Glancing at Dramatists' Dialogue: From Shakespeare to Suzan-Lori Parks

by Ruby Cohn, Mark Taylor-Batty (Editor), Daniela Caselli (Editor), Enoch Brater (Editor), Hannah Simpson (Editor)

Overview

This book examines dramatic dialogue in English-language theatre, tracing verbal invention across four centuries from Shakespeare and Restoration comedy right up to contemporary English and American theatre.

Published posthumously, this renowned theatre scholar's book considers English dramatic dialogue as exemplified in the verbal invention of particular plays. That invention is traced through puns, repetitions, adroit clichés, occasional neologisms, malapropisms, sound play and more or less recondite allusions.

In eight chapters, Cohn offers close readings of monologue and dialogue in plays by William Shakespeare, William Wycherley, George Etherege, William Congreve, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Tom Stoppard, Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Caryl Churchill, Sam Shepard, Adrienne Kennedy and Suzan-Lori Parks.

It's a fascinating text, written with Cohn's characteristic wit, warmth and lucidity, and offers both an authoritative introduction to theatre dialogue and a remarkable final addition to Cohn's scholarly legacy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350425965
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	10/16/2025
Series:	Methuen Drama Engage
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.43(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Ruby Cohn (1922 - 2011) was for 30 years at UC Davis, where she was a member of the comparative literature and theatre departments and affiliated with the English and French departments. She taught courses on modern and experimental drama, Shakespeare's legacies in modern drama, dramatic genres, and Samuel Beckett and his contemporaries. She was one of the foremost authorities on the work of Samuel Beckett and published a number of books on his work, including A Beckett Canon (2001).

Daniela Caselli is Professor of Modern Literature in the English Department at the University of Manchester, UK. She is the author of Insufferable: Beckett, Gender and Sexuality (2023), Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes's Bewildering Corpus (2009) and Beckett's Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism (2005). She edited Beckett and Nothing in 2010. Her work has appeared in Comparative Literature (2017), Parallax (2016), The Cambridge Companion to American Gay and Lesbian Literature (2015), and Feminist Theory (2010).

Hannah Simpson is Lecturer in Drama and Performance in the English Faculty at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She is the author of Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Witness: Pain in Post-War Francophone Drama (2022) and Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (2022). She has edited special issues for Twentieth Century Literature, Medical Humanities and the Journal of War and Culture Studies, serves as the Theatre Review Editor for The Beckett Circle at the Samuel Beckett Society.

Table of Contents

Introduction (Daniela Caselli and Hannah Simpson)

Note on the Text (Daniela Caselli and Hannah Simpson)

Foreword (Ruby Cohn)

Chapter 1: Shakespeare's Dialogue in a Comedy and a Tragedy: Love's Labour's Lost and Timon of Athens

Chapter 2: Restoration Genteel Comedies: William Wycherley's The Country Wife, George Etherege's The Man of Mode, and William Congreve's The Way of the World

Chapter 3: Beguiled by Wilde: Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Tom Stoppard's Travesties, and Mark Ravenhill's Handbag

Chapter 4: Pinter Between Pauses

Chapter 5: Chameleon Caryl Churchill

Chapter 6: Erotic and Erratic Triangles: Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Samuel Beckett's Play, Harold Pinter's Betrayal, David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow, and Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis

Chapter 7: The Word is my Shepard

Chapter 8: Two Generations of Dialogic Imagination: Adrienne Kennedy and Suzan-Lori Parks