Anthem Studies in Theatre and Performance

‘World Cinema and the Visual Arts’ combines new analyses of two subjects of ongoing research in the field of humanities: cinema and the visual arts. The films analysed encompass a wide geographical base, and have been drawn from a diverse array of cultural traditions.

Despite a recent surge of scholarly interest in Hannah Cowley’s works, her scandalous comedy The World as It Goes has never been published. This edition of The World as It Goes is supplemented with an introduction providing cultural, theatrical, historical and biographical contexts and contemporaneous reviews.

This book examines the topic of ‘fake news’ through the lens of theatre and drama, looking at the way in which issues of audience, authorship, and accuracy are intertwined.

A historical and critical analysis of the post-traumatic theatre of Grotowski and Kantor, examining the ways they represent Auschwitz in their respective pivotal works ‘Akropolis’ and ‘Dead Class’.

It is a book about dying, or, more accurately, about the representation of dying in the theatre. Its chief concern is how actors undertook to translate words and concepts into forms legible and significant to an audience. It deals with the ways in which playwrights wrote about death and attitudes towards death in their cultures. Nevertheless, the emphasis is on the practice of acting.

The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography is a study of the theory of kinetic theatricality in the western European context. The dancing body of courtly social dance is analyzed in French and Italian dance treatises of the Renaissance through the intertexts of oratorical action, pedagogical discourses of civility and conceptions of value emanating from descriptions of social interaction in courtesy books.

The Anthem Beckett Studies Reader, edited by S. E. Gontarski, is an indispensable guide to the restless, rigorously inventive field of Beckett studies—one that mirrors Samuel Beckett’s own refusal of settled meanings and stable forms.

Tennessee Williams, T-shirt Modernism and the Refashionings of Theater engages the Williams we thought we knew, as he grew, developed, reconfigured himself into a playwright we didn’t, in his attempts to refashion himself amid the vortices of changing sexual mores, including the performance of masculinities and the queering of theater, the struggle for a literate, literary theater, and the place of the theatrical experience in his contemporary culture.

“Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography” examines theatrical biography as a developing genre in eighteenth-century England. Drawing heavily on primary sources, then-contemporary reviews and archival material in the form of extra-illustrated or “scrapbooked” copies, this text investigates the increasing emphasis on materiality which was designed to consolidate, but often challenged, the biographer’s authority.

Four autobiographies of early twentieth-century actors and playwrights are presented in English translation, with substantive chapters on the Parsi theatre and strategies for reading autobiography in the Indian context.

‘Sites of Performance: Of Time and Memory’ focuses on the impact of time and memory as they intersect and constitute the varied spaces of theatre, performance and installation art.

Revolutions in post-digital archival practice and other forms of historical research necessitate an increasingly sophisticated interdisciplinary approach to Shakespeare studies, with Shakespeare-based films serving as an ideal model for the ongoing transformations of many disciplinary fields.