By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Murder in the Cathedral is often called T. S. Eliot’s first play, but technically, it wasn’t even his second. But before we address this, let’s take a closer look at the play itself. Murder in the Cathedral is probably Eliot’s best-known play, and his only completed work of historical drama.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Waiting for Godot is one of the most important plays of the twentieth century. But analysing its significance is not easy, because Beckett’s play represents a major departure from many conventions and audience expectations regarding the theatre.
Beginning life as a French play which Beckett wrote in the late 1940s, Waiting for Godot premiered in London in 1955, initially to negative reviews, although the support of the influential theatre critic Kenneth Tynan soon transformed its fortunes.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Six Characters in Search of an Author is one of the most famous plays about theatre, a metatheatrical masterpiece which invites us to think about the relationship between theatre and ‘real’ life. Luigi Pirandello’s most celebrated and widely staged play, Six Characters in Search of an Author is worth exploring more closely; but before we offer an analysis of the play, perhaps it might be a good idea to recap the plot (briefly).
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.
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.