Recommendations based on "Hamlet: Revised Edition (The Arden Shakespeare Third Series)"

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.

Much Ado About Nothing includes two quite different stories of romantic love. Hero and Claudio fall in love almost at first sight, but an outsider, Don John, strikes out at their happiness. Beatrice and Benedick are kept apart by pride and mutual antagonism until others decide to play Cupid.

This edition of Much Ado About Nothing iis especially designed for students, with accessible on-page notes and explanatory illustrations, clear background information, and rigorous but accessible scholarly credentials. This edition includes illustrations, preliminary notes, reading lists (including websites) and classroom notes, allowing students to master Shakespeare's work.About the Series:Newly redesigned and easier to read, each play in the Oxford School Shakespeare series includes the complete and unabridged text, detailed and clear explanations of difficult words and passages, a synopsis of the plot, summaries of individual scenes, and notes on the main characters. Also included is a wide range of questions and activities for work in class, together with the historical background to Shakespeare's England, a brief biography of Shakespeare, and a complete list of his plays.

0riginating at the National Theatre of Great Britain, Amadeus was the recipient of both the Evening Standard Drama Award and the Theatre Critics Award. In the United States, the play won the coveted Tony Award and went on to become a critically acclaimed major motion picture winning eight Oscars, including Best Picture.Now, this extraordinary work about the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is available with a new preface by Peter Shaffer and a new introduction by the director of the 1998 Broadway revival, Sir Peter Hall. Amadeus is a must-have for classical music buffs, theatre lovers, and aficionados of historical fiction.

Taking a curtain call with a live snake in her wig; being painted green and cavorting naked through the Warwickshire countryside; acting opposite a child with a pumpkin on his head... these are just a few things Dame Judi Dench has done in the name of Shakespeare.In this book, Judi tells us about every Shakespearean role she's played throughout her career. Written in dialogue with fellow artist Brendan O'Hea, Judi guides us through Shakespeare's plays with incisive clarity, reveals the secrets behind her rehearsal process and invites us to share in her triumphs, disasters and backstage shenanigans.As Judi herself says 'Shakespeare is an international language, a beacon for humanity, and a bridge across cultures. Everything you have felt or are yet to feel is all in there in his plays.'

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.

Instructors and students worldwide welcomed the fresh scholarship, lively and accessible introductions, helpful marginal glosses and notes, readable single-column format, all designed in support of the goal of the Oxford text: to bring the modern reader closer than before possible to Shakespeare's plays as they were first acted. Now, under Stephen Greenblatt's direction, the editors have considered afresh each introduction and all of the apparatus to make the Second Edition an even better teaching tool.

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.

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.

In late December 1200 A.D. a merchant arrives at the tavern near the Guildhall of the Fools' Guild with a message for one the jesters. The message is brief: "Orsino is dead." Fifteen years before, the jester, using the name of Feste, secretly interceded on the Guild's behalf in a dynastic crisis in the Duchy of Orsino, thus spoiling the plans of Saladin's agent, Malvolio. These events, recorded centuries later somewhat differently in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, led to Malvolio's humiliation and his oath of revenge. Now, with the unexpected death of the Duke of Orsino, Feste suspects murder and sees the hand of Malvolio behind it. With the backing of the Guild, Feste secretly returns to Orsino disguised as a merchant, to find out what really happened to the Duke and to ferret out Malvolio. But fifteen years is a long time and Malvolio could be disguised as anyone. Only one thing is certain: Feste must uncover and foil the plot before he is found out by Malvolio, who has been planning his revenge on Feste for a long time.