Recommendations based on "A Midsummer Night's Dream: Third Series (The Arden Shakespeare Third Series)"

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By Walter Levy

This comprehensive and balanced anthology offers a collection of 25 works of modern and contemporary drama from the 1870s through the early 1990s. Features twenty-five plays that often demonstrate a significant breakthrough in maturity of expression and style for each playwright — important leaders in the development of modern and contemporary drama.

By Bernard Shaw

Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, and Saint Joan are widely considered to be three of the most important in the canon of modern British theatre

By William Faulkner

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.’Considered one of Shakespeare’s most rich and enduring plays, the depiction of its hero Hamlet as he vows to avenge the murder of his father by his brother Claudius is both powerful and complex. As Hamlet tries to find out the truth of the situation, his troubled relationship with his mother comes to the fore, as do the paradoxes in his personality. A play of carefully crafted conflict and tragedy, Shakespeare’s intricate dialogue continues to fascinate audiences to this day.

By Marjorie Garber

A brilliant and companionable tour through all thirty-eight plays, Shakespeare After All is the perfect introduction to the bard by one of the country’s foremost authorities on his life and work.Drawing on her hugely popular lecture courses at Yale and Harvard over the past thirty years, Marjorie Garber offers passionate and revealing readings of the plays in chronological sequence, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to The Two Noble Kinsmen. Supremely readable and engaging, and complete with a comprehensive introduction to Shakespeare’s life and times and an extensive bibliography, this magisterial work is an ever-replenishing fount of insight on the most celebrated writer of all time.

By Robertson Davies

amateur production of The Tempest provides a colourful backdrop for an hilarious look at unrequited love. Mathematics teacher Hector Mackilwraith, stirred and troubled by Shakespeare's play, falls in love with the beautiful Griselda Webster. When Griselda shows that she has plans of her own, Hector despairs and tries to commit suicide on the play's opening night.

By James Shapiro

Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize’s 25th Anniversary Winner of Winners awardWhat accounts for Shakespeare’s transformation from talented poet and playwright to one of the greatest writers who ever lived? In this gripping account, James Shapiro sets out to answer this question, "succeed[ing] where others have fallen short." (Boston Globe)1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England. During that year, Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen.James Shapiro illuminates both Shakespeare’s staggering achievement and what Elizabethans experienced in the course of 1599, bringing together the news and the intrigue of the times with a wonderful evocation of how Shakespeare worked as an actor, businessman, and playwright. The result is an exceptionally immediate and gripping account of an inspiring moment in history.

By William Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt, Andrew Gurr

Rediscover Shakespeare -- the working man of the theater, not the universal bard -- and rediscover his plays as scripts to be performed, not works to be immortalized. Combining the freshly edited texts of the Oxford Edition with lively introductions, this contemporary Shakespeare enables readers to see and read Shakespeare afresh.

By William Shakespeare, Peter Ackroyd

The Complete Works of Shakespeare contains the recognized canon of the bard's plays, and his sonnets and poems. The texts were edited by the late Professor Peter Alexander, making it one of the most authoritative editions, recognized the world over for its clarity and scholarship. Described in the Guardian on its first publication in 1951 as 'a symbol in the history of our national culture', the Collins edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, edited by the late Professor Peter Alexander, has long been established as one of the most authoritative editions of Shakespeare's works, and was chosen by the BBC as the basis for its televised cycle of the plays. The book starts with two specially written articles - a biography of Shakespeare by Germaine Greer and a wide-ranging introduction to Shakespeare theatre by the late Anthony Burgess. Each play is also introduced by academics from Glasgow University, where Professor Alexander undertook his editing. New to this edition is an internet resources section, providing details of the most useful Shakespeare websites. In addition, the invaluable glossary of over 2,500 entries explaining the meaning of obsolete words and phrases (complete with line references) has been expanded and redesigned to make it much easier to use.

By Northrop Frye

In A Natural Perspective, distinguished critic Northrop Frye maintains that Shakespeare's comedy is widely misunderstood and underestimated, and that the four romances - Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest - are the inevitable culmination of the poet's career. Rather than comment only on individual plays, Frye treats the comedies as a group unified by recurrent structures, devices, and images: the storm at sea, the identical twins, the heroine disguised as a boy, the retreat into the forest, the heroine with a mysterious father.

By Dan Jones

The author of Powers and Thrones and presenter of Netflix’s Secrets of Great British Castles offers a vivid account of the events that inspired Game of Thrones and Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Richard III Discover the real history behind The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses, the PBS Great Performance series of Shakespeare's plays, starring Judi Dench, Benedict Cumberbatch, Sofie Okenedo and Hugh Bonneville. The crown of England changed hands five times over the course of the fifteenth century, as two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty fought to the death for the right to rule. In this riveting follow-up to The Plantagenets, celebrated historian Dan Jones describes how the longest-reigning British royal family tore itself apart until it was finally replaced by the Tudors. Some of the greatest heroes and villains of history were thrown together in these turbulent times, from Joan of Arc and Henry V, whose victory at Agincourt marked the high point of the medieval monarchy, to Richard III, who murdered his own nephews in a desperate bid to secure his stolen crown. This was a period when headstrong queens and consorts seized power and bent men to their will. With vivid descriptions of the battles of Towton and Bosworth, where the last Plantagenet king was slain, this dramatic narrative history revels in bedlam and intrigue. It also offers a long-overdue corrective to Tudor propaganda, dismantling their self-serving account of what they called the Wars of the Roses. “If you’re a fan of Game of Thrones or The Tudors then Dan Jones’ swashbucklingly entertaining slice of medieval history will be right up your alley… Every bit as entertaining and readable as his previous blockbuster The Plantagenets.” – Daily Express