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The Norton Anthology of Drama: Shorter Edition
Comprehensive and up-to-date, now with more instructor resources. Choose from the most comprehensive collection of plays. Enjoy accessible apparatus that helps students better analyze the works. Savor an eye-catching and informative illustration program focusing on performance. All for an unbeatable price.
Revised in response to suggestions from hundreds of instructors and students, the Third Edition features five NEW plays (four in the Shorter Edition), NEW critical “Perspectives” sections, and an expanded suite of free digital resources.
Revised in response to suggestions from hundreds of instructors and students, the Third Edition features five NEW plays (four in the Shorter Edition), NEW critical “Perspectives” sections, and an expanded suite of free digital resources.
1842 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 15, 2024
This might be the best single volume collection of plays out there. It brings together thirty three plays, including some of the enduring classics of theater, plus some plays that are less known (at least to me). But the selection of plays, annotations, the critical essays, and author biographies at the end are all excellent. It took me more than a year to get through all the plays, but the time spent was well worth it.
It is worth noting that many of the plays included here are cultural icons in their own right, with hundreds, thousands of performances, film adaptations, critical commentaries, and scholarly analyses. Some even have entire conferences and journals devoted to their study (yes, there is indeed a journal of "Hamlet Studies"). Some, though not individually famous, are representative of theatrical traditions with their own artistic conventions, leading performers and cult followings. For example, there is an obscure play by Hrotsvit of Gandershiem included. Her play The Martyrdom of the Holy Virgins was an example of the medieval religious theater, but even more significantly she was the rare example of a female playwright from the 15th century. There is also a noh play included (Zeami Motokiyo's Atsumori, the ghostly apparition of a dead samurai appearing to an admirer) and a 13th century Chinese play by Guan Hanqing ("Snow in Midsummer" - the ghost of a woman wrongly accused of a crime and executed appearing before her father, who is also a magistrate). A "miracle play" titled Everyman by an anonymous author is also included: Everyman, who represents the human soul has all worldly attributes (personified "Wealth," "Health" etc.) abandon him on the path to the grave, until only "Good Deeds" remains with him till the end.
But these are presented later since the plays are arranged roughly in chronological sequence. So the start is with the Greek greats (Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Euripides' Medea, and Aristophanes' Lysistrata). The story of Oedipus is so well known, but to get the full impact of the play one needs to suspend this knowledge and follow along as Oedipus collects clue after clue of what ails his kingdom and comes to the shattering conclusion. The same with Medea, a bloody play in which the titular character kills her own children to get her revenge against her straying husband, Jason. The final blood-drenched scene with Medea seen hovering above the stage with the bodies of her children needs to be imagined. And Aristophanes has the "love strike" by the women of Athens to get the men to end the war with Sparta.
Uniquely among the authors, Shakespeare has the honor of having two of his plays included (Hamlet and Twelfth Night). Twelfth Night has all the elements of Shakespearean comedy - cross-dressing, mistaken identity, love triangles (and quadrangles), pompous fools, cowardly lovers and finally a happy ending with all the main characters united with their ideal partners.
A number of classics of 19th and early 20th century European theater are included (Moliere's Tartuffe, Strindberg's Miss Julie, Ibsen's A Doll House, and Chekhov's Cherry Orchard). All are socially conscious and point to the key political and social issues of the day. Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest seems to be too fluffy by comparison, despite its sparkling dialog the play seems too contrived and precious (do people really talk that way??). But contrast that with Susan Glaspell's Trifles - a masterclass of understatement, sparse dialog, and nuance. A woman has murdered her husband and the men have no idea of a motive--only the neighbor women can see how lifelong petty cruelty can make the victim snap.
