Since World War II  Hugo von Hofmannsthal has regained his place as a classic of modern  European literature.  The translations collected here-Death and the  Fool, Electra, and The Tower represent different periods and interests in his career as a dramatist. Yet, as the critical introduction on Hofmannsthal's tragic theater indicates, all three plays, written in different theatrical idioms, reveal a unified and developing conception of man's estate in the modern world.  

Hofmannsthal rejected the current fashions of the modern stage but was  nonetheless a keen observer of his time. His deliberate indebtedness to  the great theaters of the past allowed him to enlarge the scope of his  own dramaturgy and to use a more articulate language than that afforded  by the conventions of the modern realistic theater.

This book includes the 1927 theater version of Hofmannsthal's last great work, The Tower, available for the first time in English translation.