Dramatic Analysis: A Reader on Western Drama is a combined play-analysis textbook and course companion that contains 22 essays on major playwrights from the European and American theaters: among them, Ibsen, Shaw, Brecht, Strindberg, Pinter, O'Neill, Williams, Miller, Mamet, Moliere, and Shakespeare. The canonical plays treated include A Streetcar Named Desire, Long Day's Journey into Night, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Mother Courage and Her Children, Death of a Salesman, The Birthday Party, Glengarry Glen Ross, Riders to the Sea, The Ghost Sonata, and Tartuffe. Supplementing this book's essays there is a critical apparatus consisting of A Step-by-Step Approach to Dramatic Analysis, a Glossary of Dramatic Terms, Study Guides, Topics for Writing and Discussion, and bibliographies. Written with college students in mind (and possibly also advanced high school students), the critical essays in this book thus cover some of the central plays treated in courses on Euro-American drama, and will provide students with practical models to help them improve their own writing and analytical skills. The author is a "close reader" committed to a detailed yet objective examination of the structure, style, imagery, and language of a play. Moreover, he is concerned chiefly with dramatic analysis that can be of benefit not only to playreaders and theatergoers, but also to directors, designers, and even actors-that is, with analysis of character, action, dialogue, and setting that can be translated into concepts for theatrical production, or that can at least provide the kind of understanding of a play with which a theater practitioner could fruitfully quarrel."