Drama From Ibsen To Brecht

Drama From Ibsen To Brecht

Summary

With typical critical flair, Raymond Williams examines the development of the dramatic form from Henrik Ibsen to Bertolt Brecht. Taking an expansive view of drama from around the world, he offers the reader profound insights into the role of theatre in society and into the workings of dramatic language. This is seminal reading for theatre-goers and literature students alike.

Reviews

  • His complex character, indeed his whole life, was held together by two qualities - scholarship and political conviction - which made him a major influence on three decades of political thought
    Independent

About the author

Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams was born in 1921 in the Welsh border village of Pandy, and was educated at the village school, at Abergavenny Grammar School, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. After serving in the war as an anti-tank captain, he became an adult education tutor in the Oxford University Delegacy for Extra-Mural Studies. In 1947 he was an editor of Politics and Letters, and in the 1960s was general editor of the New Thinker’s Library. He was elected Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1961 and was later appointed Professor of Drama.

His books include Culture and Society (1958), The Long Revolution (1961) and its sequel Towards 2000 (1983); Communications (1962) and Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974); Drama in Performance (1954), Modern Tragedy (1966) and Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (1968); The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970), Orwell (1971) and The Country and the City (1973); Politics and Letters (interviews) (1979) and Problems in Materialism and Culture (selected essays) (1980); and four novels – the Welsh trilogy of Border Country (1960), Second Generation (1964) and The Fight for Manod (1979), and The Volunteers (1978).

Raymond Williams was married in 1942, had three children, and divided his time between Saffron Walden, near Cambridge, and Wales. He died in 1988.
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