Theatre has provided many words and meanings which we use - ignorant of their origins - in everyday writing and speech. This is the first book to explore 2,000 theatre terms in depth, in some cases tracing their history over two and a half millenia, in others exploring expressions less than a decade old. Terms are defined, shown in use and cross-referenced in ways which will fascinate theatre-goers, help theatre students and encourage those engaged in the theatre to examine the familiar from new angles.

COMMUNICATION IN DRAMA: A PRAGMATIC APPROACH is a book based on the authors research work in theatrical communication. Theatre has its own language. The verbal and non-verbal communication operating in the theatrical context is a central concern of this book. The book offers an authentic view to explore numerous intricacies of communication in drama using Pragmatics as a perspective. Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics. It basically studies the use of language in various contexts pertaining to real-life communication. However, the communication in drama differs from the communication in real life. Drama is scripted and performed in the multivalent contexts of real life and theater at the same time. At the backdrop of such contextual dynamics, the existing analytical models of communication in Pragmatics are observed to have their own shortcomings, since they are basically evolved to analyze the communication in real life and not in drama. Hence, peculiarly to assess the speech situations in drama, the author has evolved a new pragmatic-analytical model in this book. The new model is authenticated by using it to analyse five milestone Indian plays in English. Precisely, the book is a pragmatic analysis of communication in drama.

List of members in each volume.

The Roman Stage (1964) gives a connected account of the drama of ancient Rome in its historical setting. Using original source material, whole plays as well as fragments, of tragedies, comedies and farces, it traces the development of theatre in Rome, and notes the historical importance of these plays – the Elizabeth world looked back with reverence on the days ‘when Roscius was an actor in Rome’ (Hamlet). It also examines the physical conditions of drama in Rome – the types of theatres, and their place in the lives of the Roman inhabitants.

This book examines the conditions of the original performances in seventeenth-century indoor theatres.