Learn how our most abundant poet and dramatist has been moving, delighting, and enlightening readers and audiences for 400 years, with no end in sight.Lecture Titles:1. Shakespeare Then and Now2. The Nature of Shakespeare's Plays3. Twelfth Night—Shakespearean Comedy4. Twelfth Night—Malvolio in Love5. The Taming of the Shrew—Getting Married in the 1590s6. The Taming of the Shrew—Farce and Romance7. The Merchant of Venice—Courting the Heiress8. The Merchant of Venice—Shylock9. Measure for Measure—Sex in Society10. Measure for Measure—Justice and Comedy11. Richard III—Shakespearean History12. Richard III—The Villain's Career13. Richard II—The Theory of Kingship14. Richard II—The Fall of the King15. Henry IV—All the King's Men16. Henry IV—The Life of Falstaff17. Henry V—The Death of Falstaff18. Henry V—The King Victorious19. Romeo and Juliet—Shakespearean Tragedy20. Romeo and Juliet—Public Violence and Private Bliss;21. Troilus and Cressida—Ancient Epic in a New Mode22. Troilus and Cressida—Heroic Aspirations23. Julius Caesar—The Matter of Rome24. Julius Caesar—Heroes of History25. Hamlet—The Abundance of the Play26. Hamlet—The Causes of Tragedy27. Hamlet—The Protestant Hero28. Othello—The Design of the Tragedy29. Othello—“O Villainy!”30. Othello—“The Noble Moor”31. King Lear—“This Is the Worst”32. King Lear—Wisdom Through Suffering33. King Lear—“Then We Go On”34. Macbeth—“Fair Is Foul”35. Macbeth—Musing on Murder36. Macbeth—“Enter Two Murderers”

    THE ONE-STOP, SINGLE-VOLUME COMPANION TO SHAKESPEARE'S GREATEST WORKS-HIS HISTORY PLAYS, COMEDIES, TRAGEDIA, ROMANCES, AND POETRYA portrait of Shakespeare's life and times: critics, contemporaries, patrons, and the era's vibrant theater.Full commentaries on all 39 plays including detailed plot summaries, a survey of dramatic interpretations on stage and screen, and an introduction to Shakespeare's sonnets and narrative poetry.Insight into Shakespeare's unique world, including his language, his sources of inspiration, and teh secret of his enduring universal appeal.

    Bradley put Shakespeare on the map for generations of readers and students for whom the plays might not otherwise have become 'real' at all" writes John Bayley in his foreword to this edition of Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth.Approaching the tragedies as drama, wondering about their characters as he might have wondered about people in novels or in life, Bradley is one of the most liberating in the line of distinguished Shakespeare critics. His acute yet undogmatic and almost conversational critical method has—despite fluctuations in fashion—remained enduringly popular and influential. For, as John Bayley observes, these lectures give us a true and exhilarating sense of "the tragedies joining up with life, with all our lives; leading us into a perspective of possibilities that stretch forward and back in time, and in our total awareness of things."

    From the Pulitzer Prize- winning author of Glengarry Glen Ross, here is a collection of thirty-two one-act plays and short dramatic pieces that David Mamet himself considers to be some of the best writing he has ever done.

    The lifetime work of Professor Alexander Schmidt of Königsberg, this book has long been the indispensable companion for every person seriously interested in Shakespeare, Renaissance poetry and prose of any sort, or English literature. It is really two important books in one.Schmidt’s set contains every single word that Shakespeare used, not simply words that have changed their meaning since the seventeenth century, but every word in all the accepted plays and the poems. Covering both quartos and folios, it carefully distinguishes between shades of meaning for each word and provides exact definitions, plus governing phrases and locations, down to the numbered line of the Cambridge edition of Shakespeare. There is no other word dictionary comparable to this work.Even more useful to the general reader, however, is the incredible wealth of exact quotations. Arranged under the words of the quotation itself (hence no need to consult confusing subject classifications) are more than 50,000 exact quotations. Each is precisely located, so that you can easily refer back to the plays or poems themselves, if you wish context.Other features helpful to the scholar are appendixes on basic grammatical observations, a glossary of provincialisms, a list of words and sentences taken from foreign languages, a list of words that form the latter part of word-combinations. This third edition features a supplement with new findings.

    Murray Abraham on gaining an audience’s sympathy for Shylock, Sir Ben Kingsley on communicating Shakespeare’s ideas through performance, Germaine Greer on the playwright’s home life, Dame Harriet Walter on the complexity of his heroines, Brian Cox on social conflict in his time and ours, Jane Smiley on transposing King Lear to Iowa in A Thousand Acres, and Sir Antony Sher on feeling at home in Shakespeare’s language. Together these essays provide a fresh appreciation of Shakespeare’s works as a living legacy to be read, seen, performed, adapted, revised, wrestled with, and embraced by creative professionals and lay enthusiasts alike.

