Read Shakespeare’s plays in all their brilliance—and understand what every word means!

Don’t be intimidated by Shakespeare! These popular guides make the Bard’s plays accessible and enjoyable.

Each No Fear guide contains:

• The complete text of the original play
• A line-by-line translation that puts the words into everyday language
• A complete list of characters, with descriptions
• Plenty of helpful commentary

The Shakespeare Book is the perfect primer to the works of William Shakespeare, packed with witty illustrations and inspirational quotes.

This bold book covers every work, from the comedies of Twelfth Night and As You Like It to the tragedies of Julius Caesar and Hamlet, plus lost plays and less well-known works of poetry. Easy-to-understand graphics and illustrations bring the themes, plots, characters and language of Shakespeare to life, including illustrated timelines which offer an at-a-glance summary of the action for each play. With detailed plot summaries and an in-depth analysis of the major characters and themes, this is a brilliant, innovative exploration of the entire canon of Shakespeare plays, sonnets and poetry.

Whether you're a Shakespeare scholar or a student of the great Bard, The Shakespeare Book offers a fuller appreciation of his phenomenal talent and lasting legacy.

Shakespeare everyone can understand--now in new DELUXE editions! Why fear Shakespeare? By placing the words of the original play next to line-by-line translations in plain English, these popular guides make Shakespeare accessible to everyone. They introduce Shakespeare's world, significant plot points, and the key players. And now they feature expanded literature guide sections that help students study smarter, along with links to bonus content on the Sparknotes.com website. A Q&A, guided analysis of significant literary devices, and review of the play give students all the tools necessary for understanding, discussing, and writing about Othello. The expanded content includes: Five Key Questions: Five frequently asked questions about major moments and characters in the play. What Does the Ending Mean?: Is the ending sad, celebratory, ironic . . . or ambivalent? Plot Analysis: What is the play about? How is the story told, and what are the main themes? Why do the characters behave as they do? Study Questions: Questions that guide students as they study for a test or write a paper. Quotes by Theme: Quotes organized by Shakespeare's main themes, such as love, death, tyranny, honor, and fate. Quotes by Character: Quotes organized by the play's main characters, along with interpretations of their meaning.

An introductory guide to "King Lear" in performance offering a scene-by-scene theatrically aware commentary, contextual documents, a brief history of the text and first performances, case studies of key productions, a survey of film and TV adaptations, a sampling of critical opinion and annotated further reading.

Paul Hammond explores how sexual relationships between men were represented in English literature during the seventeenth century. Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester is built around two principal themes: firstly the literary strategies through which writers created imagined spaces for the expression of homosexual desire; and secondly the ways in which such texts were subsequently edited and adapted to remove these references to sex between men. The author begins with a wide-ranging analysis of the forms in which both homosexual desire and homophobic hatred were expressed in the period, focusing on the problems of defining male relationships, the erotic dimension to male friendships, and the uses of classical settings. Subsequent chapters offer four case studies. The first focuses on how Shakespeare adapted his sources to introduce the possibility of sexual relations between male characters, with special attention to Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, and the Sonnets, and shows how these elements were removed in later adaptations of his plays and poems. Subsequent chapters chart the often satirical representation of homosexual rulers from James I to William III; the ambiguous sexuality figured in the poetry of Andrew Marvell; and the libertine homoeroticism of the poetry of the Earl of Rochester. Paul Hammond draws on a wide range of poems, plays, letters, and pamphlets, and discusses a substantial amount of previously unknown material from both printed and manuscript sources.

This introductory guide to "Othello" in performance offers a scene-by-scene theatrically aware commentary, contextual documents, a brief history of the text and first performances, case studies of key productions, a survey of screen adaptations, a sampling of critical opinion and further reading.

