An engaging book spanning the fields of drama, literary criticism, genre, and performance studies, which not only teaches students how to read drama, but also explores the key questions that have occupied the earliest playwrights through to today’s most distinguished literary and cultural critics

Draws on examples from major playwrights including Shakespeare, Ibsen, Beckett, and Parks

Explores the critical terms and controversies that animate the performance and study of drama, such as the status of language, the function of character and plot, and uses of writing

Engages in a theoretical, disciplinary, and cultural repositioning of drama, by exploring and contesting its position at the threshold between text and performance