Essential Shakespeare Handbook
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Essential Shakespeare Handbook
Offering a user-friendly, beautifully illustrated guide to every play in the Shakespeare canon, as well as a portrait of the Bard's life and the world of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, theEssential Shakespeare Handbook is an innovative and entertaining book which unravels the complexities of Shakespeare's plays and poems. Written in a clear and engaging style, this book will enrich the experience of the Bard's work on the page, stage, and screen.
Drama
Julius Caesar
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Julius Caesar
Yonder Cassius has a lean and hungrylook. I do not trust him so.Features a unique cover illustration by Maurice Sendak (Wherethe Wild Things Are), specially commissioned for the Shakespeare onCompact Disc series. An introductory essay by Harvard scholar Harold Bloomaccompanies the CD.
Drama
A Midsummer Night's Dream
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
The play takes place at the summer solstice, Midsummer Eve, in Athens, where everyone is pining away for the wrong person--except Theseus, the Duke, and his fiancie, Hippolyta, whose wedding day is fast approaching. Hermia, the Duke`s daughter, is intent on marrying Lysander, although her father disapproves and threatens to force her into a nunnery if she refuses to marry his choice, Demetrius. But Demetrius loves Helena, and Lysander and Hermia plan to elope despite the Duke`s orders. Meanwhile, in a subplot, the
rude mechanicals
(or artisans) Quince, Snug, Flute, Snout, Starveling, and Bottom, are hilariously rehearsing the play PYRAMUS AND THISBE to be performed at the Duke`s wedding. As Hermia and Lysander head into the Forest of Arden to elope, with Helena and Demetrius following, the amateur acting troupe likewise takes cover in the forest to rehearse in privacy. This leads all the players into the realm of magic, presided over by the King and Queen of the Fairies, Oberon and Titania. When Oberon decides to play a trick on Titania with the aid of the juice of a magic flower that causes people to fall in love with the first person (or beast) they set eyes on, the real trouble starts. The magic is used liberally on both the humans and the fairies by the trouble-making sprite Puck, inspiring many incongruous entanglements. Unlike the other plays, there is in this case no known source for Shakespeare`s fantastic plot, though the structure is classical, beginning in the court, moving to an
uncivilized
environment, and then returning to the newly ordered world of the court. Aspects of the imagery are drawn from classic works, such as Apuleius`s THE GOLDEN ASS and Ovid`s METAMORPHOSES. From evidence in the play, like Titania`s remark about three unusually unpleasant summers in a row--documented elsewhere in England`s records--composition seems to date from 1595 or 1596, and scholarship suggests that it was first performed in honor of a court wedding, though preci
Drama
Macbeth
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Macbeth
Shakespeare's dark portrait of ambition begins when the eponymous hero, a Scottish soldier, encounters three witches, who mysteriously refer to him as the future king. As, step by step, their prophecy begins to be fulfilled, the seeds of ambition are planted not only in Macbeth but in his scheming wife, who soon is plotting the murder of Duncan, King of Scotland. This murder--and the string of killings that inevitably follow--sets in motion a series of dark deeds that torment Macbeth and Lady Macbeth with guilt, which manifests itself most pointedly when a sleepwalking Lady Macbeth attempts to wash the blood from her hands, famously uttering Out, damn'd spot! MACBETH was probably written between 1603 and 1606; it is the last of Shakespeare's major tragedies and is peculiarly concise, perhaps because Shakespeare had learned of King James's penchant for shorter works. The plot was inspired by the Chronicles of Holinshed's narrative of the reigns of Duncan and Macbeth in Scotland. Richard Burbage, one of the most prominent actors of the Elizabethan stage, is said to have originated the title role.
Drama
Hamlet
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Hamlet
Shakespeare`s classic tragedy of love, madness, and revenge was first enacted in London in 1602. Young Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is in mourning for his dead father, is visited by his father`s ghost telling him that he was murdered by his own brother, Claudius, who then assumed the throne and married Hamlet`s mother, Gertrude. Intent on revenge, Hamlet feigns madness and plots to kill Claudius. When he accidentally stabs Polonius, Claudius`s counselor, Hamlet is sent into exile--and Polonius`s
daughter, Ophelia, who had been in love with Hamlet, goes mad from grief and drowns herself. In the climax of the play, old scores are settled at last, and Hamlet`s speaks his famous last words:
The rest is silence.
Considered one of Shakespeare`s greatest plays, HAMLET is part of the well-established tradition of
revenge tragedies
that were popular at the end of the Elizabethan era, but the play transcends all its influences in its examination of justice and duty, and as a subtle portrait of a sensitive young man torn between righteous revenge and his duty as a moral man.
Drama
The Best Stage Scenes Of 2004
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The Best Stage Scenes Of 2004
Description not available.
Drama
Oedipus the King
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Oedipus the King
Washington Square Press Enriched Classics make great literature even more accessible to a new generation of readers, with expanded and updated reader's supplements and essential historical information. Oedipus the King is the 2,000-year-old masterpiece that raises basic questions about human behavior that are still vigorously debated by students and scholars. Photos and illustrations. (Poetry/Plays)
Drama
Great Monologues For Young Actors
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Great Monologues For Young Actors
Description not available.
Drama
Sweet Violence
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Sweet Violence
Critic Terry Eagleton explores the nature of tragedy, drawing on the traditional Aristotlean definition and the works of, among others, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Yeats, and Thomas Hardy, as well as more modern views of what constitutes a tragedy.
Drama