American, British, Irish, and Commonwealth verse drama: an annotated bibliography, 1935-1985

Abstract

For most people, the modern stage is the province of realistic drama; verse drama, they believe, belongs to the past, to the plays of the Renaissance or the heroic tragedies of the Restoration. Apart from the work of a few well-known modern playwrights--T. S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, Archibald MacLeish, Maxwell Anderson--verse drama remains largely unrecognized by the public and unacknowledged by critics and scholars. However, these dramatists are only a few of the many contemporary playwrights writing verse plays. This study deals with verse drama written between 1935 and 1985. The introduction opens with a general discussion of the nature of modern verse drama and, drawing on the essays of many of the verse dramatists of the mid-twentieth-century, discusses the attempt of these playwrights to establish verse as a coherent, modern art form. Along with discussing the work of Eliot, Fry, MacLeish, and Anderson, the introduction refers to the verse plays of Ronald Duncan, Dorothy Sayers, Anne Ridler, Charles Williams, John Arden, William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and many others. The introduction is followed by a selected bibliography of critical works on modern verse drama. This is followed by the main body of the study, an annotated bibliography of almost 500 plays by more than 200 authors. The bibliography focuses primarily on the effectiveness of the plays as drama. It includes plays in verse or verse-and-prose written by American, British, Irish, and Commonwealth dramatists between 1935 and 1985. It includes adaptations but not translations; works which utilize music but not musicals, librettos, or operas; stage plays and radio plays, but not dramatic poems; plays for adults, but not plays for children or adolescents. The bibliography also includes production information, the dates of individual plays in collections, and the nationality of Commonwealth writers whenever that information was readily available.