Sylvan Barnet (1926–2016)

Genius might be a bit...strong...for a number of these plays. They are standard issue morality plays from the early English theatre, and many of them are rather tedious. There are some truly great works in here, such as MacBeth and Marlowe's Faust. Jonson's Volpone completes the trifecta of worthy plays. I'm afraid Milton's Samson Agonistes left me cold. It probably reads better as poetry than as a play, but even then, it was too repetitive, and way too much logorrhea.

A superb collection of tragedies with selected commentaries that augment the texts. While there are specific editions that offer superior texts for reading and analyzing individual plays, this is helpful for reading and debating a range of tragedies.

Although I don't recall which college class I had to buy this book for, I remember it being one of the most helpful aids in writing, particularly in the numerous history and theory classes I took. Now on its 11th edition (and nearly twice as long), Barnet's boom is an excellent primer on asking the right questions, all toward appreciating, understanding, and critiquing art, be it paintings, sculptures, photographs, or architecture. A couple decades later, the architecture advice is pretty show more conservative, focused solely on formal analysis, but perhaps the scope has broadened in subsequent editions to encompass broader, contemporary concerns. That said, the book best serves students by giving them a foundation of how to look at art and then how to tackle writing about it. show less

Many of the plays in this collection seem dated, but they are still interesting reading. There are several I would enjoy seeing performed, though they tend a bit toward talky and at times pretentious. In places they are rendered slightly difficult to read by the extreme dialect, and the use of Irish words for ordinary things, though the editors do take pity on the non-Irish reader and explain Irish phrases in footnotes. Particularly good works include Synge's Dierdre of the Sorrows (though show more it is extremely difficult to suspend disbelief in this piece) and O'Connor's In the Train, a short piece that presents a fascinating character study. The English are gleefully lampooned as oblivious aristocrats; the Irish are poor, but plucky and with a worldly wisdom. The collection includes a great deal of nationalism and pride of lineage, and in places poverty is a bit romanticized. Still, an enjoyable collection. show less