When we think of ancient theatre today, we tend to think of Greek theatre. Yet the Romans also had a lively and varied set of theatrical traditions, which have had a considerable influence on later drama. This book offers an introduction to these traditions, including the origins of Roman theatre, the extant plays of Plautus, Terence and Seneca, and the many works of comedy, tragedy, mime and pantomime that no longer survive as written texts. The emphasis throughout is on performance, the role of these theatrical works within Roman society, and Roman theatre's legacy.

Provides full support for students and teachers of the Cambridge IGCSE (R) Literature in English syllabus. This coursebook is a lively introduction to the study of literature in English at IGCSE level, encouraging both the enjoyment of literature and rigorous academic study. It provides a comprehensive overview of the various components of the Cambridge IGCSE Literature in English syllabus (0486 and 0476). In keeping with the spirit of the syllabus, the book stresses the importance of informed personal responses that arise from close textual study. It contains a range of stimulating literary material from around the world, including extracts from plays and prose fiction, as well as complete poems.

King Henry VIII has one of the fullest theatrical histories of any play in the Shakespeare canon, yet has been consistently misrepresented, both in performance and in criticism. This edition offers a new perspective on this ironic, multi-layered, collaborative play, revealing it as a complex meditation on the progress of Reformation which sees English life since Henry VIII's day as a series of bewildering changes in national and personal allegiance and represents 'history' as the product of varied and contradictory testimony. McMullan makes a powerful claim for the rehabilitation of Henry VIII, providing the fullest performance history of any edition to date and reading the work not as a marginal 'late' Shakespeare play but as a play which is paradigmatic of the achievement of Renaissance drama as a whole.

Embed complex literary analysis skills and ensure top achievement in IGCSE & O Level Literature in English with the stretching approach from examiner and subject expert Mark Pedroz. This new edition is fully aligned with the latest IGCSE, IGCSE (9-1) & O Level (0475/0992/2010) syllabuses so you can be sure of complete support. It promotes a reflective and analytical approach to the study of literature, with a focus on formative assessment and stretching opportunities for high-achievers. Engage learners with diverse literary extracts including updated set texts and develop personal responses through drama, debate and structured discussion. In addition, stretch your high achievers with regular extension material that embeds complex critical analysis skills. The accompanying support site offers extensive exam preparation with an additional unit focusing on unseen etxts and extended essay writing. It also contains focused revision advice, exam-style practice and close reading skills development. The online Student Book will be available on Oxford Education Bookshelf until 2028. Access is facilitated via a unique code, which is sent in the mail. The code must be linked to an email address, creating a user account. Access may be transferred once to a new user, once the initial user no longer requires access. You will need to contact your local Educational Consultant to arrange this.

It started as just another interview. Young journalist Danielle Nadler agreed to call an old man who had lived 50 years in the wilderness of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Through their weekly conversations, the mountaineer boasts of his decades of outdoor survival only to eventually reveal his personal tragedies that drove him to life in the wild. Without a Trace drops readers into the California mountain town of Bishop alongside the man locals call Sierra Phantom just as he surrenders to life with an address, and searches for a renewed purpose and community with which to share it.

This series contains poetry and prose anthologies composed of writers from across the English-speaking world. Parts of Songs of Ourselves Volume 1 are set for study in Cambridge IGCSE (R), O Level and Cambridge International AS & A Level Literature in English syllabuses. The anthology includes work from over 100 poets, combining famous names - such as William Wordsworth, Maya Angelou and Seamus Heaney - with lesser-known voices. This helps students create fresh and interesting contrasts as they explore themes that range from love to death.

Can sexual restraint be good for you? Many Victorians thought so. This book explores the surprisingly positive construction of sexual restraint in an unlikely place: late nineteenth-century Decadence. Reading Decadent texts alongside Victorian writing about sexual health, including medical literature, adverts, advice books, and periodical articles, it identifies an intellectual Paterian tradition of sensuous continence, in which 'healthy' pleasure is distinguished from its 'harmful' counterpart. Recent work on Decadent sexuality concentrates on transgression and subversion, with restraint interpreted ahistorically as evidence of repression/sublimation or queer coding. Here Sarah Green examines the work of Walter Pater, Lionel Johnson, Vernon Lee, and George Moore to outline a co-extensive alternative approach to sexuality where restraint figured as a productive part of the 'aesthetic life', or a practical ethics shaped by aesthetic principles. Attending to this tradition reveals neglected connections within and beyond Decadence, bringing fresh perspective to its late nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception.

Colourful and visually appealing to help engage and inspire your students. Full of motivating activities, with opportunities for Assessment for Learning. Glossaries help make poems accessible for all your students. Uses a wide range of poetry styles with well-known classics and more contemporary poetry, as required in the National Curriculum. Provides coverage of Framework objectives for teaching English to help you deliver the KS3 strategy. Helps with pupil's progression throughout KS3 and transition from KS3 to GCSE.

