The Companion plots continuities and discontinuities, innovations, and resistances to the new. Its authoritative contributions highlight different treatments of realist conventions, investigate anti-realist experiments, and examine representations of war, terrorism, comedy, trauma and sexuality by playwrights from Shaw and Wilde to the present. Contributors also discuss the contending forces that have influenced the construction of the modern dramatic canon, engaging with contemporary discourses that challenge the dominance of London as well as of white English males and realism.