“Some people make history; others make history interesting.” So begins a two-page spread in the October issue of Dramatics Magazine featuring two recent highlights from Yale’s drama list, Marc Robinson‘s The American Play and Robert Brustein‘s The Tainted Muse. Produced by the Educational Theatre Association and oriented toward practitioners in the field of performing arts, Dramatics brings an informed perspective to the analysis of Robinson’s survey and Brustein’s original re-interpretation of Shakespeare.

The lede in question refers to Robinson’s book, a wide-ranging history of American theatre that places dramatic works in context of the societies that both produced and responded to them. In his effort to “make history entertaining,” Robinson draws upon early American works from Royall Tyler and William Dunlap as well as contemporary plays by David Mamet and Edward Albee, never losing sight of the subtle details that marked the changes in staging and dramatic style through the centuries.

Brustein’s study of Shakespeare’s racial, gender, and sexual prejudices, The Tainted Muse, earns equally high marks for its ability to draw contemporary connections from the Bard’s world to ours. The Dramatics reviewer wonders how Shakespeare would respond to today’s debates over racism and homophobia and notes in Brustein’s words that, “Only when the world is totally free of prejudice will we have the right to make fundamental judgments on Shakespeare’s.”

To read excerpts from both books and to discover more works on theatre, visit the Press’s online Performing Arts catalog.