These are professional-level comedy monologs, but they can be easily performed by talented high school actors. Most all of the characterizations can be effectively performed by either sex. The emphasis is on comedy and social satire. Nothing is sacred, yet all monologs are within the boundaries of good taste. In most instances the monologist is making fun of his/her own dilemmas of everyday living. Good contest material. Excellent for classroom use. Each monolog is three to five minutes long. Some of the monologs: History of New York City, How I Spent My Summer Vacation, The Fanatical Spectator, Trains of Nightmarish Thoughts, Letter to an Escaper, Musical Intros. What Does Your Handwriting Tell You? Mr. Know-It-All.

Catherine comes home to Knysna from boarding school for the summer, but although she loves the lagoon and hills around the Heads, she is very lonely. Until she meets Frans – a strange young man who accepts her friendship without seeming to give anything in return. It is only when Frans turns to her for help that she realises how his sadness is connected to the past of her own family.

Performing Restoration Shakespeare embraces the performative and musical qualities of Restoration Shakespeare (1660-1714), drawing on the expertise of theatre historians, musicologists, literary critics, and - importantly - theatre and music practitioners. The volume advances methodological debates in theatre studies and musicology by advocating an alternative to performance practices aimed at reviving 'original' styles or conventions, adopting a dialectical process that situates past performances within their historical and aesthetic contexts, and then using that understanding to transform them into new performances for new audiences. By deploying these methodologies, the volume invites scholars from different disciplines to understand Restoration Shakespeare on its own terms, discarding inhibiting preconceptions that Restoration Shakespeare debased Shakespeare's precursor texts. It also equips scholars and practitioners in theatre and music with new - and much needed - methods for studying and reviving past performances of any kind, not just Shakespearean ones.

Based on a systematic sampling of nearly 2000 French and English novels from 1601 to 1830, this book's foremost aim is to ask precisely how the novel evolved. Instead of simply 'rising', as scholars have been saying for some sixty years, the novel is in fact a system in constant flux, made up of artifacts - formally distinct novel types - that themselves rise, only to inevitably fall. Nicholas D. Paige argues that these artifacts are technologies, each with traceable origins, each needing time for adoption (at the expense of already developed technologies) and also for abandonment. Like technological waves in more physical domains, the rises and falls of novelistic technologies don't happen automatically: writers invent and adopt literary artifacts for many diverse reasons. However, looking not at individual works but at the novel as a patterned system provides a startlingly persuasive new way of understanding the history and evolution of artforms.

Specifically designed for GCSE coursework assignments, this collection contains pre-20th- and 20th-century stories arranged in thematic pairs. Activities and coursework have been pitched at the right interest range and level for GCSE.

Suzanne Gossett offers a full and critical performance history, with an introduction showing how the play's performance history has paralled the criticism. It then gives an interpretation of this two-generation romance, with its successive male and female central characters, based on a reading 'through the family', and influenced by the feminist and new historicist criticism of the last two decades. The edition integrates cumulative research on Shakespeare's collaborative authorship and the transmission of the text without rewriting the play or ignoring years of emendations.

Professional poets spend many hours crafting a finished piece of work, yet we expect children in school to sit down and write when they are told to, whether they feel inspired or not. This series of four books is a toolkit to help you build a positive framework for children to read, write, understand and enjoy poetry - to bring a creative spark to the poetry classroom. A combination of featured poems, creative ideas, structured lesson plans and differentiated photocopiable activity sheets gives the series a uniquely flexible approach - which means you can use the materials in any classroom context. If you're wary of poetry, if you think it's boring, or if you're nervous about teaching poetry, then you've chosen the right book. Key themes covered in BOOK 3: Style, Shape and Structure are style and structure, addressing regular and standard forms, the impact of layout, free form, 'found' poetry, and concrete poetry. Other books in the series are: BOOK 1:Words and Wordplay; BOOK 2: Rhymes, Rhythms and Rattles;and BOOK 4: Language and Performance.

Each of the 12 extracts from contemporary children's literature is accompanied by eight sets of questions based on the Key Stage 2 (KS2) Reading Content Domains and National Curriculum. This book provides opportunities to tackle more complex vocabulary, explore how authors use language to impact their readers and develop endurance for longer passages. The clear structure and the author's passion for literature make Developing Reading Comprehension Skills Years 3-4: Contemporary Children's Literature invaluable for everyone working with pupils in Years 3 and 4. Support for teachers and parents is built in with guidance for how to teach the different question types, plus suggestions for embedding these texts in the wider English curriculum. This series is suitable for new and recently qualified teachers as well as those who are more experienced and wanting to expand the range of texts they use. If you're looking for a comprehensive resource to enhance reading provision and teaching in your classroom or to support home education, this is exactly what you need. Look for other books in the Developing Reading Comprehension Skills series.

