First published in 1935, it is still being read throughout the English-speaking world and has been widely translated. Hamlet has excited more curiosity and aroused more debate than any other play ever written. Is Hamlet really mad? Does he really see his father's ghost, or is it an illusion? Is the ghost good or bad? What does it all mean? Dover Wilson brings out the significance of each part of the complex action, against the background. His analysis of the play emphasises Shakespeare's dramatic art and shows how the play must be seen and heard to be understood. This is a readable, entertaining and scholarly book.

    Synge is most famous for the riots provoked by his 1907 play The Playboy of the Western World and, indeed, this was neither the first nor the last time that Synge's dramas incited passionate disagreements. But, one hundred years on, it's clear that his writings are amongst Ireland's most brilliant and significant, as well as controversial. Here, for the first time, a single volume collects all of Synge's published plays, including 'Playboy', along with his Poetry and Translations, and the prose works that detail his travels in The Aran Islands, in Wicklow, in Kerry and in Connemara. These are works of lasting and universal value, bringing together the sensibilities of Romanticism and Modernism, and arguing passionately for the freedom of the imagination. At the outset of the twentieth century, they not only gripped audiences with their drama, poetry and humour, they also shaped discussions about the formation of the Irish nation. Now, reading these works together in one volume reveals Synge's value system and shines a penetrating light on a key period in Irish history. A new introduction by Aidan Arrowsmith, of Manchester Metropolitan University, explains Synge s relationship to the intense political turmoil out of which his writing emerged.