John Webster's «The Duchess of Malfi» is a macabre and tragic play written between 1612 and 1613. Misuse of power, revenge, deception, cruelty, and corruption are among the many themes that run throughout this work. The work is set in the court of Malfi, in reality Amalfi in Italy, and concerns the story of the titular Duchess who is recently widowed and falls in love with Antonio, a lowly steward. However the Duchess' family, wishing ...
"The Iphigenia in Tauris is not in the modern sense a tragedy; it is a romantic play, beginning in a tragic atmosphere and moving through perils and escapes to a happy end. To the archaeologist the cause of this lies in the ritual on which the play is based. All Greek tragedies that we know have as their nucleus something which the Greeks called an Aition-a cause or origin. They all explain some ritual or observance or commemorate some grea ...
"Little Eyolf", is the story of its title character, a young boy who is paralyzed in one leg, and his family, the Allmers. At the outset of the play we find Eyolf's father Alfred returning from a trip in the mountains where he has decided to abandon work on his book and focus on raising his son. The tragic irony of this newly found yet seemingly empty devotion is exhibited when Eyolf disappears unnoticed with the Rat-Wife, a woman capa ...
William Butler Yeats was born near Dublin in 1865, and was encouraged from a young age to pursue a life in the arts. He attended art school for a short while, but soon found that his talents and interest lay in poetry rather than painting. He came to prominence during a tumultuous period in Irish history, when he struggled with the idea of an independent Irish identity. Yeats dealt constantly with the contradictions he felt in his nature and in ...
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) is revered as one of the great British dramatists, credited not only with memorable works, but the revival of the then-suffering English theatre. Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland, left mostly to his own devices after his mother ran off to London to pursue a musical career. He educated himself for the most part, and eventually worked for a real estate agent. This experience founded in him a concern for social injus ...
Benjamin Jonson (1572-1637) was a Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor, known best for his satirical plays and lyric poems. He worked shortly as an actor in «The Admiral's Men», but soon moved on to writing original plays for the troupe. Jonson's work was primarily in comedies for the public theatres, very few of his tragedies have survived. «Sejanus, His Fall,» is the earliest known attempt by the playwright at tragedy, and although ...
Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) was a man with many roles. He was not only a playwright and poet, but also a Whig Member of the British House of Commons and owner of the London Theatre Royal on Drury Lane. Though born in Ireland, Sheridan and his family moved outside of London when he was seven. Both of his parents were theatrical influences for him, as his mother was a playwright and novelist, and his father was at one time an actor. In 1 ...
"Three Sisters" is Anton Chekhov's dramatic play written in 1900 and first performed in 1901. The story concerns the lives of an aristocratic family, the Prozorovs, who struggle to search for meaning in the modern world. The three sisters, Olga, Masha, and Irina, along with their brother Andrei, are living in a small provincial town, yet they long to return to the urban sophistication of Moscow where they grew up. Chekhov's «Three ...
"Heartbreak House" is George Bernard Shaw's 1919 drama that is the story of Mazzini Dunn and his employer, Alfred Mangan, who is about to marry Mazzini's daughter. In these two characters Shaw draws a sharp contrast between the realist Mangan and the idealist Dunn, a contrast that Shaw uses to express the idea that a cultured and leisured Europe was in his opinion drifting towards destruction. A critical commentary of the European ...