The 20th century plays demonstrate a lot more experimentation and innovation. Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author implies meta-commentary about the artistic process - do authors create the characters, or do the characters exist as archetypes in some Platonic universe before the author (imperfectly) captures them. What is creativity on stage? If actors cleave too closely to the character, are they able to claim creativity or would it just be imitative. But the bloody end of the play does not fit in with the jocular tone of the rest of the play - is Pirandello implying that despite the author's attempts at creative control, the characters can break out of the mold and act autonomously? Coincidentally, another play by a female playwright, Sophie Treadwell's Machinal, also has murder as an element as in Susan Glaspell's Trifles . A stenographer marries her boss and later murders him. The innovative element here is sound - a concerto comprised of the sounds of a modern office space: ringing phones, typewriters, filing cabinets opening and shutting.
Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape makes a powerful statement with its staging: the roaring furnace, the choreographed movements of the workers, the spare set design. Though written in 1922, it is modernist in conception. Bertolt Brecht sets the action in his The Good Woman of Setzuan in China - a female shopkeeper finds it easier to make tough deals when dressed as a man, while she is repeatedly put upon or ignored as a woman. The crisis occurs when the male impersonator is accused of killing "his" female alter-ego.
Beloved plays such as Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun come next. And Samuel Beckett's enigmatic Waiting for Godot. Martin Esslin's brilliant essay on The Theater of the Absurd provides some clues, but to be honest, this is one play that I have never understood. I also found Harold Pinter's The Homecoming brutal and raw and powerful - an American professor takes his new wife home to meet his family, his father, his uncle and two brothers. But there is no love and affection in this family - only testosterone-soaked aggression, bravado, hatreds, and resentments. But the wife is more than equal to the task of taming these men (is there more to her story), and the professor is strangely feckless and apathetic.
Two plays tackle the colonial experience, but from very different perspectives. In Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, the tribal chieftain has just died and his loyal adviser (the Horseman) is expected to commit suicide after a night of sensual indulgence. The local colonial official decides that it he is going to stop the custom even if it will cause civil disturbances--and tries to recruit the Horseman's Western-educated son to help him. But the colonial meddlers and do-gooders have no knowledge and less respect for local customs. Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine too is set partly in colonial Africa--Act 1 is, while Act 2 is back in Europe. A period of 25 years separates the two Acts. This to me, was the weakest play in the collection. I cannot make up my mind if Caryl Churchill is an innovative genius or a gimmicky showboat. The introductory essay says that Churchill was aiming for the Brechtian notion of "distanciation" or "alienation," that is, to not let the audience forget the identity of the actor while viewing the character. Churchill aims to do this by deliberately casting a white man as a black servant (he is white because he has internalized the white values of his master, despite his racial identity), and a full-grown man as a little girl. The same actor plays many characters, so that each time the actor steps on stage, the audience sees a pastiche of their various roles.
Athol Fugard's "Master Harold ... and the boys," set in apartheid South Africa is simply wonderful and heartbreaking. Harold is a young boy with a dysfunctional family - a disabled father and an over-worked mother. With no parental guidance, Harold comes to see one of the family's black servants as a father-figure. But to "grow up" and assert his status as a "white man," Harold has to repudiate this relationship ... and this he does with deliberately cruel and insulting words directed at the older man. Fugard shows, without speaking a word, that racism coarsens the perpetrator too even as it aims to diminish its target.
August Wilson's Fences is also a lovely play, that addresses the 20th century African American experience. Troy is a garbageman, a responsible householder despite some petty vices. His son has the chance to go to college on a football scholarship, but Troy refuses to let him go, remembering his own bitter experiences as an aspiring baseball player. His wife's maternal love evokes respect and sympathy when she accepts Troy's child by another woman. Suzan Lori-Parks' The America Play also addresses African American life. A gravedigger's resemblance to Abraham Lincoln makes him choose a career as a re-enactor of Lincoln's assassination scene. Parks brilliantly uses the cadence of speech, strategic pauses, and the punctuation of sound (gunshots) to create a unique auditory environment for the play.
