Playwriting Commons^™

Hocus Pocus And The Croxton Play Of The Sacrament, Cameron Mcnabb

Cameron Hunt McNabb

This article addresses how heresy and parody intersect in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament through its religiously and verbally dissenting characters. The play’s highly theatrical depiction of a host miracle both enforces and undermines its emphatic endorsement of the real presence. The play ameliorates this tension by the privileging of words over deeds, aligning the transformative power of the consecratory words with the transformative power of believers’ confessions at conversion wherein both words and actions enact a transubstantiation, thus manifesting the real presence of Christ. The play’s language becomes a moral marker and the vehicle for the heretics’ dissent …

John Milton, Blackfriars Spectator?: "Elegia Prima" And Ben Jonson's The Staple Of News, Timothy Burbery

Timothy J. Burbery

In the spring of 1626 John Milton was temporarily expelled from Cambridge University, perhaps over a quarrel with his tutor William Chappell, and sent home to London, where he remained for at least several weeks. There, the seventeen-year-old poet composed his first elegy, a Latin verse-letter to his closest friend, Charles Diodati. In it, Milton claims to be enjoying his unexpected holiday by reading, girl watching, and attending the theater. Milton scholars have never reached consensus about his alleged playgoing, for while the young man speaks as a spectator, the plots and characters he mentions-these include comic types such as …

New Canadian Realisms: Eight Plays, Kim Solga, Roberta Barker

Kim Solga

New Canadian Realisms: Eight Plays collects works of contemporary theatre, each of which may be defined as “realist” through both a crucial link to the past and a zest for re-tooling old definitions. Grounded by Gwen Pharis Ringwood’s pioneering Still Stands the House, the anthology also features trey anthony’s ’da Kink in my hair, Tara Beagan’s Miss Julie: Sheh’mah, Madeleine Blais-Dahlem’s sTain, Hillar Liitoja’s The Last Supper, selections from the Impromptu Splendor series by National Theatre of the World, Theatre Replacement’s BioBoxes, and Zuppa Theatre’s Penny Dreadful, as well as a series of text-specific introductions and a resource page for …

Moss Hart: A Prince Of The Theater, Jared Brown

Jared Brown

Alan J. Pakula: His Films And His Life, Jared Brown

Jared Brown