Free summaries
Plays/Films/Dramas — page 2
99 public-domain plays/films/dramas books, summarised. Page 2 of 3.
Zanetto
Willard Gibson Day
This collection presents two distinct one-act operas—Zanetto and Cavalleria Rusticana—bound together as a souvenir libretto. While the former is a delicate, allegorical study of fleeting youth and unrequited longing, the latter is a raw, violent drama of Sicilian honor and betrayal. Together, they offer a stark…
Orthodoxy
Nina Wilcox Putnam
This one-act satire peels back the veneer of a Sunday morning church service, exposing the jarring gap between the rigid, polite rituals of a congregation and the unfiltered, often selfish, thoughts churning within their minds. It is a sharp, theatrical experiment in human honesty.
The collected works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. 09 (of 11)
Henrik Ibsen
A small Norwegian fjord town becomes the battleground where domestic tranquility collides with past ghosts, radical ideals, and the terrifying pull of the untamed sea.
The works of Thomas Middleton, Volume 3 (of 5)
Thomas Dekker
A father in disguise watches his reformed daughter struggle against debt, while a courtier duel sets off an unyielding clash of honour.
The Wonder-Working Magician
Pedro Calderón de la Barca
The hunger for forbidden knowledge leads a brilliant scholar into a pact with darkness, only to discover that the soul he bartered is tethered to a purity he cannot corrupt.
Liliom
Ferenc Molnár
A carousel barker finds his life transformed by a love he cannot articulate, leading him through a final, earthly act of violence into an afterlife of judgment.
One Day More: A Play In One Act
Joseph Conrad
The return of a long-lost son is not a celebration, but a collision between a desperate father’s obsession and the harsh reality of a wanderer’s life. This brief, haunting drama captures the inevitable friction when the illusions we hold to survive meet the people we once were.
Anathema: A Tragedy in Seven Scenes
Leonid Andreyev
A tragic spirit seeks to expose the hollowness of divine justice by testing a humble man’s capacity for love, only to find that human goodness is a flame easily extinguished by the world’s indifference.
Eyes that cannot see
Albert Theodor Gnudtzmann
A quiet, devastating drama about the blindness of parental love, this play reveals how even the most well-intentioned guardians can become the greatest obstacles to their child’s independence.
The Mortal Gods, and Other Plays
Olive Tilford Dargan
In a world of shifting power and hollow crowns, the true sovereign is the one who dares to dream of a higher justice. These plays explore the collision between ancient ambitions and the rising, unstoppable tide of human conscience.
Tannhäuser
Aleister Crowley
A seeker of the ultimate, a wanderer caught between the sacred and the profane, navigates a metaphysical journey to reconcile the disparate poles of human experience. Through the lens of a legendary minstrel, this dramatic poem probes the agonizing tension between carnal obsession and divine illumination.
The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet
Bernard Shaw
A cynical horse thief faces the hangman’s noose in the American West, only to find himself confronted by a force he cannot name, unraveling his defiance and transforming his soul.
Such is Life: A Play in Five Acts
Frank Wedekind
Deposed by a popular uprising, a proud monarch discovers that the only place left for him in his former kingdom is upon the theatrical stage.
Three Comedies
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
In the theater of late-nineteenth-century Norway, domestic life is a battlefield of hidden histories and stifled desires. These plays peel back the layers of bourgeois respectability to reveal the painful cost of maintaining appearances.
Four Short Plays
Bell, Florence Eveleen Eleanore Olliffe, Lady
These four short plays capture the domestic anxieties, social pretenses, and eccentric yearnings of early twentieth-century life with a sharp, observant wit. They offer a window into a world where private secrets and public reputations constantly collide.
The Game of Chess: A Play in One Act
Kenneth Sawyer Goodman
A ruthless governor transforms a deadly assassination attempt into a high-stakes psychological battlefield to prove his intellect remains absolute.
The collected works of Henrik Ibsen Vol. 10 (of 11)
Henrik Ibsen
A caged bird of high society trades her freedom for a respectable marriage, only to find the quiet walls of her home closing in around her like a trap.
The Dramatic Values in Plautus
Wilton W. (Wilton Wallace) Blancké
Humorless critics often misjudge the Roman playwright Plautus by holding his slapstick antics to strict standards of modern dramatic technique. In truth, his works succeed because they prioritize uninhibited public laughter over refined dramatic realism.
Fair Em
Unknown
A disguised monarch and a resilient miller’s daughter navigate a web of romantic misunderstandings, testing the true nature of nobility and devotion in a kingdom defined by shifting loyalties.
The collected works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. 03 (of 11)
Henrik Ibsen
A relentless priest demands absolute purity of will, tearing apart his own life and those of his loved ones to satisfy a God who demands everything or nothing at all.
The works of Thomas Middleton, Volume 4 (of 5)
Thomas Dekker
These plays capture the frantic, cynical, and often brutal energy of seventeenth-century London, peeling back the polished veneer of society to reveal the desperate appetites beneath.
Plays of Old Japan: The 'No'
Marie Carmichael Stopes
This volume acts as a scholarly bridge to the Nō, a centuries-old tradition of Japanese musical drama characterized by ritualized movement, mask-work, and a profound, atmospheric melancholy. Through expert commentary and translated librettos, it invites the reader into a world where the boundaries between the…
Pillars of Society
Henrik Ibsen
A town’s most respected leader builds his reputation on a foundation of silence, unaware that his carefully curated life is about to be dismantled by the ghosts of his own past.
