The Idea of a Theater: A Study of Ten Plays, The Art of Drama in Changing Perspective (Princeton Legacy Library)

Francis Fergusson, for many years head of the Drama Department at Bennington College and later director of the Princeton seminars in literary criticism, investigates the idea of a theater by examining ten plays: four classics of dramatic literature - Sophocles' Oedipus Rec, Racine's Berenice, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, and Shakespeare's Hamlet. Then he considers three modern versions of the art of the drama: the realism of Ibsen and Chekhov in Ghosts and The Cherry Orchard; the works of Shaw and Pirandello with special reference to Six Characters in Search of an Author and contemporary attempts to create a modern poetic drama in Cocteau's The Infernal Machine, Obey's Noah, and Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral.