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What Do I Read Next?
(Drama for Students)
- Thomas More's 1516 Utopia predates his fatal conflict with Henry VIII. The fictional account analyzes the ills of England before expounding upon "Utopia" ("nowhere"), a land run according to the ideals of Humanism.
- George Bernard Shaw's 1923 Saint Joan, concerns the martyrdom of Joan of Arc whose sainthood made her a misfit in her society.
- Jean Anouilh's 1969 French drama, Becket, Or the Honor of God, like T. S. Eliot's 1935 Murder in the Cathedral, tells the story of another British Christian martyr, Thomas a Becket.
- In Enemy of the People, an early (1882) play by Henrik Ibsen a town rejects and persecutes a doctor who warns the people that the town's lucrative baths are polluted.
- Plato's Apology (written between 371 and 267 BC) records Socrates's defense in his trial against the state for impiety and corrupting youth through his teachings.
- In Sophocles's Antigone (circa 400 BC), a young woman defies the king's prohibition against performing burial rites for her brother and suffers imprisonment for this act of loyalty. Jean Anouilh's 1942 adaptation of the same name is an allegory for France under Vichy rule.
- A scholarly account of the various stages of the Reformation of the English Church can be found in Christopher Haigh's 1993 English Reformation: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors.