Includes the plays The Robbers and Passion and PoliticsTwo plays concerned with tyranny and freedom. Schiller's first play, The Robbers (1781), was written in great secrecy under the prison like conditions of Württenberg's Karlsschule: Karl, the son of a count, is disinherited through the machinations of his brother Franz, and, turning his back on a social order he finds unjust and corrupt, becomes the leader of a band of robbers.In Passion and Politics (17...

Includes the plays Don Carlos and Mary StuartMajor historical upheavals of the Sixteenth Century illuminate Schiller's increasingly troubled reaction to the present in these two plays. The huge epic Don Carlos (1787), a 'play expressing a view of life', marries the ideological battle between Philip II of Spain and his son Don Carlos to a gripping narrative. In Mary Stuart (1800), Schiller, sickened by the excesses of a revolution he had once supported, brings toget...

An Almeida Theatre production that opened at the Albery Theatre with Diana Rigg and Toby Stephens, and then played for a season on Broadway. This political thriller, set in Rome at the beginning of Emperor Nero’s tyranny, lays bare the relationships at the heart of power as a world slips into moral chaos.

Includes the plays Joan of Arc and William TellTwo plays about historical characters whose fame has also raised them to the level of myth. In Joan of Arc (1801), Schiller allows his heroine a more glorious death than her historical execution at the stake, and imbues her with more passion, and compassion, than is usually ascribed to the actual Joan.In William Tell (1805), often regarded as his greatest play, Schiller creates a vivid sense of time and place -...

Includes the plays Britannicus, Phedra and BereniceJean Racine is the greatest tragedian of the French seventeenth century, using its strict rules and conventions to tell stories of overwhelming passion and cruelty.This volume brings together three of his greatest plays. Britannicus, the earliest, is set in the court of the young Emperor Nero, and in an atmosphere seething with erotic tension, documents the power-struggles surrounding the birth of a legenda...

Carlo Goldoni (1707 – 1793) was one of the most prolific and versatile playwrights of his century, even though most of his vast output deals with life confined to a few square miles of Northern Italy. This new edition contains two comedies about women surviving precariously in a man's world, but each taking a distinctly different approach to her problems. Mirandolina believes open dealing is essential; Valentina wants to have her cake and eat it, and uses intrigue to further her interests....

Goethe's classical verse play Tasso (1790) examines, in his own words, 'the disproportion of talent to life' and the predicament of the artist at odds with the world around him. In Clavigo (1774), a play which Goethe claimed only took him a week to write, we find the first of the double-portraits which culminates in two souls wrestling for dominion in the breast of Faust. Both these translations were premiered at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow.

These two tragedies, written at the peak of Schiller's career as a dramatist, contain his most telling, and touching, portrayals of women. His heroines are propelled, by birth or a sense of divine mission, into exalted political positions, where their qualities as human beings, and particularly as women, are put to the severest tests, from which they emerge triumphant, but doomed. Schiller's breadth of sentiment, combined with his consummate stagecraft, and Shakespearean mastery of verse a...

Carlo Goldoni was Italy's greatest playwright of the eighteenth century and wrote at least one hundred and fifty plays, although only a handful; of these have been performed since his time. Working for theatres in both Venice and Paris, he took much of his inspiration from 'commedia dell'arte'.This collection focuses on Goldoni's more serious side and includes the plays Don Juan, Friends and Lovers and The Battlefield. The first published English-language edition o...

Adapted by Robert David MacDonald from Gitta Sereny's Into That Darkness"Robert David MacDonald’s In Quest of Conscience, based on Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness, a record of her interviews with death camp commandant Franz Stangl, takes it for granted that the Holocaust was a shocking crime against humanity; what it wants to know, with an urgency amounting to desperation, is how it happened, and how it can be prevented from happening again." - Joyce Macmillan, S...

Includes the plays De Sade Show, Persons Unknown and Salto MoltaleA second series of plays, originally written for and performed by the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre.As witty as they are alarming, these three plays cover a considerable range of settings and offer unusual and rewarding opportunities to the actors. De Sade Show presents a gruesome picture of the notorious philosopher and his intimate friends, Salto Mortale take the audience by tortuous route to t...

Premiered in this translation by the Citizens Theatre Company, Glasgow. In Enrico Four a man believes he isHenry IV, Holy Roman Emperor. But is he?Pirandello’s study of perceptions has become a twentieth-century classic which invites us to consider our personal madness in offering a different face to everyone we meet.