Лучшие книги Уильяма Роули

В книгу включены пьесы английских драматургов первой трети XVII века: С.Тернера, Т.Мидлтона, Д.Форда и У.Роули, Д.Уэбстера, Б.Джонсона и Д.Шерли.
Представлены основные жанры: трагедия, трагикомедия, комедия.

В книгу включены три пьесы-шедевра, созданные во вторую половину правления короля Иакова I: "БУРЯ" Уильяма Шекспира, "ЧЁРТ ВЫСТАВЛЕН ОСЛОМ" Бена Джонсона, "ОБОРОТЕНЬ" Томаса Мидлтона и Уильяма Роули. Написанные в разных творческих манерах и жанрах, они, напечатанные под одной обложкой, выгодно оттеняют друг друга, демонстрируя богатство и яркую самобытность английской драматургии эпохи позднего Возрождения. При всей несхожести пьес есть и нечто, их роднящее, - это тема контраста иллюзии и реальности, кажущегося и сущего, их взаимопроникновения и трансформации.

Книга предназначена для читателя, интересующегося английской литературой эпохи позднего Возрождения.
И новый перевод "БУРИ", и две другие пьесы могут иметь театральную перспективу в России.

A changeling is a fickle person, a waverer, a person posing as another person, or an idiot. The Changeling portrays them all. The play interchanges not only characters, but authors, too. Written in 1622, it is one of the most successful collaborations in the history of the theater.

In about 1590, an unknown dramatist had the idea of writing a tragedy about the lives of ordinary people, instead of the genre's usual complement of kings and queens and politicians. His play, Arden of Faversham, inaugurated a new genre of 'domestic' drama, set in near-contemporary England and concerned with issues of marriage, crime, and property rather than war and power. Arden dramatizes a notorious murder case of forty years earlier, in which a wealthy husband was killed by his wife and her lover.

In Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness, a wife is caught by her husband in bed with his best friend, only to find that he takes unusual reprisals. The Witch of Edmonton combines a true-life story of witchcraft with a fictitious tale of bigamy and wife-murder, and The English Traveller deals with the unexpected and unwelcome changes people find when they return home after a lengthy absence.

Part of the Oxford English Drama series, this edition has modern-spelling texts; a critical introduction that outlines the way all four plays raise powerful and complex questions about the English society in which their tragic events unfold; wide-ranging notes; a chronology of the plays from their sources to recent performance; and appendices relating to two of the plays: who wrote Arden of Faversham and when did Heywood write The English Traveller.

The lyrical, bloodthirsty tragedies and witty urban comedies in this original collection were first performed during the reign of King James I (1603—25). Though nearly four centuries old, they display surprisingly modern sensibilities regarding sex, violence, morality, and honor. Brilliantly introduced and annotated by Frank Kermode, these seven Jacobean masterpieces are the finest and most representative plays of a time when drama was the most vital and important mirror of English society.

The Witch of Edmonton is an English Jacobean play, written by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford in 1621. The play-"probably the most sophisticated treatment of domestic tragedy in the whole of Elizabethan-Jacobean drama"-is based on supposedly real-life events that took place in the village of Edmonton, outside London, earlier in the year. The play depicts Elizabeth Sawyer, an old woman shunned by her neighbours, who gets revenge by selling her soul to the Devil, who appears to her in the shape of a black dog called Tom. In addition, there are two subplots. One depicts a bigamist who murders his second wife at the devil's prompting, and the other depicts a clownish yokel who befriends the devil-dog.