Gay authors and gay themes are prominent among the most recent plays including Tony Kushner's Angels in America (the first play to explicitly address AIDS on stage) and David Hwang's M. Butterfly. Hwang's play is based on apparently an actual incident in which a French diplomat had a two-decade affair with a Chinese opera singer, who turned out to be a spy working for the Communists, and even more startlingly a MAN. He implies that Western men have a fetish about Oriental women, that make them suspend all disbelief. It is also based on the stereotypical docility and effeminacy of Asia itself, compared to the masculine power of Europe. Hwang's title unmistakably references Puccini's Madame Butterfly, in which a Japanese woman marries an American who then leaves after a few years together. She waits chastely for him to come back... only to find him return with a wife. Heartbroken, she commits suicide.
Two plays also focus on the sexual exploitation of women. In Paula Vogel's How I learned to Drive, a young girl is seduced by a much older man, her uncle by marriage. It is also implied that the same man abused a young boy too, after taking him fishing. "Learning driving," a beloved American rite of passage and a young person's much-anticipated declaration of independence in this case becomes a tool of tawdry seduction. Lynn Nottage's Ruined is about the plight of women caught up in the Congolese civil war. Kidnapped and raped by soldiers of both sides, the women are then rejected by their families and communities for "bringing dishonor." They often end up in brothels where they fall victim to more sexual violence, STDs and unwanted pregnancies.
While the selections include some amazing plays, it still has a strong Western bias. A few Asian plays are included -- but none from India. No Kalidasa or Shudraka. Also, there was no play by George Bernard Shaw! Couldn't Wilde's inane Importance of Being Earnest have yielded its place to something by the other Irishman? The O'Neill selection was the Hairy Ape rather than the better-known (?) Iceman Cometh. I would also liked to have seen Neil Simon's loveable The Odd Couple included. And no Latin American authors, not even Federico Garcia Lorca. No Germans? Goethe? Schiller? But these are trivial criticisms - and no selection is ever going to please all readers.
This is a volume well-worth returning to again and again. But it comes in at a massive 1,842 pages. Despite the wafer-thin paper used in the Norton paperback edition that I read, it was still about 2 inches thick and weighed a pound or two. But it provided hours and hours of delightful reading over a whole year and I wouldn't mind going through one more time.
It is worth noting that many of the plays included here are cultural icons in their own right, with hundreds, thousands of performances, film adaptations, critical commentaries, and scholarly analyses. Some even have entire conferences and journals devoted to their study (yes, there is indeed a journal of "Hamlet Studies"). Some, though not individually famous, are representative of theatrical traditions with their own artistic conventions, leading performers and cult followings. For example, there is an obscure play by Hrotsvit of Gandershiem included. Her play The Martyrdom of the Holy Virgins was an example of the medieval religious theater, but even more significantly she was the rare example of a female playwright from the 15th century. There is also a noh play included (Zeami Motokiyo's Atsumori, the ghostly apparition of a dead samurai appearing to an admirer) and a 13th century Chinese play by Guan Hanqing ("Snow in Midsummer" - the ghost of a woman wrongly accused of a crime and executed appearing before her father, who is also a magistrate). A "miracle play" titled Everyman by an anonymous author is also included: Everyman, who represents the human soul has all worldly attributes (personified "Wealth," "Health" etc.) abandon him on the path to the grave, until only "Good Deeds" remains with him till the end.
But these are presented later since the plays are arranged roughly in chronological sequence. So the start is with the Greek greats (Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Euripides' Medea, and Aristophanes' Lysistrata). The story of Oedipus is so well known, but to get the full impact of the play one needs to suspend this knowledge and follow along as Oedipus collects clue after clue of what ails his kingdom and comes to the shattering conclusion. The same with Medea, a bloody play in which the titular character kills her own children to get her revenge against her straying husband, Jason. The final blood-drenched scene with Medea seen hovering above the stage with the bodies of her children needs to be imagined. And Aristophanes has the "love strike" by the women of Athens to get the men to end the war with Sparta.
