Author: Bernard ShawPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 88
Book Description
Widower's Houses
Author: Bernard ShawPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 88
Book Description
Widower's House
Author: John BayleyPublisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393025613
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 262
Book Description
The widower of the novelist Iris Murdoch, a retired Oxford U. English professor and eminent author himself (Bayley's Eulogy for Iris was a bestseller), candidly relates how he dealt with his wife's Alzheimer's, her death in 1999, friends' responses, and a new lifestyle and love in his mid-seventies. c. Book News Inc.
Plays by George Bernard Shaw
Author: George Bernard ShawPublisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101157666
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 529
Book Description
George Bernard Shaw demanded truth and despised convention. He punctured hollow pretensions and smug prudishness—coating his criticism with ingenious and irreverent wit. In Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Arms and the Man, Candida, and Man and Superman, the great playwright satirizes society, military heroism, marriage, and the pursuit of man by woman. From a social, literary, and theatrical standpoint, these four plays are among the foremost dramas of the age—as intellectually stimulating as they are thoroughly enjoyable. “My way of joking is to tell the truth: It is the funniest joke in the world.”—G. B. Shaw With an Introduction by Eric Bentley and an Afterword by Norman Lloyd
Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant
Author: Bernard ShawPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 380
Book Description
The Widower's Tale
Author: Julia GlassPublisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307456102
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 482
Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the National Book Award–winning author of Three Junes: Seventy-year-old Percy Darling is settling happily into retirement—reading novels, watching old movies, and swimming naked in his pond. But his routines are disrupted when he is persuaded to let a locally beloved preschool take over his barn. As Percy sees his rural refuge overrun by children, parents, and teachers, he must reexamine the solitary life he has made in the three decades since the sudden death of his wife. With equal parts affection and humor, Julia Glass spins a captivating tale about a man who can no longer remain aloof from his community, his two grown daughters, or—to his great shock—the precarious joy of falling in love.
Shaw's Settings
Author: Tony J. StaffordPublisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813048559
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 187
Book Description
Picture the young George Bernard Shaw spending long days in the Reading Room of the British Museum, pursuing a self-taught education, all the while longing for the green landscapes of his native Ireland. It is no coincidence that gardens and libraries often set the scene for Shaw's plays, yet scholars have seldom drawn attention to the fact until now. Exposing the subtle interplay of these two settings as a key pattern throughout Shaw’s dramas, Shaw's Settings fills the need for a systematic study of setting as significant to the playwright's work as a whole. Each of the nine chapters focuses on a different play and a different usage of gardens and libraries, showing that these venues are not just background for action, they also serve as metaphors, foreshadowing, and insight into characters and conflicts. The vital role of Shaw's settings reveals the astonishing depth and complexity of the playwright's dramatic genius.
The Philanderer
Author: George Bernard ShawPublisher: 1st World Publishing
ISBN: 9781595403032
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 124
Book Description
Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. 1st World Library-Literary Society is a non-profit educational organization. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - A lady and gentleman are making love to one another in the drawing-room of a flat in Ashly Gardens in the Victoria district of London. It is past ten at night. The walls are hung with theatrical engravings and photographs - Kemble as Hamlet, Mrs. Siddons as Queen Katharine pleading in court, Macready as Werner (after Maclise), Sir Henry Irving as Richard III (after Long), Miss Ellen Terry, Mrs. Kendal, Miss Ada Rehan, Madame Sarah Bernhardt, Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, Mr. A. W. Pinero, Mr. Sydney Grundy, and so on, but not the Signora Duse or anyone connected with Ibsen. The room is not a perfect square, the right hand corner at the back being cut off diagonally by the doorway, and the opposite corner rounded by a turret window filled up with a stand of flowers surrounding a statue of Shakespear. The fireplace is on the right, with an armchair near it. A small round table, further forward on the same side, with a chair beside it, has a yellow-backed French novel lying open on it. The piano, a grand, is on the left, open, with the keyboard in full view at right angles to the wall. The piece of music on the desk is "When other lips." Incandescent lights, well shaded, are on the piano and mantelpiece. Near the piano is a sofa, on which the lady and
Man and Superman
Author: Bernard ShawThe Philanderer
Author: Bernard ShawPublisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1770485716
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
The second of Shaw’s “unpleasant” plays, written in 1893, published in 1898, but not performed until 1905, The Philanderer is subtitled “A Topical Comedy.” The eclectic range of topical subjects addressed in the play includes the influence of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen on British middle-class social mores (the second act of The Philanderer is set in the fictional Ibsen Club), medical follies, the rise of the “New Woman,” and, in particular, the destructive impact of Victorian marriage and divorce laws. Just as Shaw’s other “unpleasant” plays, Widowers’ Houses and Mrs Warren’s Profession, call, respectively, for reform of laws that allow corrupt property owners to exploit the poor and for radical change to economic structures that drive women into prostitution, so The Philanderer makes the case for more liberal legislation to allow easier divorce—particularly for women—when marriages become irretrievably broken. Shaw’s attack on divorce laws becomes even clearer and stronger in the final act that he wrote for the play but discarded in favour of the version he published. The discarded version is published for the first time in this Broadview edition of the play.
A Life in a Wooden O
Author: Ben Iden PaynePublisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300105520
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 230
Book Description
Ben Iden Payne spent more than seventy years in the theatre in England and America. On his retirement at the age of ninety it was a very different theatre from the one he entered at nineteen on joining Frank Benson's touring Shakespeare company. That change was due in no small part to his own efforts. Payne could point to many experiences that would have guaranteed him a place in theatre annals: He was a director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. He staged plays for such stars as John Drew, William Gillette, John and Ethel Barrymore, Otis Skinner, and Helen Hayes. And for eight years he was general director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. Though Payne's career fills three columns in Who's Who in the Theatre, two unique achievements stand out from the others. In 1907, as director of Miss Horniman's Gaiety Theatre company in Manchester, he initiated the repertory movement in England. In four years he brought it to a peak of excellence that has never been surpassed. Later, in America, he began a career in educational theatre that would span half a century. At the Carnegie Institute of Technology he developed his "modified Elizabethan staging" - a technique that has left an indelible mark on the production of Shakespeare's plays. In this memoir Payne recalls the English theatre at the turn of the century with wit and affection. His accounts of the popular actor-managers, the fit-up companies, the Playboy riots, and of Yeats, Miss Horniman, and William Poel vividly depict an era. He captures the spirit of the American theatre of the teens, twenties, and thirties - the flamboyance of its producers, the foibles of its stars, and the casting practices that reduced able actors to types. Above all, Payne tells of his consuming desire to recreate the basic conditions of Shakespeare's own theatre in order to present his plays most effectively. No antiquarian, he does not quibble over structural details of the "wooden O's" that housed Elizabethan stages. Instead he writes as a practical theatre man determined to achieve the continuous and fluid movement needed to preserve the "melodic line" of Shakespeare's plays. The success with which he pursued this ambition has influenced theatre design and inspired others to carry on his work. Yet, in spite of the distinction of his long career, Payne recalls it with the modest simplicity that endeared him to generations of actors and students.