Death still comes to Everyman, but this study of three twentieth-century German plays shows the harder challenge of living without salvation in an age of war and unprecedented mass destruction. Death comes to everyone, and in the late-medieval morality play of Everyman the familiar skeleton forces the universalized central figure to come to terms with this. Only his inner resources, in the forms of Good Deeds and Knowledge, ensure that he repents and is redeemed. Three important twentieth-century German plays echo Everyman - Toller's Hinkemann, Borchert's The Man Outside, and Frisch's The Arsonists/Firebugs - but the unprecedented scale of killing in the First and Second World Wars changed the view of death, while in the Cold War the nuclear destruction literally of everyone became a possibility. Brian Murdoch traces the heritage of Everyman in the three plays in terms of dramatic effect, changes in the image of Death, and especially the problem of living with existential guilt. Death, now over-fed, still has to be faced, but Everyman has the harder problem of living with the awareness of human wickedness without the possibility of salvation. All three plays have tended to be viewed in their specific historical contexts, but by viewing them less rigidly and as part of a long dramatic tradition, Murdoch shows that all present a message of lasting and universal significance. They pose directly to the theater audience questions not just of how to cope with death, but how to cope with life.

In two world wars waged within the life time of one generation Death reaped a prolific harvest. His most formidable scythe in former days was not war but pestilence. But since medical science has forged all kinds of weapons wherewith to strike that dreaded tool out of his knuckles he resorted in our lifetime to a new technique of morticulture which has yielded him un dreamt-of results. Using race hatred as fertilizer he has grown on the soil of the globe a crop of dead whose size baffles the imagination. The executioners whom he employed in Hitler's Germany kept careful record of the loathsome work they did for him in torture camps and gas chambers. They reckoned that six million Jews were delivered to Death by their efforts. In Holland alone only fifteen thousand of her one hundred and fifty thousand Jews survived the massacre. Death was the chief war profiteer. Though his inflated power was reduced by the overthrow of his Nazi henchmen, his innings are still large as he stalks across the world with his satellites Poverty, Hunger, and Disease.

Everyman and Mankind are morality plays which mark the turn of the medieval period to the early modern, with their focus on the individual. Everyman follows a man's journey towards death and his efforts to secure himself a life thereafter, whilst Mankind shows a man battling with temptation and sin, often with great humour. Both texts are modernised here and edited to the highest standards of scholarship, with full on-page commentaries giving the depth of information and insight associated with all Arden editions. The comprehensive, illustrated introduction argues that the plays signal the birth of the early modern consciousness and puts them in their historic and religious contexts. An account is also given of the staging and performance history of the plays and their critical history and significance. With a wealth of helpful and incisive commentary this is the finest edition of the plays available.

The recent return of 'world literature' to the centre of literary studies has entailed an increased attention to non-European literatures, but in turn has also further marginalized Europe's smaller literatures. Dutch and Flemish Literature as World Literature shows how Dutch-language literature, from its very beginnings in the Middle Ages to the present, has not only always taken its cue from the 'major' literary traditions of Europe and beyond, but has also actively contributed to and influenced these traditions. The contributors to this book focus on key works and authors, providing a concise, yet highly readable, history of Dutch-language literature and demonstrating how this literature is anchored in world literature.

This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism. Brings together new essays from a mixture of younger and more established scholars from around the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Examines each of Shakespeare’s plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis. Volumes are organized in relation to generic categories: namely the histories, the tragedies, the romantic comedies, and the late plays, problem plays and poems. Each volume contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category, as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre. Offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twenty-first century. This companion to Shakespeare’s tragedies contains original essays on every tragedy from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus as well as thirteen additional essays on such topics as Shakespeare’s Roman tragedies, Shakespeare’s tragedies on film, Shakespeare’s tragedies of love, Hamlet in performance, and tragic emotion in Shakespeare.

Having a conscience distinguishes humans from the most advanced A.I. systems. Acting in good conscience, consulting one’s conscience, and being conscience-wracked are all aspects of human intelligence that involve reckoning (deriving general laws from particular inputs and vice versa), and judgement (contemplating the relationship of the reckoning system to the world). While A.I. developers have mastered reckoning, they are still working towards the creation of judgement. This book sheds light on the reckoning and judgement of conscience by demonstrating how these concepts are explored in Everyman, Doctor Faustus, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet. Academic, student, or general-interest readers discover the complexity and multiplicity of the early modern concept of conscience, which is informed by the scholastic intellectual tradition, juridical procedures of the court of Chancery, the practical advice of Protestant casuistry, and Reformation theology. The aims are to examine the rubrics for thinking through, regulating, and judging actions that define the various consciences of Shakespeare’s day, to use these rubrics to interpret questions of truth and action in early modern plays, and to offer insights into what it is about conscience that developers want to grasp to eliminate the difference between human and non-human intelligences, and achieve true A.I.

The Oxford Handbook to Tudor Drama is the authoritative secondary text on Tudor drama. It both integrates recent important research across different disciplines and periods and sets a new agenda for the future study of Tudor drama, questioning a number of the central assumptions of previous studies. Balancing the interests and concerns of scholars in theatre history, drama, and literary studies, its scope reflects the broad reach of Tudor drama as a subject, inviting readers to see the Tudor century as a whole, rather than made up of artificial and misleading divisions between 'medieval' and 'renaissance', religious and secular, pre- and post-Shakespeare. The contributors, both the established leaders in their fields and the brightest young scholars, attend to the contexts, intellectual, theatrical and historical within which drama was written, produced and staged in this period, and ask us to consider afresh this most vital and complex of periods in theatre history. The book is divided into four sections: Religious Drama; Interludes and Comedies, Entertainments, Masques, and Royal Entries; and Histories and political dramas.

This collection of plays from late-medieval England includes a rich selection of noncycle plays and morality plays along with some of the better-known pageants from the cycle plays and some theatrical fragments never before anthologized. These plays and fragments illustrate the most widespread early theatrical practices in England and represent drama that fed directly into the Elizabethan theatrical experience.

LITERATURE A WORLD HISTORY An exploration of the history of the world’s literatures and the many varieties of literary expression Literature: A World Historyencompasses all the world’s major literary traditions, emphasizing the interrelationship of local and national cultures over time. Spanning global literature from the beginnings of recorded history to the present day, this expansive four-volume set examines the many varieties of the world’s literatures in their social and intellectual contexts. Its four volumes are devoted to literature before 200 CE, from 200 to 1500, from 1500 to 1800, and from 1800 to 2000, with four dozen contributors providing new insights into the art of literature, and addressing the situation of literature in the world today. Organized throughout in six broad regions—Africa, the Americas, East Asia, Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania, and West and Central Asia—Literature: A World History offers readers a clear and consistent treatment of diverse forms of literary expression across time and place. Throughout the text, particular emphasis is placed on literary institutions within different regional and linguistic cultures and on the relations between literature and a spectrum of social, political, and religious contexts. Features work by an international panel of leading scholars from around the globe, in Africa, the Middle East, South and East Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Europe, and the United States Provides a balanced overview of national and global literature from all major regions of the world from antiquity to the present Highlights the specificity of regional and local cultures throughout much of literary history, together with cross-cutting essays on topics such as different writing systems, court cultures, and utopias Literature: A World History is an invaluable reference work for undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars looking for a wide-ranging overview of global literary history.