Drama & Play Anthologies

Duke Frederick, younger brother to Duke Senior, has overthrown his brother and forced him to live homeless in the forest with his courtiers, including the cynical Jaques. These include primogeniture, passing property from a father to his oldest son. As You Like It depicts intense conflict between brothers, exposing the human suffering that primogeniture entails. Most of Orlando’s courtship of Rosalind takes place while Rosalind is disguised as a man, “Ganymede.” At her urging, Orlando pretends that Ganymede is his beloved Rosalind. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, is home to the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare’s printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. Although some think that sometime between 1610 and 1613 Shakespeare retired from the theater and returned home to Stratford, where he died in 1616, others believe that he may have continued to work in London until close to his death.

A landmark anthology of the masterpieces of Greek drama, featuring all-new, highly accessible translations of some of the world’s most beloved plays, including Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound, Bacchae, Electra, Medea, Antigone, and Oedipus the King Featuring translations by Frank Nisetich, Sarah Ruden, Rachel Kitzinger, Emily Wilson, Mary Lefkowitz, and James Romm. Not only is the influence of Greek drama palpable in everything from Shakespeare to modern television, the insights contained in Greek tragedy have shaped our perceptions of the nature of human life. A detailed time line of the dramas, as well as a list of adaptations of Greek drama to literature, stage, and film from the time of Seneca to the present, helps chart the history of Greek tragedy and illustrate its influence on our culture from the Roman Empire to the present day. Thanks to these sixteen brilliant new renditions by five leading scholar-translators, the three great Athenian masters of tragic drama, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, speak to us once again in powerfully contemporary accents on such fundamental issues as gender, religion, and democratic politics .”—Paul Cartledge, author Democracy: A Life “ The Greek Plays is destined to become a perennial collection, essential reading for students, scholars, and lovers of Greek tragedy alike.

