Discover plays and dramatic writing, including works intended for performance and the study of theatre. This collection currently contains 44 titles in Literra’s catalogue.
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This first volume of A Collection of Old English Plays opens a window onto English drama from before the theatre canon became dominated by Shakespeare and the familiar later playwrights. The plays preserve a world of shifting theatrical conventions in which morality drama, comedy, satire
The second volume continues the recovery of older English plays that once circulated on stages and in print but have largely disappeared from the everyday literary canon. These works reveal how broad early English drama actually was
A Collection of Old English Plays, Volume 3 continues the exploration of English theatrical writing from periods when drama was far more diverse than the modern canon suggests. The plays gathered here preserve different experiments in comedy, morality, romance, satire, conflict, and dramatic
Ibsen’s drama follows Nora Helmer as a hidden financial decision and her husband’s reaction force her to confront marriage, social expectations, and her own independence
Volume 7 of A Select Collection of Old English Plays continues the recovery of English dramatic works that once existed within a much larger theatrical culture than the modern canon usually remembers. The plays come from different periods and dramatic traditions, so the collection can move
Volume 8 expands the archive of early English drama with plays that represent the theatrical tastes, anxieties, humor, and storytelling experiments of earlier centuries. The works vary widely in tone and structure, reflecting a period when the stage could accommodate moral allegory, broad
The ninth volume of A Select Collection of Old English Plays continues a long act of literary recovery: preserving dramatic works that once belonged to the living theatre but later slipped outside the standard canon. The plays collected here represent different dramatic habits and different
Sophocles dramatizes the downfall of the warrior Ajax after the Trojan War, exploring honor, humiliation, madness, vengeance, and the consequences of wounded pride
A public-health dispute becomes a drama about evidence, money, reputation, local politics and majority opinion. It is an unusually direct example of how a social issue becomes personal and institutional conflict
O’Neill follows an estranged father, his daughter Anna, and a sailor she loves as their pasts and secrets challenge ideas of trust, shame, work, and belonging
Sophocles creates a conflict between a ruler’s decree and a character’s obligations to family and religious law. Its compact structure makes it ideal for learning how tragedy can focus an ethical conflict without a huge cast
Shaw’s comic anti-war play mocks romantic ideas about military heroism, examining love, class, practicality, and the difference between heroic fantasy and human reality
O’Neill portrays two brothers whose different ambitions—travel and farm life—collide with love, disappointment, illness, and the painful limits of their dreams
Pushkin’s historical drama explores power, legitimacy, ambition, public opinion, rebellion, and the political consequences surrounding the reign of Boris Godunov
Shaw turns the meeting of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra into a witty political drama about power, education, empire, leadership, and personal development
Shaw’s romantic comedy examines marriage, idealism, class, and competing ideas of love when Candida’s husband and a younger poet both imagine they understand her
Chantecler is Edmond Rostand’s poetic fable about a rooster who believes that his crowing causes the sun to rise. Chantecler is proud, idealistic, and completely convinced that his voice has a cosmic purpose
Dotty Dimple at Play follows a lively child through the ordinary adventures of family and play, turning small childhood experiences into stories about curiosity, mischief, friendship, obedience, and growing understanding. Sophie May’s Dotty is appealing because she does not behave like a
Sophocles explores grief, revenge, justice, and family loyalty through Electra’s obsession with avenging her murdered father
The Game and Playe of the Chesse is an early English adaptation of a popular medieval allegory that uses the game of chess to explain society. Every chess piece represents a social role, and the movement of the pieces becomes a way to discuss how rulers, nobles, clergy, workers, and other
Hamburgische Dramaturgie is Lessing’s influential series of essays on drama and theatrical criticism, written in connection with the Hamburg National Theatre. Lessing examines plays, acting, dramatic structure, character, emotion, and the relationship between theatre and its audience
Shakespeare's tragedy follows Prince Hamlet after his father's death as he investigates a suspected murder and becomes entangled in revenge, political uncertainty, grief, deception, and moral hesitation
