Over the centuries, drama has been an influential and imaginative medium for presenting, analysing and offering ways of resolving real or fictional battles. This volume provides readers with a timely study of inter-generational conflicts and crises as seen through the eyes of male and female British and Irish playwrights from the medieval period to the twenty-first century. The contributions suggest that at the heart of inter-generational discord lies various crises between (the) age(d) and youth or, more generally, the idea of what is «old» and «new». The interaction and co-existence of age and youth in their embodied, symbolic or conceptual forms is the topic of this volume. The collection is built around the words «age(d)»/«young», which denote both the biological age of the characters and the more conceptual potential of these terms. Ultimately, the contributors to this collection of essays analyse not only the idea of inter-generationality within selected dramatic works but also inter-generational conflicts seen in clashes of cultures, artistic visions, concepts and aesthetic idea(l)s.

CONTENTS: Jamie Beckett: Fergus and the Virgin in Late Medieval York: Spectators and Inter-Generational Conflict - Nizar Zouidi: «My Father is Deceas'd»: Kingship, Patriarchy and Inter-Generational Conflicts inEdward IIby Christopher Marlowe - Murat Ogutcu: Of Fathers and Sons: Inter-Generational and Intrafamilial Loyalties and Conflict in Shakespeare's Elizabethan History Plays - Ozge Ozkan-Gurcu: Once upon a Time Admired, Now Disregarded: Paternal Anguish and Loss of Authority with Old Age inThe Merchant of VeniceandKing Lear Katarzyna Bronk-Bacon: Lessons on Age(ing): Inter-Generational and Intrafamilial Conflict in Thomas Shadwell'sThe Squire of Alsatia Susanna Centlivre'sLove at a Ventureand James Miller'sThe Man of Taste Maire MacNeill: Fashionable Confrontations: DecodingThe Conscious Lovers Jess Hamlet: «Not of an Age, but for All Time»: Intergenerational Reflections of Shakespeare in Civil War Virginia - Wei H. Kao: The Anglo-Irish Big House and War Memories in Three Plays - Takeshi Kawashima: John Osborne'sLook Back in Angerand Inter-Generational Discontinuity - Onder Cakirtas:10 Semi-Patriographic and Pathographic Beckett: The Politics of Son's Writing Father and Family inEndgame Christian Jimenez: After such Knowledge: Ageing as Agency and Agony in Harold Pinter'sThe Caretaker Lisa Siefker Bailey: «Trans» Generations in Caryl Churchill'sCloud Nine Deirdre O'Leary: Discrepancies of Embodiment: The Ageing Body and Fraught Familial Narratives in Two Plays by Enda Walsh - Victoria Pettersen Lantz: «Your Generation Curse»: Kwame Kwei-Armah's Staging of West Indian Fatherhood in Britain.