Based on historical people and real events, Arthur Miller's play uses the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence unleashed by the rumors of witchcraft as a powerful parable about McCarthyism. His plays include All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), After the Fall (1964), Incident at Vichy (1965), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), and The American Clock (1980). He has also written two novels, Focus (1945) and The Misfits, which was filmed in 1960, and the text for In Russia (1969), In the Country (1977), and Chinese Encounters (1979), three books of photographs by Inge Morath. DRAMA. The Golden Years. The Man Who Had All the Luck. All My Sons. Death of a Salesman. An Enemy of the People (adaptation of a play by Ibsen) The Crucible. A View from the Bridge. After the Fall. Incident at Vichy. The Price. The American Clock. The Creation of the World and Other Business. The Archbishop’s Ceiling. The Ride Down Mt. OTHER WORKS. Situation Normal. The Misfits (a cinema novel ). Focus ( a novel ). I Don’t Need You Anymore ( short stories). In the Country (reportage with Inge Morath photographs). Chinese Encounters (reportage with Inge Morath photographs). In Russia ( reportage with Inge Morath photographs ). Salesman in Beijing (a memoir). Timebends ( autobiography ). Homely Girl, A Life (novella). Echoes Down the Corridor (essays). On Politics and the Art of Acting. In 1692 nineteen men and women and two dogs were convicted and hanged for witchcraft in a small village in eastern Massachusetts. Just how shallow those graves were, however, is evident from the fact that the people buried there were not eradicated from history: their names remain with us to this day, not least because of Arthur Miller, for whom past events and present realities have always been pressed together by a moral logic. In his hands the ghosts of those who died have proved real enough even if the witches they were presumed to be were little more than fantasies conjured by a mixture of fear, ambition, frustration, jealousy, and perverted pride. In 1957 the Massachusetts General Court passed a resolution stating that “No disgrace or cause for distress” attached itself to the descendants of those indicted, tried, and sentenced. Declaring the proceedings to be “the result of popular hysterical fear of the Devil,” the resolution noted that “more civilized laws” had superseded those under which the accused had been tried. This was the long-delayed end of a story whose beginnings lay in the woods that surrounded the village of Salem when, in 1692, a number of young girls were discovered, with a West Indian slave called Tituba, dancing and playing at conjuring. In 1711 the governor of Massachusetts, acting on behalf of the general court of the province, set his hand to a reversal of attainder that offered restitution for this miscarriage of justice. Perversely, damages were paid not only to the victims but also to such people as William Good, who was his wife’s accuser, and Abigail Hobbs, a “confessed witch” who became a hostile witness. It stayed in his mind, but only as one of those mysterious incidents from a past separated from us by more than time: “It never occurred to me that I would ever deal with it ... because I had never formulated an aesthetic idea of this tragedy.” Then, in 1949, he came upon a new book about the trials, by Marion Starkey, called The Devil in Massachusetts. Claiming to have tried to “uncover the classic dramatic form of the story itself” Starkey insisted that “here is real Greek tragedy,” with “a beginning, a middle and an end.” Interestingly, in the notebook Arthur Miller started at this time, he noted that “It must be ‘tragic’” and, when The Crucible opened in New York, in 1953, he remarked, “Salem is one of the few dramas in history with a beginning, a middle and an end.”. Witches in the abstract were not hanged in Salem; but one by one were brought to the gallows such diverse personalities as a decent grandmother grown too hard of hearing to understand a crucial question from the jurors, a rakish, pipe-smoking female tramp, a plain farmer who thought only to save his wife from molestation, a lame old man whose toothless gums did not deny expression to a very salty vocabulary.... And after you have studied their lives faithfully, a remarkable thing happens; you discover that if you really know the few, you are on your way to understanding the millions. “It has been revived,” Starkey insisted, “on a colossal scale by replacing the medieval idea of malefic witchcraft by a pseudo-scientific concept like ‘race,’ ‘nationality’ and by substituting for theological dissension a whole complex of warring ideologies. It was “the maturation of the hysteria at the time which pulled the trigger; without the latter I’d never have launched.” As he remarked at the time, to his friend and colleague Elia Kazan, director of All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, the Salem trials offered a persuasive parallel: “It’s all here... every scene.” And certainly Miller’s own account suggests that what had once struck him as an impenetrable mystery had now begun to make psychological and social sense. The main point of the hearings, precisely as in seventeenth-century Salem, was that the accused make public confession, damn his confederates as well as his Devil master, and guarantee his sterling new allegiance by breaking disgusting old vows-whereupon he was let loose to rejoin the society of extremely decent people. In other words, the same spiritual nugget lay folded within both procedures-an act of contrition done not in solemn privacy but out in the public air. For, as he has pointed out, not only was Tituba in all probability practicing voodoo on that night in 1692, but witchcraft was accepted as a fact by virtually every secular and religious authority. To that end he quotes the eighteenth-century British jurist Sir William Blackstone as insisting that it “is a truth to which every nation in the world hath in its turn borne testimony,” and John Wesley, founder of Methodism, as stating, “The giving up of witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible.” Indeed, by the end of the seventeenth century an estimated two hundred thousand people worldwide had been executed as witches. The question is not the reality of witches but the power of authority to define the nature of the real, and the desire, on the part of individuals and the state, to identify those whose purging will relieve a sense of anxiety and guilt. In 1948 Congressman George A. Dondero, in the House debate on the Mundt-Nixon bill, to “protect the United States against Un-American and subversive activities,” observed that “the world is dividing into two camps, freedom versus Communism, Christian civilization versus paganism.” More directly Judge Irving Kaufman, who presided over the Rosenberg espionage trial in 1951, accused those before him of “diabolical conspiracy” and “denial of God.” Interestingly, on the night the Rosenbergs were executed, the cast and audience of The Crucible stood in silence as a gesture of respect. By a strange irony Miller was returning from Salem, where he had been researching the play, when he heard on his car radio news of Kazan’s testimony before the Committee. Kazan had offered names: Harry Elion, John Bonn, Alice Evans, Anne Howe. The irony lay not only in the fact that in doing so they replicated the processes of the 1692 trials, where the children cried out against Sarah Good, Bridget Bishop, George Jacobs, Martha Bellows, Alice Barrow, but that in Miller’s plays there usually comes a moment when the central character cries out his own name, determined to invest it with meaning and integrity. It was also a community riven with schisms, which centered on the person of the Reverend Parris, whose materialism and self-concern were more than many could stomach, including a landowner and inn-keeper called John Proctor. But that hardly seemed possible when Abigail Williams and John Proctor, who were to become the central characters in Miller’s drama, were eleven and sixty, respectively. Elizabeth Proctor, who had managed an inn, now becomes a solitary farmer’s wife, cut off from communion not only with her errant husband, who has strayed from her side, but also in some degree from the society of Salem. At the same time the playwright resisted an aspect of the story that would have damaged the parallel to fifties America, though it would have struck a chord with people in many other countries who were later to seize on The Crucible as an account of their own situation. In his original plan Miller toyed with making Proctor a leader of the anti-Parris faction, who backtracks on that role and equivocates in his dealings with Hale. If Proctor emerges as a leader, it is inadvertently as he fights to defend the wife he has wronged and whose life he has placed in jeopardy because of his affair with Abigail. In the screenplay for the film version Miller has the camera observe the depredations of the countryside: unharvested crops, untended animals, houses in disrepair. What took him to Salem was not, finally, an obsession with McCarthyism nor even a concern with a bizarre and, at the time, obscure historical incident, but a fascination with “the most common experience of humanity, the shifts of interest that turned loving husbands and wives into stony enemies, loving parents into indifferent supervisors or even exploiters of their children ... what they called the breaking of charity with one another.” There was evidence for all of these in seventeenth-century Salem but, as Miller implies, the breaking of charity was scarcely restricted to a small New England settlement in a time distant from our own. One dictionary definition of a crucible is a place of extreme heat, “a severe test.” John Proctor and the others summoned before the court in Salem discovered the meaning of that. It is Arthur Miller’s most frequently produced play not, I think, because it addresses affairs of state nor even because it offers us the tragic sight of a man who dies to save his conception of himself and the world, but because audiences understand all too well that the breaking of charity is no less a truth of their own lives than it is an account of historical process. In the film version of his play, Miller, free now to expand and deepen the social context of the drama, chose to emphasize the illusory sense of community: “The CROWD’s urging rises to angry crescendo. When Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt abandons his momentary rebellion to return to his conformist society, he is described as being “almost tearful with joy.” Miller’s alarm, then, is not his alone, nor is his sense of the potentially tyrannical power of shared myths that appear to offer absolution to those who accept them. If his faith in individual conscience as a corrective is also not unique, it is, perhaps, harder to sustain in the second half of a century that has seen collective myths exercising a coercive power, in America and Europe.

