This is your rhetoric translated. These wretches, these executioners, the guillotine are your speeches come to life. You have built your doctrines out of human heads... Why should an event that transforms the whole of humanity not advance through blood? 1794: the French Revolution reaches its climax. After a series of bloody purges the life-loving, volatile Danton is tormented by his part in the killing. His political rival, the driven, ascetic Robespierre, decides Danton's fate. A titanic struggle begins. Once friends who wanted to change the world, now one stands for compromise the other for ideological purity as the guillotine awaits. A revolutionary himself, George Büchner was 21 when he wrote the play in 1835, while hiding from the police. With its hair-raising on-rush of scenes and vivid dramatisation of complex, visionary characters, Danton's Death has a claim to be the greatest political tragedy ever written. In his newly-revised translation, Howard Brenton captures Büchner's exhilarating energy as Danton struggles to avoid his inexorable fall.

This collection of Büchner's three theatrical works includes Danton's Death, his great play about the French Revolution, Leonce and Lena, his "black" romantic comedy and Woyzeck, the unfinished work on which Alban Berg based his famous opera. All three works remained virtually unknown for half a century but today have found an important place in the modern repertory.

A biography of Georges-Jacques Danton, a leading French revolutionary—from his rural upbringing to his death five years after the storming of the Bastille. One of the Western world’s most epic uprisings, the French Revolution ended a monarchy that had ruled for almost a thousand years. Georges-Jacques Danton was the driving force behind it. Now David Lawday, author of Napoleon’s Master, reveals the larger-than-life figure who joined the fray at the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and was dead five years later. To hear Danton speak, his booming voice a roll of thunder, excited bourgeois reformers and the street alike; his impassioned speeches, often hours long, drove the sans-culottes to action and kept the Revolution alive. But as the newly appointed Minister of Justice, Danton struggled to steer the increasingly divided Revolutionary government. Working tirelessly to halt the bloodshed of Robespierre’s terror, he ultimately became another of its victims. True to form, Danton did not go easily to the guillotine; at his trial, he defended himself with such vehemence that the tribunal convicted him before he could rally the crowd in his favor. In vivid, almost novelistic prose, Lawday leads us from Danton’s humble roots to the streets of revolutionary Paris, where this political legend acted on the stage of the revolution that altered Western civilization. “A gripping story, beautifully told . . . Danton was a headstrong firebrand, a swashbuckling political showman with a prodigious memory, whose spectacular oratory held audiences in thrall.” —The Economist

Based on various models of metonymy, this book distinguishes metonymic drama structure from the metaphoric, symbolic, and allegorical. It applies Kristeva's theory of the "semiotic" to dramatic texts and Barker's observations on the private body to their potential theatrical representation in order to argue that there is a relationship between fragmented representations of the subject and metonymic drama structure.

This is a succinct and elegant argument for the specificity of a philosophy of tragedy, as opposed to a poetics of tragedy espoused by Aristotle.