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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
The best plays by women The first named writer in world history was a woman, Enheduanna. Yet as Virginia Woolf pointed out in A Room of One’s Own, Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister Judith would have found it impossible to make it in the world of Elizabethan theatre. But in fact, ever […]