The Drama Handbook: A Guide to Reading Plays

John Lennard & Mary Luckhurst

(Oxford, £12.99)

Years after the parodic question "How many children had Lady Macbeth?", it is still often assumed that there is an off-the-page essence to a theatrical character. But, as Lennard and Luckhurst insist, outside the theatre Lady Macbeth is only a bunch of lines in a play-text: she becomes a "character" only through an actor's performance. The book's broader message is that, when consulting the text of a play, we must remember to look up through the window at the wide, rolling vistas of hors-texte. The history of theatrical conventions, stage mechanics and design is illuminated with strong close readings of excerpts from Shakespeare, Ibsen and Beckett; nor are we to forget theatre as collaborative commerce - the roles of directors and dramaturgs, the skills of lighting designers, and the situation of play-texts in the book trade. A final section is devoted particularly to student essays; the whole could be read with profit and pleasure by any theatregoer.

Hidden Minds: A History of the Unconscious

Frank Tallis

(Profile, £16.99)

Freud did not, apparently, "discover" the unconscious; he nicked the idea from a Frenchman, Pierre Janet. Tallis fleshes out his good scientific story, of the psychoanalytic tradition and modern advances in neuroscience, with dodgy old anecdotes about how Mozart, Goethe and Coleridge found works of genius popping unbidden and whole into their heads. In the end, he doesn't manage to show that the fact of unconscious processes in the brain equates to the existence of a monolithic Unconscious mind.

Beethoven's Piano Sonatas

Charles Rosen

(Yale, £20)

In this sparkling "short companion", Rosen guides the listener through both musical structures and knotty performance decisions. His demonstration, for instance, of why Beethoven recommended a particular fingering for a passage, and why changing that fingering affects the music, is a tour de force of technical and aesthetic synthesis. You will find no mimsy evocations of Beethoven's emotions herein, rather gently comic warnings along these lines: "Classical music has become a more pretentious part of culture... and playing a Beethoven Adagio very slowly is a way of making the public aware that they are undergoing a deeply spiritual experience." A CD on which Rosen himself plays completes a gorgeous package.