This is third time round for the Arden Shakespeare. The first set was ground out between 1899 and 1944, and the second between 1946 and 1982 - slow going. The present new edition starts off briskly with Titus Andronicus, King Henry V and Antony...

Leslie Arden has created another masterpiece in 'The House of Martin Guerre,' which won her the Dora Award for Best New Musical in 1993. It is a musical about a French peasant farm boy who was forced into an arranged marriage in a 16th-century...

Closely identified though John Arden has become with the other young British playwrights who began writing in the late 1950s, his dramatic career has taken an entirely individual and in some ways disturbing direction. The controlled originality of his technique was the more remarkable at a time when John Osborne and Arnold Wesker, for all their uncompromising innovations in subject-matter, were still writing within conventional formal molds: and the unequivocal left-wing commitment of such writers contraste...

[John Arden is not] lacking in personal anger but he is the dramatist par excellence who translates that anger into situations of a strictly impersonal nature. Arden's characters are primarily used as representatives, and his plots bring about conflicts between social groups. His characters, of course, exist as very colourful individuals, but their personality is shaped at all times to suggest what they stand for … and add to the picture of the community as a whole. Thus, the isolated town or ...

Arden's work could generally be described as "civic" in nature; his themes are for the most part political, and his protagonists are frequently involved with the machinations of government. His plays develop characters that represent a wide spectrum of society, and his loosely linked scenes encompass a panorama that is sometimes quite vast. The preoccupation with political themes is linked with another quality—almost enigmatic. Arden's work is typified by a certain neutral...