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.

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 (supposedly) 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.’

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.

A Short Analysis of Aristophanes’ The Frogs

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The Frogs is one of Aristophanes’ most curious plays. It’s the only Greek play which we know for a fact was popular enough to have been given a repeat performance. It’s also notable for its discussion of the nature of theatre – an early version of literary theory and analysis, which Aristotle would help to develop in his Poetics nearly a century later.