Torquato Tasso ist ein Schauspiel in fünf Aufzügen von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, das als Protagonisten den Dichter Torquato Tasso in den Mittelpunkt der Handlung stellt. Zwischen dem 30. März 1780 und dem 31. Juli 1789 entstanden, lag das Werk im Februar 1790 im Druck vor und wurde am 16. Februar 1807 in Weimar uraufgeführt.

The collection of verses

The Song of Hiawatha is based on the legends and stories of many North American Indian tribes, but especially those of the Ojibway Indians of northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. They were collected by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the reknowned historian, pioneer explorer, and geologist. He was superintendent of Indian affairs for Michigan from 1836 to 1841.

Schoolcraft married Jane, O-bah-bahm-wawa-ge-zhe-go-qua (The Woman of the Sound Which the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky), Johnston. Jane was a daughter of John Johnston, an early Irish fur trader, and O-shau-gus-coday-way-qua (The Woman of the Green Prairie), who was a daughter of Waub-o-jeeg (The White Fisher), who was Chief of the Ojibway tribe at La Pointe, Wisconsin.

Jane and her mother are credited with having researched, authenticated, and compiled much of the material Schoolcraft included in his Algic Researches (1839) and a revision published in 1856 as The Myth of Hiawatha. It was this latter revision that Longfellow used as the basis for The Song of Hiawatha.

Longfellow began Hiawatha on June 25, 1854, he completed it on March 29, 1855, and it was published November 10, 1855. As soon as the poem was published its popularity was assured. However, it also was severely criticized as a plagiary of the Finnish epic poem Kalevala. Longfellow made no secret of the fact that he had used the meter of the Kalevala; but as for the legends, he openly gave credit to Schoolcraft in his notes to the poem.

I would add a personal note here. My father's roots include Ojibway Indians: his mother, Margaret Caroline Davenport, was a daughter of Susan des Carreaux, O-gee-em-a-qua (The Chief Woman), Davenport whose mother was a daughter of Chief Waub-o-jeeg. Finally, my mother used to rock me to sleep reading portions of Hiawatha to me, especially:

Woodrow W. Morris

April 1, 1991

The Village on Horseback features mesmerizing new work from the author of Samedi the Deafness and The Way Through Doors, one of the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2009. This collection of new pieces by experimental writer Jesse Ball is a philosophical recasting of myth and legend. Unearthing parables from the compost heap of oral tradition, folklore, literature, and popular culture, The Village on Horseback can be read as a sort of fabulist’s compendium by an author who has been called charming, lyrical, fanciful, and "disturbingly original."

«They cut it down, and where the pitch-black aisles

Of forest night had hid eternal things,

They scaled the sky with towers and marble piles

To make a city for their revellings…»

It is 1939. Paula Becker, thirteen years old and deaf, lives with her family in a rural German town. As rumors swirl of disabled children quietly disappearing, a priest comes to her family’s door with an offer to shield Paula from an uncertain fate. When the sanctuary he offers is fleeting, Paula needs to call upon all her strength to stay one step ahead of the Nazis.

A One-Minute Play

Torquato Tasso ist ein Schauspiel in fünf Aufzügen von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, das als Protagonisten den Dichter Torquato Tasso in den Mittelpunkt der Handlung stellt. Zwischen dem 30. März 1780 und dem 31. Juli 1789 entstanden, lag das Werk im Februar 1790 im Druck vor und wurde am 16. Februar 1807 in Weimar uraufgeführt.

Based upon a personal anecdote recounted to Gogol by the great Russian poet Pushkin, "The Inspector-General", also known as "The Government Inspector", is a satirical play first published in 1836. It is a comedy of errors that unstintingly portrays human greed and stupidity. The plot centers around the officials of a small provincial town in Russia, who have been informed that a dreaded inspector is soon to arrive. They mistakenly assume that the inspector is Khlestakov, an irresponsible, feckless young clerk returning home from St. Petersburg. The servility and bribery displayed by the officials betrays their fear that their misdeeds will be uncovered. This play, with its complete dearth of sympathetic characters, brilliantly constructed plot, and artful language, creates a perfect comic tension that unapologetically reveals the profound corruption of power in Tsarist Russia. First staged amidst strong objection, "The Inspector-General" has become one of the greatest of Russian comedies.

Tango to dramat o współczesnym społeczeństwie, w którym panuje konformizm, anarchia, brak postaw. Farsową sytuację kompletnego pomieszania i rozprzężenia opanowuje i wykorzystuje władza, czyli silny i brutalny cham.

