Tragedy
Marion de Lorme
Marion de Lorme is a play about a famous French courtesan with the same name, known for her relationships with the important men of her time…
Saint Joan
Saint Joan is a play by George Bernard Shaw about 15th-century French military figure Joan of Arc. Premiering in 1923, three years after her…
Tristan and Isolde
The Libretto of Richard Wagner's music drama Tristan and Isolde, translated into English by John P Jackson, is here presented as a spoken dr…
Faust I
Faust is the protagonist of a classic German legend; a highly successful scholar, but also dissatisfied with his life, and so makes a deal w…
Berenice
Titus, emperor of Rome, wants to marry Berenice, queen of Palestine, but decides that Rome will not be able to handle having him marry a for…
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet is an early tragedy by William Shakespeare about two teenage "star-cross'd lovers" whose "untimely deaths&qu…
Esther
Esther — the first of Racine's two sacred dramas — is a tragedy in the Aristotelian acceptation of the term, as being concerned with a great…
Paolo and Francesca
The tragic and adulterous story of Paolo and Francesca was originally immortalized by Dante in his "Divine Comedy". Since then, t…
Tamburlaine the Great
Tamburlaine the Great is the name of a play in two parts by Christopher Marlowe. It is loosely based on the life of the Central Asian empero…
Andromache
In this tragedy [about part of the aftermath of the Trojan War], which made its appearance in 1667, there is a more intricate plot than is u…
King Leir and His Three Daughters
King Leir is an anonymous Elizabethan play about the life of the ancient Celtic king Leir of Britain. It was published in 1605 but was enter…
The Dream
The Dream is Joanna Baillie’s gothic, proto-Lynchian meditation on fear, guilt, and the prophetic power of dreams. In the cloistered confine…
Philoctetes
Sophocles' play recounts an episode from the Trojan War, in which the wily Odysseus and Achilles' son Neoptolemus travel to a remote island …
Life is a Dream
Life Is a Dream (La vida es sueño) is a Spanish-language verse drama by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. First published in 1636, t…
Britannicus
Britannicus is son and heir of the Roman emperor Claudius. However, this does not please Nero, who wants both throne and Britannicus's fianc…
Adrienne Lecouvreur
This drama was written in 1848 for the great French tragedienne, Rachel, by Eugene Scribe and his writing partner, Ernest Legouve. Scribe is…
Oroonoko
Based on Aphra Behn's 1688 novel (which is one of the earliest novels in the English language), Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko is seen by schol…
Ion
This drama, set in Ancient Greece, was written by a Victorian lawyer who was a close friend of Charles Dickens. When collected into book for…
The Changeling
The Changeling is a sensational 1622 tragicomedy by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley that comprises two intertwining plots. The first inv…
Big Lake
Betty senses darkness and decay in the world around her, but not in Lloyd. Though he doesn't understand the source and depth of her feelings…