The book contains, then, eleven plays from the great age of French drama in the seventeenth century, one play from the prolific pen of Alexandra Hardy, who proceeded the great age, and on from the eighteenth century, the aftermath of that age.

Here are blank verse translations of ten of the best tragedies by French dramatists contemporary with Corneille and Racine, and two by the most noted successors. No great dramatist can be properly understood and appreciated without some knowledge of the lesser playwrights surrounding him. The fact has long been realized as regards to Shakespeare; but the lesser figures of the great age of French drama--men comparable to such Elizabethans as Middleton and Fletcher and Massinger--have been generally neglected. This book makes a selection of their best works available to English readers. French students who do not have access to the frequently rare French texts of these plays will find it valuable. No play by any of these dramatists, except Voltaire, has ever before been translated into English. The faithfulness and literary qualities of Dr. Lockert's translations are avouched by his two previous volumes in this field, The Chief Plays of Corneille and The Best Plays of Racine.

Representing the largest expansion between editions, this updated volume of Ottemiller's Index to Plays in Collections is the standard location tool for full-length plays published in collections and anthologies in England and the United States throughout the 20th century and beyond. This new volume lists more than 3,500 new plays and 2,000 new authors, as well as birth and/or death information for hundreds of authors.

...The book can be a goldmine. --James Leverett, Theatre Communications ...With this second volume, the Drama Scholars' Index's indispensability is greatly increased. --Richard J. Kelly, ARBA

In two of his most celebrated plays, Britannicus and Bérénice, Racine depicts the tragedies of characters trapped by the ideals, desires, and cruelties of ancient Rome. This international collection of essays deploys cutting-edge research to illuminate the plays and their contexts.

This is the fifth volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays. Geoffrey Alan Argent’s translations faithfully convey all the urgency and keen psychological insight of Racine’s dramas, and the coiled strength of his verse, while breathing new vigor into the time-honored form of the “heroic” couplet. Complementing this translation are the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary—particularly detailed and extensive for this volume, Britannicus being by far Racine’s most historically informed play. Also noteworthy is Argent’s reinstatement of an eighty-two-line scene, originally intended to open Act III, that has never before appeared in an English translation of this play. Britannicus, one of Racine’s greatest plays, dramatizes the crucial day when Nero—son of Agrippina and stepson of the late emperor Claudius—overcomes his mother, his wife Octavia, his tutors, and his vaunted “three virtuous years” in order to announce his omnipotence. He callously murders his innocent stepbrother, Britannicus, and effectively destroys Britannicus’s beloved, the virtuous Junia, as well. Racine may claim, in his first preface, that this tragedy “does not concern itself at all with affairs of the world at large,” but nothing could be further from the truth. The tragedy represented in Britannicus is precisely that of the Roman Empire, for in Nero Racine has created a character who embodies the most infamous qualities of that empire — its cruelty, its depravity, and its refined barbarity.