Abridged specifically for all those interested in Shakespeare's plays, especially teachers and students of English and drama, these one-hour performance scripts maintain the arcs of Shakespeare's plots without compromising the integrity of his original language. What remains are manageable performance texts and the essential elements needed for an introduction to three of Shakespeare's most popular plays.

Abridged specifically for all those interested in Shakespeare's plays, especially teachers and students of English and drama, these one-hour performance scripts maintain the arcs of Shakespeare's plots without compromising the integrity of his original language. What remains are manageable performance texts and the essential elements needed for an introduction to three of Shakespeare's most popular plays.

Abridged specifically for all those interested in Shakespeare's plays, especially teachers and students of English and drama, these one-hour performance scripts maintain the arcs of Shakespeare's plots without compromising the integrity of his original language. What remains are manageable performance texts and the essential elements needed for an introduction to three of Shakespeare's most popular plays.

Readers of poetry are often told to leave poems alone - to learn them by heart or to enjoy how they sound and leave it at that. This is all very well, except for those readers who have to study poetry at school or university. Or other readers who don't yet enjoy poems because they are daunted by their seemingly impenetrable meanings or inaccessible techniques.In this annotated anthology, Robert Gullifer and Matthew Jenkinson demystify poetry while showing that there are many good reasons to pick poems apart. From Beowulf to the Iraq War, a millennium of poetry is presented to give readers a sense of how poems have evolved since we first started writing them down. Historical backgrounds, meanings, techniques and effects are explained and analysed clearly and logically to help readers understand what poets have been trying to say to us across the centuries. At the same time, major themes that have recurred in poetry are highlighted, so general readers, teachers and students can navigate the poems as they wish: by time period, by technique, or by theme.This book has been designed so it is useful to anyone interested in learning about or teaching poetry, as well as those revisiting poems and poets they may have already encountered. Those poems and poets have been carefully selected to ensure that How Poems Work: covers much of the existing poetic canon while broadening it to include diverse historically important poets who have been previously overlooked, or to include less well-known poems by already canonical poets.includes poems that are technically interesting, to allow the kind of analysis expected in classrooms and examinations. appeals to a wide audience across the English-speaking world by including British and American poems alongside those from other cultures.

A study of how representations and images of Charles II and his kingship were formed and presented by those in and around the court. The reconstitution of the royal court in 1660 brought with it the restoration of fears that had been associated with earlier Stuart courts: disorder, sexual liberty, popery and arbitrary government. This book - the first full examination of its subject - illustrates the ways in which court culture was informed by the heady politics of Britain between 1660 and 1685. In political theory and practice the decades that preceded and included Charles II's reign witnessed profound interrogation of British kingship. Individuals at the heart of royal government - court preachers, poets, playwrights, courtesans, diplomats, and politicians - were assertive participants in this scrutiny. This book looks beyond the prurient interest in the sexual antics of Restoration courtiers that has characterised previous works. It engages in a genuine and sophisticated attempt to show how the complex dynamics of Charles II's court culture ran beneath the surface of show and ceremony. Ultimately it shows that the attempts to stabilise and strengthen the Stuart monarchy after the Restoration of Charles II were undercut by the cultural materials emanating fromthe royal court itself. MATTHEW JENKINSON completed his PhD at Merton College, Oxford.

When the British monarchy was restored in 1660, King Charles II was faced with the conundrum of what to with those who had been involved in the execution of his father eleven years earlier. Facing a grisly fate at the gallows, some of the men who had signed Charles I's death warrant fled to America. Charles I's Killers in America traces the gripping story of two of these men-Edward Whalley and William Goffe-and their lives in America, from their welcome in New England until their deaths there. With fascinating insights into the governance of the American colonies in the seventeenth century, and how a network of colonists protected the regicides, Matthew Jenkinson overturns the enduring theory that Charles II unrelentingly sought revenge for the murder of his father. Charles I's Killers in America also illuminates the regicides' afterlives, with conclusions that have far-reaching implications for our understanding of Anglo-American political and cultural relations. Novels, histories, poems, plays, paintings, and illustrations featuring the fugitives were created against the backdrop of America's revolutionary strides towards independence and its forging of a distinctive national identity. The history of the 'king-killers' was distorted and embellished as they were presented as folk heroes and early champions of liberty, protected by proto-revolutionaries fighting against English tyranny. Jenkinson rewrites this once-ubiquitous and misleading historical orthodoxy, to reveal a far more subtle and compelling picture of the regicides on the run.