James Armstrong, Playwright

After the critical reception of his comedy The School for Wives , the French dramatist  Molière wrote two one-act defenses of himself, The ...

The 18th-century French actress Hippolite Clairon was famous for her portrayal of classic heroines, but she also inspired contemporary drama...

Arthur Murphy was a successful playwright of the 18th century. He adapted Voltaire 's The Orphan of China (itself an adaptation of the ...

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

The novelist Marie-Henri Beyle, better known as Stendhal, the author of The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma , also wrote so...

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

The Birth of Athenian Drama Though theatre historians regularly talk about "Greek drama," all of the extent plays from ancie...

            In the 1660s and 1670s, Jean Racine wrote a series of plays, mostly on classical subjects, that included such admired works as ...