This major study reconstructs the vast history of European drama from Greek tragedy through to twentieth-century theatre, focusing on the subject of identity. Throughout history, drama has performed and represented political, religious, national, ethnic, class-related, gendered, and individual concepts of identity. Erika Fischer-Lichte’s topics include: * ancient Greek theatre* Shakespeare and Elizabethan theatre by Corneilli, Racine, Moliere* the Italian commedia dell’arte and its transformations into eighteenth-century drama* the German Enlightenment – Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, and Lenz* romanticism by Kleist, Byron, Shelley, Hugo, de Vigny, Musset, Buchner, and Nestroy* the turn of the century – Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Stanislavski* the twentieth century – Craig, Meyerhold, Artaud, O’Neill, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Muller. Anyone interested in theatre throughout history and today will find this an invaluable source of information.