Closet Drama

Closet Drama: History, Theory, Form introduces the emerging field of Closet Drama Studies by featuring twelve original essays from distinguished scholars who offer fresh and illuminating perspectives on closet drama as a genre. Examining an unusual mix of historical narratives, performances, and texts from the Renaissance to the present, this collection unleashes a provocative array of theoretical concerns about the phenomenon of the closet play—a dramatic text written for reading rather than acting.

Marta Straznicky offers a detailed historical analysis of early modern women's closet plays: plays explicitly written for reading, rather than public performance. She reveals that such works were part of an alternative dramatic tradition, an elite and private literary culture, which was understood as intellectually superior to and politically more radical than commercial drama. Elizabeth Cary, Jane Lumley, Anne Finch and Margaret Cavendish wrote their plays in this conjunction of the public and the private at a time when male playwrights dominated the theatres. In her astute readings of the texts, their contexts and their physical appearance in print or manuscript, Straznicky has produced many fresh insights into the place of women's closet plays both in the history of women's writing and in the history of English drama.

1. Drama Types, 2. Elements of Drama, 3. Literary Terms I (Drama), 4. Literary Terms II (Drama), 5. British Drama : Macbeth by Shakespeare, 6. British Drama : Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw, 7. British Drama : She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith, 8. American Drama : Fences by August Wilson, 9. American Drama : A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, 10. American Drama : All My Sons by Arthur Miller......

In this work modernism is illuminated through little-known but striking works by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and others who revived the closet drama, plays written largely for private reading as a means of exploring forbidden sexualities.

Reading Drama in Eighteenth-Century France is the first book-length study of how plays were read in eighteenth-century France and, relatedly, of closet drama: excessive plays that cannot be performed within the playhouse's confines and which thus appeal to the reader's imagination. This period in France was characterized by 'théâtromanie', a craze that encompassed the page as well as the stage. The book's first part surveys the historical context in which plays were read and offers a theoretical model for understanding this practice. The eighteenth-century closet was valued as a privileged site of reading. Although scholars routinely present this room as a place of calm reflection, Thomas Wynn develops a framework (derived in part from queer theory) to argue that it fosters passionate and disruptive pleasures that elude the coercive normativity of the playhouse. To explore the multipositional experience of reading plays in this period, Wynn turns to the journal Mercure de France, whose extensive reviews help us to think about geographies of reading, coercion, and autonomy. The second part examines how dramatists exploited the critical, imaginative, and formal potential of the reading experience. It offers close analysis of several closet plays: comedies depicting the dispute between Jesuits and Jansenists in the 1730s; Hénault's historical drama François II, roi de France (1747); and erotic plays from the end of the period. The study concludes with an account of Rétif de La Bretonne's Le Drame de la vie (1793)—an extreme and arguably unsurpassed example of closet drama. Ultimately, this book shows, closet drama is not failed theatre but rather an indisputable part of the lively, passionate, and combative theatrical culture of eighteenth-century France.

This expansive, inter-disciplinary guide to Renaissance plays and the world they played to gives readers a colorful overview of England's great dramatic age. Provides an expansive and inter-disciplinary approach to Renaissance plays and the world they played to. Offers a colourful and comprehensive overview of the material conditions of England's most important dramatic period. Gives readers facts and data along with up-to-date interpretation of the plays. Looks at the drama in terms of its cultural agency, its collaborative nature, and its ideological complexity.

The plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries are increasingly popular thanks to a spate of recent stage and screen productions and to courses that set Shakespeare's plays in context. This Reader's Guide introduces students to the criticism and debates that are specific to the drama of playwrights such as Jonson, Middleton, Dekker and Webster. Pascale Aebischer explores recent critical developments in key areas including: - How the plays were staged and printed - Innovative editions of plays - How the plays represent and contest the dominant ideologies of the Jacobean period - Dramatic genres - The representation of the human body and of social, gender and race relations - Modern productions on stage and screen Featuring suggestions for further research and reading, and a filmography of commercially available film versions of non-Shakespearean drama, this is an invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in the diverse plays of the Jacobean age.