Duke Frederick, younger brother to Duke Senior, has overthrown his brother and forced him to live homeless in the forest with his courtiers, including the cynical Jaques. These include primogeniture, passing property from a father to his oldest son. As You Like It depicts intense conflict between brothers, exposing the human suffering that primogeniture entails. Most of Orlando’s courtship of Rosalind takes place while Rosalind is disguised as a man, “Ganymede.” At her urging, Orlando pretends that Ganymede is his beloved Rosalind. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, is home to the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare’s printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. Although some think that sometime between 1610 and 1613 Shakespeare retired from the theater and returned home to Stratford, where he died in 1616, others believe that he may have continued to work in London until close to his death.

The playscript for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was originally released as a 'special rehearsal edition' alongside the opening of Jack Thorne's play in London's West End in summer 2016. When Albus hatches a plot to go back in time to save the life of Cedric Diggory—what Albus views as the biggest mistake his father made—time becomes distorted and Harry is left to examine his own life, his relationship with his son, and how love can sometimes be much more complicated than it seems. This is an interesting extension of the "Harry Potter" universe, but readers should go into it knowing that it's its own beast. Rowling didn't write it (much to the fury and vitriol of many fans), and it is in script form, so it loses some of the magic that won over millions of readers back when it all began.

This is a story of dire happenstances that broke a mind and spirit, created beliefs that twisted innocence, ultimately morphing into a malicious brew that changed the world forever. My aim in writing The Secret Journals of Adolf Hitler was to meet Hitler in person through personal documents that have survived, then deconstruct and reconstruct him via the concept of his life being revealed in journal entries. Written from a detached, personal perspective, I attempt to convey a realistic portrait devoid of condemnation or glory, yet firmly acknowledging the crimes he promulgated. There are truths that will never be known, since the Nazis went to great lengths to cover their tracks, but in the absence of facts, there are plenty of rumors.

