Customer Reviews

The Oxford Dictionary of Plays

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This books is great for people with an academic interest in plays, or produce artful plays at theatres with an audience of 10-15 cognoscenti. It seems less useful for community theatres or colleges which produce plays that people like to see. If you want to find the first play in which a turnip was used to represent pluralism in a worker's collective, this would be a good book for you.

One problem I have with this book is that it includes all of Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare is so well documented it is hard to make a case to include his plays here. Is "Merry Wives of Windsor" really among the top 1,000 plays ever written?

Also, this book does not include all (or even many?) Pulitzer-prize or Tony award winning plays, such as William Inge's Picnic. Of the 1,000 most important plays, the 50 or so Pulitzers should be among them. Also, it doesn't seem to include a lot of the more popular plays. Another problem is that it includes a great many non-English plays.

Overall, this is great resource for people with an interest in theatrical literature from around the world.

It is a pretty good book, but not worth the full asking price. It contains plot summaries of about 500 plays, but lacks a few key plays.