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Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama
David Mamet · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorBrecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic
Bertolt Brecht · 294 pages
Poetics
Aristotle · 144 pages
One of the first books written on what is now called aesthetics. Although parts are lost (e.g., comedy), it has been very influential in western thought, such as the part on tragedy.
The Theater and Its Double
Antonin Artaud · 159 pages
The Theater And Its Double is a collection of essays by french poet and playwrite Anton Artaud. Published in 1938. Artaud intended his work as an attack on theatrical convention and the importance of language of drama, opposing the vitality of the viewers sensual experience against theater as a contrived literary form, and urgency of expression against complacency on the part of the audience.
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
Stephen Greenblatt · 430 pages
"How did Shakespeare become Shakespeare? Stephen Greenblatt enables us to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life - full of drama and pageantry, and also cruelty and danger - could have become the world's greatest playwright. Greenblatt makes inspired connections between an entertainment presented to Queen Elizabeth on a vi
Shakespeare: The Biography
Peter Ackroyd · 572 pages
Drawing on an exceptional combination of skills as literary biographer, novelist, and chronicler of London history, Peter Ackroyd surely re-creates the world that shaped Shakespeare--and brings the playwright himself into unusually vivid focus. With characteristic narrative panache, Ackroyd immerses us in sixteenth-century Stratford and the rural landscape--the industry, the animals, even the flow
The Theatre of the Absurd
Martin Esslin · 443 pages
"In 1953 Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents - Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others - shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attent
Shakespeare: The World as Stage
Bill Bryson · 208 pages
William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself.Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from today's most respected a
Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays
David Ball · 96 pages
Using Hamlet as illustration, the author provides the tools for students and practitioners to use as they investigate plot, character, theme, exposition, imagery, motivation/obstacle/conflict, theatricality, and the other crucial parts of the superstructure of a play.
Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
John Lahr · 765 pages
Here, celebrated drama critic John Lahr gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds light on Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even
Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare, Vols. 1-2
Isaac Asimov, Rafael Palacios · 843 pages
The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives
Lajos Egri · 310 pages
Among the many "how-to" playwriting books that have appeared over the years, there have been few that attempt to analyze the mysteries of play construction. Lajos Egri's classic does just that, with instruction that can be applied equally well to a short story, novel, or screenplay. Examining a play from the inside out, Egri starts with the heart of any drama: its characters. All good dramatic wri
The Invisible Woman
Claire Tomalin · 352 pages
A portrait of nineteenth-century actress Ellen Ternan, the woman who was the mistress of Charles Dickens, describing her secret relationship with the author.
The Golden Thread
David Clare, Fiona McDonagh, Justine Nakase · 344 pages
This two-volume edited collection covers three hundred years of Irish women's playwriting with forty-two essays written by leading and emerging Irish theatre scholars and practitioners. Volume One looks at the period from 1716 to 1992, exploring such varied themes as the impact of space and place on identity, women's strategic use of genre, and theatrical responses to shifts in Irish politics and
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Harold Bloom · 755 pages
"Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is an analysis of the central work of the Western canon, and of the playwright who not only invented the English language, but also, as Bloom argues, created human nature as we know it today. Before Shakespeare there was characterization; after Shakespeare, there were characters, men and women capable of change, with highly individual personalities." "Shake
The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups
Ron Rosenbaum · 624 pages
Cultural historian Rosenbaum gives readers a way of rethinking the greatest works of the human imagination, as he shakes up much that we thought we understood about a vital subject and renews our sense of excitement and urgency. Rather than raking over worn-out fragments of biography, Rosenbaum focuses on cutting-edge controversies about the true source of Shakespeare's enchantment and illuminatio
Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard
Laura Bates · 306 pages
Without You
Anthony Rapp · 314 pages
Actor Rapp recounts his life-changing experience in the original cast of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Rent. Rapp had a special feeling about Jonathan Larson's rock musical from his first audition, so he was thrilled when he landed a starring role. When Rent opened to thunderous acclaim off Broadway, the cast members knew that something extraordinary had taken shape. But even as friends and f
Memoirs
Tennessee Williams · 268 pages
Long self-identified as a gay man, America's greatest playwright Williams' candour in his book about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself. Here, more than thirty years later, Williams' look back at his life is not quite so scandalous as it once seemed.