The Reading for Real Handbook was very well received by both teachers and literacy specialists when it was published in 1992. Since its first publication there have been significant changes in the field of 'reading', not least of which has been governmental demands for higher standards in reading and the resultant National Literacy Strategy (NLS).
As well as providing invaluable help for teachers struggling with the National Literacy Strategy and the Literacy Hour, several other new topics of interest are also addressed, including teaching fiction/non-fiction inside and outside the Literacy Hour, integrating reading, writing and spelling work, involving parents, assessment and working with slower readers.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203079132

I stand for simple justice, equal opportunity and human rights. They are indispensable elements in a democratic society and well worth fighting for.' Helen Suzman (1917-2009) is an example of courage and integrity. Throughout her 36-year career in Parliament, she stood up for what she believed was right, campaigning fearlessly against laws such as the Immorality Act, Forced Removals, the Pass Laws and the Death Penalty. By raising critical issues that would have been kept from the public, she gave a voice to those who had been silenced. Her actions went beyond the walls of Parliament too. She visited prisoners, including Nelson Mandela; met with activists, like Oliver Tambo; and sympathised with ordinary people suffering under the laws of apartheid. Read about Suzman's life of determination, wit and honesty, and how she earned the trust of the country and the respect of the world. They Fought for Freedom tells the life stories of southern African leaders who struggled for freedom and justice. In spite of the important roles they played in the history of southern Africa, most of these leaders have been largely ignored by the history books. The series tells their stories in an entertaining manner, in clear language and aims to restore them to their rightful place in history. Endorsed by the Helen Suzman Foundation

Closely examining the relationship between the political and the utopian in five major plays from different phases of Shakespeare's career, Hugh Grady shows the dialectical link between the earlier political dramas and the late plays or tragicomedies. Reading Julius Caesar and Macbeth from the tragic period alongside The Winter's Tale and Tempest from the utopian end of Shakespeare's career, with Antony and Cleopatra acting as a transition, Grady reveals how, in the late plays, Shakespeare introduces a transformative element of hope while never losing a sharp awareness of suffering and death. The plays presciently confront dilemmas of an emerging modernity, diagnosing and indicting instrumental politics and capitalism as largely disastrous developments leading to an empty world devoid of meaning and community. Grady persuasively argues that the utopian vision is a specific dialectical response to these fears and a necessity in worlds of injustice, madness and death.

Containing one of each of the titles in the Magpie playscripts at Stage 8, the plays in this pack are based on the Magpies storybooks at Stage 8. Ideal for consolidation and reading practice, they can be used with groups or individuals. They teach the conventions of drama and develop skills in reading aloud and shared reading. Each play has a cast list of between four and six characters including one or more narrators. There are six lines of text per page and suggestions for sound effects. The words are close to the original story and the artwork is completely re-drawn to show similar scenes to the original storybooks.

Sir David Lyndsay's A Satire of the Three Estates is the earliest complete Scottish play on record, dating from the middle of the sixteenth century. By turns funny and formal, obscene and ceremonial, and filled with sharp social commentary, it is a confident expression of dramatic prowess. John Corbett's SCOTNOTE study guide examines the historical background, explores the play's language and style, and gives a concise introduction to this key work in the Scottish theatrical tradition. These notes are suitable for senior school pupils and students at all levels.

What is narrative? How does it work and how does it shape our lives? H. Porter Abbott emphasizes that narrative is found not just in literature, film, and theatre, but everywhere in the ordinary course of people's lives. This widely used introduction, now revised and expanded in its third edition, is informed throughout by recent developments in the field and includes one new chapter. The glossary and bibliography have been expanded, and new sections explore unnatural narrative, retrograde narrative, reader-resistant narratives, intermedial narrative, narrativity, and multiple interpretation. With its lucid exposition of concepts, and suggestions for further reading, this book is not only an excellent introduction for courses focused on narrative but also an invaluable resource for students and scholars across a wide range of fields, including literature and drama, film and media, society and politics, journalism, autobiography, history, and still others throughout the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

This stimulating and accessible book is intended for instructors at the junior high school, high school, and undergraduate levels who present Shakespeare's most familiar tragedies to students who are largely unfamiliar with them. Acclaimed teacher of drama Victor L. Cahn begins with a general introduction, then examines six of Shakespeare's tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. With attention always directed towards inspiring student interest and response, Professor Cahn provides an overview or "spine" for each work, then proceeds scene by scene, focusing on salient characters, details of language, and major themes. The volume not only is entertaining and clear, but also raises provocative points of interpretation as well as numerous questions for discussion. Underlying the project is the conviction that although the plays are most effective in performance, they can nonetheless prove compelling in the classroom, where students can appreciate that although these works are set in a distant time and place, their issues and implications remain universal.