Shakespeares English

Mistaken identities, jealous relatives, lovers' quarrels and a happy ending... Discover the entertaining story at the heart of Much Ado About Nothing, one of Shakespeare's best-loved comedies. As well as the story, this audiobook contains information about the background to Much Ado About Nothing, its major themes, language, and Shakespeare's life during the time he was writing the play. Gossip, and its role in society in 16th century England, is also examined, to give some context in which the play was written.

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.

In England in the Age of Shakespeare, Jeremy Black takes readers on a tour of life in the streets, homes, farms, churches, and palaces of the Bard’s era. Panning from play to audience and back again, Black shows how Shakespeare's plays would have been experienced and interpreted by those who paid to see them. From the dangers of travel to the indignities of everyday life in teeming London, Black explores the jokes, political and economic references, and small asides that Shakespeare’s audiences would have recognized.

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.

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.

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.

This collection of Shakespeare tales focuses on themes of revenge, opening with Hamlet, the greatest revenge play of all time, one of the finest examples of revenge that a young man plans for the murder of his father. This collection of Shakespeare adaptations also includes Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice, each offering a unique perspective on the psychology of revenge.

In Shakespeare plays the tragic and the comic often fade into each other, turning into a harmonious blending of these two elements. Shakespeare takes a special delight in the employment of such harmonies. His tragedies never fail having their comic interludes, and his comedies often have a serious undertone. Still, the comic is not the tragic, and in this collection we offer some of the more humorous and witty tales from Shakespeare. The following Shakespeare adaptations are included here: A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It and Measure for Measure.

The Tragedy of Julius Caesar is a historical play and tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1599. It is one of several plays, including Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra, that were written by Shakespeare based on true events from Roman history.

Star-crossed lovers. Naughty Greeks getting up to mischief in the woods. Scottish kings losing their minds. Young men with daddy issues. Dads who just need some positive affirmation from their daughters*. (*Okay, that's maybe putting it a bit mildly) But when Imogen brings 14 amateur actors together to perform one of the Bard's great works in a bid to save their local community centre, it becomes apparent that she - or anyone who reads this book for that matter - will never see Shakespeare's greatest works in the same light again...

After a truly incredible evening in her professor's college office, Sally finds herself having lunch at an expensive restaurant with this almost impossibly glamorous woman. When Sally, 20, points out in a whisper that they have never actually kissed, her blue-eyed professor suggests a very special kind of kiss, right there in the restaurant. Sally is hugely embarrassed and excited to realize that her professor, 36, actually means to suggest that Sally hide under the dining table.