James Armstrong, Playwright

Edmund Kean has been called the greatest actor of the Romantic era, perhaps even the greatest actor of all time. (Kean wouldn't disagre...

Today, February 25th, is the anniversary of the so-called "Battle of Hernani " when partisans for and against Victor Hugo fought i...

 I recently finished Sharon Marcus's delightful book The Drama of Celebrity . Focusing on the career of legendary actress Sarah Bernhard...

Monday night, I went to a reading at the historic St. Peter's Church in Chelsea of the new play called MONSTERS SPEAK . The piece is a...

On this date in 1830, theatre patrons at the Comedie-Francaise in Paris fought the famed Battle of Hernani . While there were no swords, m...

Three books, all with the same title, Romanticism , deal with the same topic. Indeed, all employ the same key word in discussing the art and...

In 1829, the French poet Alfred de Vigny asked the following question: Will the French stage be receptive or not to a modern tragedy which...

What was it like for playwrights during the French Revolution? Though he wasn't born until 1801, the critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuv...

Anne Louise Germaine Necker was an odd fish. Her parents were Swiss Protestants who settled in Paris in the mid-eighteenth century. The year...

I've been reading Marvin Carlson's book The Haunted Stage . His central thesis is that while all literary texts bring up recollectio...