Recommendations based on "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines"

Shakespeare’s sonnets are lyrical, haunting, beautiful, and often breathtaking, representing one of the finest bodies of poetry ever penned. They demonstrate the writer’s skill in capturing the full range of human emotions within a carefully prescribed form and creating something unique in every one. Some are familiar—Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?—others unexpected, but together they form an extraordinary meditation on the nature of love, lust, beauty, and time.

The tie-in book to the latest Shakespearean film by Kenneth Branagh, whose Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing were huge critical and popular successes. Often credited with creating a popular movie audience for Shakespeare, Kenneth Branagh has wanted for many years to bring to the screen the complete, full-length version of Hamlet, Shakespeare's greatest play."The film, like the play, will have something for everyone," he says. "Its a ghost story, a thriller, an action-packed murder mystery, and a great tragedy that is profoundly moving." With an outstanding cast of international actors--including Derek Jacobi as Claudius, Julie Christie as Gertrude, Kate Winslet as Ophelia, Charlton Heston as the Player King, Robin Williams as Osric, and Gerard Depardieu as Reynaldo--Branagh's version, in which he will play the title role as well as direct, is sure to go down in film history.This beautiful volume includes Branagh's introduction and screenplay adaptation of Shakespeare's text, color and black-and-white stills, and a production diary that takes us behind the scenes for a day-to-day look at the shooting of his film.

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.

Long before the satirical comedy of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the comic operas of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan were the hottest send-ups of the day's political and cultural obsessions. Gilbert and Sullivan's productions always rose to the level of social commentary, despite being impertinent, absurd, or inane. Some viewers may take them straight, but what looks like sexism or stereotype was actually a clever strategy of critique. Parody was a powerful weapon in the culture wars of late-nineteenth-century England, and with defiantly in-your-face sophistication, Gilbert and Sullivan proved that popular culture can be intellectually as well as politically challenging.Carolyn Williams underscores Gilbert and Sullivan's creative and acute understanding of cultural formations. Her unique perspective shows how anxiety drives the troubled mind in the Lord Chancellor's "Nightmare Song" in Iolanthe and is vividly realized in the sexual and economic phrasing of the song's patter lyrics. The modern body appears automated and performative in the "Junction Song" in Thespis, anticipating Charlie Chaplin's factory worker in Modern Times. Williams also illuminates the use of magic in The Sorcerer, the parody of nautical melodrama in H.M.S. Pinafore, the ridicule of Victorian aesthetic and idyllic poetry in Patience, the autoethnography of The Mikado, the role of gender in Trial by Jury, and the theme of illegitimacy in The Pirates of Penzance. With her provocative reinterpretation of these artists and their work, Williams recasts our understanding of creativity in the late nineteenth century.

These eight Shakespeare plays, retold in prose by British author Andrew Matthews and beautifully illustrated by Angela Barrett, make a perfect introduction to the most famous writer in the Western world. As fresh today as when they were first performed, these stories are just right for entertaining the whole family!

From the earliest days of radio to the golden age of television and beyond, Orson Welles has occupied a unique place in American culture. In Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture, Michael Anderegg considers Welles's influence as an interpreter of Shakespeare for twentieth-century American popular audiences. Exploring his works on stage, radio, and in film, Anderegg reveals Welles's unique position as an artist of both high and popular culture. At once intellectually respected and commercially viable, the Shakespeare Welles gave the American public reflects his unique genius as a writer, director, and actor. From early plays in school to the Everybody's Shakespeare books and the Mercury Text Records adaptations, Anderegg illustrates how Welles tried to transcend the barriers between the classical and the popular. He argues that "Welles the Shakespearean" sought to be a restorer as well as an innovator by drawing on his knowledge of the abundant, lowbrow popularity of Shakespeare in nineteenth-century America. Welles's three film adaptations of Shakespeare, Macbeth, Othello, and Chimes at Midnight, are examined. From his peculiarly "Scottish" version of Macbeth, to his postmodern reading of the history plays in Chimes at Midnight, Welles's interpretive strategies--and the public's reception of them--are considered. In the final chapter, Anderegg surveys Welles's work as an actor--his legacy and myth--and reexamines the common view that he squandered his talents in the era after Citizen Kane. Taking into account his non-Shakespearean roles, Anderegg shows Welles to have been a markedly "Shakespearean" actor and, in his versions of the Bard's plays, a key arbiter of culture.

A tragic epic love story before Romeo and Juliet, by one of the greatest medieval Persian romance poets, in a modern-verse English translation by Dick Davis A Penguin ClassicBased on historical characters of the seventh-century Iranian court and written 850 years ago, the narrative poem about Khosrow and Shirin shares a shelf with the most intensely romantic classic stories readers love, from Tristan and Isolde to Layla and Majnun to Romeo and Juliet to Gatsby and Daisy.The love between an Iranian prince (Khosrow) and an Armenian princess (Shirin) is at the center of this tumultuous tale in which the powers of politics and warfare intertwine with no less powerful forces of erotic desire and the quest for personal and spiritual fulfilment. Theirs is a complex love story based on conflicting concepts of love, one regarding the beloved as a prize to be conquered and possessed, the other unrequited and all-consuming, relishing the very notion of the annihilation of the self through love.Davis has captured the energy and poetry of Nezami’s original in modern verse. Davis’s introduction and textual commentary further strengthens his translation by providing insightful context for the general reader and scholar alike. Khosrow and Shirin will enchant both the classicist and the general reader, to captivate a new audience for Nezami’s masterpiece. “Before Romeo and Juliet, there was Khosrow and Shirin. The medieval Persian epic ‘Khosrow and Shirin’ is a rich and gloriously excessive love story”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post.

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.' Including some of Oscar Wilde's most well-known and infamous plays, Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, this collection of the infamous writer's works displays his brilliant, quick wit to its full glory. Wilde's pithy social comedies dissect the morals and idiosyncrasies of society in the 1890s and offer a view of the sexual politics of the time.

Richard II is one of the most enigmatic of English kings. Shakespeare depicted him as a tragic figure, an irresponsible, cruel monarch who nevertheless rose in stature as the substance of power slipped from him. By later writers he has been variously portrayed as a half-crazed autocrat or a conventional ruler whose principal errors were the mismanagement of his nobility and disregard for the political conventions of his age. This book--the first full-length biography of Richard in more than fifty years--offers a radical reinterpretation of the king. Nigel Saul paints a picture of Richard as a highly assertive and determined ruler, one whose key aim was to exalt and dignify the crown. In Richard's view, the crown was threatened by the factiousness of the nobility and the assertiveness of the common people. The king met these challenges by exacting obedience, encouraging lofty new forms of address, and constructing an elaborate system of rule by bonds and oaths. Saul traces the sources of Richard's political ideas and finds that he was influenced by a deeply felt orthodox piety and by the ideas of the civil lawyers. He shows that, although Richard's kingship resembled that of other rulers of the period, unlike theirs, his reign ended in failure because of tactical errors and contradictions in his policies. For all that he promoted the image of a distant, all-powerful monarch, Richard II's rule was in practice characterized by faction and feud. The king was obsessed by the search for personal security: in his subjects, however, he bred only insecurity and fear. A revealing portrait of a complex and fascinating figure, the book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the politics and culture of the English middle ages.

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