Uniquely among the authors, Shakespeare has the honor of having two of his plays included (Hamlet and Twelfth Night). Twelfth Night has all the elements of Shakespearean comedy - cross-dressing, mistaken identity, love triangles (and quadrangles), pompous fools, cowardly lovers and finally a happy ending with all the main characters united with their ideal partners.
A number of classics of 19th and early 20th century European theater are included (Moliere's Tartuffe, Strindberg's Miss Julie, Ibsen's A Doll House, and Chekhov's Cherry Orchard). All are socially conscious and point to the key political and social issues of the day. Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest seems to be too fluffy by comparison, despite its sparkling dialog the play seems too contrived and precious (do people really talk that way??). But contrast that with Susan Glaspell's Trifles - a masterclass of understatement, sparse dialog, and nuance. A woman has murdered her husband and the men have no idea of a motive--only the neighbor women can see how lifelong petty cruelty can make the victim snap.
The 20th century plays demonstrate a lot more experimentation and innovation. Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author implies meta-commentary about the artistic process - do authors create the characters, or do the characters exist as archetypes in some Platonic universe before the author (imperfectly) captures them. What is creativity on stage? If actors cleave too closely to the character, are they able to claim creativity or would it just be imitative. But the bloody end of the play does not fit in with the jocular tone of the rest of the play - is Pirandello implying that despite the author's attempts at creative control, the characters can break out of the mold and act autonomously? Coincidentally, another play by a female playwright, Sophie Treadwell's Machinal, also has murder as an element as in Susan Glaspell's Trifles . A stenographer marries her boss and later murders him. The innovative element here is sound - a concerto comprised of the sounds of a modern office space: ringing phones, typewriters, filing cabinets opening and shutting.
Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape makes a powerful statement with its staging: the roaring furnace, the choreographed movements of the workers, the spare set design. Though written in 1922, it is modernist in conception. Bertolt Brecht sets the action in his The Good Woman of Setzuan in China - a female shopkeeper finds it easier to make tough deals when dressed as a man, while she is repeatedly put upon or ignored as a woman. The crisis occurs when the male impersonator is accused of killing "his" female alter-ego.
Beloved plays such as Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun come next. And Samuel Beckett's enigmatic Waiting for Godot. Martin Esslin's brilliant essay on The Theater of the Absurd provides some clues, but to be honest, this is one play that I have never understood. I also found Harold Pinter's The Homecoming brutal and raw and powerful - an American professor takes his new wife home to meet his family, his father, his uncle and two brothers. But there is no love and affection in this family - only testosterone-soaked aggression, bravado, hatreds, and resentments. But the wife is more than equal to the task of taming these men (is there more to her story), and the professor is strangely feckless and apathetic.
Two plays tackle the colonial experience, but from very different perspectives. In Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, the tribal chieftain has just died and his loyal adviser (the Horseman) is expected to commit suicide after a night of sensual indulgence. The local colonial official decides that it he is going to stop the custom even if it will cause civil disturbances--and tries to recruit the Horseman's Western-educated son to help him. But the colonial meddlers and do-gooders have no knowledge and less respect for local customs. Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine too is set partly in colonial Africa--Act 1 is, while Act 2 is back in Europe. A period of 25 years separates the two Acts. This to me, was the weakest play in the collection. I cannot make up my mind if Caryl Churchill is an innovative genius or a gimmicky showboat. The introductory essay says that Churchill was aiming for the Brechtian notion of "distanciation" or "alienation," that is, to not let the audience forget the identity of the actor while viewing the character. Churchill aims to do this by deliberately casting a white man as a black servant (he is white because he has internalized the white values of his master, despite his racial identity), and a full-grown man as a little girl. The same actor plays many characters, so that each time the actor steps on stage, the audience sees a pastiche of their various roles.
Athol Fugard's "Master Harold ... and the boys," set in apartheid South Africa is simply wonderful and heartbreaking. Harold is a young boy with a dysfunctional family - a disabled father and an over-worked mother. With no parental guidance, Harold comes to see one of the family's black servants as a father-figure. But to "grow up" and assert his status as a "white man," Harold has to repudiate this relationship ... and this he does with deliberately cruel and insulting words directed at the older man. Fugard shows, without speaking a word, that racism coarsens the perpetrator too even as it aims to diminish its target.
