A comprehensive reference presents over five hundred full essays on authors and a variety of topics, including censorship, genre, patronage, and dictionaries.

"The main interest of the play lies in its defense of Whig policies, by means of the historical parallel to Rome, thus showing why the Augustan Age was Augustan in politics as well as poetics. . . . Loftis's introduction is alone worth the purchase of the volume."-Choice

Combines, updates, and expands two earlier Salem Press reference sets: Critical survey of drama, Rev. ed., English language series, published in 1994, and Critical survey of drama, Foreign language series, published in 1986. This new 8 vol. set contains 602 essays, of which 538 discuss individual dramatists and 64 cover broad overview topics. The dramatist profiles contain more than 310 photographs and drawings.

This comprehensive study of dramatists, playwrights, historical development and genres contains individual articles on 198 dramatists in the first five volumes. Information for each dramatist includes: a listing of the dramatist's plays, with dates of first release, a survey of publications in literary forms other than drama, a critical survey of the writer's professional achievements, a biographical sketch centered on the writer's dramatic development and a critical analysis of the subject's canon, and a bibliography of criticism on the works of the dramatist. Volume 6 contains 24 essays covering dramatic genres, medieval drama, British drama, American drama, Afro-American, Australian and Irish drama, musical drama, experimental theater, television drama and acting styles. ISBN 0-89356-375-7 : $330.00 (For use only in the library).