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Generally agreed to be Shakespeare's last play, THE TEMPEST was most likely written in 1610. Twelve years before the action begins, Prospero--Duke of Milan--and his daughter, Miranda, were stranded by Prospero's brother, Antonio, on a remote and idyllic island where Miranda has grown up happily among the beasts and flowers, never seeing any man but her father. Many years later, Prospero uses his powers and the help of Ariel, the sprite, to effect a shipwreck--hence the play's title--that brings Antonio to the island, along with the king of Naples and his son, Ferdinand, who promptly falls in love with Miranda. Their love story, juxtaposed with Prospero's revenge on his brother and his final act of mercy, form the basis of a simple plot. A combination of tragedy and romantic comedy, the play includes a happy ending that, finally, leans toward the latter. Unlike Shakespeare's other plays, THE TEMPEST is full of magic and exoticism and what we now think of as special effects, using evocative music and extravagant imagery to create a mood of enchantment that, nonetheless, confronts serious questions about reality and illusion. Some interpretations of the play see Prospero--who, in his dazzling last speech, renounces his magic powers--as the aging Shakespeare bidding farewell to the theater. THE TEMPEST is also interesting because its events take place in a 24-hour period. And it is, of course, the source of a famous phrase: when the sheltered Miranda first lays eyes on Ferdinand, she exclaims, Oh brave new world, that has such people in it!

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships? Dr. Faustus famously asks of Helen of Troy when he conjures her at the suggestion of his students in this major work, written in 1588. A master scholar, Faust, dissatisfied by the limitations of book learning, seeks higher knowledge through black magic, which leads to a private audience with
Mephostophilis, Satan's courier. Faust agrees to sell his soul to the devil in return for 24 years of Mephostophilis's bidding. With the dark compact sealed, the play presents the conflict
between Renaissance man's drive for knowledge and God's ultimate mystery. There is a long textual history of the character Faustus in literature, manifesting in particular as source material for Marlowe in a 1587 Frankfurt piece which describes an apparently actual Dr. Faustus, practitioner of the blackest arts.

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Presents a collection of monologues and scenes from familiar plays and books for young actors to perform.

The always surprising Harvard professor Marjorie Garber turns her attention from such topics as cross-dressing, dogs, and real estate to return to one of her more academic passions: Shakespeare. Drawing on her perennially popular lectures, Garber presents in a cogent, readable series of essays the meager available information about her subject, showing how his life and experiences informed his art, and how he changed over the years as a playwright. She then looks at the individual plays, exploring language, theme, plot, and character in a traditional and informed but highly original and illuminating work of criticism.

James was writing as a late nineteenth-century novelist. Not so very many years before this, in the 1870s, another Victorian, Edward Dowden, was the first to designate Shakespeare's Last Plays as'Romances'. By then the word had acquired a lot of semantically blurred luggage since the time it simply meant a tale in a vernacular Romantic language--'Isn't it romantic?' is not the sort of question worth going into here. The Elizabethans and Jacobeans used the word of stories but not of dramas. Shakespeare never used the word at all--not of plays, not of anything.