August Wilson's Fences is also a lovely play, that addresses the 20th century African American experience. Troy is a garbageman, a responsible householder despite some petty vices. His son has the chance to go to college on a football scholarship, but Troy refuses to let him go, remembering his own bitter experiences as an aspiring baseball player. His wife's maternal love evokes respect and sympathy when she accepts Troy's child by another woman. Suzan Lori-Parks' The America Play also addresses African American life. A gravedigger's resemblance to Abraham Lincoln makes him choose a career as a re-enactor of Lincoln's assassination scene. Parks brilliantly uses the cadence of speech, strategic pauses, and the punctuation of sound (gunshots) to create a unique auditory environment for the play.
Gay authors and gay themes are prominent among the most recent plays including Tony Kushner's Angels in America (the first play to explicitly address AIDS on stage) and David Hwang's M. Butterfly. Hwang's play is based on apparently an actual incident in which a French diplomat had a two-decade affair with a Chinese opera singer, who turned out to be a spy working for the Communists, and even more startlingly a MAN. He implies that Western men have a fetish about Oriental women, that make them suspend all disbelief. It is also based on the stereotypical docility and effeminacy of Asia itself, compared to the masculine power of Europe. Hwang's title unmistakably references Puccini's Madame Butterfly, in which a Japanese woman marries an American who then leaves after a few years together. She waits chastely for him to come back... only to find him return with a wife. Heartbroken, she commits suicide.
Two plays also focus on the sexual exploitation of women. In Paula Vogel's How I learned to Drive, a young girl is seduced by a much older man, her uncle by marriage. It is also implied that the same man abused a young boy too, after taking him fishing. "Learning driving," a beloved American rite of passage and a young person's much-anticipated declaration of independence in this case becomes a tool of tawdry seduction. Lynn Nottage's Ruined is about the plight of women caught up in the Congolese civil war. Kidnapped and raped by soldiers of both sides, the women are then rejected by their families and communities for "bringing dishonor." They often end up in brothels where they fall victim to more sexual violence, STDs and unwanted pregnancies.
While the selections include some amazing plays, it still has a strong Western bias. A few Asian plays are included -- but none from India. No Kalidasa or Shudraka. Also, there was no play by George Bernard Shaw! Couldn't Wilde's inane Importance of Being Earnest have yielded its place to something by the other Irishman? The O'Neill selection was the Hairy Ape rather than the better-known (?) Iceman Cometh. I would also liked to have seen Neil Simon's loveable The Odd Couple included. And no Latin American authors, not even Federico Garcia Lorca. No Germans? Goethe? Schiller? But these are trivial criticisms - and no selection is ever going to please all readers.
This is a volume well-worth returning to again and again. But it comes in at a massive 1,842 pages. Despite the wafer-thin paper used in the Norton paperback edition that I read, it was still about 2 inches thick and weighed a pound or two. But it provided hours and hours of delightful reading over a whole year and I wouldn't mind going through one more time.
