Drama – Interesting Literature

A Summary and Analysis of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The Cherry Orchard was the last play Anton Chekhov wrote before his untimely death, in 1904. The play is in many ways an elegy for an old Russia that was in the process of dying at the turn of the century, with the new Russia powerless to be born. But despite this elegiac quality, Chekhov himself considered the play a comedy – a ‘four-act vaudeville’. Clearly further analysis of the play’s structure and style is necessary, in order to understand what makes The Cherry Orchard such a powerful piece of drama.

A Summary and Analysis of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is probably the most famous and widely studied American play associated with the Theatre of the Absurd, a movement prominent in the 1950s and 1960s. Edward Albee’s play is about the dysfunctional and self-destructive marriage between a history professor and his wife, witnessed over the course of one night (or, technically, one very early morning) following a party.

Seven of the Best Speeches from Shakespeare Plays

Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle

The plays of William Shakespeare are crammed full of memorable lines, influential phrases, and striking images. There are dozens of classic speeches, soliloquies, addresses and the like. In this post, we’ve aimed to pick the seven greatest speeches from Shakespeare’s plays, although there were many we had to leave out. What’s your favourite bit from a Shakespeare play? Is it a soliloquy, a formal address, an exchange between multiple characters?

A Study in Greene: Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle travels to Elizabethan England for Robert Greene’s comedy

Robert Greene is probably best-known, in the British popular consciousness at least, for two things. The first is for penning what was perhaps the first, and one of the most memorable, philippics against William Shakespeare: as he lay dying, Greene attacked the Stratford playwright as an ‘upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a country.’ The second is for being played (in a comical tour de force) by Mark Heap in the BBC sitcom Upstart Crow, in which David Mitchell plays the up-and-coming Bard and the lovely Liza Tarbuck plays Anne Hathaway. (I feel I must give Liza a mention, as she once called me ‘bouncy’ on national radio and the compliment has always stuck with me. But that’s another story…)

In Upstart Crow, which takes its title, of course, from Greene’s broadside, Greene is clearly Shakespeare’s senior, viewing the Bard of Avon as a young interloper threatening Greene’s pre-eminence in the theatre world. The running joke – one of several, in fact – revolves around Greene’s attempts to get rid of Shakespeare from the theatres, at any cost. One would hardly guess that in real life, Greene was only six years older than Shakespeare. But Ben Elton, the show’s writer, does have plenty of fun with the title of Greene’s most famous and enduring play for the London stage, the comedy Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.

10 of the Best Restoration Plays Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Restoration comedies and tragedies often get overlooked in our rush to celebrate the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson. Yet any survey of English literature would be substantially poorer if it didn’t mention Aphra Behn, William Wycherley, or William Congreve. Below we introduce ten of the greatest works of Restoration theatre – comedies and tragedies, though mostly the former.