This book contains some delicious schadenfreude in which I recall such humiliating debacles as breaking my shoulder while trying to impress a guy, coming very close to spending my life in a Guatemalan prison, and having my lacerated ear sewn back on by a deaf guy after losing it in a torrid love affair. “If having a quote from me might make you buy this book, you need to take a long hard look at yourself.”— James Corden “[An] honest, witty debut.”— Cosmopolitan “The comedian and creator of 2 Broke Girls spares no embarrassing details in this richly funny tell-all.”— InStyle “Hilarious.” -- People. Cummings uses borderline-insane life experiences...as a springboard for poignant self-reflection.”— Los Angeles Magazine “Provides an honest viewpoint on what it means to be a successful woman in the business world and the importance of facing insecurities straight on. “A zippy, unabashed narrative confronting personal adversity with an equal mix of humor and sincerity...[ I’m Fine...And Other Lies is] an extremely self-deprecating assault on a laundry list of proclivities, insecurities, and intimate fears many readers will easily relate to...Akin to the inner-critical narrative voice of Amy Schumer, Cummings’ observations expectedly tackle the uncomfortable and the embarrassing...with deflective humor and straight-up honesty, humility, and a keen sense of humanity.”— Kirkus Reviews “All hail the arrival of Whitney Cummings as a truly hilarious, keenly insightful and endlessly entertaining author. Her experiences will resonate deeply with those who battle low self worth and codependency.” – Publishers Weekly , starred review “If celebrity memoirs are high up on her list, this hilarious book set against touching and relatable lessons is just the one.” -- PureWow.

Do you know that the FIRST 9/11 attack actually occurred at Vienna on September 11-12 in 1683 when the Ottoman Empire stood poised at the gateway to Christian Europe with the intention of forcing Islam on the entire continent? After a months-long assault, the Turks were just hours away from bringing down the weakening citadel and imposing jihad. Aleksy, a Tatar raised by a Polish peasant family, holds in his heart the wish to become a Polish winged hussar, a Christian lancer who carries into battle a device attached to his back that holds dozens of eagle feathers. Historical Novels Review "This classic different-worlds love affair provides the human grounding for a larger story replete with well-researched period details about the struggle of 17th-century Europe against the forces of Islam, and Martin is a skilled enough storyteller to keep the whole narrative moving forward briskly to a very satisfying conclusion. He and she exchange words during a chance encounter; her brothers, though, don't take kindly to him, and a fight ensues, leading Aleksy and his family to fear Lord Halicki's wrath. Martin sets the stage so tidily that the plight of Aleksy and Krystyna, who desire to move beyond the social classes that keep them apart, transcends the historical moment. Kirkus Reviews "Amidst class and religious warfare, this alternately romantic and brutal love story is also a reminder that the struggle between Christianity and Islam is a great deal older than 2001. In an ethnically diverse Poland that is now long gone, the main characters struggle with loyalties to family, race, and country as they come to understand that no fear or evil is unchangeable." James Conroyd Martin is the award-winning author of PUSH NOT THE RIVER, a novel based on the diary of a countess in 1790s Poland; AGAINST A CRIMSON SKY, which continues the family saga into the Napoleonic era; and The WARSAW CONSPIRACY, detailing the young Polish cadets' rising against the mighty Russia.

Based on an original new story by J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, a new play by Jack Thorne, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is the eighth story in the Harry Potter series and the first official Harry Potter story to be presented on stage. Praise for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts I and II * “Series fans can breathe easy knowing this play has been respectfully and lovingly wrought.

Miranda, along with Jeremy McCarter, a cultural critic and theater artist who was involved in the project from its earliest stages--"since before this was even a show," according to Miranda--traces its development from an improbable perfor­mance at the White House to its landmark opening night on Broadway six years later. This glorious, oversize testament to the multiple Tony Award-winning musical Hamilton is a joy to anyone who loves the sound track or who has been lucky enough to score tickets to the show.

It is a captivating read and filled with powerfully moving stories about men and woman who were saved, delivered, and literally rescued from certain death. Bonnke s God given vision of a blood washed Africa changed his life, and changed the world.