January 9, 2019
Reading Process:
January 21 2018: Oedipus the King by Sophocles - see my review
January 30 2018: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare - see my review
February 15 2018: Tartuffe by Molière - see my review
March 3 2018: A Doll House by Henrik Ibsen - see my review
March 7 2018: The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde - see my review
March 15 2018: Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw - see my review
March 16 2018: Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello - see my review
June 20 2018: Medea by Euripides - see my review
June 22 2018: Lysistrata by Aristophanes - see my review
June 24 2018: Dulcitius by Hrotsvit of Gandersheim - see my review
June 24 2018: Snow in Midsummer by Guan Hanqing - see my review
July 6 2018: Atsumori by Zeami Motokiyo - see my review
July 7 2018: The Second Shepherds' Play by The Wakefield Master - see my review
July 9 2018: Everyman by author unknown - see my review
July 11 2018: Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe - see my review
July 14 2018: Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare - see my review
July 21 2018: The Rover by Aphra Behn - see my review
August 4 2018: Miss Julie by August Strindberg - see my review
August 11 2018: The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov - see my review
August 12 2018: Trifles by Susan Glaspell - see my review
August 15 2018: Machinal by Sophie Treadwell - see my review
August 16 2018: The Good Woman of Setzuan by Bertolt Brecht - see my review
August 19 2018: Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill - see my review
December 16 2018: A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams - see my review
December 20 2018: Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller - see my review
December 20 2018: Song of Death by Tawfiq Al-Hakim - see my review
December 24 2018: Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett - see my review
December 27 2018: The Homecoming by Harold Pinter - see my review
December 30 2018: Death and the King's Horseman by Wole Soyinka - see my review
December 31 2018: Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill - see my review
January 1 2019: "Master Harold"...And The Boys by Athol Fugard - see my review
January 2 2019: Fences by August Wilson - see my review
January 5 2019: M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang - see my review
January 5 2019: Angels in America: Millenium Approaches by Tony Kushner - see my review
January 5 2019: Almighty Voice and His Wife by Daniel David Moses - see my review
January 6 2019: The American Play by Suzan-Lori Parks - see my review
January 21 2018: Oedipus the King by Sophocles - see my review
January 30 2018: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare - see my review
February 15 2018: Tartuffe by Molière - see my review
March 3 2018: A Doll House by Henrik Ibsen - see my review
March 7 2018: The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde - see my review
March 15 2018: Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw - see my review
March 16 2018: Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello - see my review
June 20 2018: Medea by Euripides - see my review
June 22 2018: Lysistrata by Aristophanes - see my review
June 24 2018: Dulcitius by Hrotsvit of Gandersheim - see my review
June 24 2018: Snow in Midsummer by Guan Hanqing - see my review
July 6 2018: Atsumori by Zeami Motokiyo - see my review
July 7 2018: The Second Shepherds' Play by The Wakefield Master - see my review
July 9 2018: Everyman by author unknown - see my review
July 11 2018: Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe - see my review
July 14 2018: Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare - see my review
July 21 2018: The Rover by Aphra Behn - see my review
August 4 2018: Miss Julie by August Strindberg - see my review
August 11 2018: The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov - see my review
August 12 2018: Trifles by Susan Glaspell - see my review
August 15 2018: Machinal by Sophie Treadwell - see my review
August 16 2018: The Good Woman of Setzuan by Bertolt Brecht - see my review
August 19 2018: Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill - see my review
December 16 2018: A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams - see my review
December 20 2018: Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller - see my review
December 20 2018: Song of Death by Tawfiq Al-Hakim - see my review
December 24 2018: Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett - see my review
December 27 2018: The Homecoming by Harold Pinter - see my review
December 30 2018: Death and the King's Horseman by Wole Soyinka - see my review
December 31 2018: Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill - see my review
January 1 2019: "Master Harold"...And The Boys by Athol Fugard - see my review
January 2 2019: Fences by August Wilson - see my review
January 5 2019: M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang - see my review
January 5 2019: Angels in America: Millenium Approaches by Tony Kushner - see my review
January 5 2019: Almighty Voice and His Wife by Daniel David Moses - see my review
January 6 2019: The American Play by Suzan-Lori Parks - see my review
May 8, 2015
I will never part with this book. By far the most dear Norton anthology I own and the best introduction to drama you will find. A must buy for all lit enthusiasts and those who wish to know theater better.
June 15, 2012
Great, great, great drama scripts. Totally changed my life and my view about life. Didn't really read all of the plays though. But very amazing. Definitely changed my view about drama.
March 7, 2018
its an anthology, w/e. Didn't read all of it not trying 2 flex
December 9, 2022
WARRRRR IS OVERRRRRRR
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews