Antony and Cleopatra (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series)

Antony and Cleopatra (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series)

William Shakespeare

Theatre / Classics / Poetry

John Wilders - literary advisor to the BBC TV Shakespeare series - brings thorough scholarship and a practical understanding of performance needs to this new edition. Clarity, accessibility and rigour are the hallmarks of an edition which will provide invaluable guidance for all its readers. "This edition has a very helpful introduction and good clear text, as well as the exceptionally excellent and detailed notes." Dr Michael Herbert, St Andrews University ''a useful treatment of a complex play'Barry Gaines, University of New Mexico, Shakespeare Quarterly **
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The Oxford Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part 2 (Oxford World's Classics)

The Oxford Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part 2 (Oxford World's Classics)

William Shakespeare

Theatre / Classics / Poetry

This edition offers a fully modernized text of one of Shakespeare's most fascinating plays. *Henry IV, Part 2* is the only play in the canon whose structure almost exactly mirrors that of its predecessor, and thereby affords unique perspectives on Shakespeare's art and craft. Far from being the impoverished country cousin of an illustrious work, *Part 2* introduces unforgettable new characters like Pistol and Shallow, and memorable minor players such as Doll Tearsheet and the reluctant Goucestershire recruits. Above all, it gives us more Falstaff. Although he is now politically distanced from Hal, he looms larger than ever as a mischievous figure who never ceases to fascinate with his unique blend of native wit, inventiveness, and corruption. Through a radical reconsideration of the play's text(s) and date, it is argued here for the first time that the character of Falstaff was called Oldcastle in *Part 2* as well as in as in *Part 1*, and that it was the vetting of *Part 2* for the 1596-7 Christmas performances at Court which led to the change of name in both plays. This edition moreover takes the view that the Folio-only passages in the play reflect the text of the original prompt-book. **
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Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens

Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens

William Shakespeare

Theatre / Classics / Poetry

** *“These words are razors to my wounded heart.”* ** **—Titus Andronicus** ** ** ** *“We have seen better days.”* ** **—Timon of Athens** Eminent Shakespearean scholars Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen provide fresh new editions of the two great tragedies: *Titus Adronicus, *a graphic story of revenge, and* Timon of Athens*, a cautionary tale about false friends and unearned loyalty. **THIS VOLUME ALSO INCLUDES MORE THAN A HUNDRED PAGES OF EXCLUSIVE FEATURES:** • original Introductions to *Titus Andronicus *and* Timon of Athens* • incisive scene-by-scene synopsis and analysis with vital facts about the work • commentary on past and current productions based on interviews with leading directors, actors, and designers • photographs of key RSC productions • an overview of Shakespeare’s theatrical career and chronology of his plays Ideal for students, theater professionals, and general readers, these modern and accessible editions from the Royal Shakespeare Company set a new standard in Shakespearean literature for the twenty-first century. *From the Trade Paperback edition.*
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King John/Henry VIII (Signet Classics)

King John/Henry VIII (Signet Classics)

William Shakespeare

Theatre / Classics / Poetry

Two of Shakespeare's important and illuminating history plays in a comprehensive and scholarly update. This edition includes a discussion and criticism of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by outstanding scholars past and present, stage histories of notable actors, directors, and producers, and clear, readable text and commentaries. **
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The Tempest

The Tempest

William Shakespeare

Theatre / Classics / Poetry

This joyous play, the last comedy of Shakespeare's career, sums up his stagecraft with a display of seemingly effortless skill. Prospero, exiled Duke of Milan, living on an enchanted island, has the opportunity to punish and forgive his enemies when he raises a tempest that drives them ashore—as well as to forestall a rebellion, to arrange the meeting of his daughter, Miranda, with an eminently suitable young prince, and, more important, to relinquish his magic powers in recognition of his advancing age. Richly filled with music and magic, romance and comedy, the play's theme of love and reconciliation offers a splendid feast for the senses and the heart. Source: randomhouse.com
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A Very Old Man

A Very Old Man

Italo Svevo

Fiction / Theatre

A newly translated collection of fiction by the influential Italian modernist, continuing on his landmark work Zeno's Conscience.A Very Old Man collects five linked stories, parts of an unfinished novel that the great Triestine Italo Svevo wrote at the end of his life, after the international success of Zeno’s Conscience in 1923. Here Svevo revisits with new vigor and agility themes that fascinated him from the start—aging, deceit, and self-deception, as well as the fragility, fecklessness, and plain foolishness of the bourgeois paterfamilias—even as memories of the recent, terrible slaughter of World War I and the contemporary rise of Italian fascism also cast a shadow over the book’s pages. It opens with “The Contract,” in which Zeno’s manager, the hardheaded young Olivi, expresses, like the war veterans who were Mussolini’s early followers, a sense of entitlement born of fighting in the...
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Oedipus Trilogy

