The book contains, then, eleven plays from the great age of French drama in the seventeenth century, one play from the prolific pen of Alexandra Hardy, who proceeded the great age, and on from the eighteenth century, the aftermath of that age.

Here are blank verse translations of ten of the best tragedies by French dramatists contemporary with Corneille and Racine, and two by the most noted successors. No great dramatist can be properly understood and appreciated without some knowledge of the lesser playwrights surrounding him. The fact has long been realized as regards to Shakespeare; but the lesser figures of the great age of French drama--men comparable to such Elizabethans as Middleton and Fletcher and Massinger--have been generally neglected. This book makes a selection of their best works available to English readers. French students who do not have access to the frequently rare French texts of these plays will find it valuable. No play by any of these dramatists, except Voltaire, has ever before been translated into English. The faithfulness and literary qualities of Dr. Lockert's translations are avouched by his two previous volumes in this field, The Chief Plays of Corneille and The Best Plays of Racine.

Representing the largest expansion between editions, this updated volume of Ottemiller's Index to Plays in Collections is the standard location tool for full-length plays published in collections and anthologies in England and the United States throughout the 20th century and beyond. This new volume lists more than 3,500 new plays and 2,000 new authors, as well as birth and/or death information for hundreds of authors.

...The book can be a goldmine. --James Leverett, Theatre Communications ...With this second volume, the Drama Scholars' Index's indispensability is greatly increased. --Richard J. Kelly, ARBA

A dictionary of playwrights which contains 485 entries, each of which includes biographical information on the playwright, complete lists of published works (with dates of performance) and a bibliography of critical studies on the playwright.

In two of his most celebrated plays, Britannicus and Bérénice, Racine depicts the tragedies of characters trapped by the ideals, desires, and cruelties of ancient Rome. This international collection of essays deploys cutting-edge research to illuminate the plays and their contexts.

This is the third volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine&’s plays&—only the third time such a project has been undertaken. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has rendered these plays in the verse form that Racine might well have used had he been English: namely, the &“heroic&” couplet. Argent has exploited the couplet&’s compressed power and flexibility to produce a work of English literature, a verse drama as gripping in English as Racine&’s is in French. Complementing the translation are the illuminating Discussion, intended as much to provoke discussion as to provide it, and the extensive Notes and Commentary, which offer their own fresh and thought-provoking insights. In Iphigenia, his ninth play, Racine returns to Greek myth for the first time since Andromache. To Euripides&’s version of the tale he adds a love interest between Iphigenia and Achilles. And dissatisfied with the earlier resolutions of the Iphigenia myth (her actual death or her eleventh-hour rescue by a dea ex machina), Racine creates a wholly original character, Eriphyle, who, in addition to providing an intriguing new denouement, serves the dual dramatic purpose of triangulating the love interest and galvanizing the wholesome &“family values&” of this play by a jolt of supercharged passion.