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 ›
Drama Criticism
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
Analysis of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Nothing by Shakespeare before A Midsummer Night’s Dream is its equal and in some respects nothing by him afterwards surpasses it. It is his first undoubted masterpiece, with-out flaws, and one of his dozen or so plays of overwhelming originality… Read More ›
Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
Twelfth Night is the climax of Shakespeare’s early achievement in comedy. The effects and values of the earlier comedies are here subtly embodied in the most complex structure which Shakespeare had yet created. But the play also looks forward: the… Read More ›
Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra
Antony and Cleopatra is the definitive tragedy of passion, and in it the ironic and heroic themes, the day world of history and the night world of passion, expand into natural forces of cosmological proportions. —Northrup Frye, “The Tailors of… Read More ›
Analysis of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest
Many commentators agree in the belief that The Tempest is the last creation of Shakespeare. I will readily believe it. There is in The Tempest the solemn tone of a testament. It might be said that, before his death, the… Read More ›
Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
Shakespeare, more than any other author, has instructed the West in the catastrophes of sexuality, and has invented the formula that the sexual becomes the erotic when crossed by the shadow of death. There had to be one high song… Read More ›
Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Othello
Of all Shakespeare’s tragedies . . . Othello is the most painfully exciting and the most terrible. From the moment when the temptation of the hero begins, the reader’s heart and mind are held in a vice, experiencing the extremes… Read More ›
Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth
Macbeth . . . is done upon a stronger and more systematic principle of contrast than any other of Shakespeare’s plays. It moves upon the verge of an abyss, and is a constant struggle between life and death. The action… Read More ›
Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet
With Shakespeare the dramatic resolution conveys us, beyond the man-made sphere of poetic justice, toward the ever-receding horizons of cosmic irony. This is peculiarly the case with Hamlet, for the same reasons that it excites such intensive empathy from actors… Read More ›
Analysis of William Shakespeare’s King Lear
There is perhaps no play which keeps the attention so strongly fixed; which so much agitates our passions and interests our curiosity. The artful involutions of distinct interests, the striking opposition of contrary characters, the sudden changes of fortune, and… Read More ›
Analysis of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard
It is, as a rule, when a critic does not wish to commit himself or to trouble himself, that he refers to atmosphere. And, given time, something might be said in greater detail of the causes which produced this atmosphere—the… Read More ›
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