Oedipus Trilogy

Sophocles

Theatre / Poetry

Oedipus the King is Sophocles' legendary rendition of the myth of the great king Oedipus, perhaps the best known of all of the Greek Tragedies. When an oracle foretells that the young prince Oedipus will grow up to murder his father he is cast out of the kingdom by the king who hopes by doing so that he will avoid his fate. Oedipus grows up and many years later, not knowing his own identity, or the identity of his father, meets him at a crossroad where they argue and the king is killed. The rest of the tale pivots around the unraveling of this tangled family history and the appalling discovery of, not only patricide, but Oedipus' subsequent incest in unwittingly marrying his own mother. Contains Oedipus The King, Oedipus At Colonus, and Antigone.
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Krapp's Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces

Krapp's Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces

Samuel Beckett

Literature & Fiction / Theatre / Poetry

s/t: All That Fall; Embers; Acts Without Words, I and II; Mimes This collection of Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett’s dramatic pieces includes a short stage play, two radio plays, and two pantomimes. The stage play Krapp’s Last Tape evolves a shattering drama out of a monologue of a man who, at age sixty-nine, plays back the autobiographical tape he recorded on his thirty-ninth birthday. The two radio plays were commissioned by the BBC; All That Fall “plumbs the same pessimistic depths [as Waiting for Godot] in what seems a no less despairing search for human dignity” (London Times), and Embers is equally unforgettable theater, born of the ramblings of an old man and his wife. Finally, in the two pantomimes, Beckett takes drama to the point of pure abstraction with his portrayals of, in Act Without Words I, frustrated desired, and in Act Without Words I, corresponding motions of living juxtaposed in the slow despair of one man and the senselessly busy motion of another.
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Confessions of Zeno

Confessions of Zeno

Italo Svevo

Fiction / Theatre

'Italy's first modernist ... a marvellous writer, unjustly neglected. Svevo is a master.' - The New YorkerThe cult classic discovered and championed by James Joyce, Confessions of Zeno is a miracle of psychological realism from one of the most important figures in modern Italian literary history. A hymn to self-delusion and procrastination, long hailed as a seminal work of modernism in the tradition of Joyce, Musil, Proust and Kafka.When the vain, obsessive and guilt-ridden Zeno seeks help for his neuroses, his psychoanalyst suggests he writes his memoirs as a form of therapy. Zeno's account is an alternative reality, a series of elliptical episodes dealing with the death of his father, his career, his marriage and affairs, and, above all, his passion for smoking and his spectacular failure to resist the promise of that last cigarette. Zeno's adventures rise to antic heights in this pioneering psychoanalytic novel, as his restlessly...
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Hapgood

Hapgood

Tom Stoppard

Theatre

With his characteristically brilliant wordplay and extraordinary scope, Tom Stoppard has in Hapgood devised a play that "spins an end-of-the-Cold-War tale of intrigue and betrayal, interspersed with explanations of the quixotic behavior of the electron and the puzzling properties of light" (New York Times). It falls to Hapgood, an extraordinary British intelligence officer, to try to unravel the mystery of who is passing along top-secret scientific discoveries to the Soviets, but as she does so, the web of personal and professional betrayals―doubles and triples and possibly quadruples―continues to multiply.
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Hapgood: A Play

Hapgood: A Play

Tom Stoppard

Theatre

With his characteristically brilliant wordplay and extraordinary scope, Tom Stoppard has in Hapgood devised a play that "spins an end-of-the-cold-war tale of intrigue and betrayal, interspersed with explanations of the quixotic behavior of the electron and the puzzling properties of light" (David Richards, The New York Times). It falls to Hapgood, an extraordinary British intelligence officer, to try to unravel the mystery of who is passing along top-secret scientific discoveries to the Soviets, but as she does so, the web of personal and professional betrayals—doubles and triples and possibly quadruples—continues to multiply.
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T. S. Eliot the Poems, Volume 2

T. S. Eliot the Poems, Volume 2

T. S. Eliot

Poetry / Theatre / Literary Criticism

The Poems of T. S. Eliot is the authoritative edition of one of our greatest poets, scrupulously edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. It provides, for the first time, a fully scrutinized text of Eliot's poems, carefully restoring accidental omissions and removing textual errors that have crept in over the full century in which Eliot has been so frequently printed and reprinted. The edition also presents many poems from Eliot's youth which were published only decades later, as well as others that saw only private circulation in his lifetime, of which dozens are collected for the first time. To accompany Eliot's poems, Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue have provided a commentary that illuminates the creative activity that came to constitute each poem, calling upon drafts, correspondence and other original materials to provide a vivid account of the poet's working processes, his reading, his influences and his revisions. The first volume respects Eliot's...
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