This major study reconstructs the vast history of European drama from Greek tragedy through to twentieth-century theatre, focusing on the subject of identity. Throughout history, drama has performed and represented political, religious, national, ethnic, class-related, gendered, and individual concepts of identity.

Erika Fischer-Lichte's topics include:

* ancient Greek theatre
* Shakespeare and Elizabethan theatre by Corneilli, Racine, Molière
* the Italian commedia dell'arte and its transformations into eighteenth-century drama
* the German Enlightenment - Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, and Lenz
* romanticism by Kleist, Byron, Shelley, Hugo, de Vigny, Musset, Büchner, and Nestroy
* the turn of the century - Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Stanislavski
* the twentieth century - Craig, Meyerhold, Artaud, O'Neill, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Müller.

Anyone interested in theatre throughout history and today will find this an invaluable source of information.