Theatre History & Traditions

The Nō Plays of Japan

Arthur Waley

Introduces Noh as a theatre of suggestion built on Zeami's aesthetic of yūgen, arguing that its stillness and mask work demand a different way of watching than Western drama.

The Chinese Theater

A. E. Zucker

Surveys the conventions of Chinese opera for an English-reading audience — its symbolic stage properties, role types and mixed music-and-speech form — arguing they form a coherent alternative dramatic grammar rather than a primitive stage.

Preface to Miss Julie

August Strindberg

Sets out a manifesto for Naturalist theatre — psychologically motivated 'character-less' characters and reduced use of asides and soliloquy — that shaped how directors staged psychological realism for decades.

The Attic Theatre

A. E. Haigh

Reconstructs how Athenian tragedy and comedy were actually staged — the theatre building, the actors' masks, the chorus's movement — arguing the plays cannot be read apart from the physical conditions of performance.

The Quintessence of Ibsenism

George Bernard Shaw

Reads Ibsen's plays as a sustained attack on idealism — the comfortable lies societies tell to sustain themselves — arguing his real subject is the conflict between individual will and social convention, which let his drama function as political intervention.

The People's Theatre

Romain Rolland

Argues that a theatre for the people must be built on new plays of joy, heroism and history rather than diluted classics, because the working audience needs a drama that strengthens rather than merely diverts it.

The Commedia dell'Arte: A Study in Italian Popular Comedy

Winifred Smith

Argues that commedia dell'arte's stock masks and improvised scenarios were a professional actor's technology that spread across Europe and shaped written comedy far more than its ephemeral performances suggest.

Shakespearean Playhouses: A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration

Joseph Quincy Adams

Reconstructs the physical playhouses of Shakespeare's London from building contracts, lawsuits and eyewitness drawings, arguing that stage practice was shaped by the specific architecture of each theatre rather than by a single generic Elizabethan stage.

Kabuki: The Popular Stage of Japan

Zoe Kincaid

Traces Kabuki's descent from Okuni's riverbed dancing through onnagata female-role specialism and the mie pose, arguing it developed as deliberately popular counter-programming to the aristocratic Noh.

The Theater of Narration: From the Peripheries of History to the Main Stages of Italy

Juliet Guzzetta

Traces Italy's teatro di narrazione — solo actor-narrators retelling national history from marginal, local perspectives — arguing the form makes its audience participants in remaking history rather than passive witnesses to it.

Poetics

Aristotle

The first systematic analysis of drama: plot above character, the unity of action, and catharsis as the point of watching people suffer.

Assumes having read at least one Greek tragedy, ideally Oedipus, since it is the worked example throughout

The Mediaeval Stage

E. K. Chambers

Traces English drama's descent from church liturgy, folk ritual and mumming into secular stagecraft, arguing that professional theatre grew out of communal ceremony rather than literary invention.