Francis Fergusson, for many years head of the Drama Department at Bennington College and later director of the Princeton seminars in literary criticism, investigates the idea of a theater by examining ten plays: four classics of dramatic literature - Sophocles' Oedipus Rec, Racine's Berenice, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, and Shakespeare's Hamlet. Then he considers three modern versions of the art of the drama: the realism of Ibsen and Chekhov in Ghosts and The Cherry Orchard; the works of Shaw and Pirandello with special reference to Six Characters in Search of an Author and contemporary attempts to create a modern poetic drama in Cocteau's The Infernal Machine, Obey's Noah, and Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral.