Author Archives
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Analysis of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine
One of the things I wanted very much to do, in Cloud Nine . . . was to write a play about sexual politics that would not just be a woman’s thing. I felt there were quite a few women’s… Read More ›
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Analysis of Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman
Man and Superman is, of course, one of Shaw’s major plays, though it perhaps achieves that rank from being not one play, but two. Certainly without the long third-act dialogue in Hell, Man and Superman—for all that it dramatizes the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author
“Why not,” I said to myself, “present this highly strange fact of an author who refuses to let some of his characters live though they have been born in his fantasy, and the fact that these characters, having by now… Read More ›
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Analysis of the Morality Play Everyman
The great vice of English drama from Kyd to Galsworthy has been its aim of realism was unlimited. In one play, Everyman, and perhaps in that one play only, we have a drama within the limitations of art. . …. Read More ›
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Analysis of Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara
Recently I took my children to Major Barbara. Twenty years had passed since I had seen it. They were the most terrific years the world has known. Almost every human institution had undergone decisive change. The landmarks of centuries had… Read More ›
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Analysis of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck
The story of a simple soldier who murders his girl in a fit of jealous rage becomes the theme of a tragedy which Büchner wrote during the last months of his life. The play comes to us a fragment without… Read More ›
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Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is, perhaps, to this time, the most mature example of a myth of Contemporary life. The chief value of this drama is its attempt to reveal those ultimate meanings which are resident in modern… Read More ›
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Analysis of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata
The Lysistrata has behind it much suffering and a burning pity. Aristophanes had more than once risked his civic rights and even his life in his battle for peace, and is now making his last appeal. It is owing to… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ben Jonson’s Volpone
Volpone brilliantly exemplifies Jonson’s unique jungle vision, with its self-contained world composed entirely of predators and prey. His contempt for mercenary motivation and capitalistic enterprise is blistering; the commanding indictment of the vicious habits of the new acquisitive society shows… Read More ›
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Analysis of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus
More than any other play, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus celebrates that God-like power of language, and shows us how words can soar, and tempts us to dizzying heights within our heads. But all the time, Marlowe is in control. He knows… Read More ›
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Analysis of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan
The secret of Peter Pan seems to be that it is not merely a children’s entertainment but a great play in its own right, a memorable theatrical experience, differing only in the nature of its appeal to the adult playgoer… Read More ›
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Analysis of Molière’s Tartuffe
Whenever evoked in a modern or a postmodern cultural context, even outside France, Tartuffe still carries with it a considerable amount of polemical baggage. It may be argued that it delves far closer to the level of persistent cultural preoccupation… Read More ›
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Analysis of Sophocles’ Antigone
Within this single drama—in great part, a harsh critique of Athenian society and the Greek city-state in general—Sophocles tells of the eternal struggle between the state and the individual, human and natural law, and the enormous gulf between what we… Read More ›
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Analysis of Euripides’ Bacchae
In one key scene Dionysus asks the question which has perplexed theorists of tragedy: “would you really like to see what gives you pain?” Dionysus, ironic questioner and stage-manager of the action, is a double of the poet himself. The… Read More ›
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Analysis of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House
Whether one reads A Doll’s House as a technical revolution in modern theater, the modern tragedy, the first feminist play since the Greeks, a Hegelian allegory of the spirit’s historical evolution, or a Kierkegaardian leap from aesthetic into ethical life,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Euripides’ Medea
Medea, with its conflict between the boundless egoism of the husband and the boundless passion of the wife, was a completely up-to-date play. Accordingly, the disputes, the abuse, and the logic used by all its characters are essentially bourgeois. Jason… Read More ›
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Analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
It is the peculiar richness of a play like Waiting for Godot that it opens vistas on so many different perspectives. It is open to philosophical, religious, and psychological interpretations, yet above all it is a poem on time, evanescence,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night
The simplicity of the play’s dramatic form; the complexity of its four major characters and the progressive unfolding of their psychological richness; the directness of their presentation without gimmickry or sentimentality; the absorbing emotional rhythm of their interactions; the intensity… Read More ›
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Analysis of Aeschylus’s Oresteia
[The Oresteia is a] trilogy whose special greatness lies in the fact that it transcends the limitations of dramatic enactment on a scale never achieved before or since. —Richard Lattimore, “Introduction to the Oresteia” in The Complete Greek Tragedies Called… Read More ›
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Analysis of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex
The place of the Oedipus Tyrannus in literature is something like that of the Mona Lisa in art. Everyone knows the story, the first detective story of Western literature; everyone who has read or seen it is drawn into its… Read More ›
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