hosen and Introduced by Andrew Parkin The fourth volume of the Irish Drama Selections series (ISSN 0260-7962), General Editors: Joseph Ronsley and Ann Saddlemyer. 21.6 x 13.8 cm. 416 pp. 2009 2nd, enlarged edition Contains: London Assurance, The Corsican Brothers, The Octoroon, The Colleen Bawn, The Shaughraun, Robert Emmet, bibliographical checklist. plus Boucicault's "'Canterin' Jack' - A Sketch from Life. How The Shaughraun was originated'. Dion Boucicault was a prominent playwright and prolific adapter of foreign plays and novels. He is known and loved especially for his high melodrama. Extremely popular on the Victorian commercial theatre for over forty years, his plays today still provide enjoyment to all audiences Born in Dublin, he achieved his first West End success with London Assurance in 1841. His work frankly catered to contemporary taste and fell rapidly into neglect after his death in 1890, but his lively observation of humanity in many moods, and his unerring sense of what works on the stage, have led his plays in recent years to successful revivals in Dublin, Belfast, Chichester and London, perhaps the most notable being the National Theatre's production of The Shaughraun starring Stephen Rea in the title role.

Chosen and Introduced by Christopher Murray The fifteenth volume of the Irish Drama Selections series (ISSN 0260-7962), General Editors: Joseph Ronsley and Ann Saddlemyer. 21.6 x 13.8cm. Contains The Retrievers (hitherto unpublished), Professor Tim, The New Gossoon, The Passing Day, The Rugged Path, and The Summit, bibliographical checklist. George Shiels (1886-1949) was one of the most prolific and most successful playwrights in the history of the Abbey Theatre. Before his debut at the Abbey, Shiels's early work was staged by the Ulster Literary Theatre in Belfast and later on his work was taken up by the dynamic Group Theatre, also in Belfast. As a Northerner, Shiels embraced the whole island in his work, his use of dialect and his characterisation. Moreover, while his plays were broadly popular and wonderfully well suited to the acting talents of theatre companies North and South, his all-Ireland perspective lent his work a keen critical edge masked by easy realism and hilarious comedy. Nowadays, we turn to the dark comedy of a play like The Passing Day to re-adjust our view of Shiels and to see his plays as seriously concerned with the land question and issues of identity, gender and the law in post-colonial Ireland. From that perspective, The New Gossoon and in particular The Rugged Path (which in 1940 broke all previous box-office receipts at the Abbey, when the production played for an unprecedented twelve weeks, all previous plays having been limited to two) challenge us to look again at Shiels and see him as public commentator as well as consummate entertainer.

Chosen and Introduced by Christopher Murray The first volume of the Irish Drama Selections series (ISSN 0260-7962), General Editors: Joseph Ronsley and Ann Saddlemyer. ISBN: 0-86140-087-9 / 978-0-86140-087-4 £25.00 Paperback ISBN: 0-86140-088-7 / 978-0-86140-088-1 £9.95 Contains: Patriots, The Whiteheaded Boy, Crabbed Youth and Age, The Big House, Drama at Inish, Church Street, bibliographical checklist. Lennox Robinson was one of the leading playwrights of Dublin's Abbey Theatre as well as being its general manager and a director for many years. As with many other playwrights of the twentieth century, his work has been unjustly neglected, this volume, published in 1982, being the first of his plays to have appeared for over a quarter of a century. It is fitting, therefore, that this selection should be the first of a new series, Irish Drama Selections, which has sought to remedy the shortage of texts of the work of Ireland's dramatists, which with the exception of perhaps ten authors, are virtually unobtainable except in rare editions, long out of print.