18 books like The Way of the World
Candida
The Reverend James Mavor Morell, a respectable socialist clergyman, spends his days giving lectures and sermons while his wife, Candida, sees to his comfortable London home. That home is disrupted by the arrival of the poet Eugene Marchbanks, who is in love with Candida and determined to rescue her from what he sees as an unromantic life. Shaw wrote Candida as a reaction to Henrik Ibsen’s social…
Shares: British and irish drama, English drama, Drama, Social life and customs
Love for Love
Valentine, Sir Sampson's dissolute eldest son, finds himself at a standstill; the only way out of his financial difficulties is to give in to his father's pressure to renounce his right of inheritance. While this suggestion immediately increases the chances of his bluff younger brother Ben on the marriage mart, Valentine's own chances with his beloved Angelica would proportionally decrease. To…
Shares: Adultery, British and irish drama, English drama, Drama
Heartbreak House
Published in 1919, Heartbreak House is an examination of the failings of the European leisure classes before World War I—failings that author George Bernard Shaw blamed for the war, and that he predicted would quickly lead to another, longer war. The play is set in an English country house, where representatives of every type of English society have gathered at the home of the seemingly-mad…
Shares: Upper class, British and irish drama, Drama
Анна Каренина
Described by William Faulkner as the best novel ever written and by Fyodor Dostoevsky as “flawless,” Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and thereby exposes herself to the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of…
Shares: Upper class, Adultery, Drama, Social life and customs
What every woman knows
National Theatre, direction: A.L. Erlanger & W.H. Rapley, business management: S.E. Cochran. S.E. Cochran offers the National Theatre Players in "What Every Woman Knows," by Sir James M. Barrie, staged by Addision Pitt, scenery by Charles Squires. Stage manager Frank Peck, production built by Charles Sturbitts, properties Geo. Donaldson, electrician, Walter Burke.
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The school for scandal, 1780
The School for Scandal debuted at Drury Lane Theater in London in 1777. The play is still popular and regularly performed today. It is a comedy of manners about "the deceptive nature of appearances, the fickleness of reputation, [and] the often disreputable guises behind which goodness and honesty can conceal itself."
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An Ideal Husband
An Ideal Husband is an 1895 comedic stage play by Oscar Wilde which revolves around blackmail and political corruption, and touches on the themes of public and private honour. The action is set in London, in "the present", and takes place over the course of twenty-four hours. "Sooner or later," Wilde notes, "we shall all have to pay for what we do." But he adds that, "No one should be entirely…
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En cas de malheur
Dans la tourmente de la passionQuelque chose d'insidieux s'est glissé dans l'existence de Lucien Gobillot. Sa tranquillité, son succès professionnel et sa réputation mondaine, résultats d'un mariage ambitieux et de quelques complaisances juridiques, sont menacés. Ce qui aurait pu n'être qu'une passade sans lendemain, semblable à celles que sa femme Viviane lui consent avec une complicité…
Shares: Adultery, Romance & Relationships
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton's most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War, is a brilliantly realized anatomy of New York society in the 1870s, the world in which she grew up, and from which she spent her life escaping. Newland Archer, Wharton's protagonist, charming, tactful, enlightened, is a thorough product of this society; he accepts its standards and abides by its rules but…
Shares: Upper class, Drama, Social life and customs
The Tragedy of Jane Shore
This tragedy in five acts was originally performed in the early eighteenth century. The play focuses on one of King Henry IV’s most notorious mistresses, Jane Shore.
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The Professional
A knock on Spenser's office door can only mean one thing: a new case. This time the visitor is a local lawyer with an interesting story. Elizabeth Shaw specializes in wills and trusts at the Boston law firm of Shaw & Cartwright, and over the years she's developed a friendship with wives of very wealthy men. However, these rich wives have a mutual secret: they've all had an affair with a man named…
Shares: Extortion, Adultery
Dr. Wortle's school
Mr Peacocke, a Classical scholar, has come to Broughtonshire with his beautiful American wife to live as a schoolmaster. But when the blackmailing brother of her first husband - a reprobate from Louisiana - appears at the school gates, a dreadful secret is revealed and the county is scandalized. Ostracised by the community, the pair seem trapped in a hopeless situation - until the combative but…
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Jude the Obscure
Hardy's last work of fiction, Jude the Obscure is also one of his most gloomily fatalistic, depicting the lives of individuals who are trapped by forces beyond their control. Jude Fawley, a poor villager, wants to enter the divinity school at Christminster. Sidetracked by Arabella Donn, an earthy country girl who pretends to be pregnant by him, Jude marries her and is then deserted. He earns a…
Shares: Adultery, Romance & Relationships, Social life and customs
Back to Methuselah
Five linked plays that expound Shaw's philosophy of creative evolution in an extended dramatic parable that progresses through time from the Garden of Edesn to AD 31,920. Cf Encyclopaedia Britannica.
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Roaring Girl
This Jacobean city comedy is a curiosity in that it presents a
real-life character, the notorious cross-dresser Moll Frith, who
probably was among the first audiences of 'her' play before she was
taken up for public misconduct. Middleton and Dekker's 'roaring girl'
may outrage her society with her pipe, bluster and swagger, but she
turns out to be the moral centre of the play. Her code of honour…
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The Alchemist, 1612
Samuel Taylor Coleridge said of Ben Jonson's _The Alchemist_ that it had one out of the three most perfect plots in literature. This play, with its sharp portrayal of human folly, is considered by many to be Jonson's best comedy. First performed 1610, its popularity has endured to this day.
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She Stoops To Conquer
She Stoops to Conquer is a comedy by the Anglo-Irish author Oliver Goldsmith, first performed in London in 1773.
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Henry IV, Part 1
Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, discusses the author and the theater of his time, and provides quizzes and other study activities.
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