The Heinemann Plays series offers contemporary drama and classic plays in durable classroom editions. In this play an inspector interrupts a party to investigate a girl's suicide, and implicates each of the party-makers in her death.

An encyclopedic dictionary of technical and theoretical terms, the book covers all aspects of a semiotic approach to the theatre, with cross-referenced alphabetical entries ranging from absurd to word scenery.

An invaluable companion which enables the reader to acquire and understand a vocabulary for discussion and critical thinking on all aspects of the subject. The clear explanations of the concepts support students in their practical and theoretical explorations of the subjects and offer insights for research and reflective writing.

Two sets of identical twins provide the basis for ongoing incidents of mistaken identity, within a lively plot of quarrels, arrests, and a grand courtroom denouement. One of Shakespeare's earliest comedic efforts.

The dictionary of world literature: criticism-forms-technique presents a consideration of critics and criticism, of literary schools, movements, forms, and techniques-including drama and the theatre-in eastern and western lands from the earliest times; of literary and critical terms and ideas; with other material that may provide background of understanding to all who, as creator, critic, or receptor, approach a literary or theatrical work.

Insight Study Guides are written by experts and cover a range of popular literature, plays and films. Designed to provide insight and an overview about each text for students and teachers, these guides endeavor to develop knowledge and understanding rather than just provide answers and summaries.

Robert L. Belknap's theory of plot illustrates the active and passive roles literature plays in creating its own dynamic reading experience. Literary narrative enchants us through its development of plot, but plot tells its own story about the making of narrative, revealing through its structures, preoccupations, and strategies of representation critical details about how and when a work came into being. Through a rich reading of Shakespeare's King Lear and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Belknap explores the spatial, chronological, and causal aspects of plot, its brilliant manipulation of reader frustration and involvement, and its critical cohesion of characters. He considers Shakespeare's transformation of dramatic plot through parallelism, conflict, resolution, and recognition. He then follows with Dostoevsky's development of the rhetorical and moral devices of nineteenth-century Russian fiction, along with its epistolary and detective genres, to embed the reader in the murder Raskolnikov commits. Dostoevsky's reinvention of the psychological plot was profound, and Belknap effectively challenges the idea that the author abused causality to achieve his ideological conclusion. In a final chapter, Belknap argues that plots teach us novelistic rather than poetic justice. Operating according to their own logic, plots provide us with a compelling way to see and order our world.