Elaine Aston begins Feminist Views on the English Stage by pondering why, given the optimism for English feminist theatre at the close of the 1980s, the 1990s saw a diminishing interest in women's voices. She asks, “If ‘masculinity and its discontents’ culturally and theatrically moved centre stage in the 1990s, what happened to women and to feminism?”(5) In order to counteract the prevailing view of the 1990s as a decade dominated by the overarching theme of “masculinity in crisis,” she focuses her book on women playwrights. Aston detects a theatrical backlash against the partial advances made by women playwrights during the 1980s, mirroring a backlash against feminism within popular culture in general. In contrast to the “shock fests” of the reemergent “angry young men,” who have often been charged with nihilism, she argues that the works she examines remain politically engaged. Aston explains that Feminist Views is motivated by her desire to prevent women playwrights from being “written out” of the theatrical record.

Dancers, dance theorists, and dance historians have long confronted a double marginality—a life in dance is fragile not simply because dance is ephemeral, but its professional opportunities are scarce. Within the academy, dance is notoriously treated as a minor literature, and dance studies seldom enjoy influence outside their specialized readerships. These predicaments for dance studies can attach to more general concerns about contemporary culture. A consumer society is oriented to mass media with little value for interpersonal encounter that live performance offers. The body has been eclipsed by the machine, and the drive for speed has rendered audiences intolerant of dance's gestural nuance and impatient with its kinesthetic detail. Accordingly, the persistence of dance would seem almost perverse, a nostalgic longing for lost innocence that winds up being self-marginalizing. Against this narrative, one that can be found among dance scholars who favor more restrictive aesthetic conceptions of dance art within Western concert conventions, Felicia McCarren offers a counter-Edenic tale, one that locates dance as central to modernism's own origins, that offers a rethinking of the one-dimensionally woeful account of mechanization, and ultimately provides a reason for those outside of dance to adopt its conceptual efficacy.

Wagner has proved more fortunate than other opera composers in the liveliness, variety, and intellectual enterprise of his critical interpreters during the past decade or two. One need only cite Thomas Grey's study of the composer's aesthetics in Wagner's Musical Prose (1995); Carolyn Abbate's deconstruction of his narrative passages in Unsung Voices (1991); and Marc Weiner's analysis of how nineteenth-century racial codes shape the operas in Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (1995) to note the range of approaches that have been applied to him.

Death by Drama is revisionist theatre history at its invigorating best. Taking her cue from modern studies of urban legends, Jody Enders treats theatrical apocrypha—such as the well-known account of a convicted heretic who was supposedly executed on stage during a performance of the drama of Judith and Holofernes in 1549 in Tournai—not as fact, as such stories have often unquestioningly been taken, but as medieval urban legends that reveal spectators' attitudes toward the theatre as a place of potential threat where the true and the false dangerously mix. Looking at such legends as expressions of a culture's specific hopes, fears, and anxieties, Enders examines the “ways in which early France told, retold, invented, and reinvented stories of the tenuous boundaries between theatre and real life, thereby helping audiences to confront the nature of artistic representation” (xxiv). Although Enders's focus is medieval French theatre, her reach extends to modern theatre, film, and media, and her impeccable historical scholarship is enriched by savvy recourse to contemporary critical theory and performance studies. The resulting book shakes up settled assumptions about “what really happened” on the medieval stage, while raising profound questions about theatre's social functions then and now.

R. A. Foakes's latest book, Shakespeare and Violence, addresses an area of significant interest in Shakespeare studies. Foakes begins with a general discussion of the prevalence and persistence of violence in both life and literature. He then focuses on the evolution of Shakespeare's use of violence in his histories, tragedies, and romances. The result is a thought-provoking, well-written, and often genuinely interesting study of this subject and its manifestations in Shakespeare's plays.

These three books consider, in different ways, the interrelatedness of modern directing, stage directions, and Shakespeare's texts. All three focus on Shakespeare, although two focus more on the single text of Hamlet, and all three consider how the plays are both text and performance, and how Shakespeare on the stage and Shakespeare on the page are interrelated but distinct.

Marianne McDonald's book provides a solid introduction to ancient tragedy and theatre. The author examines the works by the three major ancient Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and supplies for each playwright biographies, synopses of their works, and modern and ancient translations and adaptations of their plays. The listing of the translations and adaptations is selective and spans from the classical period up to the twentieth century.