    With characteristic narrative panache, Ackroyd immerses us in sixteenth-century Stratford and the rural landscape–the industry, the animals, even the flowers–that would appear in Shakespeare’s plays. He takes us through Shakespeare’s London neighborhood and the fertile, competitive theater world where he worked as actor and writer. He shows us Shakespeare as a businessman, and as a constant reviser of his writing. In joining these intimate details with profound intuitions about the playwright and his work, Ackroyd has produced an altogether engaging masterpiece.

    This modern section has been overhauled to reflect the diversity of American writing since 1945. A section on 19th-century women's writing is included.

    Taking examples from the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, The Poetics introduces into literary criticism such central concepts as mimesis (‘imitation’), hamartia (‘error’), and katharsis (‘purification’). Aristotle explains how the most effective tragedies rely on complication and resolution, recognition and reversals, centring on characters of heroic stature, idealized yet true to life. One of the most powerful, perceptive and influential works of criticism in Western literary history, the Poetics has informed serious thinking about drama ever since.Malcolm Heath’s lucid English translation makes the Poetics fully accessible to the modern reader. It is accompanied by an extended introduction, which discusses the key concepts in detail and includes suggestions for further reading.

    For years, theater director Bryan Doerries has led an innovative public health project that produces ancient tragedies for current and returned soldiers, addicts, tornado and hurricane survivors, and a wide range of other at-risk people in society. Drawing on these extraordinary firsthand experiences, Doerries clearly and powerfully illustrates the redemptive and therapeutic potential of this classical, timeless art: how, for example, Ajax can help soldiers and their loved ones better understand and grapple with PTSD, or how Prometheus Bound provides new insights into the modern penal system. These plays are revivified not just in how Doerries applies them to communal problems of today, but in the way he translates them himself from the ancient Greek, deftly and expertly rendering enduring truths in contemporary and striking English.   The originality and generosity of Doerries’s work is startling, and The Theater of War—wholly unsentimental, but intensely felt and emotionally engaging—is a humane, knowledgeable, and accessible book that will both inspire and enlighten. Tracing a path that links the personal to the artistic to the social and back again, Doerries shows us how suffering and healing are part of a timeless process in which dialogue and empathy are inextricably linked.

    These pages, apparently found concealed beneath some floorboards, seemed to cast a remarkable new light on the mystery at the heart of the play. While Frayn began to lose all sense of certainty, actor David Burke, who played Niels Bohr in the London production and had some experience with documents of this sort, followed the action with particularly close interest. After the riddle was cracked and the fog had cleared, Frayn and Burke sat down together to ponder the winding trail of the Copenhagen papers.By turns comic and profound, The Copenhagen Papers explores the conundrum at the heart of all Michael Frayn's work--human fallibility and the eternal difficulty of knowing why we do what we do.

    The traditional image of Chekhov is that of the restrained artist torn between medicine and literature. But Donald Rayfield's biography reveals the life long hidden behind the noble facade. Here is a man capable of both great generosity toward needy peasants and harsh callousness toward lovers and family, a man who craved with equal passion the company of others and the solitude necessary to create his art. Based on information from Chekhov archives throughout Russia, Rayfield's work has been hailed as a groundbreaking examination of the life of a literary master.A new biography of the great author and playwright.

    The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to some of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years - from ‘The Remains of the Day' to ‘White Teeth'. A team of contemporary fiction scholars from both sides of the Atlantic has been assembled to provide a thorough and readable analysis of each of the novels in question.

    And who is funnier?"- Edna O'BrienThe cream of Flann O'Brien's comic tour-de-force, the Keats and Chapman stories began in O'Brien's column in the Irish Times. He called them "studies in literary pathology" -- monstrously tall tales that explore the very limits of the shaggy dog story. As one critic wrote, they will accumulate the fantasy to the point of sadism, and then cash home with the flat, desolating pun."The Brother" is another of O'Brien's funniest creations. He is the archetypal Dublin man -- an authority on every one of mankind's ills, from the common cold to the court case. Forget the experts, The Brother knows best."The best comic writer I can think of."- S. J. Perelman

    Wonderfully informative, this comprehensive work includes 3,000 entries and 50 illustrations covering:-EVERY PLAY, including scene-by-scene synopses, critical commentary, sources, textual commentary, and theatrical history-EVERY CHARACTER, from Aaron to Young Talbot, including those without speaking parts-THE POEMS, including the sonnets and long works in verse-ACTORS, PRODUCERS, AND DIRECTORS, including William Kempe, Charles Laughton, Sarah Bernhardt, Sir Laurence Olivier, and others who have brought the plays and characters to life over the centuries-PLACES, real and imaginary, important to Shakespeare's life and works-THEATRICAL AND LITERARY TERMS that relate to the plays and poetry-CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE, including family members, friends and colleagues, patrons, and historical figures-AUTHORS, SCHOLARS, AND PUBLISHERS of Shakespeare's works, critical studies, and histories - and much more, all in easily accessible encyclopedic format