Editors of Shakespeare's Complete Works must decide what to include. Although not in the First Folio collection of 1623, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Edward III have now entered the canon as plays co-authored by Shakespeare. Determining the Shakespeare Canon makes the case for lifting Arden of Faversham, first published in 1592, over the same threshold. A wealth of evidence indicates that Shakespeare was wholly or largely responsible for several of its central scenes (constituting Act III in editions divided into acts), and that the domestic tragedy can thus be added to the mounting list of his dramatic collaborations. Shakespeare's beginnings as a playwright are due for reconsideration. The second half of this volume provides solid grounds for accepting that publisher Thomas Thorpe's inclusion of A Lover's Complaint within the 1609 quarto of Shakespeare Sonnets was justified. While A Lover's Complaint has long been part of the Shakespeare canon, according to most editors, the poem's authenticity has been vigorously challenged in recent years. Its status is crucial to how critics assess the authority of the quarto's ordering of sonnets and interpret the structure of the sequence as a whole. These two problems of attribution are each addressed in five separate chapters that describe the converging results of different approaches and rebut counter-arguments. Stylometric techniques, using the resources of computers and electronic databases, are applied and the research methodologies of other scholars explained and evaluated. Quantitative tests are supplemented with traditional literary-critical analysis.

This "York Notes Companion "brings Renaissance drama to life by considering such classic plays as "Hamlet," "Othello" and "Dr Faustus "from the perspective of contemporary theatre-goers.

This "York Notes Companion "brings Renaissance drama to life by considering such classic plays as "Hamlet," "Othello" and "Dr Faustus "from the perspective of contemporary theatre-goers.

• Part of the first literature study guides to cover key literary periods and texts and combine them with historical and cultural contexts
• Contains essential information on relevant literary criticism
• Dr Hugh Mackay is an experienced lecturer who has also written extensively in the field
• Contains various helpful features such as extented commentaries, additional notes, timelines and annotated further reading
  

An enhanced exam section: expert guidance on approaching exam questions, writing high-quality responses and using critical interpretations, plus practice tasks and annotated sample answer extracts. Key skills covered: focused tasks to develop analysis and understanding, plus regular study tips, revision questions and progress checks to help students track their learning. The most in-depth analysis: detailed text summaries and extract analysis to in-depth discussion of characters, themes, language, contexts and criticism, all helping students to reach their potential.

No Fear Shakespeare gives you the complete text of Othello on the left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand translation on the right. Each No Fear Shakespeare containsThe complete text of the original playA line-by-line translation that puts Shakespeare into everyday languageA complete list of characters with descriptionsPlenty of helpful commentary

Shakespeare's late plays are usually seen in terms of courtliness and escapism. But the critical tradition has been too decorous. Neither neo-Christian pieties nor high-political allegory can account for the works' audacity and surprise, or the popular investment in both their form and meaning. Post-structuralist and historicist approaches show the indeterminacy and materiality of language, but rarely identify how particular figures (words and characters) capture and energise contested history. Recent criticism tends to put a pre-emptive `master-paradigm' above all else; a more sinuous, minutely attentive critical vocabulary is needed to apprehend Shakespeare's turbulent, precise, teeming metaphorical discourse. Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words reappraises the origins of authority, language, and decorum, and the prospects for each. Through his portrayal of `popular' desire--in his rustics, clowns, rogues, slaves, women--Shakespeare presents worlds which explore the meaning of the `subject', and the potential for effective transformatory agency. Rather than a Jonsonian (or perhaps earlier Shakespearian) verisimilitude, with each person discrete and verifiable, Shakespeare's characters embody metaphor-in-process; like the revamped romance genre itself, they `take on' surrounding turbulence. The plays show the stormy consequences of hegemonic violence. The subsequent exile to wilderness allows for contingent novelty: new liberties are tested amid the wreckage or recapitulation of old forms. The plays pit possible sources of regeneration (romantic pastoral, semi-populist humanism) against more primal violence and rebelliousness. Finally, the book argues against a conventional sense of the plays' movement towards divinely sanctioned closure; mischief, irony, polysemy remain; romance's political problems are competitive, multiple, and tumescently unpredictable.

