This course examines plays written in the latter part of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth. You will study a minimum of eight plays selected from works written in English by Wilde, Synge, O'Casey, Yeats, Shaw, and O'Neill, as well as from works in translation by Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, and Pirandello. There will be an emphasis on cultural and social issues relating to gender, class, and nationality, as well as attention to dramatic traditions (such as realism, naturalism, symbolism and expressionism) and staging.