Drama

In the hands of Sophocles, the master dramatist, the anguished tale of a man fated to kill his father and marry his mother retains its power to shock and move beyond any Freudian reference....

Shakespeare's most sophisticated comedy is a riotous tale of hopelessly unrequited passions and mistaken identity....

Initially banned in France by King Louis, Molière's celebrated social satire Tartuffe exposes false piety and hypocrisy in the Catholic Church....

Christopher Marlowe's play about a man who sells his soul to the devil is not only one of the first of many works to explore this theme but also one of the most startling....

Thekla, married to the needy Adolf, has a surprise encounter with her former husband, the lordly Gustav. Or is it really a surprise? Find out....

George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion is a fussy unmarried professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, who claims that he could train an uneducated person off the street to speak so that he or she could pass as a member of the aristocracy. His pick is Eliza Doolittle, who sells flowers....

Julius Caesar is one of Shakespeare’s most compelling Roman plays. The plot against Caesar and the infamous assassination scene make for unforgettable listening....

Oedipus the King is the story of a man whose life is destroyed by his own good intentions. When a terrible secret from his past is brought to the light of day, the consequences are chilling....

Stacy Keach and Jane Kaczmarek star in this 1949 masterpiece by Arthur Miller, a searing portrait of the physical, emotional, and psychological costs of the American dream....

Sophocles' The Theban Plays, all three of which are included in this collection alongside adaptations of Electra and Philoctetes, are brought to life by celebrated writers, poets, and playwrights....

In this BBC full-cast production of Much Ado About Nothing, some handsome soldiers return from battle. Yet one soldier finds himself locked in a merry war of his own....

This widely studied play is one of the "best sellers" of the Shakespeare canon....

Professor Esolen who has served as your guide through both the Inferno and Purgatory will guide you through the profound and elevated poetry of Paradise....

Four classic comedies from one of the wittiest playwrights in Western literature....

Peer Gynt (1867), the five-act romantic play in verse by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, is one of the most widely performed Norwegian plays. Based on a Norwegian folk hero, the title character is a rogue who will be destroyed unless the love of a woman saves him....

Hamlet, which dates from 1600-1601, is the first in Shakespeare's great series of four tragedies....

The skies over ancient Rome blaze with terrifying portents, and soothsayers warn Julius Caesar of approaching doom...

Antigone is a famous Greek tragedy attributed to the ancient playwright Sophocles at around 440 BCE. The play expands on the Theban legend of Oedipus that predates it, dealing with Antigone’s burial of her brother Polyneices in defiance of the law....

A tender love story, a serpentine villainess, a glittering setting in London society, and a showering of Wildean witticism....

In this classic of Chekhov’s canon, an overbearing professor pays a visit to his country estate, where Sonya and Vanya, his daughter and former brother-in-law, have slaved to maintain his wealth....

The idealistic son of a wealthy businessman seeks to expose his father's duplicity and to free his childhood friend from the lies on which his happy home life is based....

A dark tale of hubris, lust, and self-destruction… as told by a man who famously fell prey to those same impulses in his own life....

In Richard III, Shakespeare invites us on a moral holiday. The play draws us to identify with Richard and his fantasy of total control of self and domination of others....

By the time Shakespeare came to write Macbeth - almost certainly in 1605/1606 - he had already completed three of the great tragedies with which modern audiences are so familiar....

Pygmalion remains one of the most popular stories, but mainly in the medium of the musical; the evergreen My Fair Lady....