Writers, playwrights and philosophers have alike been fascinated by Shakespeare's Cleopatra. The contradictions in her character, said the writer Anna Jameson, fuse "into one brilliant impersonation of classical elegance, Oriental voluptuousness, and gipsy sorcery". When Henry James sought to suggest the charm cast over an impressionable but repressed American by a glamorous Parisian countess, it was Cleopatra's "infinite variety" to which he had recourse. There are two obvious reasons, says Adrian Poole, why the play has enjoyed a great leap in popularity and interest since the early 20th century. One is changing attitudes to gender and sexuality, and the relaxing of some of the taboos impeding the liberation of women from the confinements and distinctions in force at least since the Restoration. The other is changing conceptions of theatre. The advent of cinema encouraged lighter, swifter and more flexible forms of staging. One can scarcely think of a Shakespeare play that benefits more from such a liberation. But there are other less obvious reasons. One is the opposition between love and romance on the one hand and politics and war on the other - the play's complex re-working of some age-old myths about Venus and Mars. As our own media daily insist, at least in the anglophone world, the love-affairs of the top dogs are matters of public interest. The fate of all those men and women sacrificed "to solder up the rift" between Antony and Caesar does hang on what happens, or fails to happen, behind the scenes. No play conveys this better than Antony and Cleopatra.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's great drama of ambition, desire and guilt. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of Macbeth in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are three interviews with leading directors - Rupert Goold, Gregory Doran and Trevor Nunn - providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

Drawing on both historical analysis and theories from the modern affective sciences, Shakespeare and Disgust argues that the experience of revulsion is one of Shakespeare's central dramatic concerns. Known as the 'gatekeeper emotion', disgust is the affective process through which humans protect the boundaries of their physical bodies from material contaminants and their social bodies from moral contaminants. Accordingly, the emotion provided Shakespeare with a master category of compositional tools - poetic images, thematic considerations and narrative possibilities - to interrogate the violation and preservation of such boundaries, whether in the form of compromised bodies, compromised moral actors or compromised social orders. Designed to offer both focused readings and birds-eye coverage, this volume alternates between chapters devoted to the sustained analysis of revulsion in specific plays (Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Othello and Hamlet) and chapters presenting a general overview of Shakespeare's engagement with certain kinds of prototypical disgust elicitors, including food, disease, bodily violation, race and sex disgust. Disgust, the book argues, is one of the central engines of human behaviour - and, somewhat surprisingly, it must be seen as a centrepiece of Shakespeare's affective universe.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

William Shakespeare and 21st-Century Culture, Politics, and Leadership examines problems, challenges, and crises in our contemporary world through the lens of William Shakespeare's plays, one of the best-known, most admired, and often controversial authors of the last half-millennium. As perhaps the most oft-cited author in the West outside of the Judeo-Christian Bible, Shakespeare has often been considered a sage, providing manifold insights into our shared human qualities and experiences across time and geography. The editors and authors of this accessible book leverage the now global scope of that sibylline reputation to explore what the Bard might tell us about ourselves, our politics, our leaders, and our societies today. The chapters are written with critical rigor and will appeal to scholars and students in leadership and literary studies but are accessible to non-Shakespeare experts. Anyone looking to explore the ongoing relevance of Shakespeare's work will find this volume enlightening and entertaining.

This engaging and fresh biography begins by examining how Shakespeare's life turns into myth so comfortably as to seduce even the most sceptical scholar. The early departure, the late return. Public success, private loss. A twilight of plays about family reunions, a death at home in the biggest house in town, the one he walked by as a schoolboy and eyed with envy, or at least ambition. Shakespeare led an orbital life, everything returned to where it began. He even had the dramatic good sense to die on his birthday. One of the appealing dynamics of the Shakespeare myth is the contrast of his humble beginnings and his lofty achievements, persuading us that genius might blossom anywhere. William Shakespeare: A Brief Life honours these myths, but also explores some of the mysteries: why Shakespeare left Stratford, who he ran with in London, why he put down his pen and at last came home again. Ultimately, the book explores the compelling contrast between the mere fifty two years Shakespeare lived, with the prolonged after lives of his work and his story, which show no sign of ending.