Heiner Muller After Shakespeare makes available for the first time Macbeth and Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome, the last of the Shakespeare-inspired plays of the renowned German author to be translated into English. His reflections on the importance of his chosen dramatic model are highlighted in the text of his address Shakespeare A Difference, also included in the volume. Muller (1929-1995), whose Hamletmachine is a contemporary classic, is regarded as one of the most profound visionaries of twentieth-century drama and at the time of his death was one of Europe’s leading intellectual figures. His Shakespeare plays are startling in their imagery and poetry and uncompromising depiction of the violence of power and politics. Truly, they are plays for our age. Since first introducing his work to the English-speaking world in 1983 with Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, PAJ Publications has also published several other volumes by the author: Explosion of a Memory, The Battle, The Heiner Muller Reader. They include his dramatic works as well as poems, speeches, and interviews. Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage is one of PAJ’s best-selling titles, with over 10,000 volumes in print. The volume is translated by Carl Weber and Paul David Young. Weber has edited and translated all the Muller volumes, as well as plays by Kleist, Handke, and Kroetz. Also a director, he is professor emeritus at Stanford University. Young is the recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Paul Vogel Playwriting Award. He is currently working on a film version of his play In the Summer Pavilion.
Heiner Muller was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and will undoubtedly be among the most indispensable of the 21st, the terrors of which his plays seem to have anticipated and anatomized. As Shakespeare’s dramatic poems emerged from an historical moment of a great linguistic and cultural synthesis, Muller’s gorgeous, mind-bending and altering upgrades of Shakespeare mark our present crisis-moment of linguistic and cultural discombobulation, if not disintegration. - Tony Kushner, playwright
Heiner Muller’s unmistakable voice-ferocious and brilliant, brutal and profoun - burns through in pitch-perfect translations. Macbeth and Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome are the perfect Shakespearean vehicles for Muller’s vision of the bloody twentieth century. These plays are not just great theatre-and they are great theatre-they are indispensable documents of European culture. - Oskar Eustis, artistic director, The Public Theater
Heiner Muller’s plays, astonishing in their punch and poetry, are imbued with muscularity, richness and theatricality. His influence on the field is palpable and PAJ’s publications of brilliant translations will help to ensure that Muller’s wide-open vision of the theatre will proliferate. We urgently need his combination of the political, personal and aesthetic in our current culture. - Anne Bogart, artistic director, Siti Company
A new volume of Heiner Muller’s coruscating, deeply damaged performance prose/ poetry arrives just in time for further chapters of the continued degradation and decline of the West. His theatre pieces take on galling new dimensions as democracies all over the world are in crisis and citizens of Arab countries pour into the streets to demand self-determination…. Heiner Muller was a connoisseur of tyranny. The violence and the decay are already in the language, and thus his rendezvous with Shakespeare…. After the fire, there is space for new growth in an old forest. - Peter Sellars, director