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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
The best Restoration comedies and tragedies 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 […]