Shakespeares English

Four hundred years ago, no one bothered to write down the exact words of stage plays. Characters’ lines were scribbled on small rolls of paper (as in, an actor’s role) and passed around, but no master script was saved for the future. The main reason we’ve heard of Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, and Shakespeare himself is that a group of people made the excellent choice to preserve the plays after the Bard died. If they hadn’t created the book known as the First Folio, Shakespeare and his works would surely have been lost to history.

Spanning half a century of Elizabethan and Jacobean history and sweeping from the lowest reaches of society to the royal court, this richly textured novel tells the real story of Shakespeare in love.

It’s 1984. Patricia Vickers returns like a phantom to deliver an unwelcome revelation. Jayne Thornhill is reminded of those spiteful 1960s schooldays: bullying, Charlie the skeleton, séances, strip poker, and sexual encounters with the school’s handymen. Jayne’s confessions have now been whitewashed from lavatory walls, only to be unearthed in a third school friend’s 1969 diary.

When Nicholas Shakespeare stumbled across a trunk full of his late aunt's personal belongings, he was unaware of where this discovery would take him and what he would learn about her hidden past. The glamorous, mysterious figure he remembered from his childhood was very different from the morally ambiguous young woman who emerged from the trove of love letters, journals, and photographs, surrounded by suitors and living the precarious existence of a British citizen in a country controlled by the enemy during World War II.

Welcome to the George Inn near London Bridge; a cosy, wood-panelled, galleried coaching house a few minutes' walk from the Thames. Consider this: who else has made this their local over the last 600 years? Chaucer and his fellow pilgrims almost certainly drank in the George on their way to Canterbury. Shakespeare may have popped in from the nearby Globe, and we know that Dickens definitely did. Mail carriers changed their horses here, while sailors drank here before sailing.

So, you are stuck with having to revise Romeo and Juliet, a Shakespearean play about a lovestruck clueless couple with communication issues? In the next 30 minutes, I am going to make this revision process as pain-free as possible.

Colonel Rejas was the policeman charged with the task of capturing the Peruvian guerrilla leader Ezequiel, but having been dismissed he finds the burden of silence and secrecy too heavy. On meeting Dyer, a foreign correspondent, he is moved to relate the tortuous progress of the manhunt for the first time. The Dancer Upstairs is a story reminiscent of Graham Greene and John le Carré - tense, intricate, and heartbreaking.

The critically acclaimed author of The Fool's Tale, Nicole Galland now approaches William Shakespeare's classic drama of jealousy, betrayal, and murder from the opposite side. I, Iago is an ingenious, brilliantly crafted novel that allows one of literature's greatest villains - the deceitful schemer Iago, from the Bard's immortal tragedy, Othello - to take center stage in order to reveal his "true" motivations.

Meet Ben Dane: brilliant, devastating, devoted, honest to a fault (truly, a fault). His Broadway theater baron father is dead - but by purpose or accident? The question rips him apart. Unable to face alone his mother's ghastly remarriage to his uncle, Ben turns to his dearest friend, Horatio Patel, whom he hasn't seen since their relationship changed forever from platonic to something...other. Loyal to a fault, Horatio is on the first flight to NYC when he finds himself next to a sly tailor who portends inevitable disaster. And who seems ominously like an architect of mayhem himself.

Twelve-year-old Trish can solve tough math problems and throw a mean fastball. But because of her mom’s new job, she’s now facing a summer trying to make friends all over again in a new town. That isn’t an easy thing to do. But at her first baseball practice, Trish realizes one of her teammates is Ben, the sixth-grade math prodigy she beat in the spring Math Puzzler Championships. When a mysterious booklet of math puzzles claiming to reveal the “ultimate answer” arrives in her mailbox, Trish and Ben start to get closer and solve the puzzles together.

How can a high school girl deal with a megalomaniac? What would you do if Richard III manipulated your thoughts and took you places you didn’t want to go? Would that be any easier to take if you had a chance to meet Romeo and Juliet and Mercutio? Beth has magical powers, but will she learn how to use them in time? The immortal wizard Merlin transports high school actor Beth Owens to Shakespeare's London and the world of Shakespeare's characters in search of a missing play about King Arthur.

Shakespeare for Kids adapts and abridges Shakespeare's classic plays, presenting them in shorter versions in plain English. This conversion from Shakespearian language to today’s English, makes it easier to grasp the narrative structure of the play and appreciate Shakespeare's incredible gift for storytelling. This can be helpful for a younger audience, for those who are newer to the Shakespeare canon, and for those who simply looking for a fresh approach to the great works of Shakespeare.

Among the dramatists who wrote for the professional playhouses of early modern London was a small group of writers who were neither members of the commercial theater industry writing to make a living nor aristocratic amateurs dipping their toes in theatrical waters for social or political prestige. Instead, they were largely working- and middle-class amateurs who had learned most of what they knew about drama from being members of the audience.

He was about to be tried for treason. His gay lover had been ordered to kill him. He was trying to evade a clever inspector from the Privy Council as well as the Black Plague. And he had hired a bumbling actor named Shakespeare to front for his writings. It was obviously time for Christopher Marlowe to fake his own murder.

Bookworm Elliot Todd realizes his dream of running a bookshop in a small provincial town. Though he is yet to find his soul mate, he is for the most part contented. Then, one day, events take a dramatic turn. The death of the "Shakespeare expert" Harry Nielsen, following a talk at the bookshop, marks the beginning of a tangled web of intrigue leading to a thrilling conclusion.

Millions of words of scholarship have been expended on the world's most famous author and his work. And yet a critical part of the puzzle, Shakespeare's library, is a mystery. For four centuries people have searched for it: in mansions, palaces, and libraries; in riverbeds, sheep pens, and partridge coops; and in the corridors of the mind. Yet no trace of the Bard's manuscripts, books, or letters has ever been found.

The Bard was so incredibly prolific that even most Shakespeare scholars would welcome the occasional refresher course, and most of the rest of us haven't even got a clue as to what a petard actually is. Fear not, the best-selling authors of Homework for Grown-Ups are here to help.

A solo recording of A Midsummer Night's Dream in an American dialect.

Shakespeare often uses expressive language in his portrayal of jealousy. It is a 'green-eyed monster', an object that 'one might fight and conquer', 'an infection which strikes as quickly as the plague'. In this selection of Shakespeare stories, jealousy plays a prominent role, offering us a wonderful opportunity to learn how Shakespeare's characters are dealing with this vice.

Shakespeare was familiar with all beautiful forms and images, with all that is sweet or majestic in the simple aspects of nature and human life, of that indestructible love, and clear waters, and soft airs and sounds, and bright skies and woodland solitudes, and moon-light bowers. The writings of Shakespeare have been justly termed the richest, the purest, the fairest, that genius uninspired ever penned.