Shakespeare for the wiser sort
Shakespeare for the wiser sort

Author: Steve Sohmer

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2018-07-30

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1526135124

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William Shakespeare’s plays are riddled with passages, scenes and sudden plot twists which baffle and confound the most devoted playgoer and the most attentive commentator. Why, for example, didn’t Hamlet succeed to the throne of Denmark at the instant of his father’s death? (It’s not because the Danish throne was elective.) Why does Chorus in Romeo and Juliet promise his audience ‘two houres trafficke of our stage’ when the play obviously runs almost three hours? How is it that Old Hamlet sent his son to school in (Protestant) Wittenberg but his Ghost was sent to (Catholic) Purgatory? and is there cause-and-effect here? How can Lancelot Gobbo be correct (and he is) when he claims Black Monday (the day after Easter) and Ash Wednesday (the 41st day before Easter) once fell on the same day? And what is a ‘dram of eale’? This engaging and lucid book solves these tantalizing riddles and many others.

Shakespeare for the Wiser Sort
Shakespeare for the Wiser Sort

Author: Stephen T. Sohmer

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13:

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William Shakespeare's plays are riddled with passages, scenes and sudden plot twists which baffle and confound the most devoted playgoer and the most attentive commentator. Why, for example, didn't Hamlet succeed to the throne of Denmark at the instant of his father's death? (It's not because the Danish throne was elective.) Why does Chorus in Romeo and Juliet promise his audience "two houres trafficke of our stage" when the play obviously runs almost three hours? And what is a "dram of eale"? This engaging and lucid book solves these tantalizing riddles and many others.

Of Human Kindness
Of Human Kindness

Author: Paula Marantz Cohen

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2021-02-09

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 0300258321

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An award-winning scholar and teacher explores how Shakespeare's greatest characters were built on a learned sense of empathy While exploring Shakespeare's plays with her students, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that teaching and discussing his plays unlocked a surprising sense of compassion in the classroom. In this short and illuminating book, she shows how Shakespeare's genius lay with his ability to arouse empathy, even when his characters exist in alien contexts and behave in reprehensible ways. Cohen takes her readers through a selection of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice, to demonstrate the ways in which Shakespeare thought deeply and clearly about how we treat "the other." Cohen argues that only through close reading of Shakespeare can we fully appreciate his empathetic response to race, class, gender, and age. Wise, eloquent, and thoughtful, this book is a forceful argument for literature's power to champion what is best in us.

William Shakespeare's Star Wars
William Shakespeare's Star Wars

Author: Ian Doescher

Publisher: Quirk Books

Published: 2013-07-09

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1594746559

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The New York Times Best Seller Experience the Star Wars saga reimagined as an Elizabethan drama penned by William Shakespeare himself, complete with authentic meter and verse, and theatrical monologues and dialogue by everyone from Darth Vader to R2D2. Return once more to a galaxy far, far away with this sublime retelling of George Lucas’s epic Star Wars in the style of the immortal Bard of Avon. The saga of a wise (Jedi) knight and an evil (Sith) lord, of a beautiful princess held captive and a young hero coming of age, Star Wars abounds with all the valor and villainy of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. Authentic meter, stage directions, reimagined movie scenes and dialogue, and hidden Easter eggs throughout will entertain and impress fans of Star Wars and Shakespeare alike. Every scene and character from the film appears in the play, along with twenty woodcut-style illustrations that depict an Elizabethan version of the Star Wars galaxy. Zounds! This is the book you’re looking for.

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness
Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness

Author: Rhodri Lewis

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 0691204519

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'Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness' is a radical new interpretation of the most famous play in the English language. By exploring Shakespeare's engagements with the humanist traditions of early modern England and Europe, Rhodri Lewis reveals a 'Hamlet' unseen for centuries: an innovative, coherent, and exhilaratingly bleak tragedy in which the governing ideologies of Shakespeare's age are scrupulously upended.

Wise Children
Wise Children

Author: Angela Carter

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-10-17

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 1786826925

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In Brixton, Nora and Dora Chance – twin chorus girls born and bred south of the river – are celebrating their 75th birthday. Over the river in Chelsea, their father and greatest actor of his generation Melchior Hazard turns 100 on the same day. As does his twin brother Peregrine. If, in fact, he's still alive. And if, in truth, Melchior is their real father after all... Wise Children is adapted for the stage from Angela Carter's last novel about a theatrical family living in South London. It centres around twin chorus girls, Nora and Dora Chance, whose lives are brimming with mystery, illegitimacy and scandal. Dora narrates the story as her older self, looking back on a tumultuous life, throughout which she and her sister have loved to sing and dance. A big, bawdy tangle of theatrical joy and heartbreak, Wise Children is a celebration of show business, family, forgiveness and hope. Expect show girls and Shakespeare, sex and scandal, music, mischief and mistaken identity – and butterflies by the thousand.

To Play the Fool
To Play the Fool

Author: Laurie R. King

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2014-01-07

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1250046580

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The first cremation the homeless people held in Golden Gate Park was for a dog; their second pyre held a much larger body. To find the one responsible for these deaths, Kate Martinelli sets out on a quest for Brother Erasmus -- an enigmatic creature who has befriended the homeless and speaks only in quotations.