Audiobooks online: genre "Drama", page 5

Of all Calderon's works, "Life is a Dream" may be regarded as the most universal in its theme. It seeks to teach a lesson that may be learned from the philosophers and religious thinkers of many ages—that the world of our senses is a mere shadow, and that the only reality is to b...

Troilus and Cressida is Shakespeare's "problem" play about the Trojan War. As the opening Chorus tells us, the play "begins in the middle" of the epic conflict, and counterpoints the drama of battle with the romance of the title characters. Just as Agamemnon and his Greek force...

Eugene O'Neill's drama Anna Christie was first produced on Broadway in 1921 and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1922. It focuses on three main characters: Chris Christopherson, a Swedish captain of a coal barge and longtime seaman, his daughter Anna, who has grown up separated fr...

This Victorian melodrama, written by G.H. Lewes, common law husband of novelist George Eliot (Marian Evans), featured a scandalous love triangle. The scene is set in 16th century Spain. The main character is Don Gomez del la Vega, a nobleman in service of his king battling the Mo...

Edward the Confessor is very weak and will die soon. But with no son to succeed him, who will gain the throne? The common folk and loyal Saxon barons in England want Harold, while the Norman barons and the people in Normandy, France want Duke William. They claim Edward gave Willi...

Pillars of Society was Ibsen's first successful realist drama, first performed in 1877. Karsten Bernick is the dominant businessman in a small coastal town in Norway, with interests in shipping and shipbuilding in a long-established family firm. Now he is planning his most ambiti...

The Oresteia is a trilogy by Aeschylus, one of the foremost playwrights of ancient Greece. It encompasses three plays: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Furies. It tells the tragic tale of the House of Atreus, whose inhabitants have been cursed and are doomed to play out t...

King Henry IV, Part 1 is the second of Shakespeare’s eight Wars of the Roses history plays, with events following those of King Richard II. As the play opens, King Henry IV (formerly Henry Bolingbroke) and Henry Percy (Hotspur) argue over the disposition of priso...

Although almost completely obscure today, this romantic melodrama was arguably a bigger hit for actress/playwright Anna Cora Mowatt than her theatre history-making comedy “Fashion” (1845.) Wisely cashing in on the craze for settings and characters made popular by Alexander Dumas’...

Caliban, the primitive, savage son of the witch Sycorax and the evil frog-tiger god Setebos, seeks to obtain knowledge and become civilized from a strange magician named Prospero and his young daughter, Miranda. Through fantastic visions (including of Shakespeare plays), poetry, ...

Ferdinand is an army major and son of President von Walter, a high-ranking noble in a German duke's court, while Luise Miller is the daughter of a middle-class musician. The couple fall in love with each other, but both their fathers tell them to end their affair. The President i...

Caesar and Cleopatra, a play written in 1898 by George Bernard Shaw, was first staged in 1901 and first published with Captain Brassbound's Conversion and The Devil's Disciple in his 1901 collection, Three Plays for Puritans. It was first performed at Newcastle upon Tyne on March...