This chapter explores the verse drama, a genre favoured by Michael Field and by several other Victorian poets, including Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. This chapter sets Michael Field’s verse dramas in the wider contexts of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century drama and theatre, including debates about the New Drama (epitomised by Henrik Ibsen), ‘Shakespeare-philia’, and the modernist movement, such as T. S. Eliot’s verse plays.

This chapter chronicles the wide range of theatrical styles at the end of the nineteenth century. In addition to the melodrama, farce, and pantomime popular throughout the century, the period saw the development of more experimental forms such as the well-made play and Naturalism. Michael Field as dramatists were both inspired and confounded by this range of theatrical possibility. While their prose drama A Question of Memory was performed by J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre Society, the majority of their dramatic work – written in intricate verse, historically rich, and often requiring elaborate staging – proved unperformable during their lifetimes. The chapter argues that in this Michael Field were representative of late-Victorian women dramatists more broadly: while many of the plays associated with the New Drama told women’s stories, the act of telling remained the prerogative of men.

In this chapter, Sarah Parker interviews Tom Floyd and Sophie Goldrick of Shadow Opera about the process of creating Veritable Michael, an opera and podcast inspired by Michael Field’s life and work. Tom Floyd is the Artistic Director of Shadow Opera and Sophie Goldrick is the Producer and mezzo-soprano, who sings the part of Katharine Bradley in the show. In this interview, they respond to questions about how they originally conceived the piece, why opera is a suitable form for telling Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s story, how the collaborative creative process worked, and how audiences have reacted to the performance and the podcast.

In this chapter, Ben Levitas investigates forms of distance and temporal indeterminacy legible in the latter-day revivalist drama of Marina Carr and Brian Friel. In their works, strategies of distance, of “paratheatricality,” seek not to avoid representation but to link it to more authentic experiences for the audience. Both playwrights create a theatre of hope, a theatre for and of the future that testifies to a continuance of the Revival’s main themes and concerns (particularly with respect to time), despite their rejection of the idealism of so many early revivalist works. Friel and Carr achieve a transposition of dramatic life from the stage to the audience – that is to say, from the stage to actual life – which is, in its turn, captured in the dramatic work. Theatrical words are forms of political action insofar as strategies of performative distance and alienation find their place in dramatic productions that support a “grammar of change.”

The academic concept of ‘intermediality’ presents a challenge to traditional artistic boundaries, offering a refreshed sense of the relationship between different kinds of media. This chapter relates such ideas to modernism, considering the work of a group of writers who showed a fascination with the stage but primarily achieved fame in genres other than performed drama. It begins by examining a tension within Ezra Pound’s work: his desire to engage with the stage and yet to dismiss the significance of theatre. The discussion then references the work of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Rabindranath Tagore, and Kōbō Abe. Ultimately, although ‘intermediality’ is sometimes assumed to apply more specifically to a later historical era of advanced media technology, this chapter shows how intermedial thinking can apply productively to modernist cultural products of the earlier twentieth century.

This chapter covers the multivalent, multidirectional relationship that developed between theatre and philosophy during the modernist era. It begins with the rise of German idealism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its influence on Friedrich Nietzsche’s landmark The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. From Nietzsche’s own sway over a new generation of dramatists worldwide, the chapters expands to consider other thinkers taken as influences by global theatre-makers as well as leading philosophers and theorists around the world who took explicit interest in the stage. The chapter also explores the tensions inherent in these relationships, including open disavowals of philosophic influence by prominent dramatists and outright criticisms of the entire philosophical project by members of the avant-garde. In both its avowals of influence and disavowals of the same, the interaction between theatre and philosophy in the modernist age proved to be enormously generative for both.

This chapter will explore the fundamentals of drama, both as a skill and as a methodology for teaching other curricular requirements. It also offers practical activities and assessment practices, as well as theoretical underpinnings and methods to further develop teaching methodologies beyond this text. You will have the confidence and knowledge to engage learners of all ages and abilities to explore their own ideas through dramatic performance and to evaluate the performance of others. The key to drama is not only the development of skills, but also the ability to apply processes and value these processes as equal to the end product of a drama activity. The application of drama in literacy, numeracy and other areas of learning will be embedded throughout. A great deal of the focus on drama in the classroom in Australia is from a western perspective.

The first example of mechanical epiphany that the book sets forth is that of the well-known ‘god on the machine’ (deus ex machina) employed in the ancient Greek theatre. Moving beyond interpreting the theatrical crane as a plot device, this chapter forefronts the mēchanē’s material qualities to explore the theological potential of the object as a mode of visual epiphany. Vital to the success of this mode of epiphany was the challenge to the viewer to recognise divine intervention as well as the mechanics that constructed and enabled it. The evidence of Old Comedy, both fragmentary and the fuller plays of Aristophanes, help demonstrate how uses of the comic crane (kradē) undercut the interpretative symbiosis between man, machine, and divine agency on which tragedy was predicated. The chapter closes by exploring how the theatre as a form of mass media made it fertile ground for development and exploration of theological ideas, not just a reflection of literary norms.

This chapter attends to contemporary Latinx adaptations of early modern English drama and theater to theorize how a hegemonic playwright such as Shakespeare can be adapted as Latinx theater Cuban-American playwright Carlos-Zenen Trujillo’s 2019 play, The Island in Winter or, La Isla en Invierno (an adaptation of The Winter’s Tale), serves as a case study of the multimodal process of transnational theatrical bilanguaging, or the experience of living between languages. I argue that the currency of adapting Shakespeare for Latinx today is in the possibility of moving from a historical memory that recolonizes Latinx to an active site of Latinx temporality as worldmaking. Trujillo’s The Island in Winter as a process of epistemic disobedience disenfranchises anti-Black racism from theatrical representations of Cuban culture by integrating African Indigenous rituals into one of Shakespeare’s stories. It is through this process that cultural narratives are redrawn and reenacted, while gaps in the Western canon are exposed.

This chapter introduces the volume, explaining how O’Casey’s work has been widely read at school and university level, and frequently performed on the stage. The introduction points out that few major studies of O’Casey have been published in recent years, and argues that, by contrast with writers such as Joyce and Yeats, O’Casey is in need of updated critical reframing.

This chapter discusses Shelley’s complex orientation towards Romantic-period drama and theatre culture. For Shelley, drama provided a key opportunity for generic experimentation that is continuous with his lyrical innovations. These innovations, however, go beyond producing new kinds of Romantic ‘closet dramas’, which were intended for a smaller, more bourgeois reading public. To argue this claim, the chapter attends to how Shelley’s writings on ancient Greek dramaturgical principles resonated with his interest in Romantic-period popular theatre. As shown in his dramatic poetic theory, Shelley attempted to realise his ideal intersection of aesthetics, historical progress, and contemporary social change in works sometimes intended for popular consumption. As demonstrated by his hopes to stage certain plays, Shelley’s dramatic efforts indicate that embodiment and mixed media forms were essential to his broader poetics.