The play turns political rhetoric into drama. Speeches persuade crowds, private motives conflict with public claims, and a decision about power reshapes everything that follows
Lear asks what happens when authority, family loyalty and identity collapse at the same time. Its emotional scale is huge, but the core structure—love, power, misjudgment and consequence—is easy to see
Shaw contrasts poverty relief, religion, arms manufacturing, and social power as Major Barbara and her family debate what truly helps the poor
Manfredo is a dramatic work centered on a tragic male protagonist whose passions, conflicts, and refusal to accept ordinary limits place him outside conventional society. The name recalls the Romantic fascination with isolated, self-willed figures who challenge religious, social, and moral
Shakespeare builds comedy from overheard conversations, mistaken assumptions, verbal combat and social performance. It is a particularly friendly first Shakespeare because the emotional conflicts are immediate even when the language takes work
A tragedy of jealousy, manipulation, trust and reputation. The plot is driven by how characters interpret evidence and by how quickly an insinuation can become certainty
Plays is a dramatic collection in which the essential storytelling machinery is stripped down to its most visible parts: people speaking, wanting something, misunderstanding one another, making choices, and dealing with the consequences in front of an audience. Unlike a novel, drama does not
Plays (2) is an anthology of dramatic works rather than a single continuous story, and its value lies in the variety that becomes possible when several plays are placed side by side. Each play creates its own miniature world through dialogue, character, conflict, stage directions, and the
George Bernard Shaw's social comedy follows Professor Higgins as he transforms Eliza Doolittle's speech and manners, using their relationship to examine class, language, gender, independence, and social performance
Shakespeare’s Sonnets are a sequence of 154 poems exploring love, desire, beauty, aging, jealousy, betrayal, friendship, sexuality, poetry, and the relentless passage of time. They are often treated as a single monument, but reading them together reveals something more unstable and intimate
Jack London’s dramatic nature play blends indigenous themes, conflict, environmental imagery, and California setting in a story built around a forest and its people
Ben Jonson’s satirical comedy follows con artists who exploit gullible clients through promises of wealth, transformation, and secret knowledge
Aristophanes’s comedy follows two Athenians who build a city among the birds, turning fantasy into satire about politics, power, bureaucracy, and human ambition
Aristophanes satirizes intellectual fashions and rhetorical education by portraying Socrates-like instruction as a dangerous influence on traditional morality and family life
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare is less a single book than an entire dramatic and poetic universe. It contains comedies, tragedies, histories, romances, and the sonnets that together make Shakespeare one of the most influential writers in the English language
Oscar Wilde's comedy turns mistaken identities, courtship, marriage, and social hypocrisy into a fast-moving satire of Victorian manners and respectability
The Maid’s Tragedy is a Jacobean tragedy built around political power, forced marriage, sexual exploitation, revenge, and the collapse of moral order. Beaumont and Fletcher place a private relationship inside a corrupt court, where the ruler’s desires can determine the lives of everyone beneath
The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck is James Branch Cabell in comic, irreverent mode, turning historical and pseudo-medieval romance into an opportunity for satire. Cabell’s worlds often look like traditional tales of knights, noble families, romance, adventure, and honor, but the apparent grandeur
An island, a magician, a shipwreck and a cast of competing desires create a compact play about power, freedom, revenge and reconciliation. Its relatively controlled setting helps a beginner keep track of the action
The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson begins with an outrageous premise that gradually becomes a devastating study of race, identity, slavery, law, and the unreliability of appearances. In a Missouri town, two infants—one born enslaved and one born into a wealthy white family—are switched when they
This first volume of the collected works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher opens into the theatrical culture of Jacobean and early Caroline England. The two playwrights became famous for collaborative drama, and their work ranges across tragedy, tragicomedy, comedy, romance, and stories
Mistaken identity, disguise, desire and comic mismatch drive a play that keeps asking how much of a person’s social identity is performance
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