Tango to już klasyka, najbardziej znany i najważniejszy utwór Sławomira Mrożka o społecznych zagrożeniach.

No play in the modern theatre has so captured the imagination and heart of the American public as Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. Menagerie was Williams’s first popular success and launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career of our pre-eminent lyric playwright. Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with the legendary Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, the play has been the bravura piece for great actresses from Jessica Tandy to Joanne Woodward, and is studied and performed in classrooms and theatres around the world. The Glass Menagerie (in the reading text the author preferred) is now available only in its New Directions Paperbook edition. A new introduction by prominent Williams scholar Robert Bray, editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, reappraises the play more than half a century after it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award: “More than fifty years after telling his story of a family whose lives form a triangle of quiet desperation, Williams’s mellifluous voice still resonates deeply and universally.” This edition of The Glass Menagerie also includes Williams’s essay on the impact of sudden fame on a struggling writer, “The Catastrophe of Success,” as well as a short section of Williams’s own “Production Notes.” The cover features the classic line drawing by Alvin Lustig, originally done for the 1949 New Directions edition.

"Writers are made, not born," Ayn Rand wrote in another context. "To be exact, writers are self-made." In this fascinating collection of Ayn Rand's earliest work — including a previously unpublished piece, "The Night King" — her own career proves her point. We see here not only the budding of the philosophy that would seal her reputation as a champion of the individual, but also the emergence of a great narrative stylist whose fiction would place her among the most towering figures in the history of American literature.

Dr. Leonard Peikoff worked with Ayn Rand for thirty years; he is her legal heir and the executor of her estate.

Set in London in 1989, the year of the fatwah and the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is a thriller with a background of raves, ecstasy, religious ferment and sexual passion. By the author of The Buddha of Suburbia and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.

In these three plays — each introduced by the author — Mario Vargas Llosa, the internationally acclaimed novelist and a cultural and political figure in Peru, explores the complexities of Peruvian society and the writer's imagination.

Welcome to our war "The Two Worlds of Charlie F" is a soldier's view of service, injury and recovery. Moving from the war in Afghanistan, through the dream world of morphine-induced hallucinations to the physio rooms of Headley Court, the play explores the consequences of injury, both physical and psychological, and its effects on others as the soldiers fight to win the new battle for survival at home. Drawn from the personal experience of the wounded, injured and sick Service personnel involved, Owen Sheers' "The Two Worlds of Charlie F". premiered at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, in January 2012 and toured nationally that summer.

One hundred years after Austrian satirist Karl Kraus began writing his dramatic masterpiece, The Last Days of Mankind remains as powerfully relevant as the day it was first published. Kraus’s play enacts the tragic trajectory of the First World War, when mankind raced toward self-destruction by methods of modern warfare while extolling the glory and ignoring the horror of an allegedly “defensive” war. This volume is the first to present a complete English translation of Kraus’s towering work, filling a major gap in the availability of Viennese literature from the era of the War to End All Wars.

Bertolt Brecht hailed The Last Days as the masterpiece of Viennese modernism. In the apocalyptic drama Kraus constructs a textual collage, blending actual quotations from the Austrian army’s call to arms, people’s responses, political speeches, newspaper editorials, and a range of other sources. Seasoning the drama with comic invention and satirical verse, Kraus reveals how bungled diplomacy, greedy profiteers, Big Business complicity, gullible newsreaders, and, above all, the sloganizing of the press brought down the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the dramatization of sensationalized news reports, inurement to atrocities, and openness to war as remedy, today’s readers will hear the echo of the fateful voices Kraus recorded as his homeland descended into self-destruction.

Guilty or not guilty?

Enter the courtroom, hear the evidence, make your judgement.

A hijacked plane is heading towards a packed football stadium. Ignoring orders to the contrary, a fighter pilot shoots down the plane killing 164 people to save 70,000.

Put on trial and charged with murder, the fate of the pilot is placed in the audience's hands.

Ferdinand von Schirach's Terror, in a translation by David Tushingham, received its UK Premiere at the Lyric Hammersmith, London, in June 2017

St Petersburg, Russia, 1866. Nihilist revolutionaries have taken to the streets and the rule of the Tsar is under threat. In a small flat, Fyodor Dostoyevsky grafts out a novel for an unscrupulous publisher; it isn't the novel he wants to write, but he is under contract, so he works. All the time, though, he is haunted by a story from his past—that of a parricide, a young man who kills his father. As the characters in his imagination take shape around him, he finds himself forced to choose between rebellion and repression, authority and chaos, passion and love.