Modern Irish Drama

An excellent teaching texts for the pre-1960 years, but badly needs updating with a few more contemporary plays, at least one of which should be by a woman dramatist.

This is one of the only comprehensive texts for teaching the history of Irish drama on the market today. There should be a collection of contemporary Irish plays this good. Oh, and thank you to the reader below for the table of contents! One correction, however: "Cathleen Ni Houlihan" and "On Baile's Strand" are both Yeats plays... there is no playwright Cathleen Ni Houlihan. She's a symbol for a free and romanticized Ireland.

I'm writing this review to provide others who're considering purchasing this book an outline of content as I became incredibly frustrated when I couldn't find any such details quickly. ... Complete texts of 12 plays by 8 Irish playwrights: Cathleen Ni Hourlihan's "On Baile's Strand", W.B. Yeat's "Purgatory", Lady Gregory's "Spreading the News" and "The Rising of the Moon", J.M. Synge's "Riders to the Sea" and "Playboy of the Western World", G.B. Shaw's "John Bull's Other Island, Sean O'Casey's "Juno and the Paycock", Brendan Behan's "The Quare Fellow", Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape", and "Translations" by Brian Friel. Texts are fully annotated with explanatory notes on Anglo-Irish usage, place names, historical figures and literary allusions. Backgrounds, criticism, memoirs, prefaces, chronology and bibliography are also included. Hope this helped!!

This book is full of wonderful plays that give insight into Irish history. The collection of plays helps one to understand what the revolution was about and the events that caused it.