The speaker's ideal entertainments
George M. (George Morley) Vickers
A collection of theatrical recitations and staged dialogues designed to provide amateur performers with the tools for dramatic delivery in home, school, and community settings.
There Are Crimes and Crimes
August Strindberg
The line between an innocent thought and a criminal act is thinner than we imagine, and once crossed, it can unravel a man’s world with terrifying speed.
Daddy Long-Legs
Jean Webster
An orphan girl discovers the joy of liberation and the mystery of love when an anonymous benefactor transforms her grim existence into a vibrant college life.
Numantia
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
To preserve their honor in the face of inevitable destruction, the citizens of a besieged city choose a collective death over the humiliation of Roman subjugation.
The works of Thomas Middleton, Volume 1 (of 5)
Thomas Dekker
This collection brings together five foundational dramas from the early seventeenth-century stage, showcasing a playwright’s sharp, cynical eye for the social climbers, aging fools, and desperate schemers of London life.
Criminals
George Middleton
A newlywed bride flees her hotel on her wedding night, returning to her parents' home in a state of traumatized shock. Her sudden arrival forces three people to confront the dangerous silence surrounding the realities of marriage.
Hecuba and other plays
Euripides
Torn apart by war, betrayed by allies, and hunted by relentless rival dynasties, displaced queens and surviving heirs fight for existence when every altar turns against them.
The Return of Peter Grimm
David Belasco
Bound by a well-meaning promise to a dying patriarch, a young woman faces a loveless marriage until an extraordinary spirit returns to undo his earthly mistakes.
Rustic Chivalry (Cavalleria Rusticana): Melodrama in One Act
James Cartwright Macy
A passionate Sicilian village becomes the backdrop for a swift, lethal clash between betrayed affection and traditional honor on Easter morning.
Turandot, Princess of China: A Chinoiserie in Three Acts
Carlo Gozzi
Cruel beauty meets stubborn devotion under the shadow of the Peking scaffold.
Red oleanders
Rabindranath Tagore
The red oleander is a flower of both beauty and warning, a symbol of life force intruding upon a world of cold, mechanical greed. It represents the vibrant, dangerous spirit that refuses to be suppressed by the weight of gold.
The great Galeoto
José Echegaray
The tragedy of human fallibility is rarely more piercing than when fueled by the idle, venomous tongues of others. These plays examine how the weight of collective suspicion can transform a harmless life into a ruinous catastrophe.
The Black Cat: A Play in Three Acts
John Todhunter
HOOK A portrait of modern marriage begins to fray as an artist and his wife struggle to find equilibrium within the stifling constraints of their own disillusionment.
The collected works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. 11 (of 11)
Henrik Ibsen
Three late masterpieces lay bare the ruin left behind when human warmth is sacrificed to ambition, pride, and artistic obsession.
The son of Don Juan: an original drama in 3 acts inspired by the reading of Ibsen's work entitled 'Gengangere'
José Echegaray
A man haunted by the excesses of his father finds his own future collapsing into a void of inherited ruin. This drama offers a relentless, harrowing look at the cost of a life built on vice.
The House of Rimmon: A Drama in Four Acts
Henry Van Dyke
A warrior returns from the battlefield only to face an enemy within his own house, finding that his greatest struggle is not against foreign armies, but against the suffocating grip of a corrupt religious order.
The Scarecrow
Percy MacKaye
A witch’s creation of straw and pumpkin, animated by a devilish accomplice, seeks to win a lady’s heart and expose the hollow hypocrisy of colonial society in this darkly ironic, supernatural drama.
Savva and the Life of Man: Two plays by Leonid Andreyev
Leonid Andreyev
These two plays explore the friction between the fragility of human existence and the immense, indifferent forces that govern it. They serve as a stark, uncompromising mirror to the volatility of early twentieth-century Russian life.
'And So Ad Infinitum' (The Life of the Insects): An Entomological Review, in Three Acts, a Prologue and an Epilogue
Karel Čapek
This stinging, allegorical drama uses the frantic lives of insects to mirror the darkest impulses of human society, exposing our vanity, greed, and cycle of destructive conflict.
Hadda Pada
Guðmundur Kamban
A woman of fierce resolve faces the ruins of her romantic life, choosing a final, dramatic act of liberation that echoes the strength of ancient Icelandic legends.
![Cover of Original Plays [First Series]](https://cdn.myebooksbuy.com/c/original-plays-first-series-w-s-william-schwenck-gilbert.webp)
Original Plays [First Series]
W. S. (William Schwenck) Gilbert
Human nature reveals its funniest flaws when stripped of hypocrisy. These six plays expose vanity, romance, and moral posturing through razor-sharp verse, enchanted settings, and absurd courtroom chaos.
Duologues and scenes from the novels of Jane Austen
Jane Austen
A keen ear for the natural friction between people turns quiet parlors into electric battlegrounds of ambition, pride, and comedic absurdity.
The Noble Spanish Soldier
Thomas Dekker
A king breaks his promise, a discarded lover demands justice, and an old soldier refuses to sell his soul to the court.
Modern Icelandic Plays: Eyvind of the Hills
Jóhann Sigurjónsson
These two plays offer a stark, unsparing window into the remote Icelandic landscape, where human resilience clashes with unforgiving nature and rigid social judgment. They capture the weight of isolation and the intensity of choices made in the shadow of the mountains.
The Fatal Jealousie (1673)
Payne, Henry Neville, active 1672-1710
A man’s corrosive suspicion destroys everything he holds dear, leading him into a web of manufactured deception that turns his marriage into a graveyard. This stark, violent tragedy maps the total eclipse of reason by unchecked passion.